PREFACE
The civilian who attempts to write a military history is of necessity guilty of an act of presumption; and I am not blind to my own temerity in venturing to grapple with such a task as the History of the British Army. But England has waited long for a soldier to do the work; and so far no sign has been given of the willingness of any officer to undertake it beyond the publication, a few years since, of Colonel Walton's History of the British Standing Army from 1660 to 1700. Nor is this altogether surprising, for the leisure of officers is limited, the subject is a large one, and the number of those who have already toiled in the field and left the fruit of their labour to others is sadly small. A civilian may therefore, I hope, be pardoned for trying at any rate to make some beginning, however conscious of his own shortcomings and of the inevitable disadvantage from which he suffers through inexperience of military life in peace and, still more fatally, in war. His efforts may at least stimulate some one better qualified than himself to treat the subject in a manner better befitting its dignity and its worth.

My design is to write the history of the Army down to the year 1870, the two present volumes carrying[vi] the story down to the Peace of Paris in 1763, and two future volumes bringing it forward to the great reforms which virtually closed the life of our old Army and opened that of a new. It would have been easy to have filled a score of volumes with matters germane to the subject and of genuine interest to at least some groups of military students; nor would such treatment have been foreign to the methods of one school of British historians. There is indeed much to be said for it from the writer's standpoint, for it simplifies his task beyond belief. To me, however, rightly or wrongly, it seemed better to gather the story if possible into a smaller compass, even at the cost of omitting many instructive statistics and picturesque details. Accordingly I have compressed the six hundred years of our military history from Hastings to Naseby into one-third that number of pages, endeavouring only to set down such points and incidents as were essential to a coherent sketch of the growth of our military system. Even after Naseby and up to the reign of Queen Anne I have dealt with the history in a like arbitrary spirit, thus passing over, not I confess without regret, the Irish campaigns of Cromwell and King William, though entering with some detail into that of Schomberg. All could not be written down, as any one can bear me witness who has attempted to go below the surface of the Great Civil War alone. The reader must decide whether I have judged well or ill in that which I have left unwritten.

I must plead guilty also to deliberate omission of sundry small details which are rather of antiquarian[vii] than of true military interest, minute particulars of dress, armament and equipment and the like, the real place for which is rather in a military dictionary than in a military history. These I have sacrificed, not because I felt them to be trivial, but because I thought that the space which they demanded would be more profitably occupied by a sketch of the political relations between the Army and the country. I cannot, however, claim completeness for this sketch: and I am conscious that many questions of great constitutional importance are left unresolved, as I must frankly acknowledge, through my inability to cope with them. I have sought our acknowledged authorities on constitutional questions in vain; not one is of help. I confess that I have been amazed when reading our innumerable political histories to see how unconcernedly Army, Navy, and the whole question of National Defence are left out of account.

It is this, the political not less than the military aspect of the Army's history that I have endeavoured, however slightly and however unsuccessfully, to elucidate, at the sacrifice sometimes of purely military matters; and it is this which makes the subject so vast as to be almost unmanageable. The difficulties of tracing military operations are frequently trying enough, but they are insignificant compared to those presented by the civil administration of the Army, and by the intolerable complication of the finance. Here again the reader must judge whether or not I have chosen aright; and I would ask him only not to attribute to neglect omissions which have been made after mature deliberation.

[viii]

My authorities from the reign of Queen Anne onward, and occasionally before, are quoted at the foot of the page; but in the earlier portion of the first volume I have been content to group them in a brief note at the close of each chapter or section;[1] and I have followed the same plan with some modification throughout. I must, however, mention that these notes rarely comprise the whole of the authorities that I have consulted, much less all that lie open to consultation. It would be a simple matter, for instance, to cover a page with works consulted on the subject of the Civil War alone; but while I have, as I trust, taken pains to make my work thorough, I have been content frequently to refer the reader to such authorities as will guide him to further sources of information, should he desire to pursue them. I have spared no pains to glean all that may be gleaned from the original papers preserved at the Record Office in reference to the military administration and to the various campaigns, and I have waded through many thousands of old newspapers, with and without profit. What unknown treasures I may have overlooked among the archives preserved by individual regiments, I know not, since with an army so widely dispersed as our own it seemed to me hopeless to attempt to search for them; but such regimental histories as exist in print I have been careful to study, sometimes[ix] with advantage but not always with profound respect for their accuracy.

Maps and plans have been a matter of extreme difficulty, owing to the inaccuracy of the old surveys and the disappearance of such fugitive features as marsh and forest. I have followed contemporary plans wherever I could in fixing the dispositions of troops, but in many cases I should have preferred to have presented the reader with a map of the ground only, and left him to fill in the troops for himself from the description in the text. Blocks of red and blue are pleasing indeed to the eye, but it is always a question whether their facility for misleading does not exceed their utility for guidance. Actual visits to many of the battlefields of the Low Countries, with the maps of so recent a writer as Coxe in my hand, did not encourage me in my belief in the system, although, in deference to the vast majority of my advisers I have pursued it.

It remains to say a few words on some minor matters, and first as to the question of choosing between Old Style and New Style in the matter of dates. Herein Lord Stanhope's rule seemed to be a good one, namely to use the Old Style in recording events that occurred in England, and the New for events abroad. But I have supplemented it by giving both styles in the margin against the dates of events abroad; lest the reader, with some other account in his mind, should (like the editor of Marlborough's Despatches) be bewildered by the arrival in England of news of an action some days before it appears to have been fought[x] in the Low Countries. One difficulty I have found insuperable, which is to discover when the New Style was accepted in India; but finding that the dates given by French writers differ by eleven days from those of Orme I have been driven to the conclusion that the Old Style endured at any rate until 1753, and have written down the dates accordingly.

Another difficulty, more formidable than might be imagined, has been the choice of orthography for names of places abroad. Before the war of 1870 the French form might have been selected without hesitation; but with the rise of the German Empire, the decay of French influence in Europe and the ever increasing importance of German writings in every branch of literature, science and art, this rule no longer holds good. Finding consistency absolutely impossible, I have endeavoured to choose the form most familiar to English readers, and least likely to call down upon me the charge of pedantry. Even so, however, the choice has not been easy. Take for instance the three ecclesiastical electorates of the Empire. Shall they be Mainz, K?ln and Trier, or Mayence, Cologne and Trèves? The form Cologne is decided for us by the influence of Jean Maria Farina; Trèves is, I think, for the present better known than Trier; but Mainz, a large station familiar to thousands of British travellers, seemed to me preferable to the French corruption Mayence, as reminding the reader of its situation on the Main. For German names of minor importance I have taken the German form, since, their French dress being equally unfamiliar to English readers,[xi] there seemed to be no reason why they should not be written down correctly; but the French form is adopted so exclusively in contemporary histories that possibly not a few instances of it may have escaped my vigilance. In Flanders again it is frequently necessary to choose between the French and the Flemish spelling of a name; and, where it has been possible without pedantry, I have preferred the Flemish as nearer akin to the English. Thus I have always written Overkirk rather than Auverquerque, Dunkirk rather than Dunquerque, Steenkirk rather than Estinquerque (the form preferred for some reason by Colonel Clifford Walton), since the French forms are obviously only corruptions of honest Flemish which is very nearly honest English. Actual English corruptions I have employed without scruple, though here again consistency is impossible. It is justifiable to write Leghorn for Livorno; but The Groyne, a familiar form at the beginning of this century, is no longer legitimate for Corunna, any more than The Buss for Bois-le-duc (Hertogenbosch) or Hollock for Hohenlohe. Then there is the eternal stumbling-block of spelling Indian names. Here I have not hesitated to follow the old orthography which is still preserved in the colours of our regiments. Ugly and base though the corruptions may be they are at any rate familiar, and that is sufficient; while they probably convey at least as good an idea of the actual pronunciation as the new forms introduced by Sir William Hunter. Here once more it would be confusing to write Ally for Ali or Caubool for Cabul, though possibly less so than to confront the reader[xii] with Machhlípatan or Machlípatan (two forms used indifferently by Colonel Malleson) for Masulipatam, and Maisur for Mysore. We are an arbitrary nation in such matters and very far from consistent. Even in such simple things as the names of West Indian Islands we have dropped the old form Martinico in favour of Martinique, though we still affect Dominica in lieu of Dominique. All that a writer can do is to study the prejudices of his readers without attempt either to justify or to offend them.

Lastly, I must give the reader warning that I have spoken of our regiments throughout by the old numbers instead of by their territorial titles. As I do not propose to carry the history beyond 1870 I may plead so much technically in justification; but apart from that I would advance with all humility that life is short, and that it is too much to ask a man to set down such a legend as "The First Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment" (in itself probably only an ephemeral title), when he can convey the same idea at least as intelligibly by writing the words Sixty-fifth. I have also called regiments by their modern appellations (so far as the numbers may be reckoned modern) throughout, ignoring the anachronism of denominating what were really regiments of Horse by the term Dragoon Guards, for the sake of brevity and convenience. An Appendix gives the present designation of each regiment against its old number, so that the reader may find no difficulty in identifying it. I may add that I have written the numbers of regiments at full length in the text in all cases where such regiments[xiii] have survived up to the present day, so that the reader need be in no doubt as to their identity; and I have carefully avoided the designation of disbanded regiments by the numbers which they once bore, in order to avoid confusion.

In conclusion, I have to express my deepest thanks to Mr. G. K. Fortescue at the British Museum and to Mr. Hubert Hall at the Record Office for their unwearied and inexhaustible courtesy in disinterring every book or document which could be of service to me.
J. W. F.

June, 1899.
BOOK I CHAPTER I
The history of the British Army is commonly supposed to begin with the year 1661, and from the day, the 14th of February, whereon King Charles the Second took over Monk's Regiment of Foot from the Commonwealth's service to his own, and named it the Coldstream Guards. The assumption is unfortunately more convenient than accurate. The British standing army dates not from 1661 but from 1645, not from Monk's regiment but from the famous New Model, which was established by Act of the Long Parliament and maintained, in substance, until the Restoration. The continuity of the Coldstream regiment's existence was practically unbroken by the ceremony of Saint Valentine's day, and this famous corps therefore forms the link that binds the New Model to the Army of Queen Victoria.

But we are not therefore justified in opening the history of the army with the birth of the New Model. The very name indicates the existence of an earlier model, and throws us back to the outbreak of the Civil War. There then confronts us the difficulty of conceiving how an organised body of trained fighting men could have been formed without the superintendence of experienced officers. We are forced to ask whence came those officers, and where did they learn their profession. The answer leads us to the Thirty Years' War and the long struggle for Dutch Independence, to the English and Scots, numbered by tens, nay, hundreds of thousands, who fought under Gustavus Adolphus and Maurice of Nassau. Two noble regiments[4] still abide with us as representatives of these two schools, a standing record of our army's 'prentice years.

But though we go back two generations before the Civil War to find the foundation of the New Model Army, it is impossible to pause there. In the early years of Queen Elizabeth's reign we are brought face to face with an important period in our military history, with a break in old traditions, an unwilling conformity with foreign standards, in a word, with the renascence in England of the art of war. For there were memories to which the English clung with pathetic tenacity, not in Elizabeth's day only but even to the midst of the Civil War, the memories of King Harry the Fifth, of the Black Prince, of Edward the Third, and of the unconquerable infantry that had won the day at Agincourt, Poitiers, and Cre?y. The passion of English sentiment over the change is mirrored to us for all time in the pages of Shakespeare; for no nation loves military reform so little as our own, and we shrink from the thought that if military glory is not to pass from a possession into a legend, it must be eternally renewed with strange weapons and by unfamiliar methods. This was the trouble which afflicted England under the Tudors, and she comforted herself with the immortal prejudice that is still her mainstay in all times of doubt,

"I tell thee herald,

I thought upon one pair of English legs

Did march three Frenchmen."

The origin of the new departures in warfare must therefore be briefly traced through the Spaniards, the Landsknechts, and the Swiss, and the old English practice must be followed to its source. Cre?y gives us no resting-place, for Edward the Third's also was a time of military reform; the next steps are to the Battle of Falkirk, the Statute of Winchester, and the Assize of Arms; and still the English traditions recede before us, till at last at the Conquest we can seize a[5] great English principle which forced itself upon the conquering Normans, and ultimately upon all Europe.

This then is the task that is first attempted in this book: to follow, however briefly and imperfectly, the growth of the English as a military power to the time of its first manifestation at Cre?y, and onward to the supreme day of Agincourt; then through the decay under the blight of the Wars of the Roses to the revival under the Tudors, and to the training in foreign schools which prepared the way for the New Model and the Standing Army. The period is long, and the conditions of warfare vary constantly from stage to stage, but we shall find the Englishman, through all the changes of the art of war unchangeable, a splendid fighting man.

The primitive national army of the English, as of other Teutonic nations, consisted of the mass of free landowners between the ages of sixteen and sixty; it was called in the Karolingian legislation by the still existing name of landwehr, and known in England as the fyrd. Its term of service was fixed by custom at two months in the year. The force was reorganised by King Alfred or by his son through the division of the country into military districts, every five hides of land being required to provide an armed man at the king's summons, and to provide him with victuals and with pay. Further, all owners of five hides of land and upwards were required to do thane's service, that is to say, to appear in the field as heavily-armed men at their own charge, and to serve for the entire campaign. The organisation of the thanes was by shires. With the conquest of England by Canute a new military element was introduced by the establishment of the royal body-guard, a picked force of from three to six thousand Danish troops, which were retained by him after the rest of the army had been sent back to Denmark, and were known as the house-carles.

It was with an army framed on this model—the[6] raw levies of the fyrd and the better trained men of the body-guard—that King Harold, flushed with the victory of Stamford Bridge, marched down to meet the invasion of William of Normandy. The heavily-armed troops wore a shirt of ringed or chain-mail, and a conical helmet with a bar protecting the nose; their legs were swathed in bandages not wholly unlike the "putties" of the present day, and their arms were left free to swing the Danish axe. They carried also a sword, five missile darts, and a shield, but the axe was the weapon that they loved, for the Teutonic races, unlike the Latin, have ever preferred to cut rather than to thrust. The light-armed men, who could not afford defensive armour, came into the field with spear and shield only. Yet the force was homogeneous in virtue of a single custom, wherein lies the secret of the rise of England's prowess as a military nation. Though the wealthy thanes might ride horses on the march, they dismounted one and all for action, and fought, even to the king himself, on their own feet.[2]

The force was divided into large bands or battalions, of which the normal formation for battle was a wedge broadening out from a front of two men to a base of uncertain number; the officers and the better armed men forming the point, backed by a dense column of inferior troops. It was with a single line of such wedges, apparently from five-and-twenty to thirty of them, that Harold took up his position to bar the advance of the Norman army. Having no cavalry, he had resolved to stand on the defensive, and had chosen his ground with no little skill. His line occupied the crest of a hill, his flanks were protected by ravines, and he had dug across the plain on his front a trench which was sufficient to check a rapid advance of cavalry. Moreover, he had caused each battalion to ring itself about[7] with sharp stakes, planted into the ground at intervals with the points slanting outwards, as a further protection against the attack of horse.[3] The reader should take note of these stakes, for he will find them constantly reappearing up to the seventeenth century. There then the English waited in close compact masses, a wall of shields within a hedge of stakes, the men of nine-and-twenty shires under a victorious leader. There is no need to enter into details of the battle. The English, as has been well said,[4] were subjected to the same trial as the famous squares at Waterloo, alternate rain of missiles and charges of cavalry, and as yet they were unequal to it. Harold's orders had been that not a man should move, but when the Normans, after many fruitless attacks, at last under William's direction simulated flight, the order was forgotten and one wing broke its ranks in headlong pursuit of the fugitives. Possibly, if Harold had been equal to the occasion, a general advance might have saved the day, but he made no such effort, and he was in the presence of a man who overlooked no blunder. The pursuing wing was enveloped by the Normans and annihilated; and then William turned the whole of his force against the fragment of the line that remained upon the hill. The English stood rooted to the ground enduring attack after attack, until at last, worn out with fatigue and choked with dead and wounded, they were broken and cut down, fighting desperately to the end. Indiscipline had brought ruin to the nation; and England now passed, to her great good fortune, under the sway of a race that could teach her to obey.

But the English had still one more lesson to learn. Many of the nobles, chafing against the rule of a foreigner, forsook their country and, taking service with the Byzantine emperors, joined the famous Varangian [8]Guard of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus. At Durazzo they for the second time met the Normans, under the command of Robert Guiscard. True to their custom, they dismounted and fought on foot, a magnificent corps, the choicest of the whole army. As at Hastings, the Normans attacked and were repulsed, and as at Hastings, the undisciplined English broke their ranks in pursuit. Robert Guiscard saw his opportunity, hurled his cavalry on to their flank, and then surrounding them on all sides cut them down, in spite of a furious resistance, to the very last man. So perished these untameable, unteachable spirits, the last of the unconquered English.

The Conquest was immediately followed by the institution of knight-service. But this system, as introduced into England, differed in many material respects from that which reigned on the continent of Europe. It was less distinctly military in character, and far less perfect as an organisation for national defence. The distribution of England into knight's fees, however clearly it might be mapped out on paper, was a work of time and not to be accomplished in a day. Moreover, there was disloyalty to be reckoned with; for the English were a stiff-necked people, and were not readily reconciled to the yoke of their new masters. We find, therefore, that in very early days the practice of accepting money in lieu of personal service crept in, and enabled the Norman kings to fight their battles with hired mercenaries. For this reason England has been called the cradle of the soldier; the soldier being the man who fights for pay, solde, solidus, or, as we may say by literal translation of the Latin, the man who fights for a shilling.

The sole military interest therefore of the reigns of the Norman kings is to follow the breakdown of the feudal system for military purposes, and the rapid reversion to the Saxon methods and organisation. William Rufus was the first to appeal to the English to arm in his cause, and he did so twice with success. But[9] in the seventh year of his reign he played them a trick which lost him their confidence for ever. The fyrd had furnished twenty thousand men for service against the Norman rebels in France, and had provided every man, at the cost of his shire, with ten shillings for the expenses of his journey or, to use a later expression, for his conduct-money. William met them at the rendezvous, took their two hundred thousand shillings from them to hire mercenaries withal, and dismissed them to their homes. This Rufus has been selected by an historian of repute as the earliest example of an officer and a gentleman; he should also be remembered as the first officer who set the fashion, soon to become sadly prevalent, of misappropriating the pay of his men. The reader should note in passing this early instance of conduct-money, for we shall find in it the germ of the Queen's shilling.
1106.
1116.
1125, 25th March.

The reign of Henry the First is interesting in that it shows us English knights serving in the field against Robert of Normandy under the walls of Tenchbrai. We find that the old order of battle, the single line of Hastings,[5] has disappeared and has given place to the three lines of the Byzantine school, but that, strange to say, the Saxons have forced their peculiar principle upon the Normans. Henry caused his English and Norman knights to dismount, formed them into a solid battalion and placed himself at their head, keeping but one small body still on their horses. The enemy's cavalry attacked Henry's mounted men and dispersed them; but the phalanx of the dismounted remained unbroken, pressed on against the rabble of hostile infantry, broke it down and almost annihilated it. The victory was hailed by the English as atonement for the defeat at Hastings, so bitter even then was the rivalry between ourselves and our gallant neighbours across the channel. Ten years later the English were again in France, fighting not only[10] against rebellious Norman barons but against their ally, the French King Louis the Sixth. A long and desultory war was closed by the action of Brenville. Again Henry dismounted four hundred out of five hundred of his knights and following the tactics of Tenchbrai won, though not without hard fighting, a second victory. A third engagement, known as the battle of Beaumont, saw the old English practice repeated for the third time with signal success; but here must be noticed the entry of a new force, a company of archers, which contributed not a little to the fortunate issue of the day. For as the Norman cavalry came thundering down on the English battalion, the archers moved off to their left flank and poured in such a shower of arrows that the horsemen were utterly overthrown. These archers must not be confounded with the famous English bowmen of a later time, for most probably they were merely copied, like the order of battle, from the Byzantine model; but they taught the English the second of two useful lessons. Henry had already discovered that dismounted knights could hold their own against the impetuous cavalry of France; he now learned that the attack of horse could be weakened almost to annihilation by the volley of archers. This, at a time when cavalry held absolute supremacy in war, was a secret of vital importance, a secret indeed which laid the foundation of our military power. Henry, evidently alive to it, encouraged the practice of archery by ordaining that, if any man should by accident slay another at the butts, the misadventure should not be reckoned to him as a crime.
1141.

The miserable reign of Stephen, so unsatisfactory to the general historian, possesses through the continued development of English tactical methods a distinct military interest. The year 1138 is memorable for the Battle of the Standard, the first of many actions fought against the Scots, and typical of many a victory to come. The English knights as usual fought on foot, and aided by archers made havoc of the enemy. Here is already the germ of the later infantry; we shall find[11] lances and bows give way to pikes and muskets, but for five whole centuries we shall see the foot compounded of two elements, offensive and defensive, until the invention of the bayonet slowly welds them into one. At the battle of Lincoln, on the other hand, we find the defensive element acting alone and suffering defeat, though not disgrace; for the dismounted knights who stood round Stephen fought with all the old obstinacy and yielded only to overwhelming numbers. Thus, though two generations had passed since the Conquest, the English methods of fighting were still in full vigour, and the future of English infantry bade fair to be assured.

Nor was the cavalry neglected; for amid all the earnest of this turbulent reign there was introduced the mimic warfare known as the tournament. This was an invention of the hot-blooded, combative French, and had been originally so close an imitation of genuine battle, that the Popes had intervened to prohibit the employment therein of any but blunt weapons. The tournament being not a duel of man against man, but a contest of troop against troop, was a training not only for individual gallantry, but for tactics, drill, discipline, and leadership; victory turning mainly on skilful handling and on the preservation of compact order. Thus by the blending of English foot and Norman horse was laid, earlier than in any other country of Europe, the foundation of an army wherein both branches took an equal share of work in the day of action.
1181.

The next in succession of our kings was a great soldier and a great administrator, yet the work that he did for the army was curiously mixed. Engaged as he was incessantly in war, he felt more than others the imperfection of the feudal as a military system. The number of knights that could be summoned to his standard was very small, and was diminished still further by constant evasion of obligations. He therefore regulated the commutation of personal military service for payment in money, and formed it, under the old name[12] of scutage, into a permanent institution. Advantage was generally taken of the system, and with the money thus obtained he took Braban?on mercenaries, the prototypes of the landsknechts of a later time, permanently into his pay. When he needed the feudal force to supplement these mercenaries, he fell back on the device of ordering every three knights to furnish and equip one of their number for service; and finally, driven to extremity, he re-established the old English fyrd as a National Militia by the Assize of Arms. This, the earliest of enactments for the organisation of our national forces, and the basis of all that followed down to the reign of Philip and Mary, contained the following provisions:—

Every holder of one knight's fee shall have a coat of mail,[6] a helmet, a shield, and a lance; and every knight as many coats of mail, helmets, shields, and lances as there are fees in his domain.

Every free layman having in chattels or rent to the value of sixteen marks shall keep the same equipment.

Every free layman having in chattels or rent ten marks, shall keep an habergeon,[7] a chaplet[8] of iron, and a lance.

All burgesses and the whole community of freemen shall have a wambais,[9] a chaplet of iron, and a lance.

It is noteworthy that neither the bow nor the axe appear in this list of the national weapons, an omission for which it is difficult to account, since the bow was evidently in full use at the time. Possibly the temptation to employ it for purposes of poaching may have been so strong as to make the authorities hesitate to enjoin the keeping of a bow in every poor freeman's house. The influence of the poacher will be found [13]equally potent when the time comes for the introduction of firearms.

Richard the Lion-Heart, like his predecessors, preferred to employ mercenaries for his wars, while even the knights who accompanied him to the Crusade were in receipt of pay. Were it not that his achievements in the Holy Land had left little mark on English military history they would be well worthy of a detailed narrative, for Richard was beyond dispute a really great soldier, a good engineer, and a remarkably able commander. The story of his march from Joppa to Jerusalem and of his victory at Arsouf is known to few, but it remains to all time an example of consummate military skill. A mixed force compounded of many nations is never very easy to control, and it was doubly difficult when the best of it was composed of knights who hated the very name of subordination. Yet it was with such material, joined to a huge body of half-disciplined infantry, that Richard executed a flank march in the presence of the most formidable of living generals, and repulsed him brilliantly when he ventured, at an extremely trying moment, to attack. The plan of the campaign, the arrangements and orders for the march, the drill and discipline imposed on the knights, and the handling of the troops in the action are all alike admirable. Yet, as has been already stated, the lessons of the Crusades wrought little influence in England, mainly because she had already learned from her own experience the value of a heavily armed infantry, and of the tactical combination of missile and striking weapons. In the rest of Europe they were for a time remembered but very soon forgotten;[10] and England was then once more left alone with her secret.

Two small relics of the Crusades must however find mention in this place. The first is the employment of the cross as a mark for distinguishing the warriors of different nations, which became in due time the recognised[14] substitute for uniform among European soldiers. Each nation took a different colour for its cross, that of the English being at first white, which, curiously enough, is now the regular facing for English regiments of infantry. The second relic is the military band which, there seems to be little doubt, was copied from the Saracens. In their armies trumpets and drums, the latter decidedly an Oriental instrument, were used to indicate a rallying-point; for though at ordinary times the standards sufficed to show men the places of their leaders, yet in the dust of battle these were often hidden from sight; and it was therefore the rule to gather the minstrels (such was the English term) around the standards, and bid them blow and beat strenuously and unceasingly during the action. The silence of the band was taken as a proof that a battalion had been broken and that the colours were in danger; and the fashion lasted so long that even in the seventeenth century the bandsmen in all pictures of battles are depicted, drawn up at a safe distance and energetically playing.
1214.

The reign of King John accentuated still further the weak points of the English feudal system as a military organisation. The principle introduced by the Conqueror had been to claim for the sovereign direct feudal authority over every landholder in the country, suffering no intermediate class of virtually independent vassals, such as existed in France, to intercept the service of those who owed duty to him. Of the advantages of this innovation mention shall presently be made elsewhere, but at this point it is necessary to dwell only on its military defects. The whole efficiency of the feudal system turned on the creation of a caste of warriors; and such a caste can obviously be built up only by the grant of certain exclusive privileges. The English knights possessed no such privileges. There were no special advantages bound up with the tenure of a fief. Far from enjoying immunity from taxation, as in France and Germany, the knights were obliged to pay not only the imposts[15] required of all classes, but scutage into the bargain. Again the winning of a knight's fee lay open to all ranks of freemen, so that it could not be regarded as the hereditary possession of a proud nobility. Yet again, the grant of the honour of knighthood was the exclusive right of the sovereign, who converted it simply into an instrument of extortion. Briefly, there was no inducement to English knights faithfully to perform their service; the sovereign took everything and gave nothing; and at last they would endure such oppression no longer. When John required a feudal force, in the year 1205, he was obliged to arrange that every ten knights should equip one of their number for service. Moreover, the knights who did serve him showed no merit; the English contingent at Bouvines having covered itself with anything but glory. Finally, came mutiny and rebellion and the Great Charter, wherein the express stipulation that fiefs should be both alienable and divisible crushed all hopes of an hereditary caste of warriors for ever.
1252.

After the Charter the national force was composed nominally of three elements, the tenants in chief with their armed vassals, the minor tenants in chief, and the freemen subject to the Assize of Arms, the last two being both under the orders of the sheriffs. It made an imposing show on paper, but was difficult to bring efficient into the field. No man was more shameless than Henry the Third in forcing knighthood, for the sake of the fees, upon all free landholders whom he thought rich enough to support the dignity; yet, when the question became one not of money but of armed men, he was forced to fall back on the same resource as his greater namesake. He simply issued a writ for the enforcement of the Assize of Arms, and ordered the sheriffs to furnish a fixed contingent of men-at-arms, to be provided by the men of the county who were subject thereto.
1282.

The defects of feudal influence in military matters were now so manifest, that Edward the First tried[16] hard to do away with them altogether. Strictly speaking the feudal force was summoned by a special writ addressed to the barons, ordering them to appear with their due proportion of men and horses, and by similar directions to the sheriffs to warn the tenants in chief within their bailiwicks. The system was however, so cumbrous and ineffective that Edward superseded it by issuing commissions to one or two leading men of the county to muster and array the military forces. These Commissions of Array, as they were called, will come before us again so late as in the reign of Charles the First.
1285.

But, like all his predecessors, Edward was careful to cherish the national militia which had grown out of the fyrd. The Statute of Winchester re-enacted the Assize of Arms and redistributed the force into new divisions armed with new weapons. The wealthiest class of freemen was now required to keep a hauberk[11] of iron, a sword and a knife, and a horse. The two lower classes were now subdivided into four, whereof the first was to keep the same arms as the wealthiest, the horse excepted; the second a sword, bow and arrows, and a knife; the third battle-axes, knives, and "other less weapons," in which last are included bills;[12] and the rest bows and arrows, or if they lived in the forest, bows and bolts, the latter being probably less deadly to the king's deer than arrows. Here then was the axe of Harold's day revived, and the archers established by statute. It is evident, from the fact that they wore no defensive armour, that the archers were designed to be light infantry, swift and mobile in their limbs, skilful and deadly with their weapons. The name of Edward the First must be ever memorable in our history for the encouragement that he gave to [17]the long-bow; but we seek in vain for the man, if such there was, who founded the tradition, still happily strong among us, that the English whatever their missile weapon shall always be good shots. Even at the siege of Messina by Richard the First the archers drove the Sicilians from the walls; "for no man could look out of doors but he would have an arrow in his eye before he could shut it."
1297.
1298.

The bowmen had not long been a statutory force before they were called upon for active service. The defeat of the English by William Wallace at Cambuskenneth had summoned Edward from France to take the field in person against the Scots; and he met them on the field of Falkirk. The Scottish army consisted for the most part of infantry armed with pikes, not yet the long pikes of eighteen feet which they were to wield so gallantly under Gustavus Adolphus, but still a good and formidable weapon. Wallace drew them up behind a marsh in four circular battalions ringed in with stakes, posting his light troops, which were armed principally with the short-bow, in the intervals between them, and his one weak body of horse in rear. The English knights were formed as usual in column of three divisions, vanguard, battle and rearguard, and with them was a strong force of archers. Untrue to its old traditions, the English cavalry did not dismount, but galloped straight to the attack. The first division plunged headlong into the swamp (for the medi?val knight, in spite of a hundred warnings, rarely took the trouble to examine the ground before him), did no execution, and suffered heavy loss. The second division, under the Bishop of Durham, then skirted the swamp and came in sight of the Scottish horse. The Bishop hesitated and called a halt. "Back to your mass, Bishop," answered one contemptuous knight. His comrades charged, dispersed the Scottish cavalry, and drove away the archers between the pikemen; but the four battalions stood firm and unbroken, and the knights surged round them in vain.[18] Then the king brought up the archers and the third division of horse. Pushing the archers forward, he held the cavalry back in support until an incessant rain of arrows had riddled the Scottish battalions through and through, and then hurling the knights forward into the broken ranks, he fairly swept them from the field. It was the old story, heavy fire of artillery followed by charges of cavalry, the training of the Scots as Hastings had been of the English, for the trial of Waterloo.
1314.

It is interesting to note that Edward made an effort even then for the constitutional union of the two countries which had so honourably lost and won the day at Falkirk, but he was four centuries before his time. The war continued with varying fortune during the ensuing years. The maker of the English archers died, and under his feeble son the English army learned at Bannockburn an ignominious lesson in tactics. The Scotch army, forty thousand strong, was composed principally of pikemen, who were drawn up, as at Falkirk, in four battalions, with the burn in their front and broken ground on either flank. Their cavalry, numbering a thousand, a mere handful compared to the host of the English men-at-arms, was kept carefully in hand. Edward opened the action by advancing his archers to play on the Scottish infantry, but omitted to support them; and Bruce, seeing his opportunity, let loose his thousand horse on their flank and rolled them up in confusion. The English cavalry then dashed in disorder against the serried pikes, failed, partly from want of space and partly from bad management, to make the slightest impression on them, and were driven off in shameful and humiliating defeat. So the English learned that their famous archers could not hold their own against cavalry without support,[13] and they took the lesson to[19] heart. The old system of dismounting the men-at-arms had been for the moment abandoned with disastrous results; the man who was to revive it had been born at Windsor Castle just two years before the fight.
1327.
1333.

Thirteen years later this boy ascended the throne of England as King Edward the Third, and almost immediately marched with a great host against the Scots. The campaign came to an end without any decisive engagement, but on the one occasion when an action seemed imminent, the English men-at-arms dismounted and put off their spurs after the old English fashion. Peace was made, but only to be broken by the Scots, and then Edward took his revenge for Bannockburn at Halidon Hill. The English men-at-arms alighted from their horses, and were formed into four battalions, each of them flanked by wings of archers, the identical formation adopted two centuries later for the pikemen and musketeers. The Scots, whose numbers were far superior, were also formed on foot in four battalions, but without the strength of archers. "And then," says the old historian,[14] "the English minstrels blew aloud their trumpets and sounded their pipes and other instruments of martial music, and marched furiously to meet the Scots." The archers shot so thick and fast that the enemy, unable to endure it, broke their ranks, and then the English men-at-arms leaped on to their horses for the pursuit. The Scotch strove gallantly to rally in small bodies, but they were borne down or swept away; they are said to have lost ten thousand slain out of sixty thousand that entered the battle.

The mounting of the men-at-arms for the pursuit gave the finishing touch to the English tactical methods, and the nation was now ready for war on a grander[20] scale. Moreover, there was playing round the knees of good Queen Philippa a little boy of three years old who was destined to be the victor of Poitiers. It is therefore time, while the quarrel which led to the Hundred Years' War is maturing, to observe the point to which two centuries and a half of progress had brought English military organisation.

Authorities.—By far the best, so far as I know the only, account of the rise of English tactics and of English military power is to be found in Die Entwickelung des Kriegswesens in der Ritterzeit, by Major-General K?hler, vol. ii. pp. 356 sq., and vol. v. pp. 97 sq., a work to which my obligations must be most gratefully acknowledged. The authorities are faithfully and abundantly quoted. Freeman's Norman Conquest, Mr. J. H. Round's Feudal England, Hewitt's Ancient Armour, Oman's Art of War in the Middle Ages, Grose's Military Antiquities, and Rymer's F?dera are authorities which will occur to every one, as also the Constitutional Histories of Hallam, Stubbs, and Gneist.
CHAPTER II
Attention has already been called to the defects of the feudal system for military purposes, and to the shifts whereby successive sovereigns sought to make them good. With Edward the Second resort was made to a new device. Contracts, or as they were called indents, were concluded by the King with men of position, whereby the latter, as though they had been apprentices to a trade, bound themselves to serve him with a force of fixed strength during a fixed term at a fixed rate of wages. In some respects this was simply a reversion to the old practice of hiring mercenaries; but as Edward the Third placed his contracts for the most part within his kingdom, the force assumed a national character. The current ideas of organisation were still so imperfect that the contractors generally engaged themselves to provide a mixed force of all arms; but as they naturally raised men where they could most easily get hold of them, that is to say in their own neighbourhoods, there was almost certainly some local or personal feeling to help to keep them together. For the rest the contractor of course made his own arrangements for the interior economy of his own particular troops, and enjoyed in consequence considerable powers, which descended to the colonels of a later day and have only been stripped from them within the last two generations. It is not difficult to imagine that men thus enlisted should presently, when released from national employment, have sold their services to the highest bidder and become, as they presently did become, condottièri. It is characteristic[22] of the commercial genius of our race that England should be the cradle not only of the soldier but of the condottière;[15] in other words, that she should have set the example in making warfare first a question of wages, and next a question of profit. But her work did not end here; for these reforms created the race of professional soldiers and through them the renascence of the Art of War. In short, with the opening of the Hundred Years' War the British army quickens in the womb of time, and the feudal force sinks into ever swifter decay.

But there is another side to this picture of feudal inefficiency. Moral not less than physical force is a mighty factor in war; and it was precisely the military defects of the English feudal system that first made her a military power. Though the growth of a caste of warriors was checked, it was to make room for that which was worthy to overshadow it, a fighting nation. For in England there was not, as in other countries, any denial of civil rights to the commons of the realm. Below the ranks of the peerage all freemen enjoyed equality before the law; nay, the peerage itself conferred no privilege except on those who actually possessed it, the sons of peers being commoners, not as elsewhere noble through the mere fact of their birth. In England there were and are nobility and gentry: in other countries nobility and gentry were merged in a single haughty exclusive caste, and between them and other freemen was fixed a great and impassable gulf. Thus the highest and the lowest of the freemen were in touch with each other in England as nowhere else in Europe. More than two centuries later than Cre?y, so great and gallant a gentleman as Bayard could refuse with disdain to fight by the side of infantry. In England, whatever the pride of race, the son of the noblest peer in the land stood shoulder to shoulder with his equal when the archer fell in by his side, and where the son stood the[23] father could feel it no shame to stand. No other nation as yet could imitate this; no other could recall a Hastings where all classes had stood afoot in one battalion. Other nations could indeed, when taught by experience, dismount their knights and align cross-bowmen with them, just as at this day they can erect an upper and lower chamber and speak of a constitution on the English model; but then as now it was the form only, not the substance, that was English.

So far for the commercial and political influence that helped to mould our military system; there remains yet another great moral force to be reckoned with. Chivalry, which had been growing slowly in England since the Third Crusade, burst in the fourteenth century into late but magnificent blossom. The nation woke to the beauty of a service which gave dignity to man's fighting instincts, which taught that it was not enough for him to be without fear if he were not also without reproach, and that though the government of the world must always rest upon force, yet mercy and justice may go hand in hand with it. The girding on of the sword was no longer a social but a religious act; it marked not merely the young man's entrance into public life, but his ordination to a great and noble function. Concurrently there had arisen a sense of the charm of glory and adventure. Hitherto the English knights had gained no repute in Europe. Hatred and jealousy had held the Saxon aloof from his Norman master; now there was no more Saxon and Norman, but the English, united and strong, a fighting people that thirsted for military fame.

Let us now briefly consider the composition and organisation of the armies that were to work such havoc in France. The cavalry was drawn for the most part from the wealthier classes, though, as has been seen, there was one division of the freemen under the statute of Winchester which was called upon to do mounted service. The more important branch, the men-at-arms, was composed of two elements, knights and squires.[24] From the first institution of the feudal system, the number of men required from the greater vassals had forced them to equip their sons and serving-men, who after many changes were finally in the thirteenth century merged together under the generic name of servientes, a term which was soon corrupted into its present form of sergeants. In the year 1294 these servientes were dignified by the higher title of servientes equites, mounted sergeants, which was six years later abandoned for the familiar name of squires. These squires must not, however, be confounded with a different class of the same appellation, namely, the apprentices who were the personal attendants of the knights. The squire of which I now speak was rather a knight of inferior order corresponding to the bachelier (bas chevalier) of France. The word knight itself gives us a hint of this inferiority, being the same as the German knecht, whereas ritter is the German term that expresses what is generally understood as a knight in English. The inner history of chivalry is the story of the struggle of the sergeants to rise to an equality with the knights of the first order, and in the fourteenth century they were not far from their goal. Even now they were considered the backbone of the English army, and were equipped in all points like the class above them.

Men-at-arms, an expression derived from the French, were so called because they were covered with defensive armour from top to toe; but as the middle of the fourteenth century is a period of transition in the development of armour, it is difficult to describe their equipment with any certainty. Their offensive arms were the lance, sword, dagger, and shield. Trained from very early youth in the handling of weapons they were doubtless proficient enough with them; but they do not seem to have been great horsemen, and indeed it is recorded that they were sometimes tied to the saddle. Monstrelet, writing in the year 1416, tells us of the astonishment which certain Italians created among the French because they could actually turn their horses at[25] the gallop. It is probable that the bits employed were too weak, and that the cumbrousness of the saddle and the weight carried by each man were sad obstacles to good horsemanship; but it is worth remembering in any case that, as this passage plainly shows, men-at-arms in the saddle were reduced to one of two alternatives, to move slowly and retain control of their horses, or to gallop for an indefinite period wherever the animals might choose to carry them.

The favourite horses, alike for speed, endurance, and courage, were the Spanish, which, as they could only reach England by the journey overland through France, were not always very easily obtained. Philip the Bold in 1282 refused to allow one batch of eighty such horses to be transhipped to England; but from a contract still extant, of the year 1333, it appears that Edward the Third still counted on Spain to provide him with remounts. These horses, however, were only bestridden for action, being committed on the march to the care of the shield-bearers or squires, who led them, as was natural, on their right-hand side, and thus procured for them the curious name of dextrarii.[16] The usual allowance of horses for a knight was three, besides a packhorse for his baggage, the smallest of which, named the palfrey, was that which he rode on ordinary occasions; in fact, to put the matter into modern language, a knight started on a campaign with a first charger, a second charger, and a pony. The first charger was always a stallion; the rest might be geldings or mares. From the year 1298 the practice of covering horses with defensive armour was introduced into England, an equipment which soon came to be regarded as so essential that one branch of the cavalry, and that the most important, was reckoned by the number of barded horses.

The personal retinue of the knights was made up of apprentices or aspirants to the rank which they held. The squire or shield-bearer took charge of the knight's armour on the march, and was responsible for maintaining[26] it in proper order; and it is worth remarking that the English squire took a pride in burnishing the metal to the highest pitch of brilliancy, thus early establishing those traditions of smartness which are still so strong in our cavalry. It was also the squire's duty, among many others, to help his master to don his harness when the time for action came, beginning with his iron shoes or sollerets, and working upwards till the fabric was crowned by the iron headpiece, and the finishing touch added by the assumption of the shield. The reader will readily understand that a really efficient squire must have been invaluable, for if an engagement came in any way as a surprise there was an immediate rush for the baggage, and a scene of confusion that must have beggared description. Fortunately, the fact that both sides were generally alike unready, and the punctiliousness of chivalric courtesy, permitted as a rule ample time not only for the equipment of all ranks, but for the marshalling of the host.

In the matter of administrative organisation the men-at-arms were distributed into constabularies, being commanded by officers called constables. The strength of a constabulary seems to have varied from five-and-twenty to eighty; and this variety, together with the absence of any tactical unit of fixed strength, makes it impossible to state how many constabularies were included in the next tactical division. This was called the banner, and was commanded by a banneret, a rank originally conferred only upon such as could bring a certain number of followers into the field. Promotion to the degree of banneret was marked by cutting off the forked tail of the pennon which was carried by the ordinary knight, and leaving the remnant square. So at the present day, the pennons of lances are forked, the square being reserved for the standards of squadrons and regiments.

The independent employment of small bodies in action was almost unknown, the rule being to pack an indefinite number of men-at-arms, hundreds or even thousands, into a close and solid mass, its depth almost[27] if not quite as great as its frontage. The haye, or thin line, is of much later date. Ordinarily some modification of the wedge was the formation preferred; that is to say, that the frontage of the front rank was somewhat less than that of the rear; the mass of that particular shape being judged to be less liable to disorder and better adapted for breaking into a hostile phalanx. The relative strength of the front and rear ranks depended entirely on the numbers that were packed in between them, and it may readily be supposed that the evolutions which so unwieldly a body could execute were very few. Probably, until the moment of action came, sufficient space was maintained to permit every horse to turn on his own ground, after the Roman fashion, to right, left, or about; but for the attack ranks and files were closed up as tightly as possible, and all other considerations were sacrificed to the maintenance of a compact array. It was said of the French knights who marched with Richard the Lion-Heart that an apple thrown into the midst of them would not have fallen to the ground. We must therefore rid ourselves of the popular notion of the knight as a headlong galloping cavalier. The attack of men-at-arms could not be very rapid unless it were made in disorder; and though it comes strictly under the head of shock-action, the shock was rather that of a ponderous column moving at a moderate pace than of a light line charging at high speed. By bearing these facts in mind it will be easier to understand the failure of mounted men-at-arms to break a passive square of infantry.

Next after the men-at-arms came a species of cavalry called by the name of pauncenars,[17] which was less fully equipped with defensive armour, but wore the habergeon[18] and was armed with the lance.

Lastly came the light cavalry of the fyrd, originally established to patrol the English coast. These were called hobelars, from the hobbies or ponies which they [28]rode, and were equipped with an iron helmet, a heavily padded doublet (aketon), iron gloves, and a sword.

Turning next to the infantry, there were Welsh spearmen, carrying the weapon which gave them their name, but without defensive armour. Indeed it should seem that they were not overburdened with clothes of any kind, for they were every one provided at the King's expense with a tunic and a mantle, which were by express direction made of the same material and colour for all. These Welsh spearmen therefore were the first troops in the English service who were dressed in uniform, and they received it first in the year 1337.[19] The colour of their clothing unfortunately remains unknown to us.

Next we come to the peculiar strength of England, the archers. Though a certain number of them seem generally to have been mounted, yet, like the dragoons of a later day, these rode for the sake of swifter mobility only, and may rightly be reckoned as infantry. As has been already stated, the archers wore no defensive armour except an iron cap, relying on their bows alone. These bows were six feet four inches long; the arrows, of varying length but generally described as cloth-yard shafts, were fitted with barb and point of iron and fledged with the feathers of goose or peacock. But the weapon itself would have gone for little without the special training in its use wherein the English excelled. "My father," says Bishop Latimer (and we may reasonably assume that in such matters there had been little change in a hundred and fifty years), "My father was diligent in teaching me to shoot with the bow; he taught me to draw, to lay my body to the bow, not to draw with strength of arm as other nations do, but with the strength of the body. I had my bows bought[20] [29]me according to my age and strength; as I increased in these my bows were made bigger and bigger." The principle was in fact analogous to that which is taught to young oarsmen at the present day. The results of this training were astonishing. The range of the long-bow in the hands of the old archers is said to have been fully two hundred and forty yards, and the force of the arrow to have been such as to pierce at a fair distance an inch of stout timber. Moreover, the shooting was both rapid and accurate. Indeed the long-bow was in the fourteenth century a more formidable weapon than the cross-bow, which had been condemned by Pope Innocent the Second as too deadly for Christian warfare so far back as 1139. It was at no disadvantage in the matter of range, while it could be discharged far more quickly; and further, since it was held not horizontally but perpendicularly to the ground, the archers could stand closer together, and their volleys could be better concentrated. Thus the long-bow, though the cross-bow was not unknown to the English, was not only the national but the better weapon. In action the archers were ranked as deep as was consistent with the delivery of effective volleys, the rear ranks being able to do good execution by aiming over the heads of the men before them. It may be imagined from the muscular training undergone by the archers that they were physically a magnificent body of men.

Strictly speaking the archers were the artillery of the army, according to the terminology of the time,[21] the word artillator being used in the time of Edward the Second to signify the officer in charge of what we now call the ordnance-stores. But to avoid confusion we must use the word in its modern sense, the more so since we find among the stores of the custodian[22] of the King's artillery in 1344 the items of saltpetre and [30]sulphur for the manufacture of powder, and among his men six "gonners." Gun, it should be added, was the English, cannon the French name for these weapons from the beginning. It will presently be necessary to notice their first appearance in the field.

As to the general organisation of the army, the whole was divided into thousands under an officer called a millenar, subdivided into hundreds, each under a centenar, and further subdivided into twenties, each under a vintenar. The commander-in-chief was usually the King in person, aided by two principal officers, the High Constable and the Marshal, whose duties were, roughly speaking, those of Adjutant and Quartermaster-General. For tactical purposes the army was distributed into three divisions, called the vanguard, battle and rearguard, which kept those names whatever their position in the field or on the march, whether the host was drawn up, as most commonly, in three lines, or in one. Trumpets were used for purposes of signalling, though so far as can be gathered they sounded no distinct calls, and were dependent for their significance on orders previously issued. The failing in this respect is the more remarkable, inasmuch as the signals of the chase with the horn were already very numerous and very clearly and accurately defined.

The pay of all ranks can fortunately be supplied from the muster-roll of Calais in 1346, and although I shall not again encumber these pages with a pay-list I shall for once print it entire:
The Prince of Wales    20s.         a day.
The Bishop of Durham    6s.    8d.    "   "
Earls    6s.    8d.    "   "
Barons and Bannerets    4s.        "   "
Knights    2s.        "   "
Esquires, Constables, Captains, and Leaders    1s.        "   "
Vintenars        6d.    "   "
Mounted Archers        6d.    "   "
Pauncenars        6d.    "   "
[31] Hobelars        6d.    "   "
Foot-Archers        3d.    "   "
Welsh Spearmen        2d.    "   "
"    Vintenars        4d.    "   "
Masons, Carpenters, Smiths, Engineers, Miners, Gunners, 10d., 6d., and 3d.

It is melancholy to have to record that even so early as in 1342 corruption and fraudulent dealing had begun in the army. The marshals were ordered to muster the men-at-arms once a month, and to refuse pay for men who were absent or inadequately armed or indifferently mounted. We shall see the practice of drawing pay for imaginary men and the tricks played on muster-masters increase and multiply, till they demand a special vocabulary and a certain measure of official recognition. A favourite abuse among men-at-arms was the claim of extortionate compensation for horses lost on active service, leading to an order in this same year that all horses should be valued on admission to the corps, and marked to prevent deception. Thus early was the road opened that leads to the broad arrow. The taint of corruption, indeed, clings strongly to every army, with the possible exception of the Prussian, in Europe. War is a time of urgency and stress, which does not admit of strict audits or careful inspections, and poor human nature is too weak not to turn such an opportunity to its profit. It is an unpleasant thought that dishonesty and peculation should be inseparably associated with so much that is noble and heroic in human history, but the fact is indisputable, and must not be lightly passed over. Moreover the days when English cavalry shall go to war on their own horses may not yet be numbered; and it may be useful to remember that the medi?val man-at-arms would mount himself on his worst animal in order to break him down the quicker, and claim for him the price of his best. It is only by constant wariness against such evils that there can be built up a sound system of military administration.

Authorities.—As for previous chapter.

CHAPTER III
June 24.

Having now sketched the composition of the English forces, let us move forthwith to the scene of action. We must omit the early incidents of the war, and the assumption by Edward of the famous motto wherein he consecrated his claim to the crown of France, Dieu et mon droit. We must pass by the famous naval action of Sluys, where the English commanders in their zeal to follow the precepts of Vegetius, thought it more important to have the sun in the enemy's eyes than the wind in their own favour, and where the archers, acting as marine sharp-shooters, were the true authors of the English victory. We must overlook likewise the innumerable sieges, even that of Quesnoy, where the English first came under the fire of cannon, merely remarking that owing to their ignorance of that particular branch of warfare, the English were uniformly unsuccessful; and we must come straight to the year 1345, when Henry of Lancaster, Earl of Derby, landed at Bayonne with a force of three thousand men for a campaign in Gascony and Guienne. The name of our first artillery-officer has been given; attention must now be called to our first engineer, this same Earl of Derby, who had lately been recalled from service with the Spaniards against the Moors at the siege of Algesiras, and was the first man who taught the English how to take a fortified town.
1346, June.

Derby then with his little army harried Gascony and Guienne for a time, until the arrival of a superior French force compelled him to retire and gave him[33] much ado to defend himself. Accordingly, in June 1346 Edward the Third impressed a fleet of innumerable small vessels, none of them exceeding sixty tons burden, embarked thereon four thousand men-at-arms, ten thousand archers and five or six thousand Welsh spearmen, and sailed for the coast of France. On the 12th of July he put into St. Vaast de la Hogue, a little to the east of Cherbourg, dispersed a French force that was stationed to oppose him, and successfully effected his landing. Six days were allowed to recruit men and horses after the voyage, and the army then moved eastward to the Seine, leaving a broad line of ruin and desolation in its wake, and advanced up the left bank of the river. King Philip of France had meanwhile collected an army at Rouen, whence he marched parallel to the English along the right bank of the Seine, crossed it at Paris, and stood ready to fall upon Edward if he should strike southward to Guienne. But Edward's plans were of the vaguest; his diversion had already relieved Derby, and he now crossed the Seine at Poissy and struck northward as if for Flanders. Philip no sooner divined his purpose than he too hastened northward, outmarched the English, crossed the Somme at Amiens, gave orders for the occupation of every bridge and ford by which the English could pass the river, and then recrossing marched straight upon Edward's right flank.

The position of the English was now most critical, for they could not cross the Somme and were fairly hemmed in between the river and the sea. At his wits' end Edward examined his prisoners, and from them learned of the ford of Blanche Tache in the tidal water about eight miles below Abbeville. Thither accordingly he marched, and after waiting part of a night for the ebb-tide, forced the passage in the teeth of a French detachment that had been stationed to guard it, and sending six officers to select for him a suitable position pursued his way northward through the forest of Cre?y. On the morning of the 26th of August he crossed the[34] river Maie, and there swinging his front round from north to south-east he turned and stood at bay.
August 26.

The position was well chosen. The army occupied a low line of heights lying between the villages of Cre?y and Wadicourt, the left flank resting on a forest, the right on the river Maie. Edward ordered every man to dismount, and parked the horses and baggage waggons in an entrenched leaguer[23] in rear. The army was too weak to cover the whole line of the position, so the archers were pushed forward and extended in a multitude of battalions along the front, and backed with Welsh spearmen. Echeloned in rear of them stood the three main divisions of the army; foremost and to the right the vanguard of twelve hundred men-at-arms under the Black Prince, next to it the battle of as many more under the Earl of Arundel, and behind it, covering the extreme left, the rearguard, consisting of fifteen hundred men-at-arms and six thousand mixed archers and infantry under the King. The country being rich in provisions Edward ordered every man to eat a hearty meal before falling into his place, for he knew that the Englishman fights best when he is full. When the host was arrayed in order he rode round the whole army to cheer it; and then the men lay down, the archers with their helmets and bows on the ground before them, and waited till the French should come.

Philip meanwhile had crossed the Somme at Abbeville on the morning of the 26th, and turned eastward in the hope of cutting off the English. Finding that he was too late, he countermarched and turned north, at the same time sending forward officers to reconnoitre. The afternoon was far advanced, and the French were wearied with a long, disorderly march when these officers returned with intelligence of the English. Philip ordered a halt, but the indiscipline and confusion were such that the order could not be obeyed. The noblest blood in France was riding on in all its pride to make[35] an end of the despised English, and a mass of rude infantry was waiting to share the slaughter and the spoil. So they blundered on till they caught sight of the English lying quietly down in order of battle; and therewith all good resolutions vanished and Philip gave the order to attack.

It was now nearly five o'clock, and the heaven was black with clouds, which presently burst in a terrific thunderstorm. The English archers slipped off their bowstrings to keep them dry, and waited; while six thousand Genoese cross-bowmen, jaded by the long march, drenched and draggled with the rain that beat into their faces, conscious that they were almost disarmed by the wetness of their bowstrings, shuffled wearily into their stations along the French front. Their leaders complained that they were unfairly treated. "Who cares for your rabble?" answered the Count of Alen?on. "They are nothing but useless mouths, more trouble than help." So the cross-bowmen sulkily took their position, and the rest of the French army, from twelve to twenty thousand men-at-arms and some fifteen thousand infantry, ranged themselves in three massive lines behind them. A vast flight of ravens flew over the opposing arrays, croaking loudly over the promised feast of dead men.

Then the storm passed away inland into France, and the sun low down in the west flashed out in all his glory full in the faces of the French. The Genoese advanced and raised a loud cry, thrice repeated, to strike terror into the English: the archers over against them stood massive and silent. The loud report of two or three cannon, little more harmful than the shouts of the Genoese, was the only answer; and then the archers stepped forward and drew bow. In vain the Genoese attempted to reply; they were overwhelmed by the torrent of shafts; they shrank back, cut their bowstrings and would have fled, but for a line of French mounted men-at-arms which was drawn up in their rear to check them. The proud chivalry of France was chafing impatiently[36] behind them, and Philip would wait no longer. "Slay me these rascals," he said brutally; and the first line of men-at-arms thundered forward, trod the hapless Genoese under foot, and pressed on within range of the arrows. And then ensued a terrible scene. The great stallions, maddened by the pain of the keen barbed shafts, broke from all control. They jibbed, they reared, they swerved, they plunged, striking and lashing out hideously, while the rear of the dense column, carried forward by its own momentum, surged on to the top of the foremost and wedged the whole into a helpless choking mass. And still the shower of pitiless arrows fell swift as snow upon the thickest of the press; and the whole of the French fighting line became a confused welter of struggling animals, maimed cross-bowmen, and fallen cavaliers, crippled by the weight of their armour, an easy prey to the long, keen knives of the Welsh.

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THE CAMPAIGN OF 1346.

Nevertheless some few of the French men-at-arms had managed to pierce through the archers. The blind king of Bohemia had been guided by two faithful knights through the centre, Alen?on had skirted them on one flank, the Count of Flanders on the other, and all had fallen upon the Black Prince's battalion. The danger was greatest on the left flank; but the Earl of Arundel moved up the second line of the echelon to his support, and the English held their own. Then the second line of the French advanced, broke through the archers, not without heavy loss, and fell likewise upon the English men-at-arms. The Prince of Wales was overthrown, and was only saved by the devotion of his standard-bearer, but the battalion fought on. It was probably at this time that Arundel sent a messenger to the King for reinforcements. "Is my son dead or hurt?" he asked. "No, sire, but he is hard beset." "Then return to those who sent you and bid them send me no more such messages while my son is alive; tell them to let the boy win his spurs." The message was carried back to the battalion, and the men-at-arms fought on stoutly as ever. The archers seem also to[37] have rallied and closed on the flank and rear of the attacking French. Alen?on's banner could still be seen swaying behind a hedge of archers, and Philip, anxious to pour his third and last line into the fight, had actually advanced within range of the arrows. But the power of the bowmen was still unweakened, the ground was choked with dead men and horses, and the light was failing fast. He yielded to the entreaties of his followers and rode from the field; and the first great battle of the English was won.

When morning dawned the country was full of straggling Frenchmen, who from the sudden change in the direction of the advance had lost all knowledge of their line of retreat; the few that retained some semblance of organised bodies were attacked and broken up. Never was victory more complete. The French left eleven great lords, eighty-three bannerets, over twelve hundred knights and some thousands of common soldiers dead on the field. It was a fortunate issue to a reckless and ill-planned campaign. It is customary to give all credit for the victory to the archers, but this is unjust. Superbly as they fought they would have been broken without the men-at-arms, even as the men-at-arms would have been overwhelmed without the archers. Both did their duty without envy or jealousy, and therein lay the secret of their success.
1355.
1356.
July.
August 28.

The siege and capture of Calais followed, and then by the mediation of the Pope peace was made, and for a time preserved. Petty hostilities however never ceased in Brittany, and finally in 1355 the war broke out anew. Three armies were fitted out,—one of a thousand men-at-arms under the Black Prince for operations in Guienne, a second under the Earl of Derby for Brittany, and a third under the personal command of the King. Little, however, was effected in the campaign of 1355. The King was recalled to England by an invasion of the Scots, and the operations of 1356 in Brittany were checked by the appearance of the French King in superior force. But at the close[38] of July the Black Prince suddenly started on a wild raid from the Dordogne in the south to the Loire. His object seems to have been to effect a junction with Derby's forces at Orleans; but it is difficult to see how he could have hoped for success. He had reached Vierzon on the Cher when he heard that the King of France was on his way to meet him in overwhelming strength. Unable to retreat through the country which he had laid waste on his advance, he turned sharp to the west down the Cher and struck the Loire at Tours. There for four days he halted, for what reason it is difficult to explain, since the delay enabled the French to cross the Loire and seriously to threaten his retreat.

There was now nothing for the Prince but to retire southward with all haste. The French were hard on his track, and followed him so closely that he was much straitened by want of supplies. On the 14th of September the English were at Chatelheraut and the French at La Haye, little more than ten miles apart, and on the 15th the French made a forced march which brought them fairly to southward of the Prince, and between him and his base at Bordeaux. All contact however had been lost; and the French King, making sure that the Prince had designs on Poitiers, swung round to the westward and moved straight upon the town. On the 17th, while in full march, his rearguard was suddenly surprised by the advanced parties of the Prince. As in the movements after the Alma, each army was executing a flank march, quite unconsciously, in the presence of the other. The French rearguard pursued the reconnoitring party to the main body of the English, and after a sharp engagement was repulsed with heavy loss. The French army had actually marched across the line of the Black Prince's retreat, and left it open to him once more.
Sept. 18.

Edward lost no time in looking for a suitable position, and presently found it at Maupertuis some fifteen miles south-west of Poitiers. There to the[39] north of the river Miosson is a plain seamed with deep ravines running down to that stream; and behind one of these he took his stand, facing north-east. The sides of the ravine were planted with vineyards and blocked by thick hedges, so that it was impossible for cavalry to cross it except by a track which was broad enough for but four horsemen abreast; and these natural advantages the Prince improved by repairing all weak places in the fences and by digging entrenchments. One exposed spot on his left flank he strengthened by a leaguer of waggons as well as with the spade. He then told off his archers to line the hedges which commanded the passage across the ravine, and drew up his men-at-arms, all of them dismounted, in three lines behind it. The first line he committed to the Earls of Warwick and Suffolk, the rearmost to the Earl of Salisbury, and the centre he reserved for himself. His whole force, augmented as it was by a contingent of Gascons, did not exceed six or seven thousand men, half of whom were archers.

So passed the day of the 18th of September on the English side. The French on their part, instead of blocking up their retreat to the south and reducing them by starvation, simply moved down from Poitiers to within a league of the English position and halted for the night. Their force amounted to sixty thousand men, and they might well feel confident as to the issue of an action. Indeed, when the Black Prince, fully alive to the desperate peril of his situation, negotiated for an evacuation of the country, they imposed such terms that he could not in honour accept them. They therefore reconnoitred the English position, and laid their plans for the morrow. Three hundred chosen men-at-arms, backed by a column of German, Italian, and Spanish knights, were to charge down the ravine upon the archers, disperse them, and attack the English men-at-arms on the other side. Three lines, each of three massive battalions containing from three to four thousand men-at-arms, with lances shortened to a[40] length of five feet, were to follow them afoot, and the English were to be crushed by their own tactics.
Sept. 19.

It is hardly surprising that in the night the Black Prince's heart failed him. He resolved while he could to place the Miosson between him and the French, and at dawn began his retreat, leaving the rearguard, however, still in the position at Maupertuis in case withdrawal should be impossible.[24] He also sent two knights to watch the French army, who however approached too closely to it and were captured. His first line had already crossed the Miosson when intelligence reached him that the French had advanced, and that the rearguard was engaged. He at once ordered the vanguard to return, and himself hastening back with his own division, despatched three hundred mounted men-at-arms and as many mounted archers without delay to strengthen his right wing. The French meanwhile had moved forward, gaily singing the song of Roland, to find the way blocked by the hedges and vineyards of the ravine. Undismayed they plunged down into the narrow track; and then the English archers behind the hedges opened at close range a succession of frightfully destructive volleys. The foremost of the horsemen fell headlong down, the rear plunged confusedly on the top of them, and the pass was blocked with a heaving, helpless crowd, on which the arrows hissed down in an eternal merciless shower. The supporting column of foreign cavalry was unable to act in the confusion; it was already under the fire of the archers, and before it could move the English mounted men on the right wing came down full upon its left flank, and killed or captured every man.

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THE CAMPAIGN OF 1356.

And now the wounded French horses, mad with pain and terror, many of them riderless and all beyond control, dashed back on to the first line of the dismounted[41] French men-at-arms. It was a charge of mad animals, the most terrible of all charges, and the huge battalion fell into confusion before it. Edward was watching the battle keenly from his position; he had already ordered his men-at-arms to mount, and now Sir John Chandos, whose name must always be linked to Edward's as that of Collingwood to Nelson, broke out aloud with, "Forward, sire, forward, and the day is yours!" "Aye, John," answered the Prince, with a thought perhaps of the morning's retreat, "No going backward to-day. Forward banner, in the name of God and St. George!" The preliminary attack of the mounted men on the right had already cleared the way for them. The English cavalry scrambled in haste down into the ravine on the right, and fell upon the French men-at-arms. The front and centre divisions, already much shaken, were easily broken and dispersed; the third and strongest still remained, and against this, which resisted desperately, the whole force of the English was turned. The lesson of Falkirk was remembered. The mounted archers made the gaps and the men-at-arms rode into them. The division was broken, the King was captured, and the mass of the fugitives making for Poitiers found the gates closed against them and were cut down by hundreds. The action began at six in the morning, and lasted till late into the afternoon. The French losses were enormous. Over and above the King and many great lords two thousand men-at-arms were captured, and two thousand five hundred more were left dead on the field; the number of the unhappy foot-men that were slain it is impossible to state. The English loss is variously set down, the reports ranging from half the force to sixty-four men. The battle, from the disparity between the strength of the two sides, must remain ever memorable in the annals of war. To the English, who had but lately risen above the horizon as a military power, it gave a prestige that has never been lost.
1360.
1364,
May 16.

The peace of Brétigny closed the war, and the[42] English army was disbanded. But the soldiers, like the ten thousand Greeks who returned from Cunaxa, were too deeply bitten with their profession to abandon it for the tedium of peace. They therefore formed themselves into independent bodies, or Free Companies, and for years were the scourge of France, their chamber as they called it, which they plundered and ravaged at their pleasure. The greatest of their leaders was John Hawkwood, of whom something more must presently be said, but these bands, in less or greater numbers, were constantly to be found fighting for hire against the French. Thus three hundred of them fought for the King of Navarre against the King of France at Cocherel. The numbers engaged were little more than fifteen hundred on each side, but the action is interesting as showing the efforts of the French to meet the peculiar tactics of the English. In order to have no more trouble with unruly horses the French men-at-arms dismounted and fought on foot, and now for the first time the archers found themselves outdone. The armour of the French was so good that it turned the cloth-yard shafts; and being slightly superior in numbers the French men-at-arms forced their enemy off the field. It was but a slight success, but a defeat even of a small body of English was such a rarity in those days that it gave the French great hopes for the future, hopes which were soon to be dashed to the ground.
1365.
Sept. 29.

In the following year a quarrel as to the succession to the Duchy of Brittany between Charles of Blois and John of Montfort brought the English again into the field. The French King Charles the Fifth sent assistance to support the former, whereupon John of Montfort at once appealed to the English. John Chandos and several more of the garrison in France, eager for fresh battle against their old enemies, asked permission to join Montfort as volunteers. "You may go full well," answered the Black Prince. "Since the French are going for Charles of Blois, I give you good[43] leave." The English, both volunteers and mercenaries, accordingly hurried to the scene of war; and at Auray they fought the action which decided the campaign. The numbers engaged did not exceed four thousand in either army. Both sides dismounted, and the French men-at-arms discarding the lance as unfit for fighting afoot equipped themselves with battle-axes, so that there promised to be a stubborn fight. The English archers as usual opened the engagement, but as at Cocherel their shafts could not penetrate the armour of the French; whereupon with great deliberation they threw down their bows, and boldly advancing to the French men-at-arms plucked their axes from their hands and plied the weapons against their astonished owners with terrible effect. The whole proceeding furnishes so good an example of the thoughtless, thick-headed gallantry of the English soldier, that one can only marvel that the battle of Auray should be practically unknown to Englishmen. The intensely ludicrous picture that can be conjured up of a series of detached struggles between the brawny active Englishmen in their doublets and hose, and the unhappy Frenchmen cased stiffly in their mail, the panting, the staggering, and the rattling, the agonised curses from behind the vizor, and the great broad laugh on the honest English face—this alone should have saved it from oblivion. The English men-at-arms came quickly to the support of the bowmen, and after a long and desperate engagement, for the noble and gallant Bertrand du Guesclin was in command of the French, the English drove their enemy from the field and as usual finished the pursuit on horseback. There was no question in the action of superior archery or advantage of position, though Chandos indeed handled his reserve in a masterly fashion, but it was simply a matter of what the Duke of Wellington called bludgeon-work; and at this too the English proved themselves the better men.
1366.

By this time the oppression of the Free Companies had become so insufferable that, in order to rid the[44] country of them, Charles the Fifth ordered Bertrand du Guesclin to take a certain number of them into service and march with them to fight for the bastard Henry of Trastamare against Pedro the Cruel of Castile. It would be a mistake, we must note in passing, to look upon these companies as composed simply of low ruffians; they seem on the contrary to have been made up largely of the class of esquires, while there were poor noblemen serving even among the archers. On entering Spain they took to themselves a white cross, the old English colour of the Crusades, as their distinctive mark, and were apparently the first English troops that introduced this substitute for uniform. Further, they called themselves the White Company, and were in this respect the forerunners of the Buffs and Blues. They did little profitable work under du Guesclin, and were presently dismissed, just in time to be re-enlisted to the number of twelve thousand by the Black Prince, who, dreading an alliance of France with Spain, was preparing an expedition for the rescue of Peter the Cruel. The vassals of Aquitaine and Gascony were also summoned to the Prince's standard, a reinforcement under the Duke of Lancaster was sent from England to Brittany, whence it marched overland to the south, and by December 1366 thirty thousand mounted troops were concentrated on the frontier of Navarre. It was by general consent admitted to be the finest army that had ever been seen in Europe; so rapid had been the growth of military efficiency in England under the two great Edwards. It was organised in the usual three divisions, the vanguard being under command of the Duke of Lancaster, with Sir John Chandos at his side. The battle was under the command of the Prince himself, and the rearguard under a Gascon noble and famous soldier, the Captal de Buch. Every man wore the red cross of St. George on a white surcoat and on his shield, a badge which henceforth became distinctive of the English soldier for two centuries. The Spaniards, it is worth[45] noting, wore a scarf, a fashion which, already two generations old, was destined to last through our great Civil War, and to survive, in the form of a sash, to the present day.
1367.

On Monday the 22nd of February 1367 the first division crossed the Pyrenees by the Pass of Roncesvalles. The next two followed it on the two succeeding days, and the whole force was reunited at Pampeluna. The Prince had now two lines of operations open to him, both leading to his objective, Burgos; the one by Vittoria and Miranda on the Ebro, the other by Puente la Reyna and Logrono. He chose the former, the identical line followed in the contrary direction by Wellington in chase of the beaten French, and sent only a small detachment of volunteers under Sir Thomas Felton along the latter route. This party of Felton's deserves mention as the first body of English irregular cavalry under a reckless and daring officer. No exploit was too hare-brained for them and they did excellent service, for they were the first to find contact with the Spanish army, at Navarete, and having obtained it they preserved it, keeping the Prince admirably informed of the enemy's movements. Henry of Trastamare, on learning the advance of the English, crossed the Ebro and marched on Vittoria, but finding that the Black Prince had been beforehand with him fell back on Miranda. Felton's volunteers stuck to him so persistently and impudently during this retreat that the Spaniards at last lost patience and attacked them in overwhelming force. The English, a mere hundred men, were too proud to retire but stood firm on the hill of Arinez, the very spot where Picton broke the French centre in the battle of the 21st of June 1813, and were killed to a man. Henry then recrossed the Ebro to his first position at Navarete; the Black Prince crossed the same river at Logrono, and on the 3rd of April the two hosts stood face to face on the plain between Navarete and Najera.
April 3.

It is not easy to ascertain the force engaged on each side, but it is certain that the Black Prince, with about[46] ten thousand men-at-arms and as many archers, was superior in numbers and very decidedly superior in the quality of his troops. Nevertheless the force had suffered much hardship, and the men were individually enfeebled by want of food. The Spanish army was distributed into four divisions. The first of these, consisting of dismounted knights, was placed under the command of Bertrand du Guesclin and formed the first line. The remaining three formed the second line; the largest of them, composed of mounted men-at-arms and a rabble of rude infantry, being drawn up in rear of the vanguard, while the other two, made up chiefly of light cavalry copied from the Moorish model, were drawn up on either flank slightly in advance of the second and in rear of the first line. The arrangement of the Black Prince's army was similar but more massive; first came the vanguard under John Chandos, then a second line with two flanking divisions pushed slightly forward, as in the Spanish army, and lastly the third line in reserve. Every man in the English host was dismounted. The battlefield was a level plain; and the sight of the two armies advancing against each other, armour and pennons glancing under the morning sun was, in Froissart's words, great beauty to behold.

To face page 46
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1367.

The English archers as usual opened the engagement, and then the divisions of Chandos and du Guesclin, the two most gallant and chivalrous soldiers of their day, met in full shock. In spite of a furious resistance the English, weakened by privation, were for a moment borne back. Chandos was overthrown and went near to lose his life. But meanwhile the English archers in the flanking divisions had driven off the light horse that stood before them, and now wheeling inward enveloped du Guesclin's devoted band on both flanks. The bastard Henry strove gallantly to save the day with the second line, but the Black Prince brought up not only a second line but a third, and the battle was soon over. Then the English men-at-arms flew, as at Poitiers, to their horses, and the defeat was turned into a rout. A rapid[47] torrent, spanned by but a single bridge, barred the retreat of the fugitives; the narrow passage was choked by the press of the flying, and thousands were taken or slain.

This battle marks the zenith of early English military power. But the campaign was after all a failure. The ill faith of Pedro the Cruel forced the Black Prince to tax Gascony heavily for the expenses of the war; the province appealed to the King of France, and the Prince was summoned to be judged before his peers at Paris as a rebellious vassal. He shook his head ominously when he received the message. "We will go," he said, "but with helmet on head and sixty thousand men at our back." The war with France broke out anew, and petty operations were soon afoot all over the country; but now noble after noble in Aquitaine and Gascony forsook his allegiance and revolted to the French. Disaster came thick upon disaster. The Earl of Pembroke, a new commander, disdaining the help of the veteran Chandos, was defeated, and Chandos himself, while advancing to his relief, was slain in a skirmish, to the grief alike of friend and of foe. The Prince, already sickening of a mortal disease, turned in fury upon the insurgent town of Limoges, besieged it, took it, and ordered every soul in it to be put to the sword. Three thousand men, women, and children were cut down, crying "Mercy, mercy!" but the stern man, too ill to ride, looked on unmoved from his litter, till at the sight of three French knights fighting gallantly against overwhelming odds his heart softened, and he gave the word for the slaughter to cease.

A few weeks later his little son, but six years old, the boy upon whom the great soldier had lavished all that was tender in his nature, died suddenly at Bordeaux. The blow aggravated the Prince's sickness, and the physicians ordered him to England, in the faint hope that he might get better at home. He returned, hid himself in strict seclusion in his house at Berkhampstead, and waited for the end. Meanwhile things in France[48] went from bad to worse. A great naval defeat before Rochelle cost England the command of the sea, and with the loss of the sea Guienne and Gascony were lost likewise. An expedition under John of Gaunt landed at Calais and marched indeed to Bordeaux, but lost four-fifths of its numbers through sickness on the way. By 1374 the English possessions in France were reduced to Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne; so swiftly had victory passed away with the withdrawal of the master's hand.
1376.

At length, in 1376, the Prince came up to Westminster to attend, even in his sick-bed, the deliberations of Parliament. This was his last effort. Two months later, on the 8th of June, he summoned his faithful comrades to his chamber to bid them farewell, and as they filed past he thanked them for their good service and asked their pardon for that he could not reward them as he wished. Then he entreated them to be faithful to his son as they had been to himself: and they swore it, weeping like women, with all their hearts. The end came with a flash of the imperious soldier's spirit. Observing that a knight who had offended him had come in with the rest, the Prince instantly bade him begone and see his face no more; and then the noble heart cracked, and with a last ejaculation that he forgave all men as he hoped to be forgiven, the Black Prince, the hope and pride and treasure of England, sank back and died. Two months later he was buried with military pomp in the cathedral at Canterbury; and over his tomb were hung, and still hang, his helmet, his surcoat, his gauntlets, his crest, his shield, and his sword,[25] the veritable arms worn by the first great English soldier.[26] For a great soldier he was and a great commander. He could be stern and he could be merciless, but those were stern and merciless times, and the man whose last thoughts were for his comrades-in-arms was a chief who could hold men to him and a leader whom they would [49]follow to the death. Men no longer pray for his soul in the chapel which he founded in the crypt of the cathedral; but morning and evening the voice of the trumpet, calling English soldiers to their work and dismissing them to their rest, peals forth from the barracks without and pierces faintly into the silence of the sanctuary, no unfitting requiem for the great warrior who, waiting for the sound of a louder trumpet, sleeps peacefully beneath the shadow of his shield.

Authorities.—The principal authority for the period is of course Froissart, whose narrative has been elucidated, by the help of minor authorities, by K?hler with his usual care and pains. See his vol ii. pp. 385-523, and in particular the list of authorities on pp. 385 and 417.

CHAPTER IV
The works of the Black Prince lived after him. Not that we must look for them immediately in England, where we now enter on forty years of intestine division and civil strife. We do indeed find that Richard the Second, on his invasion of Scotland in 1385, adopted for his army the organisation that had been taught by his father at Navarete; but we discover no trace of military progress. Far more instructive is it to look to the continent of Europe and watch the spread of English military ideas there. It has already been seen that the French, not daring to meet the English archers on horseback, adopted the English system of dismounting for action; and it is interesting to note that the same fashion spread to Germany and Italy, steadily tending to overthrow the supremacy of cavalry wrought by the feudal system, and to make a revolution in the art of war. Not one of the nations, however, seems to have grasped the pith of the English tactics, the combination of the offensive and defensive elements in the infantry. The French indeed, under King Charles the Sixth, strove to raise up archers, and with all too good success, for they became so efficient that they were esteemed a menace to the nobility, and were soon effectively discouraged out of existence. Perhaps the most striking example of the misapplication of the English system is the conduct of the Austrian commander at Sempach, who by dismounting his knights deliberately gave away every advantage to the Swiss, and thus helped forward that nation on the way to make its infantry the model[51] of Europe; a very significant matter in the history of the art of war.

But the truest disciples of the Black Prince were the English Free Companies, from whom there descended to England, and indeed to Europe, a legacy of a remarkable kind. These companies were military societies framed very much on the model of the ancient trade-guilds, and had as good a right to the name as they. A certain number of adventurers invested so much money in the creation of a trained body of fighting men, and took a higher or lower station of command therein, together with a larger or smaller share of the profits, according to the proportion of their venture. If any man wished to realise his capital he could sell out, provided that he could find a buyer; if any one partner seemed to the rest to be undesirable they would buy him out and take in another. Thus grew up what was known as the purchase-system. The abuse of their monopoly by these companies drove the sovereigns of Europe after a time to issue commissions to their subjects to raise companies for their own service only; but even so the commercial basis of the company remained unchanged, being only widened when the time came for the amalgamation of companies into regiments. These military adventurers taught the nations the new art of war, and the nations could not but follow their model.

The greatest leader of free companies was an Englishman, a pupil of the Black Prince but greater even than his master, John Hawkwood. It is true that he did his work for foreign nations and in a foreign land, but even so his name must not be omitted from a history of the British Army. The company which he commanded, English almost to a man, was the terror of Italy, and not only the most formidable in the field but the smartest to the eye, for its arms were burnished till they shone like silver. Hawkwood, though a mercenary, was celebrated as the only one who never broke faith, and as a general his reputation was[52] European. The action which he fought at Castagnaro, when, in spite of great inferiority in numbers, he deliberately laid his plans for a sudden counterstroke, after the manner of Poitiers, extorts the admiration even of modern generals. Still more remarkable is his once famous retreat in the face of an overwhelming force from the Adda to the Adige, and perhaps greatest of all was the closing scene of that retreat. For, as he lay encamped in the plains by the Adige, the enemy broke the dykes of the river and turned the whole flood of its waters upon his army. It was night, and the men were encamping, weary after a hard day's march, when the deluge came upon them. Everything conspired to create a panic, but Hawkwood's coolness and confidence were equal to the danger. He bade every horseman take up one of the foot-men behind his saddle, and then placing himself at their head he led them through ten miles of the trackless waste of water, never less than girth-deep, and brought them out by sheer sagacity, not indeed without loss but without heavy loss, to the dry bed of the river. This was in his last campaign, when he was past seventy years of age; and Florence, the state which he had long faithfully served, voted him a pension for life and a monument even during his lifetime. He was making arrangements to return to England when he died; and King Richard the Second begged the city of Florence that the bones of so famous a warrior might be returned to his native land. The request was gracefully granted by the citizens, but the last resting-place of Hawkwood is now unknown. His monument in the Cathedral at Florence records that he was the most skilful general of his age, a height of military fame that has been reached by one other Englishman only, John, Duke of Marlborough.
1385,
August 14.

Yet another action must be briefly noticed to show the value set on English military skill. During the invasion of Portugal by the King of Castile, in 1385, the Portuguese were joined by a party of about five[53] hundred English adventurers, whose leaders appear to have directed most of the operations. It was under their guidance that the decisive battle of Aljubarotta, of which the Portuguese are still proud, was finally fought; and it is worthy of remark that, finding no advantageous position to hand, they deliberately constructed by means of abattis an imitation of the position of Poitiers, making it unassailable from the front except through a narrow strait, which was purposely left open and lined with archers. Marvellous to relate, the Spaniards and the French, who were fighting with them, rushed straight into the trap, and were of course utterly overthrown; whereupon, in due accordance with precedent, the Portuguese made their counter-attack and won a complete victory.[27] All this was due, as Froissart says, to the counsel of the English; and indeed, little though we may be conscious of it, it is doubtful whether even after Waterloo the prestige of English soldiers was greater than at the end of the fourteenth century.

But while the English military doctrines were thus spreading themselves over Europe, fresh innovations, which were destined to render them obsolete, were already making rapid progress. Artillery in the hands of the Germans was tending more and more to lose its cumbrous character and to take new form in mobile and practicable weapons. The heavy bombards, which could be neither elevated nor traversed, had before the close of the fourteenth century given place to lighter guns of smaller bore fixed on to the end of a shaft of wood and supported on a fork or hook, whence they derived their name of Hakenbüchse, a word soon corrupted by the English into hackbut, hagbush, and finally harquebus. A later improvement had fitted guns with a stock like that of the cross-bow, which could be brought up to the shoulder, thus more readily aligning the barrel to the eye. The step from this to the hand-gun, which could be served out as the individual weapon of a single man,[54] was but a short one and was soon to be taken. But as the traditions of Wellington and the Peninsula were to be tried once more at Alma and Inkerman before they finally perished, so the system of the two great Edwards was to be revived forty years after Navarrete at Agincourt.
1415.

It is unnecessary to dwell on the pretensions which were put forward to excuse the wanton aggression of Henry the Fifth against France. Ambitious, like Frederick the Great, of military glory he made his will the true ground for his action, counting on the spirit of a people that was never strongly averse from a French war. The military devices introduced by the Edwards, the commissions of array,[28] and the system of indentures, were still in good working order, while the discipline of the Black Prince, like his order of battle, was stereotyped in a written code of Ordinances of War. All the old machinery was therefore to hand; and perhaps the most noteworthy change that had come over the English military world was the doubling of the archers' wages from threepence to sixpence a day. Parliament voted the King a large sum of money, which however proved to be insufficient, for, significantly enough, not a contractor would furnish his contingent of men without security for the repayment of his expenses. The crown jewels were pledged in all directions, ships were hired in Holland and in England, seamen were impressed, artisans of every trade, from the miner to the farrier, were engaged, and on the 7th of August 1415 the army embarked at Southampton and the adjacent ports, and sailed for the Seine. The whole fleet numbered some fourteen hundred vessels, and the army is reckoned at thirty thousand men, men-at-arms with their attendants, and archers both mounted and afoot, all distinguished by the red cross of St. George. Further, there was a great train of the newest and best artillery, great guns called by pet names such as the[55] London and the King's Daughter, the whole under the charge of four German gunmasters.

On the second day out the fleet anchored before Harfleur. A day was taken up by the disembarkation, which was unhindered by the French; and by the 19th of August the town was fully invested. Then came a month of siege, wherein the art that was dying blended strangely with that which was just coming to birth; wooden towers and quaint engines that might have been employed by the Romans plying side by side with sap and mine and countermine and the latest patterns of German artillery. The French made a most gallant defence, and dysentery breaking out in the English camp swept off thousands of the besiegers; but at length the heavy guns prevailed. The garrison begged for terms, praying that the King would make his gunners to cease, "for the fire was to them intolerable." On the 22nd of September the capitulation was agreed on, and Harfleur received an English garrison. It was the first town that the English had reduced by the fire of cannon.

But Henry was not yet satisfied. Two-thirds of his force had melted away, dead or invalided, but he had no intention of re-embarking at Harfleur. He devoted a fortnight to the repair of the defences of the captured town, and then collecting provisions for eight days he marched northward for Calais with an army, or, as we should now call it, a flying column, of nine thousand men.

Meanwhile the French, disorganised though they were by the insanity of their king, Charles the Sixth, began to bestir themselves, and collecting an army of sixty thousand men, fourteen thousand of them men-at-arms and several thousand archers and cross-bowmen, determined to hold the line of the Somme and bar Henry's passage of the river. Henry's idea, dictated like the whole of his campaign by the precedent of Edward the Third, had been to cross the Somme by the ford of Blanche Tache. He now learned that the[56] passage was defended by the French in force. He wheeled at once to the right, and following the left bank of the river upward, tried in vain to find a crossing-place. Every bridge was broken down and every ford beset. It was plain that he was more effectually entrapped even than his predecessor Edward.
October.

The eight days' supply of provisions was now consumed, and the position of the English became most critical. Retreat Henry would not, force the passage of the Somme he could not. He decided to follow the river upward to its head-waters, and on reaching Nesle learned from a countryman of a ford, the access to which lay across a morass. Two causeways that provided a footing over it had been broken down by the French, but these were quickly repaired with wood and faggots and straw till they were broad enough to admit three horsemen abreast. Henry himself was indefatigable in the work. He took personal charge of one end of the passages, and appointed special officers to attend to the other. The baggage was carried over along one causeway, and the men by the second. Thus the passage both of morass and river was accomplished between eight in the morning and an hour before dusk of an October day. The French, who were lying in force at Peronne, now for some unexplained reason retreated towards the north-west, but sent, according to custom, a challenge to Henry to fix time and place for battle. "I am marching straight to Calais through open country," he replied. "You will have no difficulty in finding me." And he continued his advance.

At Peronne the English struck the line of the French march and looked for an immediate engagement. The force moved in order of battle, every man armed and ready for action, while the archers by Henry's order carried a stake, eleven feet long and pointed at both ends, to make them defence against cavalry. To their surprise no enemy appeared; and Henry was presently able to disperse his force along a wider front, with the advantage[57] alike of obtaining easier supply of victuals and surer information of the enemy. The English were much distressed by want of bread: other provisions were abundant, but grain was absolutely undiscoverable. Nevertheless discipline was most strictly enforced, and the order of the columns, as the speed of the march can avouch, was quite admirable. Robbery of churches or peasants, the slightest irregularity on the march or in the camp, the presence of women in the camp, all offences alike were visited with the severest punishment. One man, whom Shakespeare has immortalised as Bardolph, was detected in the theft of a pyx: he was paraded through the army as a criminal and hanged. Even French writers admit that the English dealt more mercifully with them than their own countrymen. The King himself avoided anything that might seem to indicate the slightest discouragement. One night he missed the camping-ground assigned to his division and took up that of the vanguard. "God forbid that in full armour I should turn back," he said; and pushing the vanguard further forward, he halted for the night where he stood.

On the 24th of October, Henry, who was lying at Frevent on the river Canopes, was informed by his scouts that the French were moving forward from St. Pol and must inevitably get ahead of him. He pushed on to Blangy, crossed the river Ternoise there, and advancing to Maisoncelle drew up his army in battle order before it. The whole French army was before him at Ruisseauville, but as dusk fell without an attack he withdrew for the night to Maisoncelle, and conscious of his desperate situation opened negotiations with the French, offering to restore Harfleur and make good all injuries if he might be permitted to evacuate France in peace. His overtures were rejected and he was warned to fight on the morrow. On the same evening the French moved down to a narrow plateau between the villages of Tramecourt and Agincourt, and there, cramped into a space far too narrow for sixty thousand[58] men, they halted till the morrow within less than a mile of the English position.

The night was spent in very different fashion in the two camps. The French, doubtless much inconvenienced by the straitness of their quarters, were shouting everywhere for comrades and servants as noisily as a mob of sheep; while some, forgetting the lesson of Poitiers, gambled for the ransom of the prisoners that they were to take in the morrow's battle. Huge fires were kept burning round their banners, for the rain was incessant, and the English could see everything that passed among them. They too began shouting like the French till sternly checked by the King; and then the English camp fell silent, and the men, forbidden to forget their situation in the din of their own voices, sat down to face it in all its stern reality. They could be excused if they felt some misgiving. They had covered over three hundred miles in a continuous march of seventeen days, often in hourly expectation of a fight; for four days they had not tasted bread; and now, after a few short hours more of waiting in the ceaseless pattering rain, they were to meet a host outnumbering them by five to one. Arms and bowstrings were overhauled and repaired; and the priests had little rest from the numbers that came to them for shrift. But in the discipline of that silence lay the promise of success.
October 25.

At dawn of the next morning Henry was astir, fully armed but bare-headed, riding a gray pony. Presently he led the army out of Maisoncelle to a newly-sown field, which was the position of his choice, and drew it up for battle. Every man was dismounted, and horses and baggage were parked in the rear under the protection of a small guard. But the numbers of his army were so weak that the favourite formation of the Black Prince could not be followed. The vanguard under the Duke of York became the right, the battle under the King the centre, and the rearguard under Lord Camoys the left of a single line, which even then was ranked but four men deep. It was a first example of English line[59] against French column. Henry made the men a short speech, recalling to them the deeds of their fathers, and then the whole host kneeled down, thrice kissed the ground, and rose upright again into its ranks.

Meanwhile not a sign of attack came from the French. Their order of battle had been determined many days before, but it was ill adapted to so narrow a position. It was evident that only the vanguard could possibly come into action, and such was the indiscipline that every man of rank wished to command it. Finally the whole of the magnates were placed in the vanguard, and its strength was made up to about seven thousand men-at-arms, every one of them dismounted. On each flank was a wing of twelve hundred more dismounted men, and on their flanks again two small bodies of cavalry, three hundred on the right, and eight hundred on the left, which were designed to gallop down upon the archers. This was the first French line. The second was also made up of about eight thousand dismounted men-at-arms; while the remainder, who were ordered to dismount but would not, composed the third line. The whole stood on ploughed ground, soaked by the rain of the previous night and poached deep by the trampling of innumerable feet.

The French took advantage of the delay to give their men breakfast, an example which Henry immediately followed. Then seeing that the enemy remained motionless he prepared to attack. A gray old warrior, Sir Walter Erpingham, galloped forward with two aides-de-camp to make the necessary changes of formation. The archers were deployed in front and flanks, and when all was ready old Sir Walter tossed his baton into the air and sang out "Now strike." Then galloping back to the King's battalion he dismounted and took his place in the ranks. The King, already dismounted, gave the word "Forward banner," and the English answered with a mighty cry, the forerunner of that "stern and appalling shout" which four centuries later was to strike hesitation into so fine a soldier even as Soult. Then[60] the whole line advanced in close array, with frequent halts, for the ground was deep, and the archers in their leathern jackets and hose, ragged, hatless, and shoeless after two months of hard work, could easily wear down the men-at-arms in their heavy mail. Artillery in such a sea of mud could not be brought into position on either side, and the German gunners took no part in the fight. The French on their side stood firm and closed up their ranks. They were so heavily weighted with their armour, always heavier than that of the English, that they could hardly move, and their front was so much crowded that they could not use their archers; so they broke off their lances as at Poitiers to the length of five feet, and stood in dense array, thirty-one ranks against the English four.

Arrived within range the archers struck their stakes slantwise into the ground, and drew bow. The French vanguard then shook itself up and advanced slowly, while the cavalry on their flanks moved forward against the archers. The division of three hundred lances on the right made but a poor attack; little more than half of them really came on, and even these their horses, maddened as at Cre?y by the pain of the arrows, soon carried in headlong confusion to the rear. The stronger division on the left charged home, and the leader and one or two others actually reached the line of stakes; but the stakes had no firm hold in the mud; the horses tripped over them and fell, and not one rider ever rose again. The remainder had as usual been carried back by their wounded horses upon their comrades in rear, and thence with them upon the wings of dismounted men-at-arms in which they tore terrible gaps. The centre of the French vanguard fared little better. Dazzled by the eastern sun that shone full in their eyes, and bending their heads before the sleet of arrows, they lost all idea of their direction, and became so clubbed together that they could not use their weapons. By sheer weight they forced back the English men-at-arms a lance's length, and for a time they fought hard.[61] King Henry was twice struck heavily on the helmet, one blow lopping a branch from the crown that encircled it. But meanwhile the archers had noted the gaps torn by the horses in the wings of the French fighting line. They dropped their bows, and with whatever weapon—axe, hammer, or sword—that hung at their girdle, they fell, light and active, upon the helpless, hampered men-at-arms and made fearful havoc of them. The French centre, exposed by the defeat of the wings to attack on both flanks, gave way before the King's battalion, and their first line was utterly defeated. There was no question of flight among the French men-at-arms, for the unhappy men could not move. The English simply took off the helmets of their prisoners, and, leaving them thus exposed, pressed on against the second line. This, however, was already shaken by the defeat of the vanguard; and though one leader who had arrived late in the field, the Duke of Brabant, set a gallant example, he was quickly cut down, and the defeat of the second line followed quickly on his fall. The third line still remained, but being mounted, contrary to orders, had no mind to stay and fight, but turned and fled, leaving some few of their leaders alone to redeem French honour by a hopeless struggle and a noble death.

This battle was hardly won when word was brought to Henry that his baggage, with all his treasure as well as all the horses, was in the hands of plunderers. The guard in fact had been unable to resist the temptation to join in the fight, and had left the baggage to take care of itself. The momentary confusion hereby caused gave some of the French time to rally, and Henry, not knowing how great the danger might be, ordered every man to kill his prisoners. The English hesitated, less possibly from humanity than from reluctance to lose good ransom, whereupon Henry told off two hundred archers for the duty, which was promptly carried out. He can hardly be blamed, for the fight had been won less by the slaughter than by the capture of the men-at-arms;[62] and the risk of undertaking a new attack in front with some thousands of unwounded prisoners in rear, was serious. Be that as it may, the deed was done. Henry then advanced against the rallied French and quickly broke them up; and at four o'clock, the victory being at last complete, he left the field. The French loss in nobles alone numbered from five to eight thousand men killed, exclusive of common men. A thousand prisoners and a hundred and twenty banners were taken. The losses of the English are uncertain, but probably did not exceed a few hundreds, the most distinguished of the fallen being the Duke of York.

So ended the great fight which King Harry himself decreed to be called by the name of Agincourt.[29] It sums up in itself the leading features of Cre?y, Poitiers, and Cocherel, in a word of all the finest actions of the Edwards. But it was, as fate ordained, but the afterglow of the glory of the Plantagenets, not the light of a sun new risen like a giant to run his course.

To face page 62
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1415.
1420.

To attempt to follow the later campaigns of Henry the Fifth in France would be alike tedious and unprofitable. To the last he stuck to the principles of the Black Prince, but his military talents ripened year after year, and while he lived France trembled under his sword. Finally, torn to pieces by the strife of Burgundian and Armagnac, France by the Treaty of Troyes surrendered her kingship into his hand. The contempt of the English for their enemy was such that the men once assaulted and captured a town without orders. But in the very next year came a reverse that boded ominously for the future. The Duke of Clarence was defeated at Beaugé, less by the French than by a body of Scottish auxiliaries, who had been sent to their assistance under the Earl of Buchan. Henry had hoped that the Scots would not fight against him, and ordered them henceforth to be treated as rebels, but it was to no purpose. The reader should take note of this fateful[63] year 1421, for it marks the permanent entrance of the Scots into the service of France, a fact full of import for both countries. Moreover, he will in due time see a regiment, still called the Royal Scots, withdrawn from the French army to become the first of the English Line.
1422.

The return of King Henry to France after Beaugé soon re-established the ascendency of the English arms; and then, while still in the prime of life, he sickened even in the midst of his operations and died. He was but thirty-four years of age, a great administrator, a great captain, and above all a grand disciplinarian. Yet he was no brutal martinet; nay, when once he had cast his wild days behind him he never even swore. "Impossible," or "It must be done," was the most that he said. But "he was so feared by his princes and captains that none dared to disobey his orders, however nearly related to him, and the principal cause was that if any one transgressed his orders he punished him at once without favour or mercy."[30] He and the army that fought with him at Agincourt are the true precursors of Craufurd and the Light Division. His body, borne with mournful pomp from the castle of Vincennes, still rests among us in Westminster Abbey, and above it still hang his saddle, his shield blazoned with the lilies of France, and the helmet, deeply dinted by two sword-cuts, which he wore at Agincourt. Not for three centuries was another soldier to rise up in England of equal fame with the Black Prince, John Hawkwood, and King Harry the Fifth.

Authorities.—For the life of Hawkwood see Temple Leader's Sir John Hawkwood. For the campaign of Agincourt, Gesta Henrici Quinti and Monstrelet's Chronicles are the chief authorities, while Sir Harris Nicholas's Agincourt furnishes a quantity of supplementary information. Other authorities will be found enumerated in K?hler, who is always the best guide in respect of military operations.
CHAPTER V
It is now our sad duty to watch the military glory of the Plantagenets wane fainter and fainter, until it disappears, to be followed by a period of darkness until the light is slowly rekindled at the flame of foreign fires. The decline of our supremacy in arms was not at first rapid. John, Duke of Bedford, possessed a combination of military and administrative talent little less remarkable than that of his brother the late King, and as Regent of France he took up the reins of government and command with no unskilful hand. Everything turned upon the maintenance of existing factions in France. England working with Burgundy, the red cross of St. Andrew with the red cross of St. George, could preserve the English dominion; otherwise that dominion must inevitably fall. The French, after the lull created by Henry's death, gathered an army together of which the kernel was three thousand Scots, and marched into Burgundy to besiege Crevant. A body of four thousand picked English and Burgundians at once hastened after them, and although outnumbered, and compelled, by the advance of a second French army in their rear, to fight their battle and win it at whatever cost, they defeated the enemy completely and cut the Scots to pieces almost to a man. All was still done as King Harry had done it. English tactics were forced, on pain of death, upon English and Burgundians[31] alike, and discipline was most strictly preserved. It was not[65] a promising beginning for the French, but Scotland was ready to furnish more men, and France not less ready to receive them; and so the extraordinary struggle of French against French, and English against Scots was renewed once more.

Early in 1424 ten thousand Scottish men-at-arms, under Archibald, Earl of Douglas, arrived at Rochelle, and were welcomed with eagerness by the French. Douglas was created Duke of Touraine, and all went merrily until on the 17th of August French and English, with their allies, met under the walls of Verneuil. The French and Scots numbered close on twenty thousand men, the English twelve thousand, of whom eight thousand were archers. Contrary to the hitherto accepted practice, the French formed their army into a single huge central battalion of dismounted men, with cavalry on each wing, the mounted men being designed to fall upon the English flanks and rear. Bedford, who commanded the English, imitated the enemy in forming only a single battalion, but dismounted the whole of his force, covering his front and flanks with archers, who as at Agincourt carried stakes as a defence against the attack of horse. His baggage he parked in rear, the horses being tied collar to tail that they might be the less easily driven off; and he appointed as baggage-guard no fewer than ten thousand archers.

For the whole morning the two armies stood opposite to each other in order of battle, each waiting for the other to attack; but at last, at three in the afternoon, the French advanced and were received by the English with a mighty shout. The French cavalry on the wings charged, broke through the archers, and sweeping round the English rear fell upon the baggage. They were greeted by the guard with a shower of arrows, but contrived none the less to carry off some quantity of spoil, with which they galloped away, feeling sure that the day was won.[32] But meanwhile the[66] two battalions of dismounted men-at-arms, those on the French side being exclusively Scots, had closed and were fighting desperately. For a moment the English were beaten back by superior numbers; but Salisbury, John Talbot, and other tried leaders were with them, and they soon recovered themselves. The archers on the wings rallied to their aid, while those of the baggage-guard, freed from all further alarm of cavalry, hurried up with loud shouts in support. The Scots wavered, and the English pressing forward with one supreme effort broke through their ranks, split up the battalion, and threw the whole into helpless confusion. And then began a terrible carnage, for the Scots had told Bedford that they would neither give nor receive quarter, and they certainly received none. Five thousand men, mostly Scots, were killed on the French side, John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, the Earl of Douglas and James his son being among the slain, and two hundred more were taken prisoners. Of the English some sixteen hundred only went down.
1428.

To France Verneuil was a disaster little less crushing than Agincourt, and indeed it seemed as though she had passed irrevocably under English dominion. All was however spoiled by Bedford's brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who, having made a match with a rich heiress, Jacqueline of Holland, carried away English troops to take possession of her dower-lands, and, worst of all, gave the deepest offence to Burgundy. At home Humphrey was equally troublesome, so much so that in 1425 Bedford was compelled to return to England to set matters right. It was not until three years later that he took the field again, well reinforced with men and with a powerful train of artillery. So far we have rarely found artillery employed except for sieges, but henceforth we see gunners regularly employed at the high wage of a man-at-arms, one shilling a day, and "hand-cannons" and "little cannons with stone shot of two pounds weight," playing ever a more prominent part in the field.

[67]
1429.

Against his better judgment Bedford now resolved to carry the war across the Loire, and detached the Earl of Salisbury with ten thousand men to the siege of Orleans. The operations opened unfortunately with the death of Salisbury, who was mortally wounded by a cannon-shot while examining the enemy's works; but the investment was carried on with spirit by the Earl of Suffolk, and a little action at the opening of 1429 showed that the English superiority still held good. This, the battle of Roveray, better known as the action of the Herrings, has a peculiar interest, though the occasion was simple enough. Lent was approaching; and as, among the many complications of medi?val warfare, the observance of the fast was by no means forgiven to fighting men,[33] it was necessary to send provisions of "Lenten stuff," principally herrings, to the besieging force round Orleans. The convoy being large was provided with an escort of sixteen hundred men under command of Sir John Falstolfe. The French and Scots decided to attack it on the march, but unfortunately could not agree as to their plan; the Scots insisting that it was best to dismount, the French preferring to remain in the saddle. Meanwhile Falstolfe with great dexterity drew his waggons into a leaguer, leaving but two narrow entrances defended by archers. It was the trap of Poitiers once more. The French and Scots after long discussion agreed to differ, and attacked each in their own fashion. The English archers shot with admirable precision; the Scots lost very heavily, the French after a short experience of the arrows rode out of range, and Falstolfe led his herrings triumphantly into Orleans, having killed close on six hundred of the enemy with trifling loss to himself. This was the last signal employment of the tactics of[68] Poitiers, the last brilliant success of the English in the Hundred Years' War, the first glimpse of a lesson learnt by England from the military genius of a foreign power. For the tactics of the waggon were those of John Zizka, the greatest soldier of Europe in the fifteenth century.

From this point the story is one of almost unbroken failure for the English in France. They were now about to pass through the experience which later befell the Spaniards in the Low Countries, and the French themselves in the Peninsula. The turning-point is of course the appearance in the field of Joan of Arc, a phenomenon so extraordinary that it has become the exclusive property of the votaries of poetry and sentiment, and is, perhaps rightly, not to be rescued from their hands. It is certain that her military talents were of the slightest; but, on the other hand, she possessed the magic of leadership and the amazing power of restoring the moral strength of her countrymen, which had been impaired as never before by an endless succession of defeats. The English not unnaturally attributed this power to witchcraft: for by what other agency could a peasant girl have checked the ever-victorious army? and the punishment of witchcraft being the fire they burnt her to death. Any other nation would have done the same in their place then, and there are still a few folks both in France and the United Kingdom who would do so now. But the fire in the market-place of Rouen availed the English little. "The French," as Monstrelet says, believed that "God was against the English"; and the English began to believe it themselves.
1430.

For the woman's quick instinct and the pure insight of a saintly soul had guided the maid aright. The moral quality of the English force was corrupted, and needed only to meet some loftier spirit to fall into decay. The chivalrous character of the war was gone. Hostile commanders no longer laid each other friendly wagers on the success of their next operations. The[69] army too was ceasing to be national; the English element was growing smaller and smaller in number, and fast sinking to the level of the lawless adventurers who furnished the majority in the ranks. Long contempt of the enemy had bred insolence and carelessness, and the old discipline was almost gone. The sight of a deer or a hare sufficed to set a whole division hallooing, sometimes, as at Patay, with disastrous results. On that day the French scouts, who were feeling for the enemy, roused a stag, which ran towards the English array, and was greeted with such a storm of yells as told the French all that they wanted to know. The English force blundered on, without advanced parties of any kind, till it suddenly found itself on the verge of an engagement. Then the leaders wrangled as to the question of fighting in enclosed or open country, and, having finally in overweening confidence selected the open, were surprised and routed before the archers could plant their stakes in the ground. Worst of all, an officer in high command, Sir John Falstolfe, seeing that defeat was certain, disobeyed the order to dismount and galloped away. He was disgraced by Bedford, but was afterwards for some reason reinstated, though had Harry been king he would assuredly have lost his head.[34]
Sandacourt,
1431.

Among the French the revival of the military spirit soon showed itself in a remarkable development of new ideas. They had long copied, though with a bad grace, the English practice of dismounting men-at-arms and furnishing archers with a palisade of stakes, but in 1434 at Gerberoy they used the three arms, cavalry, infantry, and artillery, in combination, with signal success. Artillery was still so far a novelty in the field that only three years before a whole army collected by the Duke of Bar had flung itself howling to the ground at the first discharge; but the English archers, though they knew better than to behave thus, were sadly dismayed when the round stone shot came bounding within their trusted[70] palisade. It was just after this, too, that two fatal blows were struck at the English by the shifting of Burgundy to the French side, and by the death of their ablest leader, John, Duke of Bedford.

Still the war, wantonly and foolishly continued by an inefficient Government, dragged on and on, and, though not unbroken by occasional brilliant exploits, turned steadily against the English. The behaviour of the soldiers was sullied more and more by shameful barbarity; and gradually but surely their hold on Normandy and Guienne slipped from them. Truce was made at last in 1444, and Charles the Seventh seized the opportunity to execute a series of long-meditated reforms in the French army. He established a national militia of fifteen companies of men-at-arms and archers, each six hundred strong, organised garrisons of trained men for the towns, took the greatest pains for the equipment, discipline, and regular payment of the troops, and formed the finest park of artillery thitherto seen. In a word, he laid the foundation of the French standing army, with the Scottish archers and Scottish men-at-arms at its head, two famous corps that remained in their old place on the army-list until the French Revolution. Thus French military organisation, spurred by a century of misfortune, made one gigantic bound ahead of English, and may be said to have kept the lead ever since.
1440.
1449.
1450,
April 18.

In England there had been no such improvement. A feeble effort had been made to check by statute fraudulent enlistment and the still graver abuse of embezzlement of the soldiers' pay by the captains, but this was of little help when the enforcement of the Act[35] was entrusted to so corrupt and avaricious a commander as the Duke of Somerset. Throughout the truce the soldiers on the English side behaved abominably; but, since they were robbed of their wages by their officers, it is hardly surprising that they should have repaid themselves by the plunder of the country. When finally the truce was broken, and the French invaded[71] Normandy, the English dominion fell before them like a house of cards. Town after town, their garrisons depleted to fill Somerset's pocket, surrendered to superior force, and the English as they marched forth had the mortification to see the Normans gleefully doff the red cross of St. George for the white cross of France. An attempt to save the province was foiled by the rout of the English reinforcements at Fourmigny, and Normandy was lost. Anjou and Maine had been already made over to the father of Henry the Sixth's Queen, and Guienne and Gascony, which had been English since the reign of Henry the Second, alone remained. Next year they too went the way of Normandy and were lost.
1453,
July 20.

Gascony, however, notwithstanding her hot southern blood, was in no such anxiety as Normandy to be quit of the English, and sent messages to England that, if an army were sent to help her, she would revolt against the French to rejoin her old mistress. England lent a willing ear, and John Talbot, the veteran Earl of Shrewsbury, was sent out to this, his last campaign. The decisive battle was fought under the walls of Chatillon. The French were strongly entrenched, with three hundred pieces of artillery in position, a striking testimony to their military progress. The English fought with the weapon which for a century had won them their victories, and for the last as for the first battle of the Hundred Years' War, every man alighted from his horse. John Talbot alone, in virtue of his fourscore years, remained mounted on his hackney; and with the indomitable old man at their head the English hurled themselves upon the entrenchment. It was a mad, desperate, hopeless venture, but they stormed forward with such impetuosity that they went near to carry the position. For a full hour they persisted, until at last, riddled through and through by the fire of the artillery, they fell back. Then the French sallied forth and turned the defeat into a rout. Old John Talbot's pony was shot under him, and being pinned to the ground under the dead animal he was killed where he lay.[72] Young John Talbot, Lord Lisle, refused to leave his father, and fell by his side. The army was dispersed over Aquitaine, and the ancestral domains of seven generations of English kings passed from them for ever. By the irony of fate a Scottish soldier[36] was appointed to hold for the crown of France the French provinces that had clung with such attachment to England. Of all the great possessions of the English in France Calais now alone was left, to break in due time the heart of an English Queen.

At home the discontent over the national disgrace was profound. The people of course cast about to find a scapegoat, and after one or two changes finally fixed upon the blameless and unfortunate Henry the Sixth. Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly the disease from which England had suffered ever since the death of King Henry the Fifth, but for this the nation itself was principally responsible. It had chosen for its rulers the House of Lancaster because Henry of Bolingbroke had agreed to accept constitutional checks on the royal power before the country was ripe for self-government. It had thrown off the yoke of discipline which alone could enable it to tug the heavy load of English weal and English honour, and it paid the inevitable penalty. Numbers of republics have made the same mistake during the present century and have suffered or are suffering the same punishment. There is no surer sign of an undisciplined nation than civil war.

In the England of the fifteenth century the disease had been deeply aggravated by the interminable campaigns in France. All classes at home, from the highest to the lowest, were equally selfish and apathetic in respect of the national good: internal order was at an end, and riots and outrages which amounted to private war continued unceasingly and remained unrepressed. The system of indentures between king and subject for the supply of troops had been extended from subject to retainer and, as has been well said, the[73] clause "for the King's service" could easily be dropped out of the contract.[37] The red cross of St. George never appears in the English battlefields; red rose and white were indeed the emblems of contending factions, but we hear far more of the badges of great families, the ragged staff, the cresset and the like, and of the liveries, which, though forbidden by statute to any but the king, were conspicuous all through the Civil War. The loss of France furnished but too much material to the hands of violence and strife. England was full of unemployed soldiers, who had been trained in the undisciplined school of French faction to treachery and plunder and all that is lowest and most inhuman in war. Hundreds of men who had held comfortable posts in French garrisons, and had turned them to purposes of brigandage, were cast adrift upon England, barbarised, brutalised, demoralised, to recoup themselves in their own country. After the peace of Brétigny the disbanded soldiery had made France their chamber and swept down thence upon Italy; the like men[38] were now to be let loose upon England, and France was to be well avenged of her old enemy. Worst of all, the leaders of factions, in the madness of their animosity, were not ashamed to import foreign troops and set them at each other's throats.
1460.
1461.

I shall not dwell upon this miserable and disastrous period, marking as it does the wreck of our ancient military greatness. Such few military points as present themselves in the scanty chronicles of this time must be noted, and no more. Of the principal figures one only is to be remarked. Warwick the "King-maker" must be passed over as rather a statesman than a soldier; Margaret of Anjou—the pestilent, indomitable woman—must be remembered only for her importation of [74]mercenaries; Edward the Fourth, full of the military genius of the Plantagenets, alone is deserving of lengthier mention. There was not an action at which he was present wherein he did not make that presence felt. It was he who at Northampton turned his treacherous admission to the left of the Lancastrian position to instant and decisive account. It was he who in the following year, still only a boy of twenty, crushed Owen Tudor at Mortimer's Cross; it was he who held supreme command at that more terrible Marston Moor of the fifteenth century, the battle of Towton.
March 28.

This action has a peculiar interest as an example of English tactics and tenacity turned upon themselves. The Lancastrians, sixty thousand strong, were formed up on a plateau eight miles to the north of Ferrybridge, facing south-their right resting on a brook, called the Cock, their left on the Great North Road. It was a strong position, but too much cramped for their numbers, having a front of less than a mile in extent. They were probably drawn up according to the old fashion in three lines of great depth. The Yorkists numbered but five-and-thirty thousand, but they were expecting an additional thirteen thousand under the Duke of Norfolk, which, advancing from Ferrybridge, would come up on their own right and against the left flank of the enemy. Edward appears to have remedied his numerical inferiority after the pattern of his great ancestor at Cre?y by forming his army in echelon of three lines, refusing his right. The foremost or left line of the echelon was commanded by Lord Falconbridge, the second by Warwick, and the third by Edward in person. The Yorkists advancing northward to the attack had just caught sight of the enemy on a height beyond a slight dip in the ground called Towton Dale, when there came on a blinding snowstorm, which so effectually veiled both armies that it was only by their shouts that they could know each other's position. Falconbridge with great readiness[75] seized the moment to push forward his archers to the edge of the plateau, whence he bade them shoot flight-arrows, specially adapted to fly over a long range, into the Lancastrian columns. This done he quickly withdrew his men. The Lancastrians thereupon poured in a tremendous shower of fighting arrows, all of which fell short of their supposed mark, and maintained it till their sheaves were well-nigh exhausted. Then Falconbridge again advanced and began to shoot in earnest; his men had not only their own stock of shafts but also those discharged by the enemy. The rain of missiles was too much for the Lancastrians: they broke from their position on the height and poured down across the dip to drive the Yorkists from the slope above it. Then the action became general and the whole line was soon hotly engaged.

What followed for the next few hours in the driving snow no one has told us, or, it is probable, could ever have told us. All that is certain is that the Lancastrians, though occasionally they could force the Yorkists back for a space, could never gain any permanent advantage, a fact that points to extremely judicious handling of the refused division by Edward. From five in the morning until noon the combat raged with unabated fury, and the pile of the dead rose so high that the living could hardly come to close quarters. At length at noon the Duke of Norfolk's column, timely as Blücher's, appeared in the Great North Road on the left flank of the Lancastrians, and began to roll them back from their position and from the line of their retreat. Slowly and sullenly the Lancastrians gave way; there was probably little attempt to alter their disposition to meet the attack in their flank; but for three long hours more they fought, disputing every inch of ground, till at last they were forced back from it upon the swollen waters of the Cock. Then the rout and the slaughter became general; thousands were drowned in the brook; and the pursuit, wherein we again see the hand of Edward, was carried to the very gates of York. Thirty-five thousand Lancastrians and[76] eight thousand Yorkists perished in the fight, an appalling slaughter for so miserable a cause. But this was a contest not merely of faction against faction, but of North against South; and the North never spoke disrespectfully of the South again. This perhaps was the principal result of what must be reckoned the most terrible battle ever fought by the English.
1471,
April 14.

The decisive battle of Barnet furnishes a still more brilliant instance of Edward's skill, and of his quickness to seize the vital point in a campaign. All turned upon his forcing his enemies to action before they could gather their full strength about them. Edward marched his men up to Warwick's position actually after dusk had fallen, a rare accomplishment in those days, and drew up his men as best he could in the dark. When day broke with dense fog he discovered that his army far out-flanked Warwick's left, and was as far out-flanked by Warwick's on his own left. The result seems to have been that the two armies edged continually round each other until their respective positions were reversed,[39] for some of Warwick's cavalry, coming back from the pursuit of Edward's left, found itself on its return not, as it supposed, in rear of Edward's army, but of its own. The cry of treason, always common in the Wars of the Roses, was quickly raised, and in the general confusion the battle was lost to Warwick. None the less the victory was due to Edward's promptness; and indeed the rapidity alike of his decisions and of his marches stamp him as a soldier of no ordinary talent, and as in many respects far in advance of his time.
1487.

For the rest the Wars of the Roses show unmistakable signs of the changes that were coming over the art of war.[40] A most important point is the ever increasing [77]employment of artillery in the field and the greater value attached to it. Richard, Duke of York, is said to have had a great train of ordnance and so many as three thousand gunners with him at Dartmouth in 1452. Artillerymen were becoming far more common, and as a natural consequence bade fair to command a smaller price in the wage-market. From this time also it may be said that the duel of artillery tends to become the regular preliminary to a general action. Still more significant is the augmented prominence of the common foot-soldier, known from his peculiar weapon as the bill-man, who now begins to supplant the dismounted man-at-arms in the work of infantry, and as a natural consequence restores the latter to his proper station among the cavalry. New weapons again make their appearance in the hands of the foot-soldier. Both Edward and Warwick introduced hired bands of Burgundian hand-gun men, whereby the English became acquainted with the new arm that was to drive out the famous bow. Again, on the field of Stoke there were seen two thousand tall Germans armed with halberd and pike, under the command of one Martin Schwartz, who fought on the losing side, but stood in their ranks till they were cut down to a man.[41] Lastly, the old order of battle in three lines was becoming rapidly obsolete. At Bosworth both armies were drawn up in a single line, with the cavalry on the wings; and the cavalry itself was beginning at the same time to forsake the formation in column for that in line, or as it was called, en haye.

All these changes were symptoms of a great movement that was passing over all Europe. The art of war, like all the other arts, was undergoing a transformation so fundamental that it has received the name of a renascence. England, cut off by her expulsion out of France from[78] her former contact with continental nations, exhausted by her civil wars, reduced to her true position as a naval power, and above all wedded to the peculiar system which had brought her such success, lagged behind other nations in the path of military reform. The century of the Tudors' reign is for the English army a century of learning, and to understand it aright we must first look abroad to the countries that were before her in the school, and glance at the innovations that were introduced by each of them in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Not without such study can we trace to their source innumerable points, great and small, that are observable in our army of to-day, nor grasp to the full the greatness of the English soldiers who, long before the renascence of the art of war, had divined its leading principles, had established for their country noble military traditions, and above all had made it a national principle that the English must always beat the French.

Authorities.—Monstrelet as before is the most important authority for the wars in France. The Wars of the English in France (Rolls Series) are valuable in elucidation. For the rise of the Scots in France M. Francisque Michel's Les Ecossais en France, and Forbes Leith's Scots Men-at-Arms in France. For the Wars of the Roses the sources of information are proverbially meagre, but the material has been worked up with admirable skill by Mr. Oman in his Warwick, to which I am greatly indebted. For the reorganisation of the French Army Daniel's Ancien milice Fran?aise may be consulted.
BOOK II CHAPTER I
Five years after the battle of Agincourt the religious wars in Bohemia had given birth to one of the great soldiers of the world's history, John Zizka, the blind general of the Hussites. His military genius, quickened by fanaticism and spurred by the stern necessity of encountering an enemy always superior in numbers and equipment, had led him to ideas which were far in advance of his age. A master in organisation and discipline, he had evolved literally out of nothing the most famous army of its day in Europe, and by inexhaustible activity and resource had rendered it invincible. Beginning with such rude material of war as waggons and flails, and with no more skilful men than poor Bohemian peasants, he matured a system of tactics which defeated not only the chivalry of Europe but even the light irregular cavalry, soon to become famous as hussars, of Hungary. As victory supplied him with the means of procuring better arms, he rose rapidly to the occasion. Throwing all military pedantry to the winds he fought as his own genius dictated, and in the rapidity of his movements and unrelenting swiftness with which he followed up a victory he bears comparison with Napoleon. He was the first man to make artillery a man?uvrable arm, the first to execute complicated evolutions in the face of an enemy, and the first to handle cavalry, infantry, and artillery in efficient tactical combination. The employment of waggons for defence we have already seen copied by the English[82] at the battle of the Herrings, but Zizka's influence[42] spread far wider than this by breaking down the strength of European chivalry, and showing that drill, discipline, and mobility could make the poorest peasant more than a match for the armoured knight.
1382.

Zizka, however, had not been the first to deal a blow at the supremacy of feudal cavalry. The English archers and dismounted men-at-arms had been before him, and another power, which was destined to abolish that supremacy for ever, had been in some respects the predecessor even of the English. Allusion has already been made to the victory of the Swiss over the Austrian chivalry at Sempach; from that day it may be said that they began their advance to the highest military reputation of Europe. Appointed from the ruggedness of their country as well as by their own poverty to fight rather on their own feet than on horseback, cut off in great measure by the same causes from the feudalism that had overrun the rest of Europe, they were by nature destined to be infantry, and as infantry they developed their fighting system. Beginning like all primitive foot-men in all countries with the simple weapons of shield, spear, and axe, they improved upon them to meet their own peculiar wants. The problem before them was, how to defeat mounted men mailed from head to foot in the open field, how to keep the horses at a distance and cut through the iron shells that protected the men. The instinct of a Teutonic nation led them to give first attention to the cutting weapon. The English had turned their axes into broad-bladed bills; the Flemings had gone further and produced the godendag, a weapon good alike for cut and thrust; the Swiss, improving upon the godendag, invented the halberd, which combined a hook for pulling men out of the saddle, a point to thrust between the joints of their armour, and a broad heavy blade, the whole being set on the head of an eight-foot shaft.[83] The weight of the halberd made it, as an old chronicler[43] says, a terrific weapon, "cleaving men asunder like a wedge and cutting them into small pieces." Altogether it was calculated to surprise galloping gentlemen who thought themselves invulnerable in their armour.
1422.
1444.
1476.
1477.
1515.
1522, 1525.

But the halberd did not solve the problem of keeping horses at a distance. For this purpose the primitive spear was lengthened more and more till it finally issued in the long pike, the pike of the eighteen-foot shaft, which for nearly two centuries ruled the battlefields of Europe. The birthplace of the long pike is obscure,[44] but it was undoubtedly first brought into prominence by the Swiss, and that by a series of brilliant actions. Arbedo attested the firmness of the new infantry in the field; St. Jacob-en-Birs, where the Swiss detached sixteen hundred men to fight against fifty thousand, its boundless confidence; and finally the three crushing defeats of Charles the Bold at Granson, Morat, and Nancy, established its reputation as invincible. For action the Swiss were generally formed in three bodies, van, battle, and rear—the van and rear being each of half the strength of the battle or main body. These bodies were always of a very deep formation, and if not actually square were very solidly oblong. Occasionally the whole were massed into one gigantic battalion in order that the proportion of pikes to halberds, which was about one to three, might go further in securing immunity from the attack of cavalry. The van, from the desperate nature of its work, was called the Verlorener Hauf, from which is derived our own term, not yet wholly extinct, forlorn hope.[45] As regards discipline [84]the Swiss appear to have been orderly and sober men until spoiled by the multitude of their successes, but at the last they became intolerably insubordinate. The cantons indeed were so deeply bitten with the military mania, that all great occasions, feasts, fairs, and even weddings, were made the occasion of some form of military display, while the very children turned out with drums, flags, and pikes, and marched with all the order and regularity of full-grown soldiers. In fact fighting became the regular trade of Switzerland, and as her people enjoyed for a time a practical monopoly of that trade they soon became grasping and avaricious, and would dictate to generals under threat of mutiny when and where they should fight, select their own position in the order of battle, and open the action at such time as they thought proper. Their officers lost control of them, and would plaintively say that if they could but enforce obedience in their men they would march through France from end to end. This insubordination was their ruin. The French, who were their chief employers, at last lost all patience with them, and gave them at Marignano a lesson which they did not speedily forget. The suppression of this mutiny, which was in fact a two days' battle of the most desperate description, cost the Swiss twelve thousand men; and it speaks volumes for the fine qualities that were in them that the defeat attached them more closely than ever to the cause of France. But the spell of their invincibility was broken, and two more severe defeats at the hands of a rival infantry at Bicocca and Pavia destroyed their prestige for ever. Nevertheless they were superb soldiers, and as their good fortune delivered them from a meeting with the English archers, who would certainly have riddled their huge bristling battalion through and through, they became as they deserved the fathers of modern infantry. Let it be noted that they marched in step to the music of fife and drum, that they carried[85] a colour in each company, and that several of the cantons carried a huge horn, whose sound was the signal for all to rally around it.

It was not to be expected that the Swiss should long enjoy their monopoly as the infantry of Europe without exciting competition. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century arose the rivals who were to wrest their supremacy from them, namely, the landsknechts of Swabia, or as the contemporary English called them, the lance-knights of Almain, who were the direct forerunners of the modern German infantry. The records that survive of them are very full, and as it was through them that the teaching of the Swiss was carried into England, with results that are visible to this day, a brief study of their history is essential to the right understanding of the history of our own army.

The Swabian infantry was called into existence by the imperative necessity for preventing any potentate who might be so fortunate as to enlist the Swiss, from dictating his will to Europe. Swabia being the province next adjoining Switzerland was not unnaturally the first to learn the methods of her neighbour; and though at first all fighting men who imitated the tactics and equipment of the mountaineers were known by the generic name of Swiss, yet the Swabians, as if from the first to point the distinction between them and their rivals, took the name of landsknechts, men of the plain, as opposed to men of the mountains. Maximilian the First, seeing how valuable such a force would be in the eternal contest of the House of Hapsburg against the House of Valois, more particularly since the Swiss were the firm allies of the French, gave them all possible countenance and encouragement; and very soon the landsknechts grew into one of the weightiest factors on the battlefields of Europe. Though mercenaries like the Swiss and the still earlier bands of Braban?ons, and as such engaged on all sides and in all countries, they yet cherished not a little national sentiment; and[86] the greatest of all their work was done in the service of the Empire.

When therefore the emperor needed infantry he issued a commission to some leader of repute to enlist for him a corps of landsknechts. The colonel[46] thus chosen thereupon selected a deputy or lieutenant-colonel and captains[47] according to the number of men required, and bade them help him to raise his regiment. Then the fifes and drums were sent into the district, with a copy of the Emperor's commission, to gather recruits. The recruits came, gave in their names and birthplaces to the muster-master, were informed of the time and place of assembly, and received a piece of money,[48] conduct-money as the English called it, to pay the expense of his journey thither and to bind the bargain. Here we draw a step closer to the Queen's shilling. At the assembly the men were formed in two ranks, facing inwards. An arch[49] was built by planting two halberds into the ground and laying a pike across them, and then every man passed singly beneath it under the eye of the muster-master and of his assistants, who watched every one sharply, rejecting all who were physically deficient or imperfectly armed, and above all taking care that no man should pass through twice, nor the same arms be shown by two different men. For captains were still unscrupulous, and were ever striving to show more men on their roll than they could produce in the flesh, and put the pay that they drew for them into their own pockets. So old was the trick and so deep-rooted the habit, that even in Hawkwood's bands the legitimate method of increasing a captain's pay was to allow him a certain number of fictitious men, called mortes payes (dead heads), and permit him to draw wages for them. [87]This practice in a legitimised form continued in our own army within the memory of living men.

Four hundred men was the usual number assigned to a company[50] of landsknechts, but there was as yet no certainty either in the strength of companies themselves or in the number of them that were comprised within a regiment. The muster[51] over, the men formed a ring round the colonel, who read aloud to them the conditions of service and the rate of pay, including under the former all the ordinary points of discipline. The men thereupon raised their hands, and with three fingers uplifted, swore by the Trinity that they would obey. The colonel then called into the ring the officers whom he had selected to be ensigns,[52] and delivered to each the colour of his company, exhorting him to defend it to the death. Nor must it be supposed that the ensign was then the beardless boy with which our own later experience has accustomed us to identify the title. He was rather a hardened, grizzled old warrior, who could be trusted at all critical times to rally the men around him. Pursuant to Oriental tradition, the fife and drum of each company were under the ensign's immediate orders, so that the position of the colour might always be known by sound if not by sight. The flag itself, which gave the officer his title, bore some colour or device chosen by the colonel, and among the landsknechts was always very large and voluminous, probably to contrast with the flags of the Swiss, which were the smallest in Europe. The landsknechts prided themselves on the grace and skill with which they handled these huge banners, and indeed all the dandyism (if the term may be allowed) observable in later years in the manipulation of the colour may be traced to them.

This ceremony over, the various companies separated [88]and formed each a distinct ring round its captain and ensign. The captain then selected his lieutenant,[53] and calling him under the colours bade the men obey him. He then chose also his chaplain and quartermaster, and having added to these a surgeon his patronage was exhausted. The men were then handed over to the senior non-commissioned officer,[54] a very important person, who was responsible for all drill and for the posting of all guards, and received his appointment directly from the colonel. Under his guidance the company elected a sergeant, who then in turn selected himself an assistant;[55] the assistant then chose a reconnoitrer,[56] and the reconnoitrer a quartermaster-sergeant. Finally, the company was distributed into files[57] of ten men apiece, which selected each of them a file-leader,[58] who, though he received no extra pay, enjoyed certain privileges within his file, such as the right to a bed to himself in quarters and the like. With his election, the file being the unit of the company, the hierarchy was complete.

It is unnecessary to trouble the reader with a list of the regimental staff, but a word must be said of the provost. His principal function was the maintenance of discipline, for which purpose he was provided with a staff of gaolers and an executioner, and his title is still attached to the same duties in the English army of to-day. But apart from this, it was his office to fix the tariff of prices of goods sold by the sutlers who accompanied the regiment. It was a most difficult and dangerous duty, for if he fixed the price too high the men became discontented and mutinous, and if too low the sutlers deserted the camp and left it to provide for itself, which was an alternative little less [89]formidable than the other. In consideration of the perils of his office the provost received certain perquisites in addition to his salary, such as the tongue of every beast slaughtered and an allowance for every cask broached, and even so was none too well paid.[59] It is hardly necessary to point out that in this commercial side of the provost's duties there lies the germ of our modern canteen, wherein the practice of taking perquisites, though strictly forbidden, still prevails among canteen-stewards.

The duties of another officer, whose name must be written down in the original, the Hurenweibel, show the early methods of coping with a difficulty which particularly besets our Indian army. Every regiment of landsknechts was accompanied by a number of followers on the march; and although by strict rule no woman was allowed to accompany a man except his lawful wife, yet we hear without surprise that there were many women following the colours whose status was not recognised by the rule above referred to. The poor creatures led a hard life. The washing, cooking, scavenging, and all manner of unpleasant duties, as well as the more congenial task of nursing the sick and wounded, was entrusted to them, and in case of a siege they were required to make the fascines and gabions. Their masters treated them very brutally, and as every colonel naturally wished to cut down their numbers as low as possible, no pains were spared to make their lives a burden to them. Over all this rabble the Hurenweibel was king, the sceptre of his office being a thick stick called a "straightener,"[60] which he used unmercifully. Yet these followers loved the life and tramped after their lords all over Europe, increasing their numbers as they went; the boys as they grew up being employed to carry [90]the men's weapons or harness on the march. Such boys, or rather fags, were called in French goujats, and are a curious feature in the armies of the time. The greatest of all goujats, if legend may be trusted, was Thomas Cromwell, the Hammer of the Monks.

For the trial of military offences a board of justices accompanied each distinct body, but there were some corps of landsknechts that enjoyed the privilege of the trial of the long pikes,[61] which gave the rank and file sole jurisdiction in respect of crimes that brought disgrace on the regiment. In such cases the provost laid his complaint; and the ensigns, thrusting their flags point downward into the ground, vowed that they would never fly them again until the blot on the fair name of the regiment was removed. The culprit was then tried according to a certain fixed procedure by his comrades alone, without the intervention of any officer. If he were found guilty, the men drew themselves up in two ranks, north and south, facing inwards; the ensigns, with colours flying, posted themselves at the east end of the lane thus formed, and the prisoner was brought to the west. The ensigns then exhorted him to play the man and make bravely for the colours, and the provost, clapping him thrice on the shoulder in the name of the Trinity, bade him run. Then the doomed man plunged into the lane, and every comrade plied pike and halberd and sword on him as he passed. The swifter he ran the sooner came the end, and as he lay hewn, mangled, and bleeding, gasping out his life, his comrades kneeled down together and prayed God to rest his soul. Then all rose and filed in silence three times round the corpse, and at the last the musketeers fired over it three volleys in the name of the Trinity.

The strength of a regiment of landsknechts varied very greatly. There might be thirty companies or there might be ten; the total force sometimes reached ten or twelve thousand men, and in such a case was frequently strengthened by a contingent of artillery. The weapons[91] were the pike, the halberd, and a proportion of firearms, which last tended constantly to increase. Every man found his own arms, and the dress of the landsknechts, being that which it pleased each man best to wear, was generally both fantastic and extravagant, for they had all the soldier's ambition to let their light shine before women. Maximilian's courtiers were so jealous of their gorgeous apparel that they begged him to forbid it, but the emperor was far too sensible to do anything so foolish. "Bah!" he said, "this is the cheese with which we bait our trap to catch such mice," a sentiment which English officers will still endorse. Not all the prejudices of dying feudalism could induce Maximilian to discourage his new infantry; on the contrary, meeting a regiment once on the march he dismounted, shouldered a pike, and marched with them for the rest of the day. It is worth noting that the drum-beat of the landsknechts, whereof they were extremely proud, probably the selfsame beat as that to which Maximilian strode along that day, still preludes the marches of our own military bands.[62]

The drill of the landsknechts was probably crude enough. There was no exercise for pike or halberd, and there is no sign of the complicated man?uvres that were so common at the opening of the seventeenth century; but as they always fought, like the Swiss, in huge masses, there was probably little occasion for these. The men fell in by files, probably at sufficient distance and interval to allow every man to turn right or left about on his own ground; but for action they were closed up tight in vast battalions far too unwieldly for any evolution. Moreover, few of the officers knew anything of drill. They were selected for bravery and experience, no doubt, in some cases, but not for military knowledge; and it is the more probable that the colonels, according to custom, sold the position of officer to the highest bidder, since Maximilian could[92] rarely furnish them with money for their preliminary expenses. The one duty expected without fail of officers was that they should be foremost in the fight, and as a rule they one and all took their place in the front rank with the colonel for centre, and, armed like their men, showed the way into the enemy's battalion. Not one remained on a horse in action, though he might ride regularly on the march; and indeed the landsknechts disliked to see an officer mounted on anything larger than a pony at any time, admitting no reason for an infantry-man to ride a good horse except that he might run away the faster. The duties of officers being thus defined, it is easy to see why the colonel reserved to himself the appointment of the colour-sergeants, for they were practically the only men who knew anything of drill or man?uvre. The colonel might prescribe the formation of his battalion for action, but only the colour-sergeants could execute it; and hence arose the rule that sergeants should be armed with no weapon but a halberd, since any heavier weapon would impede them in the eternal running up and down the ranks which was imposed on them by their peculiar duty. The influence of these traditions was still visible in our army until quite recently. But a few years have passed since sergeants shouldered their rifles as though they carried a different weapon from the men, and officers have only lately ceased to depend on them greatly in matters of drill.

Such was the new infantry of Europe at the close of the fifteenth and the opening of the sixteenth centuries, not yet perfected, but advancing rapidly to an efficiency and importance such as had for many centuries been unknown in Europe. And now the nations poured down into the fair land of Italy to teach each other in that second birthplace of all arts the new-born art of war. France was the first that came; and few armies have caused greater wonder in Europe than that which marched with Charles the Eighth through Florence in 1496. The work begun for the expulsion of the[93] English from France had been steadily continued. Louis the Eleventh had hired Swiss sergeants to drill his infantry, and Picardie, the senior regiment of the old French line, was already in potential existence. But it was not these, but other men who set the Florentines at gaze. For there were to be seen the Scottish archers, the finest body-guard alike for valour and for stature in the world, the Swiss, marching by with stately step and incredible good order, the chivalrous gentlemen of France, mailed from top to toe and gorgeous in silken tabards, riding in all the pride of Agincourt avenged, mounted archers less heavy but more workmanlike as befitted light cavalry, and lastly a great train of brass artillery, cannons and culverins, and falcons, the largest weighing six thousand pounds and mounted on four wheels, the smallest made for shot no bigger than a doctor's pills and travelling on two wheels only. Already the quick-witted French had thought out the principle of the limber, and had made two wheels of their heavy guns removable. Already too they had trained the drivers of the lighter ordnance to move as swiftly as light cavalry.[63]

We cannot follow this army through the triumphs and the disasters of the next half century, but we must needs glance briefly at the rapid progress of French military organisation. Louis the Twelfth took the improvement of his foot-soldiers seriously in hand and increased the number of the companies, or bands as they were called, that had been begun by the bands of Picardy. The number of these bands, permanent and temporary, demanded the appointment of an officer who should be intermediary between the general and the captains of independent companies. About the year 1524 such an officer was established with the new title of colonel,[64] and [94]the companies placed under his command were said, in French, to be under his regiment. The word soon grew to be used in a collective sense, and such and such companies under Colonel A.'s regiment became known simply as Colonel A.'s regiment. The colonel had a company of his own, but having no leisure to attend to it made it over to a captain, who was called the colonel's lieutenant or lieutenant-colonel. Another company was commanded by the sergeant-major, the word sergeant, which we met with first at the very beginning, having come into use in France with a new meaning in the year 1485. As already mentioned in speaking of the landsknechts, the name of sergeant became for some reason bound up with the functions of drill, and the sergeant-major was to the regiment what the sergeant was to the company. He was therefore the only officer who remained on his horse in action, his duties compelling him continually to gallop from company to company for the correction of bad formation, and for the ordering of ranks and files. It will be seen that the sergeant-major, or as we now call him major, originally did the work which is now performed in England by the adjutant.

Captain was of course an old title, and had been used for the chief of a band in France ever since 1355, having been borrowed possibly from the free companies. The captain's locum tenens or lieutenant had been instituted by the reforms of Charles the Seventh in 1444, and together with him his standard-bearer or ensign,[65] but there were other junior officers who came later even than the colonels to supplement the new military vocabulary. In 1534 we encounter for the first time fouriers, caps d'escouade, and lancepessades. The first of these, which existed for a time in the corrupted form furrier,[95] has passed from the English language.[66] The second is the French form of the Italian capo de squadra, head of the square, a reminiscence of the days when men were formed into square blocks, squads or squadrons, which passed into caporal and so into our English corporal. The third, again a French form of the Italian lanz pesato, signified originally a man-at-arms whose horse had been killed and who was therefore compelled to march with the foot. Being a superior person, he was not included among the common infantry-men but held this distinctive and superior rank, whence in due time was derived the prefix of lance to the titles of sergeant and corporal. Finally, in the year 1550 foot-soldiers in France began to be called by the collective name of fanterie or infanterie. This word, too, was a corruption from the Italian, for Italian commanders used to speak of their troops as their boys, fanti, and collectively as fanteria; and from them the term passed into all the languages of Europe. Nothing could better commemorate the situation of Italy in the sixteenth century as at once the cockpit of the nations and the school of the new art of war.

But before leaving France there is another aspect of her military institutions to be touched on. After the death of Francis the First, and particularly during the period of the religious wars, the discipline and tone of the French army underwent woeful deterioration. Captains from the first had been proprietors of their companies, which indeed were sometimes sold at auction by the colonel to the highest bidder; and, as they received a bounty in proportion to the numbers that they could show on their rolls, the rascality and corruption were appalling. The enforcement of strict discipline was bound to cause desertion, and every deserter meant a man the less on the captain's roll and a sum the less in the captain's pocket. No effort therefore was made to restrain the misbehaviour of soldiers when[96] off duty; they were allowed to rob and plunder at their own sweet will, and they had the more excuse since they were encouraged thus to indemnify themselves for the pay stolen from them by their officers. This recognised system of pillage was known as picorée,[67] a word which has passed through the English language in the form of pickeer. Yet another method there was among many of falsifying the muster-rolls, namely on the day of inspection to collect any yokels or men that could be found, thrust a pike into their hands, and present them as soldiers. They were duly passed by the muster-master, and as soon as his back was turned were dismissed, having served their purpose of securing their pay for the illicit gain of the captain till next muster. Such men were called passe-volans, a word which also was received into the military terminology of Europe, and like mortes-payes received at last official recognition. It must not be thought that such abuses were confined to France, but it is significant that she was the country to find names for them.[68] Nor must the reader be unduly impatient over the mention of these details in the military history of foreign nations. The English soldier for the next century and more is going to school, where like all pupils he will learn both good and evil; and it is impossible to follow his progress unless we know something of his schoolfellows as well as of his tutors.
1495.
Atella, 1496.
1503.
1512.

Last of the nations let us glance at Spain, at the close of the fifteenth century just emerging triumphant from eight centuries of warfare against the Moors and girding herself for a great and magnificent career. Her training in war had been against an Oriental foe, swift, active, and cunning, and it is not surprising that when first she entered the field of Italy and met the massive columns of the Swiss at Seminara she should [97]have given way before them. But at the head of the Spanish troops was a man of genius, Gonsalvo of Cordova, who was quick to learn from his enemies. Confining himself for a time to the guerilla warfare which he understood the best, he mingled pikes among the short swords and bucklers which were the distinctive weapons of the Spanish infantry, and within a year had gained his first victory over the Swiss. His next campaign found him with a body of landsknechts in his pay, when he quickly perceived the possibilities that lay not only in the pikes but still more in the fire-arms which they brought with them. Before the year was past he had routed Swiss infantry and French cavalry in two brilliant actions at Cerignola and on the Garigliano, and fairly driven them out of Naples. He then set himself to remodel the Spanish foot by the experience which he had gathered in his later campaigns, and this with full appreciation of the moral and physical peculiarities of his countrymen. Thus though it was in the Spanish tongue that the pike was first named the queen of weapons, yet the value of the sword in the hand of a supple active people was never overlooked, and at Ravenna no less than Cerignola the rush of nimble stabbing Spaniards under the hedge of pikes had proved fatal to the lumbering unwieldy Teuton.
1522.
1525.

Still more remarkable was the rapid development of the power of musketry in Spanish hands. At Bicocca the Marquis Pescayra met the attack of a gigantic Swiss battalion by drawing up a number of small squares or squadrons of Spanish arquebusiers in front of his own battalion of pikes. His instructions were that not a shot should be fired without orders, a fact that points to early excellence in what is now called fire-discipline, but that each front rank should fire a volley by word of command and having done so should file away to the rear to reload, leaving the remaining ranks to do the like in succession. The results of this man?uvre were disastrous to the Swiss; and this ingenious method of maintaining a continuous fire of[98] musketry was the law in Europe for the next century and a half. In fact, if it were necessary to fix an arbitrary date for the first really effective use of small fire-arms in the battlefield the day of Bicocca might well be selected. But we must not fail to note concurrently the drill and discipline which made Pescayra's evolution possible. Three years later, at the famous battle of Pavia, this same skilful soldier attempted a still bolder innovation with his arquebusiers, and with astonishing success. Being threatened with a charge of French heavy cavalry (men-at-arms) he deployed fifteen hundred of his marksmen in skirmishing order before his front, who, taking advantage of every shelter and moving always with great nimbleness and activity, maintained a galling fire as the cavalry advanced, and finally, taking refuge under the pikes of the battalions which were drawn up in their support, smashed the unfortunate French as effectively as the English archers at Cre?y. In truth, the effect of this daring experiment on military minds in Europe was hardly less than that of Cre?y itself. Henry, Duke of Guise,[69] an excellent soldier, was so much struck by its success that he showed how the principle might be indefinitely extended and find ultimate shape, as many years later it did, in the formation of distinct corps of light-infantry. His own attempt to organise such a body in France was however a failure, and the Spanish arquebusiers long held their own as the first in Europe, a proud position which they had most worthily gained.

The remarkable prowess of the Spanish infantry soon made it popular with the nation. The cavalry, in the palmy days of chivalry the most gorgeous in Europe, lost its attraction for the young nobles, who enrolled themselves as private soldiers in the ranks of the foot, and carried pike and arquebus with the meanest of the people. Charles the Fifth himself once shouldered a piece, and marched, like Maximilian, in[99] the ranks, until ordered by the commander-in-chief[70] of his own appointment not to expose himself to unnecessary danger, when like a good soldier he at once obeyed orders. And this leads us to another eminent feature of the Spaniards, the excellence of their discipline. English and French contemporary writers[71] agreed that they owed their victories to nothing else but obedience and good order, for that they were not in themselves remarkable as a fighting people. "I am persuaded," says Roger Williams, "that ten thousand of our nation would beat thirty thousand of theirs out of the field, excepting some three thousand [the choicest of the army] that are in the Low Countries." Gonsalvo was the man who had laid the foundation of this discipline, and it was worthily maintained by his successors. Charles the Fifth went so far in his respect for it as always to salute the gallows whenever he happened to pass them. And yet there are no signs of extraordinary brutality in the Spanish army, but on the contrary most remarkable tokens of good fellowship between officers and men, and of healthy esprit de corps. There was a system of comradeship which was the envy of all Europe. The two officers of each company, the captain and ensign,[72] would each take to themselves and entertain from three to six comrades from the young nobles who served in the ranks; sergeants would also take one or two such comrades, and the privates formed little messes among themselves in like manner, with the result, unique in those days, that fighting and brawling were unknown in a Spanish camp. Quite as striking was the pride which the old soldiers took in themselves and their profession. It is recorded that a party of Spanish recruits, who had arrived at Naples, ragged, slovenly, and unkempt, and were staring about them in a clownish and unsoldierly fashion, were at once taken in hand by the old soldiers, who lent them [100]good clothes, made them tidy, and taught them proper manners.[73]

For the rest the Spaniards originated a system which, though it now seems obvious enough, was in those days a new thing. It consisted simply in the maintenance of a nucleus, or as we should now call it a dep?t, of trained men sufficiently numerous to teach recruits their duty. All recruits were trained in the garrisons at home, and from thence passed into the ranks of the regiment wherein they were needed; and every draft so disposed of was immediately replaced by an equal number of new recruits. When it is remembered that, according to the ideas of the time, seven thousand trained infantry and three thousand cavalry were judged sufficient to leaven an army of fifty thousand men, the strength which her system of recruiting gave to Spain is not easily exaggerated. The trained regiments of Spanish infantry were but four, and their united strength did not exceed seven thousand men, but their ranks were always full. The number of companies into which they were distributed was uncertain, and the strength of the companies themselves varied from one hundred and fifty to three hundred men, a curious defect in the most perfect organisation of the time. Lastly, the Spanish regiments were known by the name of tercios,[74] a term with which the reader must not quarrel, as he will encounter it on the battlefield of Naseby.
1475.
1567.

Not less remarkable than their forwardness in organisation and discipline was the ready quickness of the Spaniard in the improvement of fire-arms. The primitive hand-gun, as I have already said, differed little except in size from the smaller cannon of the time. It consisted simply of a barrel with a vent at the top, and though indeed attached to a wooden stock had no lock of any description. Hand-guns were often made so [101]short that they could be held even by a mounted man with one hand and fired with the other. Match-cord or tinder for purposes of firing the charge by the vent was already in full use. The next step was to increase the length of the barrel and support it on a forked rest, a plan introduced by the Spaniards at Charles the Fifth's invasion of the Milanese in 1521. Ten years later a vast stride was made by the substitution of a pan at the side of the barrel for a vent at the top, and by the addition of a grip to the stock to hold the match-cord, which was brought in contact with the pan by pressing a trigger. In a word, the barrel was fitted with a lock. An extremely ingenious Italian in the French service, Filippo Strozzi, then took the improvement of fire-arms in hand, copying however, as always, from the Spanish model. The bore of the harquebus (for the primitive German hakenbuchse had by this time found its permanent corrupted form) was by him enlarged to bear a heavier charge and carry a larger bullet; and so perfect was the workmanship of the Milanese gunsmiths whom he employed that he succeeded in killing a man at four hundred and a horse at five hundred paces. The stock being long and the recoil very severe, men suffered not a little from bruises and contusions with this weapon; but its efficiency was proved. Strozzi also introduced another Spanish improvement, namely the practice of making all his arquebuses of one bore, which, though it now sounds obvious enough, waited for some years to find general acceptance in Europe. Hence the weapons were known as arquebuses of calibre, which phrase in England was soon shortened simply to calivers. These however were arms of small bore:[75] it was, as usual, the Spaniards who were the first to arm their infantry with muskets[76] of large calibre. Alva was the man who [102]introduced them, and the rebels of the Low Countries the first who felt their power. It needed but the substitution of a flint-lock for a match, and the abolition of the rest, to turn this weapon into Brown Bess, never so famous in English hands as in the battlefields of Alva's home. Bandoliers and cartridges had long been known to the Spaniards, and even to the French[77] before the middle of the sixteenth century, so that the general progress in arms and equipment was rapid.

But the weapons had hardly been improved for infantry before cavalry also began to crave for them. The simplest method of course was to place pike and arquebus in the hands of mounted men and turn them into mounted infantry, which was duly done in the French army by Piero Strozzi in 1543, and has earned him the title of the father of dragoons.[78] But still earlier in the century there had grown up in Germany a new kind of cavalry, called by the simple name of Reiters, which had perfected the smaller fire-arms, the petronel[79] and the pistol, and had finally adopted the latter for its principal weapon. The result was an important revolution in the whole tactics of cavalry.
1554.

Mention has already been made of the abandonment, at the close of the fifteenth century, of the dense column of mounted men-at-arms in favour of the less cumbrous formation in line, or as it was called en haye. The lance being still the principal arm of the cavalry, the freedom of movement gained by the change brought the attack of horse much nearer to the shock-action which is the rule at the present day. The new formation had, however, its disadvantages, for in the imperfect state of military discipline there was no certainty that the whole line would charge home. Retirement was so easy that cowards would drop back, feigning to bleed at the nose, to have lost a stirrup or cast a shoe,[80] while men of spirit, [103]and this was especially true of the impetuous French, would race to be the first into the enemy's squadron, and from premature increase of speed would arrive at the shock in loose order, and with horses blown and exhausted. So well was this defect realised that a shrewd French officer, Gaspard de Tavannes, at the battle of Renty deliberately reverted to the old dense column and overthrew every line that he met.

Yet another cause was contributing to restore the column as the favourite formation for the attack of cavalry. With the steady improvement in fire-arms, the bullet became more and more potent in velocity and penetration, and increasingly difficult to fend off by means of armour. It must never be forgotten that a bullet-wound, for a century and more after the introduction of fire-arms, generally meant death. The primitive surgery of the time, misled by the livid appearance of the edges of the wound, pronounced bullets to be in their nature venomous, and treated the hurt somewhat as a snake's bite, with such tortures of boiling oil and other descriptions of cautery as are sickening even to read of. Wise men took refuge in the virtues of cold water, and kept the surgeons at a safe distance. "Trust a doctor and he will kill you; mistrust him and he will insult you," wrote a Frenchman[81] who had suffered much from the profession. But above all, men relied on prevention rather than cure; so to keep bullets out of their bodies they made their armour heavier and heavier, covering themselves with stithies, to use the words of contemptuous critics,[82] till they could neither endure swift movements themselves nor find horses that could maintain any pace under the burden.[83] It was obvious therefore that if cavalry was to act by shock, the shock must be, as in former days, that of ponderous weight rather than of high speed.

[104]

Moreover, quite apart from all questions of formation there was much in the prevailing tactics of infantry to encourage cavalry to change the lance for the pistol. Huge square battalions, bristling with eighteen-foot pikes and garnished with musketeers, were not easily to be broken by a charge, but presented a large mark at a fairly safe range to the mounted pistolier. Thus all circumstances conspired to favour a great and radical reform in the tactics of cavalry, the change not only from line to column, but from shock to missile action. When once the pistol was recognised as the principal weapon of the horsemen, it was obvious that all other tactical considerations must give way to the maintenance of a continuous fire. To this end there was but one system known, namely the old method of Pescayra, that the front rank should fire first and file away to the rear to reload, leaving successive ranks to come up in its place, and go through the same performance in turn. Plainly, therefore, a reversion to the old dense column, as great in depth as in breadth of front, was imperative. It was accordingly re-introduced, and from its quadrate outline was called by the name of a squadron, which from this period tends to become a term applied exclusively to cavalry. Massed together in such squadrons men could move slowly and steadily, willingly sacrificing speed that they might take the better and surer aim.
1557.

Such was the new principle brought forward early in the sixteenth century by the mounted mercenary bands of Germany, and with ever-increasing success. Very soon the reiters become recognised as a valuable force, and received from Charles the Fifth something of the encouragement that the landsknechts had gained from Maximilian. The military aspirants of the Empire, forsaking the ranks of the once honoured infantry, hastened to enrol themselves among the new horse, and the landsknechts decayed that the reiters might flourish. That the new service was as honourable[105] as the old may be doubted, for the reiters were proverbial for brutality, and their practice of blackening their faces betokens something of a ruffianly spirit; but, be that as it might, they forced their system, in spite of bitter opposition, upon the cavalry of Europe, and from the day of the battle of St. Quentin may be said to have assured their evil supremacy.

It is therefore necessary to glance briefly at their organisation. The tactical unit was the squadron, which was of uncertain strength, varying from one hundred to three or even five hundred men. The officers were a captain,[84] lieutenant, ensign,[85] and quartermaster,[86] and the staff was completed by a chaplain, a sergeant[87] and a trumpeter. As every man brought his own equipment there was no precise uniformity, but it may be assumed as certain that all wore complete defensive armour to the waist, and some even to mid-thigh. For offensive purposes a pistol, or rather a brace of pistols, was indispensable. As in the case of the landsknechts, all matters of drill were the business of the sergeant, but it does not appear that the reiters ever attained great proficiency in man?uvre. Thus in action the successive ranks of the squadron seem to have been unable to file to the rear except to their left, so that it was impossible to post them on the right wing without bringing them into collision with the centre of their own line of battle. The trumpeters, it is worth noting, were required to be masters of but six calls,—Saddle, Mount, Mess, March, Alarm, Charge,—of which the French employed the first two and last two only. We shall presently make further acquaintance with these six calls, but it is sufficient meanwhile to call attention to their existence in the middle of the sixteenth century. The reiters however, should not be forgotten, for though not comparable to the landsknechts for quality as troops, they furnished [106]the model for the first famous regiment of English cavalry.[88]

Lastly, let me close this necessarily brief and imperfect account of the renascence of the art of war by a remark which should perhaps have come first rather than last. Amid all the innovations which went forward during the sixteenth century in the province of armament, classical models reigned supreme in organisation and man?uvre. The whole story of the renascence resembles, if I may be allowed to use the metaphor, a long musical passage in pedal point, on the deep bass note of classical tradition. For this the revival of classical learning was doubtless responsible. When generals celebrated a triumph, as more than one general did, in the Roman manner after a victory, the pageant could hardly be complete without the presence of legions; and when Machiavelli declared that the Swiss tactics were those of the Macedonian phalanx, military students could be in no doubt where to seek out models for their own imitation. Francis the First adopted in 1534 both the name and organisation of the Roman legions for a time, while no military writer omitted to recommend the Roman ideal to aspirants of his profession. Every soldier steeped himself in ancient military lore, and quoted the Hipparchicus of Xenophon[89] and the Tactics of ?lian, the Commentaries of C?sar and the expeditions of Alexander, Epaminondas' heavy infantry and Pompey's discipline. A Frenchman could not even praise the merits of the Englishman as a marine without calling him epibates. In a word Europe for two centuries, went forth to war with the newest pattern of musket in hand, and a brain stocked with maxims from Frontinus and Vegetius and ?neas Poliorceticus, and with examples from Plutarch and Livy and Arrian. She might well have found [107]worse instructors; but their lessons were for the most part imperfectly understood, and their broad principles seldom correctly deduced or intelligently applied. An opportunity was thus afforded for the demon of pedantry, which was eagerly and joyfully seized. Nevertheless, the present armies of Europe still double their ranks and files, by whatever name they may designate the evolution, after the manner prescribed by ?lian, and by him borrowed, it is likely, from the stern martinets of ancient Laced?mon.

Authorities.—The chief authorities for Zizka's campaigns and organisation are ?neas Sylvius, Balbinus, Miscellanea Rerum Bohem. 1679; Dubravius, Hist. Bohem. 1602; Palacky, Gesch. v. B?hmen. His articles of war will be found in Neuere Abhandlungen der k?nigl. B?hm. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft, Band I. p. 375. For the Swiss, Simler, de Repub. Helvet; John of Winterthur, Pirckheimer, and the Chronicle of Berne. All the authorities for the battle of Sempach have been collected in Liebenau's memorial volume. A fantastic work, but not without useful information, is Karl Bürkli's Der wahre Winkelried, 1886. K?hler has handled both Bohemians and Swiss with his wonted thoroughness. For the landsknechts there are Adam Reissner's Georg von Frundsberg (1st ed. 1568, 3rd ed. 1620); Fronsperger's Kriegsbuch; Hortleder's Der r?mischen Kaiser, etc.; Adelspiegel, von Cyriack Spangenberg, 1594; the whole of which are more or less summarised in Barthold's Georg von Frundsberg, 1833, and in a still more compact form by Dr. Friedrich Blau, Die deutschen Landsknechte, 1882. The Spanish military reforms are more difficult to ascertain. I have relied principally on Roger Williams's brief account, sundry notices in Brant?me's Vie des hommes illustres; Paul Jove's Vita Gonsalvi Magni, and, perhaps most valuable of all, Reissner. For the French there are Daniel's Ancien milice; Susanne's Hist. de l'ancienne infanterie fran?aise; Paul Jove, and the Memoires of Vieilleville, Du Bellay, Villars, de Mergey, de la Noue, Tavannes, Onosandre, Brant?me, Monluc, and others. I have also consulted, among Italian writers, Julius Ferrettus, De re militari, 1575; Domenico Mora, Il soldato, 1570; Savorgnano's Arte militare; and of course Machiavelli. Lastly, I have not failed to study the classical authorities quoted in the text.
CHAPTER II
The accession of the Tudors to the throne of England marks an important period in our military history. The nation, after thirty years of furious internal war, during which it had lost all sense of national honour, began to settle down once more to a life of peace, and awoke to the fact that England was now no more than an insular power. France was lost to her except Calais, but Calais was something more than a mere sentimental possession. It was the bridge-head that secured to the English their passage of the Channel; and while it remained in the hands of an English garrison there was always the temptation to engage in Continental wars and to employ the army for purposes of aggression as well as of defence. Still the prospects of regaining the ancestral possessions of the Plantagenets in France seemed so hopeless that the English sovereigns might well doubt whether it were not now time to give the Navy the first and the Army the second place; and this question, already half decided by the keen good sense of King Henry the Eighth, was finally determined by the loss of Calais itself. There was, of course, always a frontier to be guarded on the Tweed, but with the cessation of expeditions to France, which had invariably called the Scotch armies across the border, there was no longer the same danger of Scottish invasion; and moreover, England and Scotland were now beginning to draw closer together. Thus it would seem that after the death of Queen Mary there should have been little reason for the existence of an English army, and[109] indeed it will be seen that the national force became in many respects lamentably deficient. But meanwhile the wars of Europe changed from a contest between nation and nation to a death struggle between Catholic and Protestant. It was religion that drew the Scotch from their old alliance with the French to their former enemies the English; and it was religion which led the English to the battlefields of the Low Countries, where they learned the new art of war. The reign of the Tudor dynasty therefore falls for the purpose of this history into three periods, which are conveniently separated by the fall of Calais or the more familiar landmark of the accession of Elizabeth, and by the first departure of English volunteers to the Low Countries in 1572.

It is extremely difficult to discover the exact condition of England's military organisation when Henry the Seventh was fairly seated on the throne. The old feudal system, which had been turned by the nobles to such disastrous account for their own ends in the Civil War, seems to have been but half alive. Compositions, indents, and commissions of array had already weakened it in the past, and indents in themselves had been shown to be unsafe. The difficulties wherein Henry found himself are shown by two statutes imposing the obligation of military service on two new classes, namely holders of office, fees or annuities under the crown, or of honours and lands under the King's letters patent. It was stipulated that they should receive wages from the day of leaving their homes until the day of their return to them; but they were strictly forbidden to depart without leave, and their service was declared to be due both within the kingdom and without. But in fact the sovereign seems to have been driven back on the force which represented the old Saxon fyrd, and had its legal existence under the Statute of Winchester. Noblemen and gentlemen could of course still show a body of retainers, but many, indeed most, of the ancient magnates had perished, and recent experience had shown the danger[110] of permitting their retinue to become too powerful. A curious complication, to which I shall presently return, in the collapse of the old feudal service was the extreme dearth of good horses. Altogether everything tended to compel resort to the national militia as the principal military force of England. Two allowances to the levies of the shire seem to have been finally established in this reign, namely coat-money and conduct-money. The first, as its name denotes, helped the soldier to provide himself with clothing and was a step further towards uniform; and indeed it is possible that it was deliberately designed to exclude the liveries of the nobility, already condemned by statute, in favour of the national white with the red cross of St. George. The conduct-money was simply the old allowance which was seen in the days of William Rufus, but which from henceforth apparently was refunded to the shire from the Exchequer. Both, however, though paid in advance to the soldier, were ultimately deducted from his pay, and are therefore of interest in the history of the British soldier's stoppages. Finally, we find indications of a stricter discipline in a statute that makes desertion while on service outside the kingdom into felony, and subjects captains who defraud men of their pay to forfeiture of goods and to imprisonment.

A few points remain to be mentioned before we pass to the reign of Henry the Eighth. The first was the establishment of that royal body-guard, which with its picturesque old dress and original title of Yeomen[90] of the Guard still survives among us. Though doubtless imitated from the Scottish Guard of the French kings, it is of greater interest as being composed not of aliens but of Englishmen, and as the first permanent corps of trained English soldiers in our history. Another smaller matter cannot be ignored without disrespect[111] to military sentiment. After the victory of Bosworth Field Henry offered at the altar of St. Paul's Cathedral a banner charged with "a red fiery dragon" upon a field of white and green, the ensign of Cadwallader, the last of the British kings, from whom he was fond of tracing his descent. The scarlet of this red fiery dragon became from this time the royal livery, and was for the present reserved, together with purple, to the King's use alone.[91] But the green and white was more liberally distributed both to soldiers and mariners. A white jacket with the red cross of St. George had long been a common distinction of the English soldier, and the white as a colour of the Tudors now became so general that for a time "white coat" was used as a synonym for soldier.

Lastly must be noticed the definite establishment of the Office of Ordnance for the custody of military stores. The early history of the office is exceedingly obscure, and the existence of King Edward the Second's artillator hardly warrants us in assuming the permanent foundation of the department in the fourteenth century. The record of a Clerk of the Ordnance in 1418 sets the office on surer ground, and in 1483 the appointment of a Master-General advances it to a stage at which it becomes recognisable by us even at the present day; for the title of Master-General was held by John, Duke of Marlborough, and by Arthur, Duke of Wellington.

With Henry the Eighth we reach a new example in our history of an English soldier-king. Young, able, accomplished, and ambitious, he was strongly imbued with the military spirit, and possessed many qualities that must have made him a popular and might have made him a distinguished commander. He excelled[112] in every exercise of arms; he was the finest archer in his kingdom; he had studied the art of war in the best authorities; he understood the conduct both of a siege and of a campaign; and lastly, he was no mean artillerist. This last attribute, however, he shared with several sovereigns of his time. Artillery was a favourite hobby with the crowned heads of Europe, possibly as a symbol of their military strength, for being unable to give themselves the pleasure of a great review owing to the inevitable confusion and expense, they were fain to console themselves with the several pieces, each one of them called by its pet name, that composed their park of ordnance. Altogether Henry was a prince who bade fair to restore the military prestige of England.
1509.
1511.

His first step was to increase his standing force by the creation of a second body-guard of men-at-arms,[92] composed of young men of noble blood; the reason given being that there were far too many such young men in the kingdom who were untrained in arms. The corps, as might have been expected with the best dressed sovereign in Europe, was so gorgeously arrayed that it perished after a few years under the weight of its own cost. His next act was more practical, a writ to the sheriffs for the better enforcement of the Statute of Winchester, which is interesting for its attempt to restore the command of the forces of the shore to their original holders.[93] Concurrently, however, we encounter a large number of the old-fashioned indents and commissions of array, all issued in prospect of English intervention in the eternal strife of the Hapsburgs and the Valois.[94] In 1512 an expedition was sent to the south of France, and there the defects of the army were lamentably seen. Although the importation of hand-guns and arquebuses shows that England was not blind to the progress of fire-arms in Europe, this force [113]was armed principally if not exclusively with the old-fashioned bows and bills, and worse than all, these bows, which had been issued from the stores in the Tower, were found nearly all of them to be useless. Moreover, the victuals were "untruly served" to the men, their pay was withheld from them, and, acutest of all grievances, they could get no beer. The Council of War, in which the command was vested, could never agree as to a plan of operations, and though it kept the men thus inactive made no attempt to drill or exercise them. The natural result was a mutiny. One large band struck work for eightpence a day in lieu of the regular sixpence, several others swore that nothing should keep them from going home, and the disturbance was only quelled by the hanging of a ringleader.[95]
1513.

Henry seems to have had suspicions of the state of affairs, for in the same year Acts were passed to renew the existing statutes against desertion and fraud; though from the incessant re-enactment of these particular provisions it is clear that they were either easily evaded or negligently enforced. In the following year, however, Henry took the field in person in Normandy, where his presence appears materially to have altered the complexion of affairs. His force was designed to have consisted of thirty thousand men, but was reduced by impending trouble with Scotland to less than half that number. The details of its organisation are still extant, and it is curious to find that, after but two generations of severance from France, the French terms vanguard, battle, and rearguard have given place to fore-ward, mid-ward, and rear-ward. Another novelty is the addition of wings, which had formerly been attached to the vanguard only, to the midward also; which was clearly a new departure.[96] There is again a strong tendency, which after a year becomes a rule, to make the tactical units of uniform strength, one hundred men being the common establishment for a company. [114]Every captain too has an officer under him called his petty captain, a name which appears in the statutes of the previous reign, and was not yet displaced by the title, as yet reserved to the King's deputies only,[97] of lieutenant. The ensign[98] does not yet make his appearance, for the grouping of companies is strictly territorial, and one standard apparently alone is allowed to each shire. Every company, however, has the distinctive badge of its captain, and the archers of the King's Guard are dressed in uniform of white gaberdines. Lastly, there are in the army fifteen hundred Almains, the landsknechts of whom account was given in a previous section, eight hundred of whom, "all in a plump," marched immediately before the King. Possibly this place of honour was granted to them to kindle the emulation of the English, but more probably because Henry, following the evil example of the French, trusted more to trained mercenaries than to his own subjects. We shall constantly meet with such contingents of aliens among the English during the next forty years, until at last England awakes, like every other nation in Europe, to the truth that her own children, as carefully trained, are worth just double of the foreigners.

The most remarkable of the mounted men in this army were the Northern Horsemen, who, called into being at some uncertain period by the eternal forays on the Scottish border, now appear regularly on the strength of every expedition as perfectly indispensable. They were light cavalry, the first deserving the name [115]ever seen in our army, and probably the very best in Europe. They wore defensive armour of back and breast and iron cap, carried lance and buckler or sometimes a bow, and were mounted on "nags" which were probably nearer thirteen than fourteen hands high. For duties of reconnaissance they were perfect, and they must be reckoned the first regular English horse that were the eyes and ears of the army. We shall see them at a later stage merged in a mounted body much resembling them, namely the demi-lances, which were destined, during the period of transition that is before us, to fill the place already almost vacated by the men-at-arms.

There is no need to dwell on the incidents of a not very eventful campaign. The panic flight of the French at the Battle of the Spurs upheld the old belief that they could not stand before the English; and the siege and capture of Terouenne under the personal direction of Henry helped to confirm it. A fruitless attack on an English convoy, curiously resembling the Battle of the Herrings in its main features, also helped to maintain the ancient reputation of the English archers. Lastly, the siege of Tournay gave Henry an opportunity of showing off some of his new artillery. There were twelve huge pieces, called the twelve apostles, of which he was particularly proud; but as St. John stuck in the mud and was unfortunately captured, it is well not to say too much of them. But the French were by no means impressed with the appearance of their old enemies in the field. "The English," wrote Fleuranges in a patronising way, "are good men and fight well when parked in a strong position, but otherwise I make no great account of them."
1513,
September.
September 9.

But while Henry was plying his apostles against Tournay, some still older enemies of the nation had formed a very different opinion of the English. For in September, Thomas, Earl of Surrey, met the Scots at Flodden Field, and dealt them a blow from which they never wholly recovered. The odds against the[116] English were heavy, for they could bring but twenty-six thousand men against forty thousand or, as some say, eighty thousand Scots, and the position taken up by James the Fourth was so strong that Surrey could not venture to attack it. With ready intelligence he made a detour from south to north of the Scottish host, and James, who had not attempted to molest him during the movement, hurried down, fearful of being cut off from his base, to meet him in the open field. The sequel is an example of the helplessness of pedantry, even of the newest pattern, in the face of genuine military instinct. The Scotch had studied the methods of the landsknechts; they were armed principally with pikes; they were drawn up in five huge battalions, after the Swiss model, and they advanced to the attack in silence "after the Almain manner." Lastly, they had with them some of the finest artillery hitherto seen.[99] Yet all this availed them nothing. The English too were formed, after a method which had lately come into fashion, in two divisions, fore-ward and rear-ward, each with two wings; but Surrey boldly wheeled both into one grand line,[100] holding but one small body of horse in reserve, and appears to have overlapped the cumbrous masses of the enemy. There is no need to give details of the battle; it began between four and five in the evening and was over in an hour. The English leaders seem to have shown not only bravery but skill. The English archers as usual wrought havoc against unarmoured men; the English bills got the better of the Scottish pikes, and the English light cavalry, admirably handled, twice saved the infantry from defeat. Ten thousand Scots were slain, and James himself, with the head and heir of almost every noble house in Scotland around him, lay covered with ghastly wounds among the dead. He had, from some whimsical return to an obsolete practice, dismounted his men-at-arms, who, in obedience to the new fashion which counselled [117]protection against the new-fangled bullets, were clad in the heaviest armour. Arrows fell harmlessly from them, and even bills could not cut them down with less than half a dozen strokes; but they could not fly, and the bill-men did not weary of killing. And so on Flodden Field was shown a forecast of what was to be seen later in Italy, when infantry, finding men-at-arms prostrate on the ground, hammered them to death like lobsters within their shells before they could break through their armour.

Still the lesson of Flodden to the English was mainly that bows and bills were still irresistible; and to a conservative people none could have been more welcome. Henry, who was an enthusiastic archer, had already renewed a statute of his father's prohibiting the use of the cross-bow without a licence, and he now withdrew all licences and extended the prohibition to hand-guns.[101] The long-bow, on the other hand, received all the encouragement that enactments and sentiment could afford it. Henry dressed himself and his body-guard in green, which was the archer's peculiar colour; and the Venetian ambassador Giustiniani writing in 1519 described, with but slight exaggeration, the English military forces as consisting of one hundred and fifty thousand men, whose peculiar though not exclusive weapon was the long-bow. Men-at-arms were extinct, light cavalry insignificant in number. Giustiniani, however, did not add that the archers were now more efficiently equipped than at any previous period, being provided with two stakes instead of one, and further protected by a breastplate.[102] Nor did he notice a new weapon, the Moorish or Morris pike, which had lately come into use among the English, and had brought them a little closer to the famous infantry of the Continent.
1520.

It is, however, almost with a smile that we see Henry with undiminished satisfaction flaunting his [118]archers in the face of Francis at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Francis on his side produced his Swiss, and gave the English an opportunity of studying the first infantry in Europe. Fleuranges was at their head, and as his eye wandered from the scarlet and gold of the body-guard to the white and green of the other English troops, he probably felt justified in his opinion that they could not meet his own men in the open field. Henry, however, was unchangeable,[103] and the only sign of novelty that we see at this famous pageant is a horn-shaped flag borne in the retinue of Cardinal Wolsey, the cornette, which was in due time to give its name to the standard-bearers of the English cavalry.[104]
1522.
1523.
1525.

Peace never endured long in those days, and in 1522 Henry was again at war with Francis, in alliance with Charles the Fifth. Again the English deficiencies became patent. In his expedition to France, which led to little result, Henry was forced to rely principally on Charles for cavalry;[105] and when it was evident that France would require to be fought on the Scottish border also, the Earl of Surrey, who held command in the north, begged for a reinforcement of four thousand landsknechts. The French, he said, would certainly bring pikes with them, and the English were not accustomed to pikes, though they would soon learn from the Almains.[106] In plain words, the English soldiers with their existing equipment were unfit to meet the French in the field. Fortunately the Duke of Albany, who was opposed to Surrey, was a coward, and little came of the alarm in the north. But the danger seems for the moment to have aroused Henry to a sense of his backwardness, for we find in 1523 a scheme for the purchase of ten thousand eighteen-foot [119]pikes and corselets, five thousand halberds, and ten thousand hand-culverins with matches,[107] bullet-moulds and powder-flasks complete. This is the first indication of a design to equip the army according to the best rules of the age, and, if it had been adopted, little change would have been needed for a century and a half. It is difficult to say why it was not, for at this time there are signs of an intention to take the improvement of the army seriously in hand.[108] But Henry changed his policy. Peace was made, and was immediately followed by a proclamation to enforce the statute for the encouragement of the long-bow and the discountenance of cross-bows and hand-guns.[109] We must come down to the prolonged rejection of breech-loading artillery by the country in our own day before we can find a parallel to such perversity.
1539.

Nevertheless, in spite of all Henry's efforts fire-arms seem to have taken some hold on England, and particularly on London. In the general alarm that followed the insurrection known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, the King relied principally on London; and in 1537 he granted a Charter of Incorporation to the Artillery Company of the city, an association formed for the improved training of the citizens in weapons of volley, which term included hand-guns and cross-bows as well as the long-bow. This association survives as the Honourable Artillery Company. Again, at the great review of the London trained-bands two years later we find like symptoms of a change. The old account of this pageant is of singular interest for the sight which it gives us of the most efficient soldiers in England. The force consisted of fifteen thousand picked men, all able-bodied and properly equipped, and all, except the officers, clothed in white even to their shoes. [120]White was at once the old colour of England, the colour of the city, and the colour of the Tudors. The men paraded at Mile End, the famous drill-ground which was later to pass into a proverb, at six o'clock in the morning, and at eight moved off on their march to Westminster, in the three orthodox divisions of fore-ward, mid-ward, and rear-ward. First came the artillery, thirteen field-pieces, with their ammunition and "gun-stones," for shot was not yet always made of metal, in carts behind them. Then came the banners of the city, and then the musketeers, five in rank, with five feet of distance between ranks; after them came the bowmen in open order, every man a bow's length[110] from his neighbour; then followed the pikemen with their morris-pikes, "after the Almain manner," and lastly came the bills. Every one of the five divisions in each ward had its own band, its own colours, and its officers riding at its head; and it is worthy of note that the hand-guns and pikes took precedence of the bows and bills. So they marched on in their spotless white to Westminster, where the King awaited them on a platform. As the musketeers passed him they fired volleys, for a volley was of old the salute to the living as well as to the dead, the great guns were man?uvred and "shot off very terribly," doubtless to an accompaniment of female screams, and the force marched back through St. James' Park to the city. The review was intended as a demonstration against the menaces of foreign powers, and it had its due effect.
1544.

The danger passed away; but within four years Henry was again in the field fighting with Charles the Fifth against the French. There is little that is worth remarking in the campaigns that followed. The English as usual took with them their bows and bills, and the archers still came off with credit. A contingent of landsknechts was with them, who behaved so ill[121] as to draw upon themselves more than ordinary dislike; and indeed the palmy days of the landsknechts were over. One portion of the English army alone provoked the warm admiration of Charles, namely, the Northern Horsemen. Wallop, the English commander, took justifiable pride in them, and detached them to clear the country before the Emperor on his departure. Away started the sturdy border-men on their tough little ponies, while Charles watched with all his eyes; and when he saw them breast an ascent before them and "hurl" up the hill, he cried out with honest delight.[111]

Nevertheless it must be confessed that Henry, though the eight and thirty years of his reign were perhaps the most eventful in the history of the modern art of war, did singularly little for the army. The passion for the bow, which evinced itself in repeated enactments and proclamations to the very close of his reign, and the false system of hiring mercenaries, led to a neglect of the infantry which might easily have proved disastrous. For the cavalry, though here again he was inclined to use mercenaries, he showed more care. He was much exercised by the decay of the English breed of horses, and passed three several Acts for its remedy. The wording of these throws a flood of light on our ancient troop-horse. To improve the breed it was enacted that every owner of a park should keep from two to four brood-mares not less than thirteen hands high, and that no stallions under fourteen hands should be employed for breeding; the hand to be reckoned as four inches and the measurement to be made to the withers. From the operation of this Act the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, the home of the Northern Horsemen, were excluded. By a subsequent Act it was ordained that all chases, forests, and commons should be driven once a year, the unlikely mares and foals slaughtered, and no stallions allowed to run free that were under fifteen hands in height. What effect these measures may have wrought[122] I am unable to say; but the knowledge of the small stature of brood-mares can help us to a better understanding of the difficulties which beset the maintenance of an efficient cavalry.[112]
1513.

But the arm wherein Henry worked most improvement was undoubtedly the artillery. We find him at first purchasing all his guns abroad, for the most part in Flanders, and procuring his gunners also from foreign parts; but it is clear, from the number of Englishmen whose appointment to the post of gunner remains on record, that the English were rapidly learning their business from their instructors, while as early as 1514 we find Lord Darcy pleading for the employment of native gunners.[113] There is evidence too that the artilleryman's art was by no means so rare as it had been, gunners receiving no more than the ordinary soldier's pay of sixpence a day.[114] The casting of ordnance in England was less common, though there are scattered notices of English gun-founders from the beginning of the reign. Finally, in the year 1535 John Owen began to make even the largest guns, and obviated the necessity of depending on foreign makers for artillery. In 1543, moreover, Henry induced two foreigners to settle in England, Peter Bawd and Peter van Collen, who among other improvements devised mortar-pieces[115] of large calibre and shells to fire from them. Shell, indeed, was frequently used in the campaign of 1544, and Henry was early in appreciating its advantages. There was, however, still the difficulty of finding horses to draw the field-guns, which he seems to have attempted to overcome as early [123]as in the third year of his reign by some kind of registration of waggoners and teams. The drivers were to wear the white coat and red cross, and to be mustered and paid every month; and for their protection it was ordered that their paymaster should take no bribes from them beyond one penny a month from each man, a curious commentary on the financial morality of the army. Be that as it may, however, there exists no doubt that Henry the Eighth created the British gunner who, as his proud motto tells, has since worked his guns all over the world.
1542.
1544.

His zeal as an artillerist led Henry also, perhaps almost insensibly, towards the peculiar organisation for defence which was copied at a later period by the colonies, and for a short time was expanded even into an imperial system. The mounting of valuable guns entailed the necessity of maintaining a small body of trained men to keep them in order; and thus grew up the practice of stationing small independent garrisons in all the principal fortresses, which garrisons were immovably attached to their particular posts and constituted what was really a permanent force. Thus almost at a stroke the military resources of England fell into three divisions—the standing garrisons just mentioned, the militia which could be called out in case of invasion, and the levies, nominally feudal but in reality mercenary, which were brought together for foreign service and disbanded as soon as the war was over. The attention devoted by Henry to the defence of the coast identifies his name peculiarly with certain modern strongholds, which stand on the same site and bear the same appellation as he gave them three centuries ago. Nor must it be forgotten that, though he did comparatively little for the army, Henry did very much for the navy, and perceived that the true defence of England was the maintenance of her power on the sea.

Two small points remain to be mentioned before we dismiss the most popular of English kings. A dear lover of music he took an interest in his military bands,[124] and we find him sending all the way to Vienna to procure kettle-drums that could be played on horseback "after the Hungarian (that is to say the Hussars') manner," together with men that could make and play them skilfully. Ten good drums and as many fifers were ordered at the same time, with advantage, as may be hoped, to the English minstrels. Lastly, Henry was the first man of whom we may authentically say that he brought the English red-coats into the field for active service. Red garded with yellow was the uniform worn by his body-guard at the siege of Boulogne; and perhaps it was right that the scarlet should have made its first appearance in the presence of such old and gallant enemies as the French.
1547.
1549.

Under the rule of his boy successor we find little change in the old order of things. There was the usual fight with the Scotch on the border, and yet another crushing defeat, at Pinkie, of the old inveterate enemy. But hired Italian musketeers contributed not a little to the victory; and the state of the forces of the shires was most unsatisfactory. Fraudulent enlistment and desertion, doubly expensive since the payment of coat- and conduct-money had been instituted, were as common as ever, and the dishonesty of officers was never more flagrant. A stringent Act was passed to check these irregularities, with apparently the usual infinitesimal measure of success. Foreign troops were never so much employed in England, though even they complained of unjust dealing. The insurrection in the west was suppressed principally by landsknechts and Italian harquebusiers, not however before they had suffered one repulse from the men of Devon, beyond doubt to the secret joy of all true Englishmen. Nevertheless the reign saw the rise of the Gentlemen Pensioners and, more important still, the appointment of a lord-lieutenant in every county, to be responsible for the forces of the shire. The latter was no doubt a stroke in the right direction, but it did not touch the heart of the matter. The worn-out machinery which[125] had been patched and tinkered for five centuries was not so easily to be repaired; and a new fly-wheel, though it might turn magnificently on its own axis, could not keep the other broken-down wheels in motion.
1553.

The reign of Queen Mary brought the most important change in the military system of the country that had occurred for two centuries. The Statute of Winchester was superseded and a new Act enacted in its place. The reform, however, was in reality quite inadequate to the occasion. It provided for the supply of more modern weapons and for a new distribution, according to a new assessment, of the burdens entailed by the maintenance of a national force; but in substance the new statute was drafted on the lines of the old, and the variations were very superficial. The extinction of men-at-arms hinted at by Guistiniani is sufficiently proved by the mention of two different kinds of cavalry, "demi-lances" or "medium" horse and the light horse with which we are already acquainted; and progress in the equipment of the infantry is shown by the mention of long pikes and corselets and of harquebuses. But alongside of these improved weapons are the familiar bows and bills; and a clause which, considering that Mary had married the heir of Spain is truly marvellous, provides that a bow shall in all cases be accepted as an efficient substitute for an arquebus. These details, however, are comparatively unimportant. The difficulty was one, not of arms, but of men; and Mary knew it. She would have formed a standing army if she had dared, but as she designed it principally for the coercion of her own subjects she ventured neither to ask for the money to establish it nor to brave the indignation that would have followed on its establishment.
1557.
1558.

Her unpopularity at the close of her reign, so strikingly in contrast with the devoted loyalty which she had enjoyed on first mounting the throne, told heavily against the efficiency, always largely dependent[126] on sentiment, of the forces of the shire. Never children crept more unwillingly to school than the English contingent which joined the Spaniards after the battle of St. Quentin. Never half-witted woman looked on with more helpless, impotent distraction at the robbery of her jewels than the once iron-willed Mary, when Guise marched up to Calais. The English garrison made all the resistance that could be expected of brave men, but they were outnumbered, and the commanders asked in vain for reinforcements. The Government awoke to the danger too late; and, yet more sadly significant, the forces of the shires came unwillingly to the musters and came unarmed. Yet Mary's name is bound up with two material benefits conferred on the British soldier. The men who went to St. Quentin received eightpence a day, the sum for which her father's men had mutinied forty years before; and from this time, for two full centuries, eightpence replaces sixpence as the soldier's daily stipend. More thoughtful too than any of the kings that came before her, she left directions in her will for the provision of a house in London, with a clear endowment of four hundred marks a year, "for the relief and help of poor, impotent and aged soldiers" who had suffered loss or wounds in the service of their country. For all her man's voice and masculine will, she had a woman's heart which warmed to the deserving old soldier, and whatever her demerits in the eyes of those who wear the gown, her memory may at least be cherished by those who wear the red coat.
CHAPTER III

We enter now on the fateful reign of Queen Elizabeth. The condition of England at its opening after the previous years of misgovernment was most unpromising. Wrenched from its moorings by the Reformation, the country had been tossed about by a hurricane of religious fanaticism, which, working round through all points of the compass, had left her helpless and bewildered, uncertain by which course to steer or for what port to make head. Elizabeth was by political exigency rather than religious conviction a Protestant, but her great object in life was to sail, if she could, clear of the circular storm and lie outside it. The design was an impossible one, and her obstinate persistence therein went near to bring England to utter ruin, but in the extremely difficult position wherein she found herself on her accession to the throne she had much excuse for a tortuous policy. The finance was in hopeless disorder, and the realm through long neglect virtually defenceless. There was no discipline in such forces as the country could raise; and the military stores, which her father had taken such pains to collect, appear to have perished. The French were in Scotland in considerable force, and, as the Council pointed out, France was a state military, while England was established for peace. There in reality lay the kernel of the whole matter. England was behind all Europe in military efficiency, and all Europe was keenly alive to the fact.

The situation was so desperate that heroic measures,[128] however distasteful to the Queen from their expense, were inevitable. Arms were purchased hastily in vast quantities in Flanders, the forces of the shire were called out, and Elizabeth exercised in St. James' Park with fourteen hundred men of the trained-bands, who had been equipped by the city with caliver, pike, and halberd. But up in the north, the loyalty of the troops was doubtful, and their discipline more doubtful still. Fraud again was rife among the officers. The landsknechts during their stay had set the fashion of extravagance in clothing, and some captains, as it was quaintly said, carried twenty to forty soldiers in their hose. Thus, though the muster-rolls of the army in Scotland showed eight thousand men for whom the Queen paid wages, but five thousand were actually with the colours, and the pay of the remaining three thousand went of course into the captains' pockets. This state of things was put down with a strong hand by special Commissioners, and the little army round Leith became orderly and efficient; but corruption had sunk so deep that it had eaten its way even among the officials of the ordnance at the Tower of London.

The French, however, were in due time compelled to evacuate Scotland, and the danger in the north ceased to be pressing. There was, however, constant trouble in Ireland; and to provide the necessary troops to keep it in order, resort was made to an instrument of which we shall hear much in the years that follow, namely, the press-gang. None the less the revelations discovered by the war in Scotland prompted Cecil to require a report from the magistrates all over England as to the condition of the population and the working of the statutes enacted for national defence. The answer was by no means complimentary to the influence of the Reformation, nor encouraging in respect of military efficiency. The people, reported the magistrates, were no longer trained to the use of arms, because the gentlemen no longer set them the example. In plain words the old system of the fyrd, a people in arms,[129] was obsolete. Not one but many causes had conspired to make it so. The country was passing through a social as well as a religious revolution; old landmarks were vanishing, old customs dying out; and the loss of the old faith had become to many an excuse for disburdening themselves of every irksome duty. Again, Calais was lost, and though there were still vague hopes that it might yet be regained, England was now strictly insular and France was closed as a field of national adventure. The people had awaked to the fact that their heritage was the sea; and the life of the corsair, free, stirring, lucrative, and dangerous, appealed powerfully to a race at once adventurous and grasping, energetic and casual, bold and born gamblers.

Moreover, the national weapon, the long-bow, and the tactics that went with it, were things of the past, while the new arms were at once distasteful and costly, and in the unsettled state of the country not to be trusted in every man's hand. The whole business of war, too, was becoming difficult and elaborate, and was passing through transitions too rapid to permit it to be learned once for all. Military training no longer consisted in friendly matches at the archery butts, but in precise movements of drill and man?uvre, unwelcome alike because their advantages were unrecognised, and because they could no longer be learned from the old masters. The acknowledged leaders in hundred and parish and shire gave place to experts trained in foreign schools, men who swaggered about in plumed hats and velvet doublets and extravagant hose, swearing strange oaths of mingled blasphemy taught by Spanish Catholics and Lutheran landsknechts, and prating of besonios and alferez, of camp-masters and rote-masters, of furriers and huren-weibels, of false brays, mines and countermines, in one long insolent crow of military superiority. Such instructors were not likely to soften the painful lesson that war had become a profession, and could no longer be tacked on as a mere appendage to the everyday life of the citizen.

Now, therefore, if ever, was the time for the establishment of a standing army in England. She was menaced by foreign enemies on all sides, and in perpetual peril of intestine insurrection. There was unceasing trouble in Ireland, and eternal anxiety on the Scottish border. The forces of the shires had been proved to be worthless, and the service was not only inefficient but unpopular; the people came unwillingly to the muster, and would gladly have paid to be relieved of the burden. Great results would have followed from the institution of a standing force; order would have been maintained at home; interposition in foreign affairs would have had redoubled weight; untold expense through unreadiness, knavery, and inefficiency would have been spared; and finally, the British Army would have grown up to be honoured as a great national possession, called into existence to stave off a great national peril, instead of to be abused as an instrument of tyranny, and to be condemned to a blighting heritage of jealousy and suspicion.

But Elizabeth would have none of such things. She refused, to her credit, to employ foreign mercenaries, and by breaking off that evil tradition did lasting good. But she was incapable of living except from hand to mouth. She hated straight dealing for its simplicity; she hated conviction for its certainty; above all she hated war for its expense. She loved her money as herself, and to these twain she would sacrifice alike the most faithful servant and the most friendly State. She was so mean and dishonest in defrauding even such troops as she employed of their due, that no one seems to have dared even to hint to her the expediency of keeping a standing army. It may be urged that this was well for the liberties of England, but, on the other hand, it went near to destroy them altogether; and, after all, a standing army did not save either James the Second of England or Louis the Sixteenth of France. The people of England, however, saw more clearly[131] than their tricky inconstant Queen, and made good her delinquencies in their own way.

The French had not long evacuated Scotland when the desperate condition of the Protestants in France forced the Prince of Condé to offer Elizabeth Havre and Dieppe as pledges for the restoration of the lost Calais, if she would send him money and men. Elizabeth consented; and seven or eight thousand men were despatched to garrison these two ports. Five hundred of them, English and Scots, at once volunteered to cut their way into Rouen, which was closely besieged by Guise, and fell at the capture of the town, fighting desperately till they were cut down almost to a man. These volunteers should be remembered, for they cleared the ground for the foundation-stone of the British Army, English and Scots fighting side by side for the Protestant cause in a foreign land. The remaining troops were, as was inevitable under the parsimonious rule of Elizabeth, ill-equipped and ill-provided, a miserable contrast to the armies of the Plantagenets, and a shameful example which has been followed only too faithfully since. War between France and England at once broke out in earnest, and the garrison of Havre required reinforcement. No troops of course were ready, and it was necessary to raise recruits in a hurry. The prison doors were opened; the gaols were swept clean; robbers, highwaymen, and cut-purses, the sweepings of the nation, were driven into the ranks; and a second evil precedent, companion to the press-gang, was set for the misleading of England the Unready. None the less these poor men fought gallantly enough against the besieging French, until the plague suddenly broke out among them; and then they went down like flies. Between the 7th and 30th of June the effective strength of the garrison of Havre sank from seven thousand to three thousand men. More men were hurried across the channel to perish with them, but the waste was greater than the repair, and in another fortnight but fifteen hundred of the[132] whole force were left. Further requests for men and arms were met by the despatch of raw boys and of all the worn-out ordnance in the Tower—"The worst of everything is thought good enough for this place," wrote the General, Lord Warwick, in the bitterness of his soul—and finally after a grand defence Havre was surrendered.

Nevertheless, little or nothing was done to make good defects in the years that followed. The dishonesty of the officers and the indiscipline of the men in Ireland was past all belief; but it was only with extreme difficulty that Elizabeth was induced to remedy the evil, which brought untold misery and oppression upon the forlorn Irish, by the simple process of paying her soldiers their wages. It was not until 1567, when the movements of Philip the Second gave the alarm of invasion, that a corps of arquebusiers, four thousand strong, was formed for the defence of the coast towns from Newcastle to Plymouth, and prizes were given for the encouragement of marksmanship with the new weapon. Even so, practice with the bow was still enjoined upon the villagers, as though no better arm could be discovered for them.[116]

Then came the rebellion, which but narrowly missed a most serious character, of the Catholic nobility in the North. Disloyalty was widespread in Yorkshire, and it was proverbial that the Yorkshire levies would not move without pay; but Elizabeth was too economical to send the train-bands from London to nip the insurrection in the bud, and only at the last moment consented to provide money for the payment of the troops on the spot. The difficulties of the commanders were frightful. The numbers that came to muster were far short of the true complement; horsemen were hardly to be obtained by any shift, and the footmen that presented themselves came with bows and bills only, there being but sixty firearms, and not a single pike, among two thousand five hundred infantry. The[133] rebels, on the other hand, were very well equipped, and had a force of cavalry armed after the newest pattern of the Reiters. "If we had but a thousand horse with pistols and lances, five hundred pikes and as many arquebuses," wrote Elizabeth's commanders, "we should soon despatch the matter"; but even so trifling a contingent as this could not be produced except after infinite difficulty and delay.[117]

For all this Elizabeth was responsible; but the peril was so great that it stirred even her avaricious soul. From this year bows and bills began slowly to make way for pikes and firearms; and a manuscript treatise in the State Papers shows that the reform was brought under the immediate notice of the Royal Council.[118]

An alarm of invasion by the French in the following year led also to a general stirring of the sluggish forces of the shire. The French ambassador reported that one hundred and twenty thousand men could take the field in different parts of the country; and the muster-rolls showed the incredible total of close on six hundred thousand men. Yet when we look into these muster-rolls we find simply a list of able-bodied men and of serviceable arms in each shire without attempt at organisation. In truth, throughout the long reign of Elizabeth we feel that in military matters one effort and one only is at work, namely, in Carlyle's words, to stretch the old formula to cover the new fact, to botch and patch and strain the antiquated web woven by the Statute of Winchester and newly dyed by the Statute of Philip and Mary to some semblance of the pattern given by the armies of France and Spain.

But when we turn from the Queen to the people we perceive the energy of a very different force. The [134]English army indeed was not created by a sovereign or a minister; it created itself in despite of them. The superior equipment of the northern rebels over that of the forces of the Queen was typical of the whole course of English military progress in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The army was conceived in rebellion, born in rebellion, nurtured in rebellion. Protestantism all over Europe went hand in hand with rebellion; and Elizabeth, always irresolute and incapable of conviction, was distracted between a political preference for Protestantism and a natural abhorrence of disloyalty. For years she struggled by the most contemptible trickery to be true to both these opposing principles, and for a time, by the help of extraordinary good fortune, she attained the success which only a false woman could compass. But long before she could make up her mind, the people had taken matters into their own hands, and thereby begun the creation of our present army. It was on May Day 1572, four years later than the first rising of the Low Countries against Spain, that the army took its birth from a review of Londoners before the Queen at Greenwich. In the ranks that day were many captains and soldiers who had served in Scotland, Ireland, and France, and were now adrift without employment on the world. Subscriptions were raised by sympathetic Protestants in the city, and three hundred of them were organised into a company and sent to fight for the Dutch under Captain Thomas Morgan. From this beginning we must presently trace the history of the English regiments in the Low Countries to the eve of the Civil War; and for the next seventy years therefore our story must flow in two distinct streams—the slender thread that runs through England itself, and the broader flood which glides on with ever-increasing volume in the Low Countries, on the Neckar, and even in distant Pomerania. And since at every great national crisis the two streams for a time unite, the lesser tributary may be dismissed forthwith by a brief review of the[135] progress of the military art in England to the close of the sixteenth century.

London as usual led the van of military improvement. In the year following the departure of Morgan's company, three thousand men of the train-bands were formed into a special corps, which was mustered three times a week for exercise, and having been armed with weapons of the newest pattern was regularly drilled by experienced officers on the once famous ground at Mile End. William Shakespeare, it is evident, was one of the spectators that went from time to time to see them, and no doubt laughed his fill at the failings of the recruits. These were sometimes not a little serious. Thus one caliverman left his scouring-stick in the barrel, and accidentally shot it into the side of a comrade, whereof the comrade died; so that the whole body of calivermen gained the enjoyment of a military funeral in St. Paul's Churchyard, whither they followed the corpse with trailing pikes and solemn countenances, and at the close of the ceremony fired their pieces over the grave.[119]

Something therefore had at least been learned from the landsknechts, and other changes were coming fast. The old white coat and red cross seems to have disappeared abruptly at the beginning of the reign, and coats, or, as they were called, cassocks,[120] generally red or blue, were provided by shires and boroughs in their stead. Once, indeed, these bright hues are found condemned as too conspicuous for active service in Ireland, and some dark or sad colour, such as russet, is recommended in its stead,—a curious anticipation of our modern khaki.[121] Again, to turn to smaller changes, the word petty captain had dropped out of use since 1563, to yield place to the title of lieutenant, and the word ensign seems to have been accepted generally at about the same time. Sergeant had been the title of the expert at drill since 1528, but [136]in 1585 there is a distinct order that the men appointed to instruct the bands of the shires shall be called corporals.[122] Two years later we find officers of higher rank asking for a new denomination, and proposing that they may bear the title of colonel and the officers next below them that of sergeant-major, or, as we now call it, major. It was indeed time, for the word regiment came likewise into use at the same period, and a regiment without a colonel is naught. Before the end of the century the term infantry had also passed into the language, while the flags of the infantry, from their diversity of hues, had gained the name of colours.[123]

But far more striking than these superficial changes is the sudden deluge of military pamphlets which burst over England from the year 1587 onwards. The earliest military treatise, so far as I have been able to discover, that was delivered to the English in the vulgar tongue is The Ordering of Souldiours in battelray, by Peter Whitehorn, which was published in 1560. This book produced, no doubt, some effect in its time, but it is of small import compared with those that follow. The earliest written by an Englishman, though not published until four years after his death, was the work of one William Garrard, gentleman, who had served with the King of Spain for fourteen years and died in 1587. It is a remorseless criticism of the existing English military system. The author sweeps away bows and bills in a single contemptuous sentence, and lays it down for a dogma that there are but two weapons, for the tall man the pike and for the little nimble man the arquebus. But in the matter of equipment, he notes that the English are lamentably deficient. As good an arquebus could be made in England as in any country, but the armourers had already learned to make cheap and nasty weapons for common sale to the poor men of the shire. [137]Again, other nations carried their powder in flasks or metal cartridges, but the English actually carried theirs loose in their pockets, ready to be kindled by the first spark or spoiled by the first shower, and in any case certain to suffer from waste. Such slovenliness, says the indignant Garrard, is fit only "for wanton skirmish before ladies"; it is impossible for such arquebusiers to attain to the desirable consummation of "a violent, speedy, and thundering discharge." The pikemen, again, instead of a light poniard carried "monstrous daggers like a cutler's shop," fitter for ornament than use. Moreover, the dress of both was open to objection. Colour was a matter of indifference, though some fine hue such as scarlet was preferable for the honour of the military profession, but all military garments should be profitable and commodious, whereas nothing could hamper the limbs more than the great bolstered and bombasted hose that were then in fashion. I cannot resist the temptation of transcribing Garrard's picture of the march of the ideal soldier, and the delicate appeal to the soldier's vanity.

"Let the pikeman march with a good grace, holding up his head gallantly, his face full of gravity and state and such as is fit for his person; and let his body be straight and as much upright as possible; and that which most important is that they have their eyes always upon their companions which are in rank with them and before them, going just one with another, and keeping perfect distance without committing the least error in pace or step. And every pace and motion with one accord and consent they ought to make at one instant of time. And in this sort all the ranks ought to go sometimes softly, sometimes fast, according to the stroke of the drum.... So shall they go just and even with a gallant and sumptuous pace; for by doing so they shall be esteemed, honoured and commended of the lookers on, who shall take wonderful delight to behold them."

Earlier in appearance though not earlier composed[138] than Garrard's was a shorter work by one Barnaby Rich, which appeared in 1587, and wherein the writer had the courage to condemn the practice of emptying the gaols into the ranks; but the great military book of the year was a translation from the French of La Noue, one of the noblest and ablest of the Huguenot commanders. Though written of course for Frenchmen, the soundness of doctrine in respect of discipline and equipment and the commendations of the Spanish system were of value to all; while of still greater import to England was the impassioned advocacy of the missile tactics of the Reiters for cavalry. But perhaps most striking of all in the light of later events is the deep note of Puritanism to which every page of the treatise is attuned. In La Noue's Huguenot regiments there were no cards, no dice, no swearing, no women, no leaving the colours for plunder or even for forage, but stern discipline at all times and public prayers morning and evening. It is difficult to suppress the conjecture that this book had been read and digested by Oliver Cromwell.

The strong opinions expressed in these books of course provoked controversy. Sir John Smyth, knight, an officer of some repute, boldly took up the cudgels on the other side, and undertook to prove even in 1591 that the archer was more formidable than the arquebusier and the arrow than the bullet, which was an argument only too welcome to old-fashioned insular Englishmen. On the other hand, he enters minutely and intelligently into points of drill and man?uvre, condemns the bombasted hose as vehemently as Garrard himself, and prescribes a more serviceable dress for the soldier. From him we learn our first knowledge of the manual exercise of the pike, how it should be advanced and how shouldered with comely and soldierlike grace, and how men should always step off with the right foot. From him also we obtain sound instruction for the shock attack of cavalry, and some mention of the Hungarian light horsemen, called "ussarons"; and from him finally we gather information of the extraordinary inefficiency[139] even at the close of the reign of the shire-levies of England, of the neglect of the arms and the corruption of the muster-masters.

Roger Williams, whom I have already quoted, also entered the lists at this time with an account of the Spanish organisation, and combated warmly for the superiority of the lance over the pistol as the weapon of cavalry; and a translation by Sir Edward Hoby from the Spanish of Mendoza (1597) also upheld the cause of shock-action. Hard upon these followed a version of the striking work of Martin du Bellay, with its complete scheme for what we now call the short-service system; and in the same year (1598) appeared a dialogue by one Barret, which sought to close the whole controversy. A conservative gentleman who upholds bows and bills is utterly demolished by a captain who pleads for pike and musket, would abolish the shire-levies bodily as useless, and would substitute a reorganised force on the favourite model, already once adopted in France, of the Roman legion. But Barret knew his countrymen and expected little. "Such as have followed the wars," he says, "are despised of every man until a very pinch of need doth come"; and military reform then as now could not be pushed forward except under pressure of a scare of war.

So matters drifted on to the close of the sixteenth century and beyond it. The military spirit was abroad, and the military pen busy beyond precedent. The character of the old soldier became a favourite with beggars and vagabonds, and was rewarded so freely at the hands of the charitable that it was necessary to suppress the imposture by special statute. Yet in spite of all this simmering and seething nothing was done in England for the English army. Soldiers who wished to learn their profession sought service elsewhere than with the Queen; even in Ireland the value of a company sank to fifty pounds;[124] and the most conspicuous type of warrior that was to be found at home was the worst.[140] Shakespeare, who saw everything and into the heart of everything, marked these impostors and reproduced them with such genial satire, such incomparable humour, that in our delight in the dramatist we overlook the military historian. Yet he is as truly the painter of the English army in his own day as was Marryat of the navy in later years. Falstaff the fraudulent captain, Pistol the swaggering ensign, Bardolph the rascally corporal, Nym the impostor who affects military brevity, Parolles, "the damnable both sides rogue," nay, even Fluellen, a brave and honest man but a pedant, soaked in classical affectations and seeking his model for everything in Pompey's camp—all these had their counterparts in every shire of England and were probably to be seen daily on the drill ground at the Mile End. Not in these poor pages but in Shakespeare's must the military student read the history of the Elizabethan soldier.
CHAPTER IV
The arrival of the first English volunteers, under Thomas Morgan, in the Low Countries was, as fate willed it, most happily timed to synchronise with the movement that laid the foundation of Dutch Independence. In April 1572 an audacious enterprise of the fleet of Dutch privateers under the Count de la Marek had led to the surprise and capture of the town of Brill, a success which at once fired the train of revolt in the seven provinces north of the Waal and shook the hand of Spain from town after town first in Holland and Zealand, and later in Friesland, Gelderland, Utrecht, and Overyssel. The incident, which time was to prove so far reaching in its results, was a curious commentary on the latest phase of Elizabeth's policy. She had just reconciled herself with Alva and forbidden De la Marck's privateers to enter English ports: the sea-rover's reply was to beard Alva in his own stronghold and deal Elizabeth's friend a blow from which he never recovered. The whole island of Walcheren, excepting Middelburg, fell into the hands of the insurgents, and Alva, who was a splendid soldier, whatever his other failings, lost no time in attempting to recover the port of Flushing. By the irony of fate Morgan's volunteers arrived in the very nick of time to save it, and in the sally which brought them first face to face with the dreaded troops of Spain they made a brilliant beginning for the new British Army. Of the three hundred, fifty were killed outright in this action, the first of fifty thousand or twice fifty thousand who were to lay their bones in Holland during the next seventy years.


Morgan, having rescued Flushing, at once wrote letters to England to point out the importance of the town which he held and to beg for reinforcements. In the autumn accordingly appeared Colonel Sir Humphrey Gilbert, with a regiment, the first of many English regiments that were to enter the Dutch service, of ten companies and fourteen hundred men, raw troops under a raw leader. Morgan would have been the better commander, but he was a modest unambitious man; Gilbert, on the other hand, suffered from fatal ignorance of his own incapacity. Sir Humphrey at once launched out boldly into complicated operations which he was utterly incompetent to direct, was outwitted and outman?uvred, fell back on swearing when things went wrong, and not only lost his own head but completely broke the spirit of his men. The new regiment in fact behaved very far from well. "I am to blame to judge their minds," wrote Roger Williams, the ablest of Morgan's officers, after Gilbert's first defeat, "but let me speak truth. I believe they were afraid." He adds elsewhere a gentle but telling criticism, that lays the blame on the right shoulders. "A commander that enters the enemy's countries ought to know the places that he doth attempt: if not he ought to be furnished with guides." So ignorant were even educated Englishmen of the alphabet of war. Gilbert, however, did not learn his lesson quickly. A slight success, wherein the English displayed conspicuous gallantry, heated his ambition once more to boiling-point; he essayed another adventure in the grand manner, failed utterly, and sailed home with the scanty remnant of his regiment, a sadder and wiser man.

Morgan meanwhile had gone home and raised ten more companies, with which however he could do very little. The men were not paid on their disembarkation in Holland, as William of Nassau had promised them, and they became discontented and insubordinate. Morgan naturally took their part, and the result was, that after some few petty engagements against the[143] Spaniards, he took his departure in dudgeon and sailed with the seven hundred men that were left to him to England. He had done good work, and his name deserves to be remembered; for he was the first man who made perfect arquebusiers of the English, and the first who taught them to love the musket. Fifty years had flown since the Spaniards had shown the way, and the English were only just beginning to follow. Roger Williams on Morgan's retirement took service with the Spaniards for a time, in order to learn his duty the better, and presently returned, without reproach, to wield the knowledge that he had gained against themselves. To such shifts were British officers reduced who wished to master their profession.
1578,
January 29.
August.

To follow the actions of sundry other corps of volunteers during the succeeding years would be tedious. I pass at once to the landing in July 1577 of a company of three hundred Englishmen under the command of John Norris, one of the first and most eminent of the new school of officers who were the fathers of our Army. He had learned his work first in Ireland, and later in France under a great disciplinarian, the Admiral Coligny. He too arrived at a critical time. A few months after his disembarkation, while he was still in garrison at Antwerp, Don John of Austria surprised the Army of the States at Gemblours, and not only defeated it but shattered it to fragments. Six months later Don John attempted to repeat the blow against a second Army of the States, a heterogeneous force of English, Scotch, and Flemings, under the command of the veteran Huguenot, De la Noue. Having but fourteen thousand men against thirty thousand of the finest troops in Europe, De la Noue took up a strong position at Rymenant, near Malines, and stood on the defensive. After trying in vain to draw him from his entrenchments Don John finally launched a desperate attack on the quarter held by the English and Scotch under Norris. Four companies of Scots bore the first brunt of the assault, but were presently reinforced, just[144] in time, by Norris's eleven companies of English; and then the struggle became as desperate as ever was fought by British soldiers. The Spanish troops were the flower of the army, the Old Regiment,[125] which had not its peer in Europe; but with all their magnificent training and discipline they could not carry the position. Three times they forced the British back, and three times when success seemed assured they were met by a resistance that would not be broken, and were hurled back in their turn. The day was intensely hot, and the British, scorning all armour, fought in their shirt-sleeves, but they fought hard, and not only hard but, thanks to John Norris, in good order. Norris himself, always in the thickest of the fight, had three horses killed under him in succession, but never lost hold of his men; and at last the famous infantry of Spain drew back, beaten, and Don John abandoned the attack. It was a great day for old "Bras de fer" De la Noue, but a still greater for John Norris and his British. They had, by general admission, not only saved the day, but they had repulsed the most formidable troops in the world.

During the years that follow Norris and his companies were incessantly engaged, generally victorious, though once at least defeated with heavy loss; their gallant leader, though frequently wounded, reappearing always whenever work was to be done. Their highest trial was when they encountered the greatest General of the day, Alexander of Parma, and the whole Spanish army with him, in a rearguard action, and beat them off with such persistent bravery that the French volunteers after the engagement crowded to their colours and begged to be allowed to serve under them. Norris indeed was the Moore of the sixteenth century, alike as a teacher in the camp and as a General in the field.
1584,
July 10.

Nevertheless, brilliant as his service was, he could not stay the victorious advance of the Spaniards. After ten years of fighting the Dutch States had lost almost the whole of Spanish Flanders except a few large towns and[145] the sea-coast from Dunkirk to Ostend, and still Elizabeth would not move to help the Dutch insurgents in a task, no less vital to England than to them, which lay beyond their strength. At last the assassination of William the Silent forced her to make up her uncertain mind to the inevitable rupture with Spain. The United Provinces were in the utmost need; the strong hand of Alexander of Parma was at the throat of Antwerp, and unless its grip could be relaxed the city must inevitably fall. The States threw themselves upon the English Queen, entreating her even to make them a part of her realm, and at last, after much paltry haggling, Elizabeth consented to send them four or five thousand men, taking over the towns of Brill, Flushing, Rammekins, and Ostend as security for their obligations towards her. Elizabeth was always careful to look after the money.

This agreement being at last concluded the press-gang[126] was at once set to work in England; four thousand men were raised and dressed in red coats, and within a fortnight after the signing of the Treaty they had crossed the North Sea, only to find that Antwerp was already in Parma's hands and that they had come too late. Norris, however, at once took the force in hand, and was carrying on active operations with brilliant success when he was stopped by a peremptory rebuke from the Queen; the troops had been transported for the relief of Antwerp, and she would not have them employed on any other service. The States, naturally exasperated by this contemptible double-dealing, received the troops reluctantly into the cautionary towns and left them with no very good grace to take care of themselves. Elizabeth, as her nature was, had refused to send a penny of money or an ounce of supplies, and the soldiers, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-lodged, began to melt away by hundreds through death and desertion.


In December, however, Robert, Earl of Leicester, was sent out as Commander-in-Chief of the forces in the Low Countries, and as he brought with him a reinforcement of cavalry, and also money sufficient to pay the arrears of the soldiers' wages, it was hoped that matters would be placed on a better footing. But it was not to be. Elizabeth was not yet in earnest in breaking with Spain, and Leicester, gathering an inkling of her intentions from her refusal to provide him with additional funds, went very unwillingly to take up his command. On arriving in Holland he found things even worse than he had anticipated. The men were in a shocking state, dying fast of cold and hunger; they had not a penny wherewith to supply themselves; and their clothing was so deficient that for very nakedness they were ashamed to appear in public. Leicester with all his faults had evidently a genuine tenderness for his unfortunate soldiers; he wrote letter after letter pressing vehemently for money, but Elizabeth would not give a farthing. The natural consequences followed. By February half the men were dead, and the half that remained alive were in a state of suppressed mutiny. No good officer would accept a command in the army on such terms, and the companies fell into the hands of unscrupulous swindlers who sent their men out to plunder and did not omit to take their own share, rejoicing over every soldier who died or deserted for the money that would pass into their pockets when the long-deferred pay-day should come. There have been many sovereigns and many ministers in England who have neglected and betrayed their soldiers, but none more wantonly, wilfully, and scandalously than Elizabeth.
July.

Nevertheless, as the spring of 1586 approached, it behoved Leicester to open a campaign of some kind. Parma was advancing along the line of the Maas, evidently bent on taking every fortified town on the river, and it was necessary if possible to check him. The Generals, however, were ill-matched; Parma easily brushed aside Leicester's feeble opposition, and having[147] secured the line of the Maas turned next to that of the Rhine. Meanwhile a large reinforcement of men, unarmed and untrained, had been sent from England; and Leicester concentrated his forces, summoning all the garrisons of the cautionary towns to join him at Arnheim. Philip Sidney came from his government at Flushing, Lord Willoughby came from Bergen-op-Zoom, John Norris and his brother Henry hurried up likewise, the veteran Roger Williams joined them, and lastly, in the retinue of Lord Willoughby, came a young man of greater promise than any, named Francis Vere. The plan of operations was soon determined; since Parma could not be checked on the Rhine, he must be called away from it by a diversion in the north on the Yssel, where the Spaniards still held the towns of Doesburg and Zutphen.

All turned out as had been expected. Doesburg was easily captured, and Parma no sooner heard that Leicester was before Zutphen than he abandoned his operations on the Rhine and marched north to relieve it. Halting on the evening of the 21st of September at some distance from the town, he sent forward a convoy of supplies towards it, protected by an escort of three thousand men under the command of the Marquis of Pescayra.[127] The convoy was to start at midnight, and it was reckoned that it would be within a mile and a half of Zutphen by daybreak. Pescayra was then to halt at an appointed place, send a messenger into the town and concert arrangements with the Governor for a sortie to facilitate the entrance of the convoy.
Sept. 22
Oct. 2.

Intelligence of Parma's design was duly brought to Leicester, who, calling John Norris, ordered him to take two hundred horse and three hundred foot and lie with them in ambuscade by the road by which the convoy was expected to arrive. Norris readily picked out two hundred horse, ordered Sir William Stanley to follow them with three hundred pikemen, and before dawn of the 22nd had successfully taken up the position[148] assigned to him. No force appears to have been detailed by Leicester to support the ambushed party, and no scouts to have been sent forward by Norris to give warning of the enemy's approach. The morning broke with dense impenetrable fog, amid which the English could hear a distant sound of rumbling waggons and tramping men. Presently Norris was joined by all the adventurous gentlemen—Lord Essex, Lord Audley, Lord North, and many others—who were to be found in Leicester's camp: they had not been able to resist the temptation of an action, and came galloping up with their retinue at their heels to see the sport. The sounds of the approaching convoy became more distinct, but nothing could be seen till the fog suddenly rolled away and revealed straight before them the three thousand Spaniards, horse and foot, marching by their waggons in beautiful order.

The English gentlemen threw all discipline to the winds at the sight: they never dreamed of anything but a direct attack, and one and all went at once, each in his own way, to work. Young Lord Essex called on his squadron of troopers to follow him, and couching his lance flew straight upon the enemy's cavalry, overthrew the foremost man and horse, flung away his broken lance for his curtel-axe, and with his handful of men hard after him burst into a heavy Spanish column and shivered it to pieces. The routed Spaniards fled in disorder to the shelter of their musketeers, with Essex still spurring at their heels; and then Spanish discipline told. The musketeers fired a volley which brought down many of the English horses and compelled the rest to wheel about. Then the action became simply a series of furious personal combats. Sir Philip Sidney's horse was killed under him at the first charge, but he mounted another and plunged into the hottest of the fight. Lord North, unable owing to a recent wound to draw on more than one boot, dashed in half-booted as he was and fought as busily as any. Sir William Russell swung his curtel-axe so murderously that the[149] Spaniards vowed he was a devil and no man. Lord Willoughby was so beset with enemies that only great good fortune and immense personal strength served to pluck him out. Sir William Stanley's horse was struck by seven bullets but found strength to carry him safe out of action. And meanwhile the drivers of the waggons had fled, and English and Spanish soldiers were tugging the heads of the teams this way and that with oaths and yells and curses; but still Spanish discipline told, and still the convoy moved slowly forward. Again and again the Spanish horsemen shrank before the English cavaliers, but the firm ranks of the musketeers always gave them shelter, and, charge as the English might, the waggons crept on and on till they fairly entered the town. Nothing was gained by the action. The attack, if supported, might have been fatal to Pescayra, but no support could be looked for from Leicester, and there was so little intelligence in the onslaught that no one seems to have attempted even to hamstring the waggon-horses. Zutphen therefore remains no more than one of the maddest of the many mad exploits performed by English officers of cavalry, and is remembered chiefly through the death of one of the noblest of them. Before the action, Philip Sidney had given the thigh-pieces of his armour to the Lord Marshal, Sir William Pelham; at its close he was seen riding painfully back, with the unprotected thigh shattered by a musket bullet. He lingered in agony for some days and then died. His body was brought back to England to be followed to St. Paul's Churchyard by the London train-bands and laid to rest, as befitted a good and gallant soldier, under the smoke of their volleys.[128]

Yet another scene of desperate valour was witnessed at Zutphen before the campaign came to an end. One principal protection of the town was an external[150] sconce,[129] which on a former occasion had resisted the troops of the States for a whole year, and was now carried by the English by assault. The breach was barely practicable, the footing on the treacherous sandy soil being so uncertain that the storming party could hardly mount it. Their leader, Edward Stanley, however, was not to be turned back. Dashing alone into the breach he caught the head of a Spanish soldier's pike that was thrust out against him and tried to wrench the weapon from his grasp. Both men struggled hard for a time, while a dozen pikes were broken against Stanley's cuirass and a score of bullets whistled about his ears. At last Stanley, without quitting his hold, allowed the Spaniard to raise the pike, used the purchase so gained to help him up the wall, scrambled over the parapet and leaped down alone into the press of the enemy with his sword. His men, redoubling their efforts, hoisted each other up the breach after him and the sconce was won. Stanley, marvellous to say, escaped unhurt, and received not only warm commendation in Leicester's despatches, but a pension for life from Leicester's own pocket, for the most daring act that is recorded of the whole of that long war.

The plot of the Spanish Armada now began to thicken, and the scene must be shifted for a moment to England. In the Low Countries Parma was looking about for a port of embarkation from which to ship his men across the North Sea. He fixed upon Sluys, and in spite of a desperate resistance from a handful of gallant Englishmen, led by Roger Williams, he succeeded in capturing it after a siege of three months. At the end of 1587 Leicester resigned his command and returned to England; and in the following year all the best officers, and many of the English companies, were gathered together in the camp at Tilbury. Leicester was in chief command, with John[151] Norris for his second, and Roger Williams among others for assistant, but these officers were not on very friendly terms with each other; and, indeed, the less said of Tilbury Camp as a whole the better. Contemporary writers indeed aver that it was a pleasant sight to see the soldiers march in from the various shires, "with cheerful countenances, courageous words and gestures, leaping and dancing";[130] but such a display was a better indication of loyalty than of discipline, and sadly different from the pace, full of gravity and state, which had been enjoined by the best authorities. There was, moreover, great disorder and deformity of apparel; most of the men wore their armour very uncomely, and the whole army refused point-blank to use the headpieces issued from the Tower. Ammunition again was short, provisions were scanty, organisation was extremely defective, and the general confusion incredible. Four thousand men who had marched, pursuant to orders, twenty miles into Tilbury, found that they must go that distance from the camp again before they could find a loaf of bread or a barrel of beer. A thousand Londoners who were likewise in the march were ordered to halt unless they could bring their own provisions with them. Leicester might safely remark that "great dilatory wants are found upon all sudden hurly-burlies,"[131] but there was no excuse for such chaos after the incessant warnings of the past thirty years. Elizabeth must bear the chief share of the blame. The woman who in her imbecile parsimony starved the fleet that went forth to fight the Armada could not be expected to show better feeling towards the army. It was no thanks to the Queen that the Spanish invasion was repelled.

I shall not follow the veterans John Norris and Lord Willoughby on their expeditions to Corunna and Brittany in the following year. Far more important to us is the rise of a great leader, and the opening of a new era in the war of the Low Countries. [152]On Leicester's resignation of the chief command, there was appointed to succeed him a man whose name must ever be venerated in the British Army, Prince Maurice of Nassau,[132] second son of William the Silent. Though but twenty years of age when selected as Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the United Provinces, he had already made up his mind that if the War of Independence were to end in victory it must be fought not, as heretofore, with a mob of irregular levies, but with a trained, disciplined, and organised army. His own natural bent lay chiefly towards mathematics, which he cultivated as a means to the mastery of military engineering, and eventually reduced to practice by so sedulous a use of the spade in all military operations as to provoke many a sneer from soldiers of a more primitive type. But Maurice knew his own mind, and was not to be deterred by sneers. His principal assistant was his cousin, Louis William, Stadtholder of Friesland, an industrious student of classical antiquity with the rare faculty of adapting old systems to modern requirements. To his diligence was due the instruction of the army in drill and discipline, and to his influence must be ascribed Maurice's admiration for the Tactics of ?lian.[133] His new and elaborate man?uvres also elicited the scorn of the old school of officers,[134] but he too was not easily discouraged; and the two cousins worked hand-in-hand, the one at the broader principles, the other at the hardly less important details, of their profession, until they raised up an army which supplanted the Spanish as the model for Europe. Not the least [153]weighty of Maurice's reforms was the regular payment of the men, and the stern repression of fraudulent practices among the officers. In a word, he appreciated the value of sound administration no less that of pure military skill and training in the conduct of a war.

The tactical organisation of the new army was not so perfect as, with the Spanish model before us, we might with reason have expected. The tactical unit of infantry was the company, and the regiment still consisted of an uncertain number of companies temporarily united under the command of a colonel. The composition of the companies again was uncertain. The normal strength was one hundred and thirteen men, which was later reduced to eighty, but colonels had double companies—some even double regiments—and there appears to have been no very great exactitude, probably because men could only be persuaded to serve under the captain of their choice. The officers of a company were of course captain, lieutenant, and ensign; the non-commissioned officers included two sergeants and three corporals, as well as a "gentleman of the arms," who was responsible for the condition of the weapons. Lastly, there were two drummers, who, it should be noted, like the trumpeters in the cavalry, were not the mere signal-makers that they now are, but the men regularly employed in all communications with the enemy, and as such expected to possess not only discretion but some skill in languages. They received far higher pay than the common soldier, and if they did a tithe of that which was expected of them they were worth every penny of it.

Every company was divided into three corporalships, each of which was the peculiar care of one of the three corporals and of one of the three officers. In equipment there were at first three descriptions of arms—halberds, pikes, and muskets—of which however the halberds soon disappeared, leaving pikes and shot in equal numbers, but with an ever-growing tendency towards preponderance of shot. The normal formation of a company was[154] in ten ranks; and the men were never less than three feet apart from each other, such open order being essential to the execution of the prescribed evolutions. To increase the front, the ranks were doubled by moving the even ranks into the intervals of the odd; to diminish the front, the files were doubled by the converse process.[135] To take ground to flank or rear every man turned to right or left or about on his own ground, and it is worth remarking that the best men were always stationed in the front rank and the next best in the tenth, and that while the captain was posted in front of his company, the lieutenant, except in a charge, remained always in the rear.

The musketeers were usually drawn up in two divisions, one on either flank of the pikes; and the problem that eternally confronted the captain was how to handle the two elements in effective combination and yet contrive never to confuse them. In action the musketeers generally moved in advance of the pikes, firing by ranks in succession, according to Pescayra's method, and filing to the rear to reload. Sometimes they were extended across the front of the pikes, but more often they kept their place on the flanks. Meanwhile the pikemen, heavily weighted by helmet, corselet, and tassets (thigh-pieces), moved stolidly on: as they drew nearer the enemy the musketeers fell back until they were first aligned with them, and then abreast of the fifth or sixth rank. If neither side gave way, matters came to push of pike and a general charge, wherein the musketeers ceased firing and fell in with the butt, a method of fighting which was peculiarly favoured by the English. To resist cavalry the musketeers fled for shelter under the pikes, generally in considerable disorder, and the[155] outer ranks of pikemen, lunging forward, stayed the butts of their pikes against the hollow of the left foot.

The cavalry was divided at first into lancers and carbineers, the former being fully covered with armour to the knee; but the lance, in deference to the fashion of the Reiters, was soon[136] discarded for the pistol. The carbineers carried a carbine[137] with a wheel-lock, and were trained to shoot from the saddle, the ranks firing in succession according to Pescayra's system. The tactical unit was the troop or cornet, which, after many changes, was finally fixed at a strength of one hundred and twenty men, and divided, like the company, into three corporalships. Captain, lieutenant and cornet, three corporals, a trumpeter, a farrier, and a quartermaster made up the higher ranks of the troop, no such title as a sergeant appearing in the cavalry. Of artillery I shall say nothing, since the Dutch organisation was in this respect peculiar, and could not serve like that of the infantry and cavalry as a model for the English.

Concurrently with the rise of Maurice as Commander-in-Chief must be noted that of a new English General, whose name is bound up for ever with the actions of his countrymen in the Low Countries. Francis Vere came of the old fighting stock of the Earls of Oxford. The seventh Earl had fought with the Black Prince at Cre?y and Poitiers, the twelfth with King Harry at Agincourt, and succeeding holders of the title had distinguished themselves on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. Francis, grandson of the fifteenth Earl, was born about 1560, came to Holland with Leicester in 1585, and after brilliant service at the defence of Sluys and elsewhere rose to be sergeant-major of infantry, a sure proof that he was not only a gallant man but an adept in his profession. Finally, in August 1589 he was appointed sergeant-major-general of the Queen's forces [156]in the Low Countries, where he was joined by two gallant brothers, Horace and Robert, who worthily upheld the honour of the name.

His task, as that of every officer who had to do with such a woman as Elizabeth, was at first no easy one. His force being very small required constant reinforcement, and was accordingly strengthened by five hundred of the "very scum of the world," such being the description of recruit that Elizabeth preferred to supply. He took care, however, to procure for himself better material, and at the opening of 1591 had no fewer than eight thousand men under his command. But as fast as he trained them into soldiers Elizabeth required their services for her own purposes, and frittered them away in petty meaningless operations in France, filling their place with some more of the very scum of the world, which could be swept out of the gaols and taverns at a moment's notice. The system was in fact that of drafting, in its most vicious form. Vere for a time bore it in silence, but at last he protested, and like all of Elizabeth's best men was soundly abused for his pains. Still the Queen knew his value well enough to withdraw not only his troops but himself from the expedition to Cadiz, and the disastrous island-voyage to the Azores.

A far more serious difficulty was the corruption of departments and contractors at home and the vicious system of paying the men. The wages of a private at eightpence a day were reckoned for the year at ￡12 : 13 : 4, of which ￡4 : 2 : 6 was deducted for two suits of summer and winter clothing,[138] ￡6 : 18 : 6 paid in imprests at the rate of 2s. 8d. a week, and the balance, ￡1 : 2 : 6, alone made over in money. Even in theory the allowance does not sound liberal, but in practice it was ruinous. The men drew their pay and clothing from their captains, and the captains received the money in uncertain instalments, the balance due to[157] them being made good at the close of every six months. This in itself was wasteful, since it enabled the captain to put in his own pocket the wages of soldiers who had died or had been discharged in the interval. But apart from this the captains frequently withheld the clothing altogether, or served out material of uncertain quality, charging the men treble the just price for the same; or again they would make their own contract for victualling the men, of course to their own profit, in lieu of paying to them the weekly 2s. 8d. which was due to them for subsistence. How widely the practice may have obtained among officers it is difficult to say, but the system was presently altered to the advantage alike of the State and the soldier by the officials in London. The officers also had their complaints, not a whit less sweeping, against those officials, and they preferred them in uncompromising terms. Such representations were not likely to meet with encouragement. Elizabeth was not friendly to soldiers, and hated to be troubled with obligations towards men who had faithfully served her. An Act had been passed in 1593 throwing the relief of crippled or destitute soldiers on their parishes, and she could not see what more they could want. Bloody Mary had shown them compassion; not so would Good Queen Bess; she would not be pestered with the sight of the "miserable creatures." As to the complaints of officers, she had heard enough of their ways, and would take the word of the Treasurer of the Forces against theirs. Still Vere and his captains persisted, and at last the shameful truth was revealed that the Treasurer himself was the culprit, and had for years been cheating alike his Queen, her officers, and her men.

It is easy therefore to understand the relief with which the English commanders in the Low Countries must have welcomed a new treaty made in 1598, whereby Elizabeth was quitted of her engagement to furnish the United Provinces with auxiliary troops, and all English soldiers were ordered henceforth to take[158] their pay from the States and their orders from the Dutch Generals. The troops in the Low Countries were now comparatively freed from the caprices of the Queen and could work in harmony with their masters. From this point therefore the English fairly enter the school of the new art of war.
CHAPTER V

So far I have abstained from any attempt to describe the military operations of the States, or even the brilliant little enterprises of Vere himself, since his assumption of the command: but at this point, when we enter upon the palmy days of the English in Holland, it is worth while to be more precise. So far Maurice had occupied himself principally with the task of recovering the towns occupied by the Spaniards within the seven provinces;[139] the States-General in the year 1600 resolved upon the bold step of carrying the war into the enemy's country. Ostend, which was held by the Queen of England, was to be the base of operations, and the design was to land a force on the Flemish coast and besiege first Nieuport, to the west of Ostend, and afterwards Dunkirk. Maurice and Vere both thought the enterprise hazardous in the extreme, but they were overruled by the civilians. A force of twelve thousand infantry, sixteen hundred cavalry and ten guns was assembled at Flushing, and a fleet was collected to transport it to its destination. The army was organised in the three familiar divisions, vanguard, battle, and rearguard, of which the rearguard under Sir Francis Vere consisted of sixteen hundred English veterans, two thousand five hundred Frisians, two hundred and fifty of Prince Maurice's body-guard, and ten cornets of horse, making in all four thousand five hundred men. With Vere were men whose names through themselves[160] or through their successors were to become famous—Sir Edward Cecil, Sir Charles Fairfax, Captain Holles, and others. In another division of the army was a regiment of Scots under Sir William Edmunds, which had recently been recruited to the high strength of one hundred and fifty men to each company. English and Scots already loved to fight side by side.

The force embarked on the 21st of June, but being delayed by calms landed short of Nieuport, marched overland, capturing the fort of Oudenburg on the way, and on the 1st of July was before Nieuport. The Spanish commander, the Archduke Albert, no sooner heard what was going forward than he at once concentrated his army at Ghent for an immediate advance; and Maurice, who was busily preparing for the siege of Nieuport, was surprised by the sudden intelligence that his little garrison at Oudenburg had been overwhelmed, and that the Spanish forces were in full march for his camp. The situation in which he found himself was now very critical. Expecting no such movement Maurice had divided his forces round Nieuport into two parts, which were cut off from each other by the haven that runs through the town. Though dry at low water this haven was unfordable at high tide, and the bridge which was constructing across it was still unfinished. Worst of all, it was the weakest division of the force, three thousand five hundred men under Ernest of Nassau, that stood on the side of the haven nearest to the enemy; and a battle within twenty-four hours was inevitable.
July 2.

The question therefore arose whether the action should be fought in dispute of the enemy's passage over a stream called the Yser leet which barred the line of his advance, or on the sandy dunes by the sea-shore, where the Spaniards would certainly seek it if the passage were successfully accomplished. Vere was for the former course, and Maurice, thinking the advice good, ordered Count Ernest's division to march straight for the bridge on the Yser leet, saying that he would[161] shortly follow with the rest of the army. Vere protested in vain that this was a perversion of his counsel: either the whole army must march with Count Ernest, or no part of it must move at all; for to send forward a weak division in the hope of delaying the Spanish advance was simply to court defeat. Maurice, however, stuck to his opinion, and at midnight Count Ernest marched off with his division unsupported to the bridge. He arrived too late, for the Spaniards had already secured the passage, and he therefore took up the best position that he could find, behind a dyke, to defend himself as well as he could. The first shot had hardly been fired when his men began to run. It was such a panic as has rarely been matched in the annals of war. Cavalry and infantry, Dutchmen and Scots, threw down their arms, took to their heels and fled like swine possessed of devils into the sea. The Scotch officers of Sir William Edmunds' regiment strove to rally the fugitives, but in vain: they were cut down one after another, and the men that escaped death by lead or steel were swallowed up literally in the waves. Two thousand five hundred men, including a thousand massacred at Oudenburg, were thus lost, and Maurice had now to face his enemy with a weakened army and with his retreat barred by the haven behind him. Defeat would mean not only annihilation but the undoing of all the work of the rebellion. With superb courage he ordered his fleet of transports to sea, and staked all on the hazard of the coming battle.

Meanwhile Vere, whose division had this day the place of the vanguard, had moved at daybreak down to the bank of the haven and was waiting for the ebb-tide to cross it, when the news came that the Archduke's army was in full march along the sea-shore. As soon as the tide permitted he forded the haven with all haste, not allowing the men to strip, for, as he said, by nightfall they would have dry clothes or want none. Presently he came in sight of the enemy, ten thousand foot, sixteen hundred horse and six guns, moving along the[162] flat sands of the sea-shore. The space between the sea and the enclosed country was broken up into three descriptions of ground running parallel one to another; next the sea was the narrow plain of the strand between high- and low-water mark, next the strand were the broken hillocks of the sand-dunes, and between the dunes and the enclosed land ran a margin of unbroken green, called by Vere the Greenway. Vere lost no time in taking up a position at the narrowest point that he could find, distributing his division skilfully among the hillocks to repel an advance through the dunes, and posting two guns, by Maurice's order, to command the Greenway. To his right rear stood the battle or second division, one thousand strong, and in rear of the battle the third division of rather more than two thousand men. The army was thus formed in echelon of three lines with the right refused, its left resting in the sea, its right on the enclosed land.

Weak in cavalry, the Spaniards halted till the rising tide had covered all but thirty yards of the strand, and then moved the whole of their horse to the Greenway and of their infantry into the dunes. Maurice likewise withdrew his cavalry from the shore and massed it in columns on the Greenway, leaving but two troops, both of them English, still standing on the beach. For two whole hours of a beautiful summer's afternoon the two armies waited each for the other to advance, and at last, at half-past two, the Spaniards began to move. Vere, taking every possible advantage of the sandhills to protect and conceal his men, had thrust forward small parties to contest every inch of ground; and it was against the foremost of these, two and fifty English and fifty Frisians, that the first attack of five hundred of the flower of the Spanish infantry was directed. Meanwhile the Spanish cavalry moved forward along the Greenway. This cavalry, disordered by the fire of Vere's two guns and galled in flank by a detachment of his musketeers, soon gave way before the cavalry of the States; but the struggle of the infantry in the van was very severe.[163] The first attack of the Spanish vanguard was repulsed, but being quickly reinforced it moved forward again and the fight then became desperate. For a time the battle seems to have resolved itself into a furious contest for the possession of a single sandhill, round which, as round the two-gun-battery at Inkermann, both sides fought madly hand to hand, each alternately repelling and repelled, till at last this "bloody morsel," as Vere called it, was finally carried by the English.

The Archduke without delay brought up his centre in line with his vanguard, and essayed to force his way through Vere's right. The columns were met by a murderous fire from a party of musketeers which had been posted by Vere to check any such movement, and were driven back; and then the whole strength of the Spanish attack was concentrated once more upon Vere's main position. Husbanding his strength to the utmost, Vere gradually drew the whole of his English into action and fought on. So far, owing to the skill of his dispositions, little more than half of his force had been engaged, but seeing that they were likely to be overwhelmed by numbers, he sent messengers to summon his reserve of two thousand Frisian infantry, and to beg Maurice to help him with cavalry from his right. Messenger after messenger was despatched without result. Vere went down among his few remaining men, and the little force, cheered by his presence, fought gallantly on and still held the enemy at bay. He was struck by a musket ball in the thigh and by a second in the leg, but he concealed the wounds and held his men together. Yet the expected reinforcements came not, and the English were slowly forced back, still in good order and still showing their teeth, from the dunes on to the beach, the Spaniards following after them, but afraid to press the pursuit. As the English retired, Vere's horse was shot under him and fell, pinning him helpless to the ground. Three of his officers ran up and freed him; and mounted on the[164] crupper behind one of them, he continued calmly to direct the retreat.

Arrived on the sands he found his reserve of Frisians still halted in their original position, having never received orders to move, and with them the two troops of English horse. A charge of the cavalry, supported by two hundred infantry under Horace Vere, soon swept the Spaniards back into the dunes, and then at last Sir Francis made himself over to the surgeon, while Maurice came forward, cool and unmoved, to save the day. The Spaniards now massed two thousand infantry together for a further advance, while the English officers, weary with fighting and parched with heat and sand, exerted themselves to rally their men. The English were quickly reformed, so quickly that the Spaniards, who had sent forward a party to disperse them, promptly withdrew it at the sight of Horace Vere returning with his two hundred men from the beach. Maurice saw the movement and exclaimed joyfully, "Voyez les Anglais qui tournent à la charge." He at once ordered up the cavalry from the right under Sir Edward Cecil; and meanwhile Horace Vere and his brother officers hastily decided that their only chance was at once to charge the two thousand Spaniards with their handful of men. They rushed desperately down upon them; the Spaniards, worn out by a long march and hard fighting, gave way, and Maurice catching the supreme moment launched Cecil's troopers into the thick of them. A second charge disposed of the Spanish horse; Maurice ordered a general advance, and the battle was won. Three thousand Spaniards were killed outright; six hundred more with all their guns and one hundred and twenty colours were captured. On the side of the States the loss fell almost wholly on the English. Of their captains eight were killed, and but two came out of the field unhurt; of the sixteen hundred men eight hundred were killed and wounded. They with the Frisians had borne the brunt of the action, and Maurice gave them credit for it. So ended the fight of[165] Nieuport,[140] the dying struggle of the once famous Spanish soldier, and the first great day of the new English infantry.
1601.
July 9.

Next year the Archduke Albert sought revenge for his defeat by the investment of the one stronghold of the United Provinces in Flanders, the little fortified fishing-town of Ostend. The garrison had made itself so obnoxious to the surrounding country that the States of Flanders petitioned the Archduke to stamp out the pestilent little fortress once for all; and hence it was that in the following years the principal operations grouped themselves around the siege. The Archduke's army consisted of twenty thousand men with fifty siege-guns; the garrison of barely six thousand men, half English and half Dutch, of which fifteen hundred English, all dressed in red cassocks, were a reinforcement just imported from across the sea. Francis Vere was in supreme command, and his brother Horace commanded a regiment under him.

I shall not weary the reader with details of Vere's skill and resource in improving the defences of the town, or of the incessant encounters that took place during the first weeks of the siege. The Spanish fire was so hot and the losses of the besieged so heavy that the garrison was fairly worn out with the work. Vere was dangerously wounded in the head within the first three weeks and compelled to throw up the command until restored to health, and at the close of the first month hardly a red cassock of the fifteen hundred was to be seen, every man being wounded or dead. Nevertheless, the sea being always open to the besieged, fresh men and supplies could always be poured into the town to repair the waste. Two thousand English, for a wonder well equipped and apparelled, were the first to arrive, and were followed by a contingent, of French and Scots.[166] They too went down with terrible rapidity. The town was but five hundred yards across, and the Spanish batteries were built within musket-shot of the defences. Hardly a house was left standing, and the garrison was compelled to burrow underground as the only refuge from the incessant rain of missiles. The winter set in with exceptional rigour, the defenders dwindled to a bare nine hundred effective men, and at Christmas Vere, in the face of foul winds and failing supplies, was compelled to resort to a feigned parley to gain time. By a fortunate change of wind four hundred men were able to enter the harbour and recruit the exhausted garrison.
1602.

So far the Spaniards had fired one hundred and sixty-three thousand cannon-shot into the town, and they now decided on a general assault. On the 7th of January Vere received intelligence of the coming attack, and, though his force was far too weak to defend the full extent of his works, made every preparation to repel it. Firkins of ashes, barrels bristling with tenterhooks, stones, hoops, brickbats, clubs, what not, were stored on the ramparts, and at high tide the water was dammed up into the ditch. At nightfall the Spanish columns fell on the devoted town at all points. They were met by a shower of every description of missile; flaming hoops were cast round their necks, ashes flung in their eyes, brickbats hurled in their faces; and storm as they might they could gain no footing. Thrice they returned to the assault, and thrice they were beaten back, and at last they retired, sullen and furious, for the tide was rising, and on one side they could advance to the town only by a passage which was not fordable at high water. Vere opened the sluices of the ditch as they retreated, and the rush of water swept scores if not hundreds of them out to sea. The Spanish loss was two thousand men; that of the garrison did not exceed one hundred and thirty.
1603-1604.

I shall not further follow this memorable siege. Vere and his brother Horace left the town worn almost to death in March 1602, but still the defence was maintained.[167] Reinforcements from England came in by hundreds and by thousands. Rogues, vagabonds, idle, dissolute, and masterless persons were impressed impartially together with men of honesty and reputation, clapped into red or blue cassocks and shipped across to Ostend. Volunteers of noble and of humble birth, some in search of instruction, some with a thirst for excitement, hurried likewise to the siege, and Ostend became one of the sights of Europe. Governor after governor, gallant Dutchmen all of them, came to take command. Three of them were killed outright, but still the defence continued, until at last on the 13th of September 1604 the heap of ruins which marked the site of Ostend was surrendered into the generous hands of Spinola. The siege had lasted three years and ten weeks, and had cost the lives of one hundred and twenty thousand men.

Before the town fell the campaigns of Francis Vere were ended. In 1602 he accompanied Maurice to the siege of Grave, where he was once more dangerously wounded, and in the summer of 1604 he retired from the service of the States, from whom he deservedly received a pension for his life. In the very same year King James the First made a treaty with the Archdukes of the Spanish Netherlands, which left the Dutch patriots henceforth to fight their battles by themselves; but nations like the English and Scotch are not bound by the decisions of such a creature as James. The British troops not only remained in the service of the State but grew and multiplied exceedingly, and Francis Vere, who had made their service honourable and given their efforts distinction, could feel that his work was well done. A few short years of rest closed a life that was shortened by hardship and wounds; and on the 28th of August, 1609, within four months of the signing of the truce which gave breathing time to the exhausted combatants of the Dutch war, the old soldier died peacefully in his house in London. His tomb in Westminster Abbey is admired by thousands who know not one of his actions,[168] but surely it is no derogation to art to remember that the recumbent marble effigy, and the four noble figures that kneel around it are those not of conventional heroes, but of honest English fighting men, typical of many thousands who perished in the cause of Dutch freedom and lie buried and forgotten in the blood-stained soil of the Netherlands.
1619.

The twelve years' truce gave the English regiments a rest which, though not wholly unbroken, left some of the more daring spirits free for other adventure. The cause of the Elector Frederick, a prince less interesting to the English as the Winter King than as the husband of their favourite Princess Elizabeth, called Horace Vere and many another gallant gentleman with four thousand good soldiers into the Palatinate, where however their bravery could not avail to save them from inevitable failure. King James of course had no part in the venture; so far from moving a finger in aid of the Protestant cause in Germany, he even conspired secretly with Spain for a partition of the Netherlands, which was to be effected by the English troops in the Dutch service, the very men who had made the cause of the United Provinces their own and had carried it through the perils of Nieuport and Ostend. It is hardly surprising that such a man should, not indeed without searching of heart but without stirring a hand, have suffered Germany to drift into the Thirty Years War.
1621.
1624.
1625-1637.

The lapse of the twelve years' truce found a large contingent of English under the command of Sir Edward Cecil attached to the army of Prince Maurice; and three years later the final breach of England with Spain increased its number from six to twelve thousand, and in 1625 even to seventeen thousand men. It would be tedious to follow them through the operations of the ensuing campaigns; it must suffice to call attention to the rise of men who were to become famous in later days and thus bridge over by a few stepping-stones the connection of the British army with the old Dutch schools of war. The first names are those of Philip Skippon, whom we find wounded before Breda in 1625,[169] and of Captain John Cromwell, a kinsman of the great Oliver, who was also wounded in the same action. Coming next to the siege of Bois le Duc in 1629 we find the list far longer—Lord Doncaster, Lord Fielding, who trailed a pike in Cecil's regiment, Lord Craven, a Luttrell, a Bridgeman, a Basset, a Throgmorton, a Fleetwood, a Lambert, a second Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, Philip Skippon, Jacob Astley, Thomas Culpeper, the veterans Balfour and Sandilands from north of the Tweed, and many more. Lastly, at the siege of Breda in 1637 we see Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice, sons of the Winter King, as forward in the trenches as any needy cadet could be, working side by side with Philip Skippon, Lord Warwick, and George Goring. Of these Skippon and Goring divided the honours of the siege. Skippon at a post of extreme danger drove off two hundred Spaniards at push of pike with thirty English; he was struck by five bullets on helmet and corselet and at last shot through the neck, but he merely sat down for ten minutes and returned to his work until recalled by the Prince of Orange. Goring in the extreme advanced sap paid extra wages from his own pocket to any who would work with him, and remained there while two-and-twenty men were shot down round him, until at last he was compelled to retire by a bullet in the ankle. Meanwhile fresh volunteers kept pouring in—Herbert, son of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Sir Faithful Fortescue of the King's cavalry in Ireland, Sir Charles Slingsby, with many more, and lastly Captain George Monk of Potheridge in Devon, one day to be the first colonel of the Coldstream Guards, and even now distinguished by peculiar bravery.

There they were, brave English gentlemen, all wearing the scarf of orange and blue, fighting side by side with the pupils of Francis Vere, learning their work for the days when they should be divided into Cavaliers and Roundheads and flying at each other's throats. It was a merry life enough, though with plenty of grim earnest. Before each relief marched off for the night[170] to the trenches it drew off in parado[141] to the quarters of the colonel in command, heard prayers, sang a psalm and so went to its work; but though there was a preacher to every regiment and a sermon in the colonel's tent, there was no compulsion to attend, and there were few listeners except a handful of well-disposed persons.[142] It was to be a very different matter with some of them ten years later, but that they could not foresee; and in truth we find among the gentlemen volunteers some very familiar types. One of them arrived with eighteen suits of clothes, got drunk immediately on landing and remained drunk, hiccuping "thy pot or mine," for the rest of his stay. It is not difficult to understand why this gentleman was sent to the wars. Another, Ensign Duncombe, came for a different reason; he had fallen in love with a girl, who though worthy of him was not approved of by his parents. So he too was sent out to forget her, as such foolish boys must be; and he became a great favourite and did well. But unluckily he could not forget; so one day he sat down and wrote two letters, one full of passion to his beloved, and another full of duty to his father, and having done so, addressed the passionate epistle, as is the way of such poor blundering boys, to his father and the dutiful one to the lady. And so it came about that some weeks later the regiment was horrified to hear that young Duncombe had shot himself; and there was an ensign the less in the Low Countries and a broken heart the more in England, sad silence at the officers' table and much morbid discussion of the incident in the ranks. It is such trifles as these that recall to us that these soldiers of old times were really living creatures of flesh and blood.

The men too were learning their business with all the elaborate exercise of musket and of pike, and familiarising themselves with the innumerable words of [171]command and with the refinements in the execution of the same. The pikeman learned by interminable directions to handle his weapon with the better grace, and listened to such cautions as the following. "Now at the word Order your pikes, you place the butt end of your pike by the outside of your right foot, your right hand holding it even with your eye and your thumb right up; then your left arm being set akimbo by your side you shall stand with a full body in a comely posture." The musketeer too grasped that the minutest motion must be executed by word of command. Stray grains of powder spilled around the pan disappeared at the word Blow off your loose corns, sometimes by a puff or two sometimes by a "sudden strong blast," but always in accordance with regulation. At the word Give fire again he learned the supreme importance of "gently pressing the trigger without starting or winking," and soon revived the old English reputation, first won by the archers, for fine marksmanship. An eye-witness records with delight that after each shot they would lean on their rests and look for the result as coolly as though they had been so many fowlers watching for the fall of their bird. Lastly, they learned a new feat, untaught in any drill-book, with which this section may fitly be closed. Pikemen and musketeers were drawn up in line, every pike with a wisp of straw at its head, and every musket loaded with powder only; and at the word every wisp was kindled and every musket fired in rapid succession. The volley met with a stop at first, to use the words of our authority, as was perhaps natural at a first attempt, but eventually it ran well; and thus was fired before Bois le Duc in the year 1629 the first feu de joie that is recorded of the British Army.[143]

Authorities.—The chief sources of information for the actions of the British in the Low Countries are the histories of Meteren, [172] Grimeston and Commelyn; Roger Williams's Actions of the Low Countries; Hexham; Vere's Commentaries; the Leicester Correspondence (Camden Society); the Calendars of State Papers, Domestic and Foreign Series; and the Holland Papers in the Record Office. These last, consisting of several scores of portfolios of manuscript documents, I cannot pretend to have studied exhaustively. Sir Clements Markham's Fighting Veres and Mr. Dalton's Life of Lord Wimbledon are the best modern books on the subject, and I wish to acknowledge to the full my obligation to them. Hexham's Principles of the Art Military is the best authority for the Dutch system of drill. The Tactics of ?lian, translated with commentary by Captain John Bingham, 1616, is also valuable. Last, but not least, the reader will supply for himself the familiar name of Motley.
CHAPTER VI
It is now needful to turn to the second and perhaps more important school of the British Army. As in the Low Countries we found English and Scots fighting side by side, but gave to the English, as their numerical preponderance demanded, the greater share of attention, so now in the German battlefields of the Thirty Years' War we shall see them again ranked together, but must devote ourselves for the same reason to the actions of the Scots.

The North Britons seem to have found their way very quickly to the banners of Gustavus Adolphus, and to have fought with him in his earlier campaigns long before he had established himself as the champion of Protestantism. To mention but two memorable names, Sir John Hepburn and Sir Alexander Leslie had risen to high rank in his service many years before he crossed the Baltic for his marvellous campaigns in Germany. But to trace the history of the famous Scottish regiments aright, they must be briefly followed from their first departure from Scotland to take service under King Christian the Fourth of Denmark, who curiously enough forms the link that connects the two schools of Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus.
1626,
August 17.

It was in reliance on promises of subsidy from the English King Charles the First that Christian first levied an army and took the field for the Protestant cause. His plan was for a defensive campaign, but this was impossible unless his soldiers were regularly paid, which they would be, as he hoped, with English money.[174] Needless to say, Charles when the moment came was unable to fulfil his promise; Christian was driven to take the offensive and was completely defeated by Tilly at Lutter. The unhappy king appealed indignantly to Charles for help, but Charles could send nothing but four English regiments which had been raised for service in the Low Countries two years before, and were now, through the prevailing maladministration in every department of English affairs, weak, disorganised and useless. Their numbers were however supplemented by the press-gang, and a body of some five thousand men, unpaid and ill-found, ripe for disease and disorder, were shipped off to the Elbe.

A little earlier than the defeat at Lutter one of the many gentlemen-adventurers in Scotland, Sir Donald Mackay, had obtained leave from King Charles to raise and transport five thousand men for King Christian's ally, the famous free lance, Count Ernest Mansfeld. It does not appear that he succeeded in recruiting even half of that number, for heavy drafts had already been made upon the centre and south of Scotland for levies. Still some two thousand men were collected by fair means or foul, and even if some of them were taken from the Tolbooth at Edinburgh, it was fitting that in a corps so famous there should be representatives from the Heart of Midlothian. But it is certain that a goodly proportion were taken from the northern counties and in particular from the district of the Clan Mackay, and that these took the field in their national costume and so were the first organised body deserving the name of a kilted regiment. The officers, from their names and still more from their subsequent behaviour, seem to have been without exception gentlemen of birth and standing, worthy to represent their nation. Some of them probably had already experience of war; one at least, Robert Munro, the historian of the regiment, had served in the Scottish body-guard of the King of France, and had learned from sad experience the meaning of the word discipline.[144]

[175]
1627.

The regiment sailed in divisions from Cromarty and Aberdeen and arrived at Glückstadt on the Elbe in October 1626. The winter was spent in training the men, but not without riot and brawling. The officers were constantly quarrelling, and there was so little discipline among the men that a sergeant actually fell out of the ranks when at drill to cudgel a foreign officer who had maltreated one of his comrades. Meanwhile Count Mansfeld, who had originally hired the regiment, was dead, and in March 1627 Sir Donald Mackay offered its services to the King of Denmark. Christian accordingly reviewed it, and having first inspected the ranks on parade, "drums beating, colours flying, horses neighing," saw it march past and paid it a handsome compliment. The men were then drawn, after the fashion of the landsknechts, into a ring, where they took the oath and listened to a rehearsal of the articles of war; and so their services began. Half of them were despatched with the English regiments to Bremen, and the remainder were stationed at Lauenburg to guard the passage of the Elbe.
July.

After a vast deal of marching and counter-marching four companies, under Major Dunbar, were left at Boitzenburg, at the junction of the Boitze and the Elbe, while Mackay with the remaining seven was moved to Ruppin. Three days after Mackay's departure, Tilly's army, ten thousand strong, marched up to Boitzenburg and prepared to push forward into Holstein. Dunbar knowing his own weakness had strengthened his defences, but eight hundred men was a small garrison against an army. On the very first night he made a successful sortie; and on the next day the Imperialist army assaulted his works at all[176] points. The first attack was repulsed with loss of over five hundred men to the assailants. Reinforcements were brought up; the attack was renewed and again beaten off, and finally a third and furious onslaught was made on the little band of Scots. In the midst of the fighting the ammunition of the garrison failed and its fire ceased. The Imperialists, guessing the cause, made a general rush for the walls. The Scots met them at first with showers of sand torn from the ramparts, and presently falling in with pike and butt of musket fought the Imperialists hand to hand, and after a desperate struggle drove them out with the loss of another five hundred men. Tilly then drew off and crossed the Elbe higher up, and Dunbar by Christian's order marched proudly out of Boitzenburg. This was the first engagement of Mackay's regiment, a fitting prelude to work that was to come.[145]
October.

The headquarters of the regiment was presently moved from Ruppin to Oldenburg to hold the pass against Tilly's advance, and here they too came into action. They were ill supported by their foreign comrades, for the Danes gave way, the Germans of Christian's army took to their heels, and the brunt of the engagement fell upon half the regiment of Scots. After two hours of heavy fighting they were relieved by the other half, and so the two divisions, taking turn and turn, maintained the struggle against vastly superior numbers from seven in the morning till four in the afternoon, when the enemy at last drew off owing to the darkness. The spirit shown by the Scots was superb. Ensign David Ross received a bullet in the chest; he retired for a few minutes to get the wound dressed, and returned to the fight; nor did he afterwards miss an hour's duty on the plea that he was wounded. Hector Munro of Coull, being shot through the foot, refused[177] to retire till he had fired away all his ammunition, and before he could do so was shot in the other foot also. Yet another, Hugh Murray, being ordered to bring away his brother's corpse under a heavy fire, swore that he would first empty his brother's bandoliers against the enemy, and was shot in the eye, though not fatally, while fulfilling his oath. Yet these were young soldiers, of so little experience that they left their reserve of ammunition exposed, and suffered heavily from the explosion of a barrel of powder. They lost sixteen officers and four hundred men that day.

That night the Danish army retreated to Heiligenhaven, but some German Reiters that were attached to it were so unsteady that they speedily turned the retreat into a flight; and when the harbour was reached the cavalry crowded on to the mole to seize all the transport-vessels for themselves. Sir Donald Mackay, who was himself wounded, was not the man to suffer his regiment to be sacrificed; he calmly ordered his pikemen to advance, swept the whole of the Reiters into the sea, seized the nearest ship, brought others out of the roadstead and proceeded to the work of embarkation. The last boat's load shoved off surrounded by the enemy's horse, and the last of the Scots, a gallant boy named Murchison, though wounded in the head and shot through the arm, swam off to the boat under a heavy fire, only to die two days later of his injuries. The rest of the Danish army, thirty-five troops of horse and forty companies of foot, surrendered without a blow. Hence it is hardly surprising that, when next the Scots found themselves in quarters alongside Danish horse, there was a furious riot which cost the lives of seven or eight men before it could be suppressed. But in truth Mackay's regiment was so much weakened by its losses that both colonel and lieutenant-colonel returned perforce to Scotland to raise recruits.
1628.

I shall not follow the various small actions of the[178] earlier part of the campaign of 1628 in Holstein, though many of them were brilliant enough. It must suffice that Scotch and English fought constantly side by side not only against the enemy, but once riotously against the Danes themselves, whom they considered to be unduly favoured in the matter of rations. In May the Imperialists moved up in force to occupy Stralsund; and the burghers having appealed to Christian for assistance received from him the seven companies, now reduced to eight hundred men, of Mackay's regiment.
June 26.

On arrival their commanding officer at once selected the most dangerous post in the defences, as in honour bound, and for six weeks the regiment was harassed to death by exhausting duty. The men took their very meals at their posts, and Monro, who was now a major, mentions that he never once took off his clothes. They suffered heavily too from the enemy's fire, a single cannon shot strewing the walls with the brains of no fewer than fourteen men; but still they held out. At last Wallenstein came up in person, impatient at the delay, and vowed that he would take the town in three nights though it hung by a chain between heaven and earth. His first assault was hurled back by the Scots with the loss of a thousand men. But the Highlanders also had been severely punished; three officers and two hundred men had been killed outright, and seven more officers were wounded. On the following night the attack was renewed and again repulsed, but the garrison was now compelled to open a parley in order to gain time; and the negotiations were prolonged until the arrival of a second Scottish regiment under Lord Spynie enabled the defenders to renew their defiance.
1630.
February.

Shortly after the King of Sweden charged himself with the defence of Stralsund. Alexander Leslie, whom we shall meet again, was appointed to take the command, and Mackay's and Spynie's regiments after a final sortie were withdrawn to Copenhagen. Of Mackay's, five hundred had been killed outright in the siege, and a bare hundred only remained unwounded; in fact the[179] regiment required virtually to be reconstructed. The work of recruiting and reorganisation occupied the winter months, at the close of which the corps, now raised to ten companies and fifteen hundred men, was honourably discharged from the service of Denmark, and free to join itself, as it presently did, to Gustavus Adolphus.

Its first duty was to learn the new drill and discipline introduced by the King of Sweden; and as his system was destined to be accepted later by all the armies of Europe, no better place can be found than this, when it was just brought to perfection and first taught to British soldiers, to give some brief account of it.

The infantry of Gustavus Adolphus, as of all other civilised armies at that period, was made up of pikemen and musketeers, and beyond all doubt had originally been trained and organised on the models of the Spanish and the Dutch. Enough has already been said of these to enable the reader to follow the reforms introduced by the Swedish king. First as regards weapons: the old long pike was cut down from a length of fifteen or eighteen feet to the more modest dimension of eleven feet, and the old clumsy musket with its heavy rest was replaced by a lighter weapon which could be fired from the shoulder without further support. The defensive armour of the pikeman was also reduced to back, breast, and tassets; and thus both divisions of the infantry, carrying less weight than heretofore, were enabled to move more rapidly and to accomplish longer marches without fatigue. This was a first step towards the mobility which the great soldier designed to oppose to the old-fashioned forces of mass and weight.

Next as to the tactics of infantry: Gustavus's first improvement was to reduce the old formation from ten ranks to six; his second and more important was to withdraw the musketeers from their old station in the flanks of companies, and to mass pikes and shot into separate bodies. It is abundantly evident that he looked[180] upon the development of the fire of musketry as of the first importance in war, and to this end he sought to render the musketeers independent of the protection of the pikes. This idea led him to a curious revival of old methods, nothing less than a modification of the stakes which were seen in the hands of the English at Hastings and Agincourt, and which now took the name of hog's bristles or Swedish feathers. This, however, was a small matter compared to his improvement in the method of maintaining a continuous fire. Pescayra's system was one which, on the face of it, was not suited to young or unsteady troops. In theory it was a very simple matter that the ranks should fire and file off to the rear in succession, but in practice the temptation to men to get the firing done as quickly as possible and to seek shelter behind the ranks of their comrades was a great deal too strong. The retirement was apt to be executed with an unseemly haste which was demoralising to the whole company, and there was no certainty that the retiring ranks, instead of resuming their place in rear, would not disappear from the field altogether. Gustavus therefore made the ranks that had fired retire through[146] instead of outside their companies, where, through judicious posting of officers and non-commissioned officers, any disposition to hurry could be checked by the blow of a halberd across the shins or by such other expedients as the reader's imagination may suggest. In an advance, again, he made the rear ranks move up successively through the front ranks, and in a retreat caused the front ranks to retire through the rear.

This reform was as much moral as tactical; but the next made a great stride towards modern practice. Not content with reducing ten ranks to six Gustavus on occasions would double those six into three, and by making the front rank kneel enabled the fire of all[181] three to be delivered simultaneously. Here is seen the advantage of abolishing the old musket-rest, with which such a concentration of fire would have been impossible. Still following out his leading principle, he encouraged the use of cartridges to hasten the process of loading; and finally to perfect his work he introduced a new tactical unit, the peloton, called by Munro plotton and later naturalised among us as the platoon of musketeers, which consisted of forty-eight men, eight in rank and six in file, all of course carefully trained to the new tactics. Yet with all these changes the drill was of the simplest; if men could turn right, left, and about, and double their ranks and files, that was sufficient.

In the matter of pure organisation Gustavus again improved upon all existing systems. First he made the companies of uniform strength, one hundred and twenty-six men, distributed into twenty-one rots or files, and six corporalships. A corporalship of pikes consisted of three files, and of musketeers of four files;[147] and to every file was appointed a rottmeister[148] or leader, who stood in the front, and an unter-rottmeister or sub-leader, who stood in the rear rank. Both of these received higher pay than the private soldier. Two sergeants, four under-sergeants and a quartermaster-sergeant completed the strength of non-commissioned officers, while three pipers and as many drums made music for all. Moreover each company carried a kind of reserve with it in the shape of eighteen supernumerary men who bore the name of passe-volans, the old slang term for fictitious soldiers since the days of Hawkwood, and; were allowed to the captain as free men, unmustered. The officers of course were as usual captain, lieutenant, and ensign.

[182]

Eight such companies constituted a regiment, which was thus one thousand and eight men strong, with a colonel, lieutenant-colonel, and major over all. The regimental staff included many officials borrowed from the landsknechts' model for the trial and punishment of offenders, and for a complete novelty, four surgeons. The provision of medical aid had formerly been left to the captains, and it is to Gustavus that we owe the first example of a sounder medical organisation.

Four companies or half of such a regiment were called either a squadron or by the Italian name battaglia, to which must be traced our modern word battalion. Two such regiments were called a brigade, which marks the latest advance in organisation made by Gustavus. Maurice of Nassau had been before him in the formation of brigades but had not reduced them to uniform strength. The Swedish brigades had a stereotyped formation for battle, and were called after the colour of their standards, the white, the blue, the yellow, and finally the green, better known as the Scots Brigade, which is that wherein we are chiefly interested.

Passing next to the cavalry, the marks of Gustavus's reforming hand are not less evident. The force at large was divided into cuirassiers and dragoons. Of these the latter, who were armed with muskets and were simply mounted infantry, may be dismissed without further observation. The cuirassiers, except outwardly, bore a strong resemblance to the Reiters, for, though stripped of all defensive armour except cuirass and helmet, they still carried two pistols as well as the sword. Gustavus, however, here as with the infantry, took a line of his own. He began by reducing the depth of the ranks from the bottomless profundity of the Reiters to three or at most four; and though he still opened his attack with the pistol and so far adhered to missile tactics he to a considerable extent combined with them the action by shock. As in the infantry, it was Pescayra's system that he wished to supersede. The Reiters, as we know by the testimony[183] of many eye-witnesses, were often so anxious to go to the rear and reload that they fired their pistols at absurd ranges, sometimes indeed hardly waiting to fire before they turned about. Unable to apply to cavalry the system which he had adopted for the infantry, and failing in common with all his contemporaries to grasp the principle that, since a horse has four legs and a man two, the evolutions of horse and foot must be fundamentally different, Gustavus none the less determined that his cuirassiers should at all events come to close quarters with their enemy. He therefore trained them not to fire till they could see the white of their opponents' eyes, and having fired to strike in with the sword.

Hence he has the credit, which is not wholly undeserved, of having restored shock-action, and is said to have made his cavalry charge at the gallop; but the first statement is misleading, and the second in the face of contemporary accounts incredible. In the first place, the sword is a singularly ineffective weapon against mailed men, and a true restorer of shock-action would almost certainly have reverted to the lance. In the second place, mounted men who open their attack with pistols will infallibly check their horses at the moment of firing in order to ensure greater accuracy of aim. Lastly, Gustavus's favourite plan for the attack of cavalry was to intersperse his squadrons with platoons of musketeers, which advanced with them within close range[149] and fired a volley into the enemy's horse. This preliminary over, the cuirassiers advanced, fired their pistols, fell in with the sword, and retired; by which time the musketeers had reloaded and were ready with another volley. Close range of the musket of those days would not have allowed space for a body of horse to gather way for a shock-attack in the modern sense, and it is therefore more than doubtful whether the Swedish squadrons charged at higher speed than the trot. Gustavus's system was in fact simply a revival of Edward the First's at Falkirk, which had already been[184] developed with great success by Pescayra at Pavia. Nevertheless, by reducing the depth of squadrons and insisting that his men should come to close quarters, Gustavus unquestionably did very much for the improvement of cavalry.[150]

Most remarkable of all were his reforms in the matter of artillery. Profoundly impressed by the power of field-guns he spared no effort to make them lighter and more mobile, so as to be at once easily man?uvred and capable of transport in larger numbers. Here again Maurice had been before him, not without success, but Gustavus possessed in the person of a Scotch gentleman, Sir Alexander Hamilton, an artillerist of wider views than lay to the hand of the great Dutch soldier. Hamilton's first experiment was to make leathern guns,[151] strengthened by hoops of metal and with apparently a core of tin, which could easily be carried on a pony's back or stacked away by the dozen in a waggon. Gustavus used them frequently in his earlier campaigns but discarded them at latest after the battle of Breitenfeld, finding that their life did not extend beyond ten or a dozen rounds. He then fell back on light two-pounders and four-pounders, which required few horses for draught, and could be loaded and fired by a skilful crew more rapidly even than a musket. A few such guns were attached to each regiment and called regimental pieces; and very effective they were presently found to be.

Further, Gustavus was a consummate engineer, as fond of the spade as Maurice himself, and a past master of field-fortification. On stepping ashore in Germany he first fell on his knees and prayed, and then picking up a spade began to dig with his own hands. This, it [185]may here be mentioned once for all, was the one point in his system which the Scots could not endure; they always grumbled when called upon to use the spade, and in spite of the King's occasional reproaches, always made less progress with field-works in a given time than any other corps in the army.

Lastly, to turn to broader principles, the great innovation of Gustavus, visible in all his reforms, was to match mobility against the old system of weight. He never massed his troops in unwieldy bodies, but distributed them in smaller and more flexible divisions, allowing plenty of space for facility of man?uvre. His order of battle was that which was customary in his time, consisting of two lines with infantry in the centre and cavalry on the flanks; but he always allowed three hundred yards of distance between the first and second line, and erected the practice of keeping a reserve, which had been intermittently observed for centuries, into an established principle. Again, he carefully studied the effective combination of the three arms with a thoroughness unknown since the days of Zizca, supplying artillery to his infantry, and supporting impartially horse with foot and foot with horse. Finally, as the backbone of all, he enforced with a strictness that had never been seen before him the observance of discipline.
1631.

Such was the Army and such the General to which Mackay's regiment now joined itself. In June 1630 it embarked for Germany as part of the thirteen thousand men which formed the Swedish army, half of the companies at Elfsknaben, the remainder under Munro at Pillau. The latter detachment was wrecked off Rügenwalde, which was held by the Imperialists, and lost everything; but having made shift to obtain arms calmly attacked the Imperial garrison and captured the town—as daring a feat of arms as ever was done by Scotsmen. After several small engagements Monro rejoined his headquarters at Stettin, and in January 1631 Gustavus, who boasted with justice that his army was as effective for a winter's as for a summer's campaign, invaded[186] Brandenburg and marched for the Oder. The Scotch were organised into the famous Scots Brigade, consisting of four picked regiments—Hepburn's, Mackay's, Stargate's, and Lumsden's, the whole under the command of Sir John Hepburn.
May.

We must pass over the operations in Brandenburg, where the Scots Brigade distinguished itself repeatedly, and come forthwith to Saxony, whither Gustavus had been called from the Oder by Tilly's advance upon Magdeburg. Arriving too late to save the unhappy city he entrenched himself at Werben, at the junction of the Elbe and the Havel, and gave the world a first notable example of his skill as an engineer. Tilly, having lost six thousand men in the vain attempt to storm the entrenchments, invaded Saxony, whither Gustavus at once followed him and offered him battle on the plain of Leipsic.

On the 7th of September Tilly took up his position facing north, on a low line of heights running from the village of Breitenfeld on the west to that of Seehausen on the east. His army was drawn up in a single line. On each wing as usual was posted the cavalry, seven regiments under Pappenheim on the left, seven more under Furstenburg on the right, all drawn up in the dense columns beloved of Charles the Fifth. In the centre was Tilly himself, with eighteen regiments of infantry, his famous Walloons among them, massed together in the old heavy Spanish formation. On the heights above him were his guns. The whole force numbered forty thousand men, and their General was a man who, though seventy years of age, had never lost a battle.
Sept. 7.

On the other side the armies of Gustavus and of his allies the Saxons were drawn up in two lines. On the left were the Saxons, fourteen thousand strong, and on the right, with which alone we need concern ourselves, the Swedes. In touch with the Saxon right, the Swedish left under Field-Marshal Horn was made up, both in the first and second lines, of six regiments of horse, with four platoons of musketeers between each regiment.[187] The right wing under Gustavus himself was similarly composed. In the centre the first line was made up of four half brigades of foot, supported by a regiment of cavalry and eight platoons of Scots; and the second line of three brigades, of which Hepburn's was one. In rear of both lines was a reserve of cavalry, and in the extreme rear a further reserve, the first ever seen, of artillery.

The battle opened as usual with a duel of artillery, which was continued from noon till half-past two, the Swedish guns, more numerous and better served than Tilly's, firing three shots to the enemy's one. Then Pappenheim, on Tilly's left, lost patience, and setting his cavalry in motion without orders came down upon the Swedish right. He was met by biting volleys from the platoons of musketeers and charges from the cuirassiers at their side; his men shrank from the fire, and edging leftward across the front of Gustavus's wing swept down towards its rear. General Bauer, in command of the reserve cavalry of the first line, at once moved out and broke into them; and the whole Swedish right coming into action drove back Pappenheim's horse, after a hard struggle, in disorder. Gustavus checked the pursuit, for Tilly had pushed forward a regiment of infantry in support of Pappenheim, and turning all his force on this unhappy corps annihilated it.

On the Imperialists' left Furstenburg, following Pappenheim's example, had also charged, and had driven the entire Saxon army before him like chaff before the wind.[152] He followed them in hot pursuit; and had Tilly at once advanced with his centre against Field-Marshal Horn, the situation of the Swedes would have been critical, for their left was now completely uncovered. But owing to the faulty disposition of his artillery Tilly could not advance directly without putting his guns out of action, and he therefore followed in the track of Furstenburg to turn Horn's left flank. The delay gave Horn time to make dispositions to meet the attack.[188] Hepburn's brigade came quickly up with another brigade in support, and the Scots after one volley charged the hostile infantry with the pike and routed it completely. Gustavus meanwhile had again advanced with his cavalry on the right, and sweeping down on the flank of Tilly's battery captured all his guns and turned them against himself. The battle was virtually over, but four splendid old Walloon regiments stood firm to the last, and though reduced to but six hundred men retreated at nightfall in good order.

The victory was crushing; and yet of all the Swedish infantry two brigades alone had been engaged, and of these the Scots had done the greater share of the work. The battle marks the death-day of the old dense formations and the triumph of mobility over weight, and is therefore of particular interest to a nation whose strength is to fight in line.
1632.

From Leipsic Gustavus marched for the Main, where the Scots were as usual put forward for every desperate service, and held his winter court at Mainz. In the spring of the following year he marched down to the line of the Danube with forty thousand men, forced the passage of the Lech in the teeth of Tilly's army, entered Bavaria and by May was at Munich. Then hearing that the towns on the Danube in his rear were threatened he turned back to Donauw?rth, whence he was called away by the movements of Wallenstein in Saxony to Nürnberg. Such marching had not been since the days of Zizca. He now turned Nürnberg, as he had turned Werben in the previous year, into a vast entrenched camp; for he had now but eighteen thousand men against Wallenstein's seventy thousand, and it behoved him to make the most of his position. Wallenstein, however, without risking an engagement, took the simpler course of making also an entrenched camp, cutting off Gustavus's supplies from the Rhine and Danube, and reducing him by starvation. Reinforcements came to the Swedes, which raised their army to five-and-thirty thousand men; Wallenstein allowed them to pass in unmolested to consume[189] the provisions the quicker. The pinch of hunger began to make itself felt in the Swedish camp, pestilence raged among the unhappy troops, and at last Gustavus in desperation launched his army in a vain assault upon Wallenstein's entrenchments. For twelve hours his men swarmed up the rugged and broken hill with desperate courage, three times obtaining a momentary footing and as often beaten back. The cannonade was kept up all night, and it was not till ten o'clock on the following morning that the Swedes retreated, leaving four thousand dead behind them. The Scots Brigade suffered terribly. Monro, out of a detachment of five hundred men, lost two hundred killed alone, besides wounded and missing. His lieutenant-colonel who relieved him at night brought back but thirty men next morning. Other corps had lost hardly less heavily, and Gustavus, foiled for once, retreated to Neustadt, leaving one-third of his force dead around Nürnberg.
1634,
August 26.

Sir John Hepburn, in consequence of a quarrel with the Swedish king, now took leave of him and entered the service of France; and the Scots Brigade, weakened to a mere shadow, was left behind at Dunkerswald to await reinforcements, while Gustavus marched away to his last battlefield at Lützen. We need follow the fortunes of the Brigade little further. The famous regiments, together with the other Scots and English in the Swedish service, now some thirteen thousand men, did abundance of hard and gallant work before the close of the war. The ranks of Mackay's regiment were again swelled to twelve companies and fifteen hundred men, but at N?rdlingen it was almost annihilated, and emerged with the strength of a single company only. Times had changed, and discipline had decayed since the death of Gustavus; and in 1635, on alliance of France with Sweden, and the outbreak of war between France and Spain, the fragments of all the Scotch regiments were merged together, and passed into the service of France under the command of the veteran Sir John Hepburn as the Regiment d'Hebron.

There for a short period let us leave it, wrangling with Regiment Picardie for precedence, claiming, on the ground that some officers of the Scottish Guard had joined it, to be the oldest regiment in the world,[153] and earning the nickname of Pontius Pilate's guards. Hepburn commanded it for but one year, for he fell at its head at the siege of Saverne, but it fought through many actions and many sieges, the battle of Rocroi not the least of them, before it returned to the British Isles. We shall meet with it again before that day under a new name, and under yet a third name shall grow to know it well.

Authorities.—Munro's Expedition is far the most valuable; it has been abridged and supplemented by Mr. John Mackay in his Old Scots Brigade. Harte's Life of Gustavus wrestles manfully with the military details, which are very clearly summed up in Mr. Fletcher's Gustavus in the Heroes of the Nations Series. Some few details will be found also in Fieffé's Histoire des troupes Etrangères.
CHAPTER VII
Once more we return to England and take up the thread of the army's history within the kingdom. Of the reign of James the First there is little to be recorded except that at its very outset the Statute of Philip and Mary for the regulation of the Militia was repealed, and the military organisation of the country based once more on the Statute of Winchester. James was not fond of soldiers, and military progress was not to be expected of such a man. Enough has already been seen of his methods through his dealings with the Low Countries, and there is no occasion to dwell longer on the first British king of the House of Stuart.
1625.

Charles the First was more ambitious, and sufficiently proud of the English soldier to preserve the ancient English drum-march.[154] Soon after the final breach with Spain he imbibed from Buckingham the idea of a raid on the Spanish coast after the Elizabethan model, which eventually took shape in the expedition to Cadiz. Of all the countless mismanaged enterprises in our history this seems on the whole to have been the very worst. There was abundance of trained soldiers in England who had learned their duty in the Low Countries; and Edward Cecil, he whom we saw some few years back in command of the cavalry at Nieuport, begged that liberal offers might be made to induce them to serve. Officers again could be procured from the Low Countries, and therefore there should have been no difficulty in organising an excellent body of men. In[192] the matter of arms, however, though English cannon was highly esteemed, Charles was forced to purchase what he needed from Holland, which was a sad reflection on our national enterprise. Accordingly over a hundred officers were recalled from Holland; and two thousand recruits were collected, to be sent in exchange for the same number of veterans from the Dutch service. Eight thousand men were then pressed for service in various parts of England, and the whole of them poured, without the least preparation to receive them, into Plymouth, where they gained for themselves the name of the plagues of England. Sir John Ogle, a veteran who had served for years with Francis Vere, eyed these recruits narrowly for a time, old, lame, sick and destitute men for the most part, and reflected how without stores, clothes, or money he could possibly convert them into soldiers. Then taking his resolution he threw up his command and took refuge in the Church. Very soon another difficulty arose. The States-General firmly refused to accept two thousand raw men in exchange for veterans, and shipped the unhappy recruits back to England. They too were turned into Plymouth and made confusion worse confounded. Then the arms arrived from Holland, and there was no money to pay men to unload them. The port became a chaos. Buckingham had already shuffled out of the chief command and saddled it on Cecil, and the unfortunate man, good soldier though he was, was driven to his wit's end to cope with his task. His tried officers from Holland were displaced to make room for Buckingham's favourites, who were absolutely useless; and yet he was expected to clothe, arm, train, discipline, and organise ten thousand raw, naked men, work out every detail of a difficult and complicated expedition, and make every provision for it, all without help, without encouragement, and without money. Cash indeed was so scarce that the king could not afford to pay the expenses of his own journey to Plymouth.

Under such conditions it is hardly surprising that[193] the enterprise was a disastrous failure. A few butts of liquor left by the Spaniards outside Cadiz sufficed to set the whole force fighting with its own officers, and after weary weeks at sea, aggravated by heavy weather and by pestilence, the result of bad stores, Cecil and the remains of his ten regiments returned home in misery and shame.[155]
1626.

A similar enterprise under Lord Willoughby in the following year failed in the same way for precisely the same reasons; but Buckingham, still unshaken in his confidence, led a third and a fourth expedition to Rochelle with equal disaster and equal disgrace. The captains had no more control over their men than over a herd of deer.[156] At last, at the outset of a fifth expedition, which promised similar failure, the dagger of Lieutenant Felton, a melancholy man embittered by deprivation of his pay, put an end to Buckingham and to all his follies. On the whole he had not treated the soldiers worse than Elizabeth, but a man of Elizabeth's stamp was more than could be borne with.

Nevertheless, amid all these failures there were still plenty of men in England who had the welfare of the military profession at heart. Foremost among them was the veteran Edward Cecil, now Lord Wimbledon, who strove hard to do something for the defence of the principal ports, for the training of the nation at large, and in particular for the encouragement of cavalry. The mounted service had become strangely unpopular with the English at this time, whether because the eternal sieges of the Dutch war afforded it less opportunity of distinction, or because missile tactics had lowered it from its former proud station, it is difficult to say. Certain it is that officers of infantry, and notably Monro, never lost an opportunity of girding at horsemen as fitted only to run away, and as preferring to be mounted only that they might run away the faster. But Cecil, though in this respect unique, was by no means the only man who [194]made his voice heard. Veteran after veteran took pen in hand and wrote of the discipline of Maurice of Nassau and, as time went on, of the system of Gustavus Adolphus; while on the other hand one ingenious gentleman, still jealous of the old national weapon, invented what he called a "double-arm," which combined the pike and the bow, the bow-staff being attached to the shaft of the pike by a vice which could be traversed on a hinge. Strange to say this belated weapon was not ill-received in military circles and found commendation even among Scotsmen.[157] On one important point, however, there was a general consensus of opinion, namely that the condition of the English militia was disgraceful, its system hopelessly inefficient and the corruption of its administration a scandal. The trained bands were hardly called out once in five years for exercise; few men knew how even to load their muskets, and the majority were afraid to fire a shot except in salute of the colours, not daring to fire a bullet from want of practice.[158]. The Londoners, as usual, alone made a favourable exception to the general rule.
1639.

The real root of the evil was presently to be laid bare. The disputes between Charles the First and his subjects were assuming daily an acuter form, until at last they came to a head in the Scotch rebellion of 1639. It was imperative to raise an English force forthwith and move it up to the Border. Charles, as usual in the last stage of impecuniosity, thought to save money by an exercise of old feudal rights, and summoned every peer with his retinue to attend him in person as his principal force of cavalry. It was a piece of tactless folly whereof none but a Stuart would have been guilty: the peers came in some numbers as they were bid, but they did not conceal their resentment against such proceedings. [195]The foot were levied as usual by writ to the lord-lieutenant with the help of the press-gang, they behaved abominably on their march to the rendezvous, and on arrival were found to be utterly inefficient. Their arms were of all sorts, sizes, and calibres, and the men were so careless in the handling of them that hardly a tent in the camp, not even the king's, escaped perforation by stray bullets. In other respects the organisation was equally deficient; no provision had been made for the supply of victuals and forage; and altogether it was fortunate that the force escaped, through the pacification of Berwick, an engagement with the veterans from the Swedish service under old Alexander Leslie that composed a large portion of the Scottish army.
1640.

The following year saw the war renewed. This time the farce of calling out a feudal body of horse was not repeated, but unexpected difficulties were encountered in raising the levies of foot. In 1639 the infantry had been drawn chiefly from the northern counties, where the tradition of eternal feuds with the Scots made men not altogether averse to a march to the Border. But in 1640 the trained bands of the southern counties were called upon, and they had no such feeling. It is possible that unusual rigour was employed in the process of impressment, for the authorities had been warned, after experience of the previous year, to allow no captains to play the Falstaff with their recruits. Be that as it may, the recalcitrance of the new levies was startling. From county after county came complaints of riot and disorder. The Wiltshire men seized the opportunity to live by robbery and plunder; the Dorsetshire men murdered an officer who had corrected a drummer for flagrant insubordination; in Suffolk the recruits threatened to murder the deputy-lieutenant; in London, Kent, Surrey, and half a dozen more counties the resistance to service was equally determined; and when finally in July four thousand men reached the rendezvous at Selby, old Sir Jacob Astley could only designate them as the arch-knaves of the country. Money being of course[196] very scarce, the men were ill-clothed and ill-found, and their numbers were soon thinned by systematic desertion. A new difficulty cropped up in the matter of discipline. Lord Conway, who commanded the horse, had executed a man for mutiny; he now found that his action was illegal and that he required the royal pardon. If, he wrote, the lawyers are right and martial law is impossible in England, it would be best to break up the army forthwith: to hand men over to the civil power is to deliver them to the lawyers, and experience of the ship-money has shown what support could be expected from them.

There, in fact, lay the kernel of the whole matter; indiscipline was not only rife in the ranks but widespread throughout the nation. From long carelessness and neglect the organisation of the country for defence by land and sea had become not only obsolete but impossible and absurd. For centuries the old vessel had been patched and tinkered and filed and riveted, occasionally by statute, more often by royal authority only, but chiefly by mere habit and custom. But now that the reaction which had established the new monarchy was over, and men, stirred by a counter-reaction, subjected the military system to the fierce heat of constitutional tests, the whole fabric fell asunder in an instant, and brought the new monarchy down headlong in its fall. The story is so instructive to a nation which has not yet given its standing army a permanent statutory existence, that it is worth while very briefly to trace the progress of the catastrophe.

According to ancient practice, the various shires were called upon to provide their levies for the Scotch war with coat-money and with conduct-money to pay their expenses till they had passed the borders of the county, from which moment they passed into the king's pay. The writs to the lord-lieutenants distinctly stated that these charges would be refunded from the Royal Exchequer, and though the chronic emptiness of the Royal Exchequer might diminish the value of the pledge, the form of the writ was distinctly consonant with[197] custom and precedent. Many of the county gentlemen, however, refused to pay this coat- and conduct-money; they had been encouraged by the attacks made on military charges in the Short Parliament; and the Crown, aware of the general opposition to all its doings, did not venture to prosecute. Another incident raised the general question of military obligations in an acuter form. In August 1640, Charles, sadly hampered by the general objections to military service on any terms, fell back on the old system of issuing Commissions of Array to the lord-lieutenants and sheriffs. In themselves Commissions of Array, especially when addressed to these particular officers, were nothing extraordinary; they had been in use to the reign of Queen Mary, and though more or less superseded by the appointment of lord-lieutenants, were by implication sanctioned by a statute of Henry the Fourth.

Now, however, these Commissions at once raised a storm. The deputy-lieutenants of Devon promptly approached the Council with an awkward dilemma. To which service, they asked, were the gentry to attach themselves, to the trained bands or to the feudal service implied in the Commissions of Array; since both were equally enjoined by proclamation? The Council answered that the service in the trained bands must be personal, and the feudal obligation satisfied by deputy or by pecuniary composition; in other words, if the gentry halted between two services, they could not go wrong in performing both. A second question from the deputy-lieutenants was still more searching: how were the bands levied under the Commissions to be paid? The reply of the Council pointed out that the laws and customs of the realm required every man, in the event of invasion, to serve for the common defence at his own charge. Here Charles was strictly within his rights; and the plea of invasion was sound, since the Scots had actually passed the Tweed. Parliament, however, seized hold of the Commissions of Array, and after innumerable arguments as to their illegality, took[198] final refuge under the Petition of Right. Stripped of all redundant phrases, the position of the two parties was this: Charles asked how he could raise an army for defence of the kingdom, if the powers enjoyed by his predecessors were stripped from him; and Parliament answered that it had no intention of allowing him any power whatever to raise such an army.[159]
August 28.
1641,
May.

The campaign in the north was speedily ended by the advance of the Scots and by the rout of the small English detachment that guarded the fords of the Tyne at Newburn. The Scots then occupied Newcastle, and England to all intent lay at their mercy. Nothing could have better suited the opponents of the king. A treaty was patched up at Ripon which amounted virtually to an agreement to subsidise the Scotch army in the interest of the Parliament. The Scots consented to stay where they were in consideration of eight hundred and fifty pounds a day, failing the payment of which it was open to them to continue their march southward and impose their own terms. Charles could not possibly raise such a sum without recourse to Parliament, and the assembly with which he had now to do was that which is known to history as the Long Parliament. Within seven months it had passed an Act to prevent its dissolution without its own consent, and having thus secured itself, it allowed the English army to be disbanded, while the Scots, having played their part, retired once more across the Tweed.
1641-2.
1642.

It would be tedious to follow the widening of the breach during the year 1641. Both parties saw that war was inevitable, and both struggled hard to keep the militia each in its own hands. The scramble was supremely ridiculous, since it was all for a prize not worth the snatching. Charles has been censured for throwing the whole military organisation out of gear because he wished to employ it for other objects than the safety of the kingdom, but it would be difficult, I[199] think, for any one to explain what military organisation existed. By the showing of the Parliamentary lawyers themselves, there was no statute to regulate it except the Statute of Winchester; in strictness there was no legal requirement for men to equip themselves otherwise than as in the year 1285. It was to the party that first made an army, not to that which preferred the sounder claim to regulate the militia, that victory was to belong. Strafford had perceived this long before, but three years were yet to pass before Parliament should realise it. The few movements worth noting in the scramble may be very briefly summarised. The king reluctantly consented to transfer the power of impressment to the justices of the peace with approval of Parliament, and abandoned his right to compel men to service outside their counties. But he refused to concede to Parliament the nomination of lord-lieutenants or the custody of strong places, and Parliament therefore simply arrogated to itself these privileges without further question. In July the Commons resolved to levy an army of ten thousand men, in August the King unfurled the Royal Standard at Nottingham; and so the Civil War began.

The lists of the two opposing armies of 1642 are still extant: the King's, of fourteen regiments of foot and eighteen troops of horse, and the Parliament's, of eighteen regiments of foot, seventy-five troops of horse, and five troops of dragoons; but it would be unprofitable to linger over them, for except on paper they were not armies at all. Two names however must be noticed. The first is that of the commander of the royal horse, Prince Rupert, a son of the Winter-King. He had now been domiciled in England for seven years, in the course of which he had found time to serve the Dutch, as we have seen, at the siege of Breda in 1639, and the Swedes in the following year, commanding with the latter a regiment of horse in more than one dashing engagement. He was now three-and-twenty, not an unripe age for a General in those days, as Condé was[200] presently to prove at Rocroi. The second name is that of the Captain of the Sixty-Seventh troop of the Parliamentary horse, Oliver Cromwell, a gentleman of Huntingdon, not inconspicuous as a member of Parliament but unknown to military fame. He was already forty-three years of age, and so far was little familiar with the profession of arms.[160]

On the 23rd of October these two men met at Edgehill, the first important action of the war, on which I shall not dwell further than to notice the part that they played therein. Rupert, knowing the deficiency of fire-arms in the royal cavalry, before the battle gave his horsemen orders to keep their ranks and to attack sword in hand, not attempting to use their pistols till they had actually broken into the enemy's squadrons. Here was an improvement on the Swedish system, a step nearer to shock-action, which was crowned by complete success. Oliver Cromwell having seen the havoc wrought by the Royalist cavalry, sought and found after the battle the cause of the inferiority of the Parliament's. "Your troops," he said to John Hampden, "are most of them old decayed serving-men and tapsters: their troops are gentlemen's sons and persons of quality. Do you think the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen who have courage, honour, and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go as far as gentlemen will go, or you will be beaten still." Hampden heard and shook his head; he was a wise and worthy person, but he had probably an idea that no men except such as those which had been swept into the ranks by the King and the King's father could possibly be induced to become soldiers. So he said that it was a good notion but impracticable. Captain Cromwell set to work to show that it was not impracticable, and began to raise men who, in his own words,[201] made some conscience of what they did, and to teach them discipline.
December.

Meanwhile the helplessness of the Parliament in the early stages of the war was almost ludicrous; and though indeed few things are more remarkable than the rapid growth of administrative ability between the years 1642 and 1658, it must be admitted that at first the civil leaders of the people were little better than children. Nearly the whole nation, and with it the majority of legislators, had made up their minds that the first battle would decide the contest, and they were woefully disappointed when it did not do so. Failing at first to realise the elementary principle that money is the sinew of war the Houses trusted at first to irregular contributions for its support, nor was it until pressed to extremity that they determined to employ general taxation. Money was the first and eternal difficulty, which however pressed even harder on the King than on the Parliament. The next obstacle was the utter collapse of the existing military organisation. The county levies were ready enough to fight in defence of their own homes, but they were unwilling to move far from them; and when the enemy had left their own particular quarter they thanked God that they were rid of him and returned to their usual avocations. This again was a difficulty that beset both sides and was never overcome by the King. The Parliament tried to meet it by the establishment of associations of counties, which were virtually military districts, and did something, though not much, to widen the narrow sympathies of the militiamen. But these associations, though a step in the right direction, depended too much on the individual energy of the men at their head to attain uniform success; and one only, the Eastern, wherein Cromwell was the moving spirit, did for a time really efficient work.

A third and most formidable danger was the superiority of the Royalist cavalry. The long neglect of the mounted service left the supremacy to the ablest[202] amateurs, and the majority of these, though there were hundreds of gentlemen on the Parliamentary side, were undoubtedly for the King. Nor was it only the courage, honour, and resolution of which Cromwell had spoken that favoured them; they had from the nature of the case better horses, a higher standard of horsemanship and equipment, a quicker natural intelligence and a higher natural training. The thousand lessons which the county gentlemen learned when riding with hawk and hound were of infinite advantage in the casual and irregular warfare of the first two or three years; and whatever may be said of Rupert's ability on the battlefield, there can be no question that the work of his innumerable patrols was admirably done. The dashing character of Rupert was also an advantage in a sense to the King's cause, for it attracted to him a group of fellow hot-heads similar to those that had followed Thomas Felton under the Black Prince. One fatal defect however marred what should have been a most efficient cavalry, the blot that had been hit by Cromwell, indiscipline.
1643.

The campaign of 1643 found Parliament little wiser than before as to the true method of conducting a war. Though it had named Lord Essex as General it gave him no control over the operations of any army but his own, and there was consequently no unity either of design or of purpose. Charles, on the contrary, had a definite plan, which had been mapped out for him by some unknown hand and was within an ace of successful execution. He himself with one army fixed his headquarters at Oxford; a second army under Newcastle was to advance from the north, a third under Prince Maurice and Sir Ralph Hopton from the extreme west, both converging on Charles as a centre; and the united forces were then to advance on London. Hopton, an experienced soldier and as noble a man as fought in the war, executed his part brilliantly, advancing victoriously into Somerset from Cornwall, and finally defeating the force specially sent to meet him by the Parliament at[203] Roundway Down. This action is memorable for the appearance, and it must be added the defeat, of what was probably the last fully mailed troop of horse ever seen in England, Sir Arthur Hazelrigg's "Lobsters," so called from the hardness of their shells. Hopton's advance was only stayed by the unwillingness of his Western levies to move any further from their homes. In the north again the Parliament had suffered disaster; the Fairfaxes, who were the mainstay of the cause, sustained a crushing defeat, and but one man stood in the way to bar Newcastle's march upon London.

That man however was Oliver Cromwell. Already he had begun to put in practice the scheme which Hampden had pronounced impracticable. He had chosen his recruits from the Puritan yeomen and farmers of the Eastern Counties, men who had thrown themselves heart and soul into the religious struggles of the time, who made some conscience of what they did, "who knew what they were fighting for and loved what they knew," and who thought it honourable to submit to rigid discipline for so noble a cause. Cromwell was now a colonel, and he had already shown the mettle of his force, while it was still incomplete, by defeating a body of twice its numbers in a skirmish at Grantham. This too he had done not by any novelty in tactics, for he admits that he attacked only at a pretty round trot, but by superiority of handling and of discipline. With the same troops strengthened and improved he now advanced and met a strong force of Newcastle's advanced horse at Gainsborough; and by skilful man?uvring and full appreciation of the principle, as yet unwritten, that in the combat of cavalry victory rests with him that throws in the last reserves, he routed it completely. Following up his success he came, unexpectedly as he admits, upon the main body of Newcastle's army, both horse and foot. Horses and men were weary after a hard day's work and a long pursuit, but they showed a bold front; and Cromwell, drawing them off by alternate bodies, once again a movement which was not to be[204] found in the text-books,[161] safely effected his retreat. In truth the man was a born soldier, and probably a great deal fonder of the profession of arms, late though he had entered upon it, than he would have cared to admit. "I have a lovely company," he wrote shortly after this action, with the genuine pride of a good regimental officer; and in spite of the rigour of his discipline his troops increased until they were sufficient to fill two complete regiments.

The danger from the north was averted for the moment, but the situation was so critical that the Parliament authorised the impressment of men and raised Essex's army to a respectable total. But meanwhile negotiations had been opened with the Scots for the advance of their army against the King's forces in the north, and by September the conditions, military, financial, and religious, were agreed upon. This treaty brought home to the Parliament the necessity for immediately opening up its communications with the north and making a way whereby the Scots might penetrate further southward. The difficult task was achieved by the united efforts of two men who here fought their first action together, Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. The day of Winceby must for this reason remain memorable in the history of the Army, not the less so because it brought Cromwell nearer to his death than any action before or after it.
1644.

By the close of the year Parliament began to realise that if the war were to be carried to a successful issue, some more effective force than mere trained bands must be called into existence. It accordingly voted that Essex's army should be fixed at a permanent establishment of ten thousand foot and four thousand horse with a regular rate of monthly pay. This was progress in the right direction, but in the disorder of the financial administration it was extremely doubtful whether the scheme would not be wrecked by its cost. Meanwhile[205] the Scots had crossed the Tweed and fairly entered as partners with the Parliament in the rebellion. This new factor led to the formation of a Committee of Both Kingdoms for the subsequent conduct of the war, an important step towards unity of design and administration but clogged by one fatal defect, namely, that the military members—Essex, Manchester, Waller, and Cromwell—were all absent in the field, and that the direction of operations therefore fell entirely into the hands of civilians. A Committee was better than a whole House, and that was all that could be said, for the new directorate soon came into collision with its officers in the field. On the invasion of the Scots, Charles of necessity altered his plan of campaign and detached Rupert to the north, who marked the line of his advance in deeper than ordinary lines of desolation and bloodshed. The Parliamentary generals in the north, Fairfax and Manchester, were at the time engaged upon the siege of York. The Committee, scared by the terror of Rupert's march, ordered them to raise the siege and move southward to meet him. They flatly refused; and their persistence in their own design led to the greatest military success hitherto achieved by the Parliament, the victory of Marston Moor.
July 2.

Of no battle are contemporary accounts more difficult of reconciliation than those of Marston Moor, but the main features of the action are distinguishable and may be briefly set down. Both armies consisted of about twenty-three thousand men, and were drawn up in two lines, the infantry in the centre and the cavalry in the flanks. On the Royalist side Rupert, as was usual for the Commander-in-Chief, led the right wing,[162] five thousand horse in one hundred troops; his centre, fourteen thousand foot, was under Eythin, a veteran officer imported from Germany; his left, four thousand cavalry, was led by Goring. On the Parliamentary[206] side Ferdinand, Lord Fairfax, commanded the right wing of horse, the first line consisting of English, the second of Scots; the centre was composed principally of Scottish infantry under old Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven; the left wing of horse was commanded by Cromwell, his first line being composed of English, and the second of Scots under the leadership of David Leslie.

With extraordinary rashness and folly Rupert led his army down close to the enemy and posted it within striking distance, trusting that a ditch which covered his front would suffice to protect him from attack. The two forces having gazed at each other during the whole afternoon without moving, he at last dismounted between half-past six and seven and called for his supper, an example which was followed by several of his officers. The Parliamentary army seized the moment to advance with its whole line to the attack. Cromwell on the left led his cavalry across the ditch, and, though Rupert was quickly in the saddle to meet him, routed the leading squadrons of the Royalists. Rupert's supports however were well in hand, and falling on Cromwell threw his troops into disorder[163] till David Leslie, an excellent officer, brought up the Parliamentary supports in their turn and routed the Royalists. Then superior discipline told; Cromwell's men quickly rallied and the whole of Rupert's horse fled away in disorder. In the centre the Parliamentary infantry was for a time equally successful, but the horse on the right wing came to utter disaster. The ground on the right was unfavourable for cavalry, being broken up by patches of gorse; and although Thomas Fairfax with a small body of four hundred men, armed with lances, broke through the enemy and rode in disorder right round the rear of the Royalist army, the main body was hopelessly beaten. Goring, after the Swedish fashion, had dotted bodies of[207] musketeers among his horse, who did their work admirably. Part of Goring's troopers galloped off first to pursue, and then to plunder the baggage, while the remainder turned against the Scotch infantry and pressed them so hard that, in spite of Leven's efforts, almost every battalion was broken and dispersed. Three alone behaved magnificently and stood firm, till in the nick of time Cromwell returned from the left to rescue them. His appearance turned the scale, and the victory of the Parliament was made certain and complete.

Rupert after the action gave Cromwell the name of Ironside; he had never encountered so tough an adversary before. Marston Moor may indeed be termed the first great day of the English cavalry. We find, curiously enough, examples of three different schools in the field, the old school of the lance under Thomas Fairfax, the Swedish of mixed horse and musketeers under Goring, and the new English of Rupert and Cromwell; but the greatest of these is Cromwell's. He alone had his men under perfect control, and had trained them not only to charge, but what is far more difficult, to rally.

Little more than a week later came the first sign of an entirely new departure in the Parliament's conduct of the war. In spite of Marston Moor the general position of its affairs was anything but favourable. The inefficiency of local committees and the narrow self-seeking of local forces, combined with the jealousy of rival commanders and the absence of a commander-in-chief, threatened to bring swift and sudden dissolution to the cause. Time had aggravated rather than diminished the evil, and unless it were remedied forthwith, it would be useless to continue the war. Sir William Waller, an able commander, who had frequently suffered defeat less from his own incapacity than from the impossibility of keeping a force together, gave the authorities plainly to understand that unless they formed a distinct permanent army of their own, properly organised, properly disciplined, and regularly paid they could not hope for success.

Mutiny, desertion, and indiscipline had dogged every[208] step of the local levies, as the Parliament very well knew; but experience still more bitter was needed before it could be induced to take Waller's advice. For the present it voted the formation of an army of ten thousand foot and three thousand horse and ordered it to be ready to march in eight days. Ignorance and infatuation could hardly go further than this. Shortly after came a great disaster in the west, nothing less than the capitulation of Essex's whole army. Then came the second battle of Newbury, which left the King in a decidedly improved position. Finally at the close of the campaign the Parliamentary forces sank into a condition which was nothing short of deplorable, the dissensions among the commanders rose to a dangerous height, and as a crowning symptom of the general collapse the Eastern Association, the strongest of all the local bodies, declared that its burden was heavier than it could bear and threw itself upon the Parliament. In the face of such a crisis the Houses could hesitate no longer, and on the 23rd of November they made over the whole state of the forces to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, with directions to consider a frame or model of the whole militia.

Thus the work that should have been done years before by Elizabeth was at length taken in hand; and the broken-down machinery of the Plantagenets was at last to be superseded. There was of course jealousy as to the hands in which so powerful an engine should be placed, and the difficulty was overcome only by the Self-denying Ordinance, which debarred members of both Houses of Parliament from command, and laid the ablest soldier in England aside as impartially as inefficient peers like Manchester and Essex. But such an evil as this could be easily remedied, for something more than an ordinance is required at such times to exclude the ablest man from the highest post. To bring the New Model into being was the first and greatest task; and this was done by the Ordinance of the 15th of February 1645. The time was come, and England had at last a regular, and as was soon to be seen, a standing army.

BOOK III CHAPTER I
Even before the Ordinance for the establishment of the New Model Army had been passed, Parliament had voted, on the motion of Oliver Cromwell, that the chief command should be given to Sir Thomas Fairfax. There is little difficulty in discovering the reason for this choice. If by the Self-denying Ordinance all members of both Houses were to be excluded from command in order to rid the country of incompetent officers, there could be no doubt that Fairfax was the man best fitted to be captain-general. He had been the soul of the Parliamentary cause in the north, and, though by no means uniformly successful in the field, had shown vigour in victory, constancy in defeat, and energy at all times. Though not comparable to Cromwell in military ability, and perhaps hardly equal either to Rupert on the one side or to George Monk on the other, he was none the less a good soldier and a gallant man, though if anything rather too fond of fighting with his own hand when he should have been directing the hands of others. He knew the value of discipline and was strong enough to enforce it, but he understood also the art of leading men as well as driving them to obedience. Heir of a noble family and born to high station, he could fill a great position with naturalness and ease; being above all things a gentleman, honourable, straightforward, disinterested, and abounding in good sense, he could occupy it without provoking envy or jealousy. No higher praise can be given to Fairfax than that every one was not only contented but pleased to serve under him.

[212]

Joined with him as sergeant-major-general, and therefore not only as commander of the foot but as chief of the staff, was the veteran Philip Skippon. His long experience of war in the Low Countries, and the respect which such experience commanded, doubtless prompted his selection to be Fairfax's chief adviser. The post of lieutenant-general, which carried with it the command of the cavalry, was left unfilled. Every one knew who was the right man for the place, and there could be little doubt but that, notwithstanding all self-denying ordinances, he must sooner or later be summoned to hold it. For the present he was employed, pending the expiration of the forty days of grace allowed him by the Ordinance, in watching the movements of the Royalist forces in the west. Though there had been trouble even with his famous regiments in the general collapse at the close of 1644, yet it was noticed that in January 1645 no troops had appeared so full in numbers, so well armed, and so civil in their carriage as Colonel Cromwell's horse. "Call them Independents or what you will," said one newspaper, "you will find that they will make Sir Thomas Fairfax a regiment of a thousand as brave and gallant horse as any in England."

This however was not to happen at once. Fairfax, having obtained the Parliament's approval of his list of officers, was busily engaged with Skippon in hewing rougher material than Cromwell's troopers into shape. Many of the disbanded regiments of Essex lay ready to his hand, but they had lately shown a mutinous spirit which it required all Skippon's tact and firmness to curb. The old man, however, as he was affectionately called, knew how to manage soldiers, and the promise of regular pay, notwithstanding that one quarter of the same was deferred as security against desertion, soon brought them cheerfully into the service. Nevertheless there were, even so, not voluntary recruits enough to supply the twenty-two thousand men required by the Ordinance; more than eight thousand were still wanting, and the Committee of Both Kingdoms could think of no better[213] means for raising them than the press-gang. This was the system which, when enforced by Charles the First, had been denounced as an intolerable grievance, and it was not less violently resisted when sanctioned by Parliament. The Government, however, carried matters with a strong hand, and a couple of executions soon brought the recalcitrant recruits to submission.

The scene of the making of the New Army which was destined to subdue the King was, by the irony of fate, royal Windsor. It is on the broad expanse of Windsor Park and on the green meadows by the Thames, before the wondering eyes of the Eton boys, that we must picture the daily parade of the new regiments, the exercise of pike and musket and the assiduous doubling of ranks and files, old Skippon, gray and scarred with wounds, riding from company to company and instituting mental comparisons between them and the English soldiers of the Low Countries, and the younger sprightlier Fairfax, still but three-and-thirty, watching with all a Yorkshireman's love of horseflesh the arrival of troopers and baggage-animals. Every day the scene grew brighter as corps after corps received its new clothing, for the whole army, for the first time in English history, was clad in the familiar scarlet. Facings of the colonel's colours distinguished regiment from regiment; and the senior corps of foot, being the General's own, wore his facings of blue.[164] Thus the royal colours, as we now call them, were first seen at the head of a rebel army.

The senior regiment of horse was also in due time to be clothed in the same scarlet and blue. For Cromwell's two regiments of horse had been selected, as was their due, to be blent into one and to take precedence, as Sir Thomas Fairfax's, of the whole of the English cavalry. In this same month of April the regiment was in the field, turning out quicker than any other corps on the sounding of the alarm, while the "lovely company" of which the colonel had boasted,[214] now called the General's troop, was distinguishing itself above all others. Modern regiments of cavalry that wear the royal colours need not be ashamed to remember that they perpetuate the dress of Oliver Cromwell's troopers. Excluded though Cromwell was from the making of the New Model Army, he was none the less its creator, for it was he who had shown the way to discipline and regimental pride.

It is now necessary briefly to sketch the organisation of the New Model. Beginning therefore with the infantry, the foot consisted of twelve regiments, each divided into ten companies of one hundred and twenty men apiece. As all the field-officers, even if they held the rank of general, had companies of their own, the full number of officers to a regiment was thirty: colonel, lieutenant-colonel, major, seven captains, ten lieutenants and ten ensigns. Each company included moreover two sergeants, three corporals, and one, if not two, drums.[165] The privates were divided as usual into an equal number of pikemen and musketeers: the weapons of officers being, for a captain, a pike; for a lieutenant, the partisan; and for an ensign, the sword. Since Skippon, a veteran of the Dutch school, was at the head of the infantry, it can hardly be doubted that the Dutch system of drill was preferred to the Swedish. Gustavus Adolphus, it must be remembered, was chiefly concerned with the Scots; while the contemporary drill books of the English prefer the teaching of Maurice of Nassau. It is therefore reasonably safe to conclude that the normal formation of the infantry of the New Model was not less than eight ranks in depth.

The cavalry consisted of eleven regiments, each of which contained six troops of one hundred men. Here[215] again every field-officer had a troop of his own, so that the full complement of officers to a regiment numbered eighteen, namely, colonel, major, four captains, six lieutenants, and six cornets. Three corporals and a trumpeter were included among the hundred men; and the admirable system which sorted each troop into three divisions, each under special charge of an officer and a corporal, was in full working order. In the matter of drill and tactics, the English cavalry was before rather than behind the times. The modified shock-action of Gustavus Adolphus had, under the influence of Rupert and Cromwell, been virtually superseded. The men indeed were still armed, according to the old fashion, with iron helmet and cuirass, and still carried each a brace of pistols as well as a sword; but they were instructed to trust to their swords in the charge, and to use their fire-arms only in the pursuit. Gustavus had formed his horse as a rule in four ranks; Rupert fixed the depth at three;[166] the Parliamentary officers went so far as to reduce the ranks to two, sacrificing depth to frontage, and trusting to speed, we cannot doubt, to overcome weight. Last and most daring innovation of all, they abolished the file as the tactical unit of the troop and substituted the rank in its place.[167] No better testimony to the improvement of English discipline could be found than this reduction in the depth of the ranks of cavalry. For once it may be said that the English horse stood in advance of all Europe.

As regards the duties of reconnaissance, not a treatise on cavalry omits to mention that it is the function of the horse to scour the ways in advance of an army; but there are no precise directions as to the manner of fulfilling it. Cromwell's constant references [216]to a "forlorn" of horse show that he employed advanced parties regularly, and attention has already been called to the efficiency of Rupert's patrols. There is no evidence, however, that the men received any instruction in the matter of reconnaissance, and it is only from the Royalist Vernon that we learn that vedettes were posted then, as now, in pairs.

The dragoons of the New Model seem, in spite of a resolution of the Commons that they should be regimented, to have been organised in ten companies, each one hundred strong. Their officers were a colonel, a major, eight captains, ten lieutenants, and ten ensigns. The dragoons were mounted infantry pure and simple, riding for the sake of swifter mobility only, and provided with inferior horses. They were armed with the musket and drilled like their brethren of the foot; their junior subalterns were called ensigns and not cornets, and they obeyed not the trumpet but the drum. Their normal formation was in ten ranks of ten men abreast. For action, nine out of the ten dismounted, and linking their horses by the simple method of throwing the bridle of each over the head of his neighbour in the ranks, left them in charge of the tenth man.[168]

Next we must glance at the Artillery which, together with the transport, was comprehended under the head of the Train. The only organised force of which we hear as attached to the train is two regiments of infantry and two companies of firelocks, which were used for purposes of escort only. The firelocks were distinguished from the rest of the army by wearing tawny instead of scarlet coats, and seem therefore to have been a peculiar people, but the immediate connection of flint-lock muskets with cannon is not apparent.[217] The truth seems to be that the English were behind the times in respect of field artillery, and indeed we hear little of guns, except siege-cannon, during the whole period of the Civil War. English military writers of the period rarely make much of artillery in a pitched battle. They recommend indeed that the enemy's guns should be captured by a rush as early as possible, and they generally agree that cannon should be posted on an eminence, since a ball travels with greater force downhill than uphill. On the other hand, it was objected even to this simple rule that if guns were pointed downhill there was always the risk of the shot rolling out of the muzzle, so that in truth the gunner seems to have been sadly destitute of fixed principles for his guidance in action.

The neglect of field artillery in England is the more remarkable inasmuch as English gun-founders enjoyed a high reputation in Europe. The cannon of that day were necessarily heavy and cumbrous, since the bad quality and slow combustion of the powder made great length imperative; but there was no excuse for not imitating the light field-pieces of Gustavus Adolphus. The probable reason for the backwardness of the English was the peculiar organisation of the Dutch artillery, which gave no opening for the instruction of English gunners in the school of the Low Countries. Nevertheless there was a distinct drill for the working of guns, with thirteen words of command for the wielding of ladle and sponge and rammer. A gun's crew consisted of three men—the gunner, his mate, often called a matross, and an odd man who gave general assistance; and the number of little refinements that are enjoined upon them show that the artillerymen took abundant pride in themselves. Thus the withdrawal of the least quantity of powder with the ladle after loading was esteemed a "foul fault for a gunner to commit," while the spilling even of a few grains on the ground was severely reprobated, "it being a thing uncomely for a gunner to trample powder under his[218] feet." Lastly, every gunner was exhorted to "set forth himself with as comely a posture and grace as he can possibly; for the agility and comely carriage of a man in handling his ladle and sponge is such an outward action as doth give great content to the standers-by." Nevertheless artillerymen seem nowhere, and least of all in England, to have been very popular. They had an evil reputation all over Europe for profane swearing, a failing which is attributed by one writer to their enforced commerce with infernal substances, but which was more probably due to the fact that, being less perfectly organised than other branches of the army, they were less amenable to rigid discipline.

But if the gunners were but a casual and ill-administered force, much more so were the drivers. Over a thousand draught-horses were collected for the general use of the New Model, but how many, if any, of these were set apart for the artillery, it is impossible to say. Ordinary waggoners with their teams were impressed or hired to haul the guns, and it is recorded that the hackney-coachmen of London performed the duty more than once. The chief use of the escort of infantry was therefore to prevent the drivers from running away. It is doubtful whether the guns themselves travelled on four wheels or on two, contemporary drawings showing instances of both; but in either case there was no approach to what is now called the limber, the horses being harnessed simply to the trail.[169] The ammunition again was transported in ordinary waggons, the powder being indeed occasionally made up into cartridges, but more often carried simply in barrels which were unloaded behind the gun when it was posted for action. It was the function of the odd man of the gun's crew to cover up the powder-barrel between each discharge of the gun, to avert the danger of a general explosion. In fact, one principal link alone connects the artillery of the New Model with the artillery of to-day, the gun-carriages were painted of a fair lead-colour.

[219]

Lastly we come to the Engineers, a corps which is more obscure to us even than the Artillery. Even in the days of the Plantagenets the English kings had taken Cornish miners with them for their sieges; and in the war of Dutch Independence Yorkshire colliers were specially employed for the digging of mines. But, although by the middle of the sixteenth century the Germans had already organised a corps of sappers,[170] no such thing existed in England. In truth, the British were not fond of the spade. The English indeed handled it often enough under Vere and his successors, while the Scots, though sorely against the grain, were forced to do the like by Gustavus Adolphus. But considering the schools wherein the British were trained, nothing is more remarkable in the Civil War than the neglect of field-fortification and the extreme inefficiency with which at any rate the earlier sieges were conducted. It is significant that the pioneers,[171] who are the only men that we hear of in connection with the unorganised corps of engineers, were the very scum of the army, and that degradation to be "an abject pioneer" was a regular punishment for hardened offenders. It is still more significant that the principal engineers of the New Model Army bear not English but foreign names.

So much for the various branches of the military service: it remains to say a few words of the Army as a whole. Of the organisation of what would now be called the War Department, it is extremely difficult to speak. There was a parliamentary Committee of the Army, which seems to have enjoyed at first an intermittent and later a continuous existence, and which was entrusted with the general direction of its affairs and in particular with the business of recruiting. There were also Treasurers at War, who were charged with the financial administration, and there was the already venerable Office of Ordnance, which was responsible for arms and equipment. Speaking generally, though the functions of the [220]Committee and of the treasurers seemed to have overlapped each other at various points, the military administration seems to have tended to the following allocation of responsibility: that the Committee of the Army took charge of the men, the Office of Ordnance of the weapons and stores, and the Treasurers at War of the finance, while the Commander-in-Chief was answerable for the discipline of the Army.

Passing next to purely military organisation, which of course fell within the province of the Lord-General, it is to be remarked that the makers and commanders of the New Model knew of no better distribution of command than under the three heads of Infantry, Cavalry, and Train. There was no such thing as a division comprehending a proportion of all three arms under the control of a divisional commander; and though we do hear frequently of brigades, the word signifies merely the temporary grouping of certain corps under a single officer, rarely an essential part of the general organisation. The subjoined list gives a tolerable idea of the allotment of functions among the members of the staff. It is only necessary to add that all orders of the commander-in-chief were issued through the sergeant-major-general, distributed by him to the sergeant-majors or, as they are now called, majors of the different regiments, and by the sergeant-majors in their turn to the sergeants of every company and the corporals of every troop.
Commander-in-Chief.
His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax, Knight, Captain-General.

Headquarter Staff.
(Chief of the Staff)—Major-General[172] Skippon.
Commissary-General of the Musters.—Comm.-Gen. Stone (with two deputies).
Commissary-General of Victuals.—Comm.-Gen. Orpin.
[221] Commissary-General of Horse Provisions.—Comm.-Gen. Cooke.
(Transport) Waggon-Master-General.—Master Richardson.
(Intelligence) Scout-Master-General.—Major Watson.
(Military Chest) Eight Treasurers at War (civilians),
(with one deputy).
Judge Advocate-General.—John Mills (civilian).
(Medical) Physicians to the Army.—Doctors Payne and Strawhill.
" Apothecary to the Army.—Master Web.
" Chaplain to the Army.—Master Boles.
(Military Secretary) Secretary to the Council of War.—Mr.
John Rushworth (civilian), with two clerks.
(Aides-de-Camp) Messengers to the Army.—Mr. Richard
Chadwell, Mr. Constantine Heath.

Foot.[173]
Major-General    Skippon.
Quartermaster-General    Spencer.
Assistant-Quartermaster-General    Master Robert Wolsey.
Adjutant-General    Lieutenant-Colonel Gray.
Marshal-General    Captain Wykes.

Ten regiments of foot; each regiment of ten companies; each company of one hundred and twenty men, exclusive of the officers.
Regiment.    Colonel.    Regiment.    Colonel.
1st.    {    Sir Thomas Fairfax.    5th.    Harley.
Lieut.-Colonel Jackson.    6th.    Montague.
2nd.    {    Major-General Skippon.    7th.    Lloyd.
Lieut.-Colonel Frances.    8th.    Pickering.
3rd.        Sir Hardress Waller.    9th.    Fortescue.
4th.        Hammond.    10th.    Farringdon.

Horse.
Lieutenant-General    Oliver Cromwell.
Commissary-General    Henry Ireton.
Quartermaster-General    Fincher.
Adjutants-General    Captains Fleming and Evelyn.
Marshal-General    Captain Laurence.
Mark-Master General    Mr. Francis Child.

Eleven regiments of horse; each of six troops; each troop of one hundred men, besides officers.

[222]
Regiment.    Colonel.    Regiment.    Colonel.
1st.    {    Sir Thomas Fairfax.    6th.    Lieut.-General Cromwell.
Major Disbrowe.    7th.    Rich.
2nd.        Butler.    8th.    Sir Robert Pye.
3rd.        Sheffield.    9th.    Whalley.
4th.        Fleetwood.    10th.    Graves.
5th.        Rossiter.    11th.    Comm.-General Ireton.

The captain-general's bodyguard consisted of one troop, taken from his regiment of horse, under Colonel Doyley.

Dragoons.

Colonel Okey.

Ten companies each of one hundred men, besides officers.

Train.
Lieut.-General of the Ordnance    Lieut.-General Hammond.
Controller of the Ordnance    Captain Deane.
Engineer General    Peter Manteau van Dalem.
Engineer Extraordinary    Captain Hooper.
Chief Engineer    Eval Tercene.
Engineers    Master Lyon, Master Tomlinson.
Master Gunner of the Field    Francis Furin.
Captain of Pioneers    Captain Cheese.
A Commissary of Ammunition
A Commissary of the Draught Horses
Two Regiments of Infantry    { Colonel Rainborough's.
{ Colonel Weldon's.
Two companies of Firelocks.

April 30.

The regiments of the New Model were not yet complete when Fairfax received orders from the Committee of Both Kingdoms to march westward to the relief of Taunton. It is extraordinary that this presumptuous body of civilians, even after it had provided the General with an efficient army, still took upon itself to direct the plan of campaign. It is still more extraordinary that Fairfax, who had disregarded it before Marston Moor, should now have meekly obeyed. Charles, whose chief hopes rested in a junction with the gallant and victorious Montrose, was actually moving northward to meet him while Fairfax was[223] tramping away to Taunton. Nay, even after Taunton had been relieved, the sage Committee could think of no better employment for the New Model than to set it down to the siege of Oxford. Fatuity could hardly go further than this. There were in the field on both sides four armies in all, ranged alternately, so to speak, in layers from north to south. Northernmost of all was Montrose, below him in Yorkshire lay Leven with the Scots, south of Leven was Charles, and south of Charles the New Model. And yet the Committee proposed to keep Fairfax inactive before Oxford while Charles and Montrose crushed Leven between hammer and anvil.
May 9.

A brilliant victory of Montrose at Auldearn brought matters to a crisis. Leven was compelled to retreat into Westmoreland; and the Scots insisted that Fairfax must break up from before Oxford and move up towards the King. Charles, meanwhile, with his usual indecision had suspended his march northward for the sake of capturing Leicester, and was now lying at Daventry, uncertain whither to go next. Fairfax called a council of war, which decided to seek out the enemy and fight him wherever he could be found, and, more important still, requested the appointment of Cromwell to the vacant post of lieutenant-general. The Parliament meanwhile had come to its senses, and resolved that the General should henceforth conduct his own campaign without the advice of a committee of civilians. Having done so, it could hardly refuse to sanction the return of Cromwell. He was therefore summoned to headquarters; and Fairfax began to work in earnest. So energetic were his movements, when once the paralysing hand of the Committee was withdrawn, that the Royalists at once jumped to the conclusion that "Ironside" had rejoined the army.

He had not yet rejoined it, and yet the Royalists were right, for it was his spirit, the spirit of discipline, that was abroad in the army. The New Model was by no means perfect when it marched from Windsor at the end of April 1645. The old failings of insubordination,[224] desertion, and plunder, natural enough among a body of men largely recruited by impressment, showed themselves abundantly at the outset of the march to Oxford, but they were put down with a strong hand, not by preaching, but by hanging. Nor was it by severity only that Fairfax brought men to their duty. According to custom, every regiment was told off in succession to furnish the rearguard, but when the turn of Fairfax's regiment came, the men claimed that, being the General's own, they had a right to a permanent place in the van. Fairfax said nothing, but simply jumped off his horse and tramped along in the midst of them in the rearguard; and after this there were no more quarrels over precedence. After a month in the field the newspapers could report that oaths, quarrelling and drunkenness were unknown in the New Model. "Yea, but let Cromwell be called back," they added; and before long this too was done. At six o'clock on the morning of the 13th of June, while Fairfax was sitting at a council of war, Cromwell marched into the camp at Kislingbury at the head of his regiment. It was but a small reinforcement of six hundred troopers, but as they rode in a cheer rose from the cavalry which was taken up by the whole army, as the word ran round the camp that Noll was come.
June 14.

Next day was fought the battle of Naseby. It was not a well-managed fight. After considerable shifting of position, so much prolonged that Rupert came to the conclusion that Fairfax wished to decline an engagement, the New Model Army was finally drawn up on the plateau of a ridge about a mile to the north-east of Naseby village. It lay behind the brow of a hill which slopes down somewhat steeply to a valley below called the Broadmoor, and was formed according to the usual fashion of the time. Six regiments of three thousand six hundred horse formed the right wing, seven thousand infantry under Skippon made up the centre, two thousand four hundred more horse under Ireton made the left. Ireton's flank was covered by a hedge,[225] which by Cromwell's direction was lined with dismounted dragoons.

The disposition of the Royalists was of the same kind, though their force was of little more than half the strength of the New Model. The right wing of cavalry was under Rupert, the centre of infantry under old Sir Jacob Astley, the left wing of cavalry under Sir Marmaduke Langdale. Each army held two or three regiments of infantry in reserve.

Rupert, conspicuous in a red cloak, opened the action by a rapid advance with his horse against Fairfax's left. Ireton thereupon drew over the brow of the hill to meet him, and Rupert, evidently rather astonished to find so large a force in front of him, incontinently halted. Ireton then made the fatal mistake of halting likewise. Whether he was hampered by the ground or unequal to the task of handling so large a body of horse, is uncertain; but, whatever the reason, his wing was in disorder, and instead of continuing the advance he began to correct his dispositions. Rupert at once seized the moment to attack. A few divisions under Ireton's immediate leadership charged gallantly enough and held their own until driven back by Rupert's supports, but the rest hung back, and Rupert pressing on, as was his wont, scattered them in confusion. Ireton, losing his head, instead of trying to rally them, plunged down with his few squadrons on the Royalist infantry, was beaten back, wounded and taken prisoner; and in fact the left wing of the New Model was for the time completely overthrown. Away went Rupert in hot pursuit with his troopers at his heels for a mile beyond the battlefield, and galloping up to the park of Parliamentary baggage, summoned it to surrender. He was answered by a volley of musketry, and then too late he recollected himself and rode back to the true scene of action.

In the centre also matters again had gone ill with the Parliament. Skippon was wounded early in the day, and though he refused to leave the field was unable[226] actively to direct the engagement. Either his dispositions were incomplete, or his colonels were helpless without him; but the left centre, its flank exposed by Ireton's defeat, gave way and in spite of all the efforts of the officers could not be rallied. Fortunately Fairfax's regiment on the right centre stood firm; and the steadiness of three regiments in the reserve enabled the Parliamentary infantry to maintain the struggle.

But it was on the right that the best soldier in the field was stationed, and his presence counted for very much. He too was hampered by bad ground, patches of gorse and a rabbit-warren on his extreme right preventing all possibility of a general advance of his wing. But instead of halting like Ireton he took the initiative in attack. The leftmost troops under Whalley, having good ground before them, at once moved down, fired their pistols at close range,[174] and fell in with the sword. Langdale's horse met them gallantly enough, but were beaten back and retired in rear of the King's reserve, where they rallied. But Whalley's supports came up quickly to second him, and meanwhile the rest of Cromwell's wing came up as best it could over the broken ground, and falling on the opposing bodies of Royalist horse routed all in succession. The Royalists retreated for a quarter of a mile and rallied; and Cromwell, detaching part of his horse to watch them, rode down with three regiments against the King's reserve of horse. Charles, to do him justice, bore himself gallantly enough, but some one gave the unlucky word, "To the right turn—march!" whereupon the whole of his men turned tail and sweeping the King along with them joined their beaten comrades in rear. Thither also presently came Rupert with such a following of blown and beaten horses as he could collect. Ireton's wing had rallied, and was pressing so close on his rear that he dared not stop; and Rupert's foolish[227] and premature pursuit had squandered his squadrons as effectually as a defeat.

The whole of Charles's army was now beaten or dispersed except his centre, and against this the whole force of the Parliamentary army was now directed. Okey, who commanded the dragoons, finding the ground clear before him, made his men mount and attacked it in flank; Fairfax's regiment of foot engaged it in front, and Ireton's rallied troopers in rear. All soon laid down their arms excepting a single battalion,[175] which stood alone with incredible courage and resolution till it was fairly overwhelmed. Even so, however, Fairfax dared not advance further till he had reformed his whole line of battle. But the Royalists could not face a second attack; they turned and fled; and the Parliament's cavalry pursued the fugitives for fourteen miles, capturing the whole of the King's artillery, his baggage, and practically his entire army. It was a decisive victory though not a very glorious one. But for Cromwell, who alone after Skippon's fall seems to have kept his wits about him and his men in hand, Naseby would probably have added one more to the indecisive battles of the Civil War.
1646.
Sept. 13.

Nevertheless the New Model had won its first action, and Fairfax now started on a campaign to the west, which did not end until he had penetrated through Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, and crushed Royalism under foot even to the Land's End. It was a long march of incessant and at first of severe fighting, which taxed the mettle even of his best soldiers, but the army gathered strength, in spite of constant hardships, in its swift progress from victory to victory, and by the summer of 1646 it had finished the work begun at Naseby and was virtually master of England. Meanwhile the persistent folly of the King had raised it from a partisan to a national army. Charles, who had no[228] spark of patriotic feeling in him, had from the first striven not only to set nationality against nationality within the British Isles, but had appealed to foreigners from France, Lorraine, and Holland to uphold his rights. All these transactions had been revealed by the capture of his baggage at Naseby; and his defiance of all the insular prejudice of the English damaged him unspeakably even with those who were most sincerely attached to his cause. Margaret of Anjou was not yet forgotten; and if men coupled Charles's name with hers, it was no more than he deserved. Now, however, he was beaten, beaten on every side. In the first six months of 1645 Montrose, perhaps the most brilliant natural military genius disclosed by the Civil War, had scored success after success with a handful of Scots and Irish. A woman in emotion and instability, a man in courage, and a magician in leadership, he was an ideal leader for such untameable, combative spirits, the stuff of which Dundonalds are made. Yet Montrose's work had been undone at Philiphaugh, and Charles's last hope was gone. A few more ineffectual struggles to divide England against herself, and he was to be purged away as a public enemy by the ever victorious army.
CHAPTER II
On the subjugation of the west the English Parliament thought for the present only of securing its position within England itself. It has been seen how at the first outbreak of the war the Parliamentary leaders had taken the Scottish army into pay, and how even after the formation of the New Model they had tried to saddle it with the hardest of the work. In truth, the behaviour of the Parliament towards the Scots had been sufficiently shifty and ungracious; it had taken at any rate some care to pay its own troops, but it persistently neglected its allies, who had done excellent service in the north. Indeed, had Leven yielded to the English Parliament's wishes, had he not in fact been forced by the victory at Auldearn to retreat, the Scots instead of the English might have won the Naseby of the Civil War, an event which would have led to untold complications. Now however that the English army had done the work for itself, all parties in England became anxious to be rid of the Scots. Matters were somewhat confused by the fact that in 1646 Charles threw himself into the hands of Scotland; but by the close of the year it was agreed that the Scottish army should be paid off and withdrawn over the border, and that the King should be surrendered to the English, who had conquered him. The Parliament therefore gained its great object, a free hand for the management of its own affairs. It overlooked however in its calculations one important factor, the Army.
1647.

At the opening of 1647 there was a general cry[230] throughout England for peace. The country was exhausted; the finance of the Parliament was in hopeless disorder; and the people groaned under the enormous expense of the war. Obviously the most natural item for retrenchment was the Army; its work was done, and there was no further reason for its existence; it should therefore be disbanded or at any rate very greatly reduced. Moreover economy was not the only motive that prompted such a policy. The Parliament, united for the moment in the general desire to get quit of the Scots, fell back, almost immediately after this was accomplished, into faction. Presbyterians and Independents were the original names of the two rival parties, but for our purpose it is simpler to narrow them forthwith to Parliament and Army; for among many of the Presbyterian members who had held commands in the first years of the war, there existed a professional as well as a political and religious jealousy of the successful officers who had supplanted them. Parliament having created the Army by a vote thought that it could extinguish it by the same simple process; having used it as a ladder whereon to rise to undisputed supremacy it now proposed to kick it down. But such an Army was not disposed to make itself a plaything of Parliament.

Petitions from various quarters for the disbandment of the New Model turned the heads rather than strengthened the hands of the two Houses. The only safe and honest course, if the Army must be disbanded, was to discharge the whole of the country's obligations to it in full. Now the pay of the foot was eighteen weeks and of the horse forty-two weeks in arrear, and the total debt due to the forces amounted to three hundred and thirty thousand pounds. The Parliament was in straits for money and by no means inclined to make the necessary effort to raise this sum. It proposed as an alternative to turn twelve thousand of the soldiers into a new army for the pacification of Ireland, and this without a word as to the terms on which the men had[231] taken service, and without the least mention of a settlement of arrears. Further, as if it were not enough to irritate the men, the Parliament did its best to alienate the officers. It passed resolutions insulting to the army, insulting to Fairfax, insulting to Cromwell. So deeply injured indeed was Oliver by this ungrateful treatment, that he thought seriously of carrying his sword and such troops as he could raise to the wars in Germany. Such was the pitch of disgust to which the Parliament had driven the ablest of its servants.

The Army raised its first protest in the form of a respectful petition from the men: the Parliament met it with violent and ungracious censure. Certain officers who had supported this petition then tendered a vindication of their conduct: the Commons refused even to read it. Finally, as if to aggravate the Army to extremity, the Lords proposed to grant the troops six weeks' pay in temporary satisfaction of arrears. This was too much. Discontent grew apace in the ranks, the men refused to have anything to do with service in Ireland, and finally the Army, by the election of two representatives for each regiment, organised itself for the orderly maintenance of its just claims. These representatives were called agitators, a name which in those days signified simply agents. The degradation of the term in our own time into a synonym for political busy-bodies must not mislead us, nor blind us to the dignified patience, under extreme provocation, of this irresistible body of disciplined men.
May 25.

For the moment the Parliament was awed into concessions and promises, but its leaders did not lightly submit to humiliation, and rather than yield to the Army looked about for a force to countervail it. First they turned to the City of London, which was strongly Presbyterian, and sought an armed force in the City train-bands. Next they resorted to Scotland, which was intensely jealous of the New Model, and formed a coalition with it in favour of the King, thereby[232] sowing the seeds of a quarrel between North and South Britain. Finally, after stultifying itself by a promise of attention to the Army's complaints, it passed an Ordinance for its disbandment without further ado. This was past endurance. The soldiers broke into open mutiny; and Fairfax and Cromwell, having striven in vain to gain justice for their men, and at the same time to keep them in subordination to the Parliament, placed themselves at the head of a movement which they could no longer repress. It was indeed high time, for the Presbyterian leaders had already invited the Prince of Wales to place himself at the head of the Scots for an invasion of England.
August 6.

On the 4th of June the Army assembled about four miles from Newmarket at Kentford Heath. There in the course of the next few days it erected a general council, composed of the general officers who had taken the side of the men and of two officers and two privates from each regiment, and made a written declaration of its policy. Still the Parliament remained obstinate, and now endeavoured to enlist the discharged soldiers of the earlier armies in order to meet force with force. The Army advanced to Triplow Heath, whither Parliament sent a last message to propose terms for an agreement. The overtures were rejected, and the Army continued its advance. In panic fear the Parliament now offered bribes to any officers or men who would desert the Army. This contemptible device was a total failure. It then tried to raise troops, to reopen negotiations with the Army, to call out the London trained bands, to forbid the Army's further advance, to gain certain troops, which were not of the New Model, from the north; all was in vain. Irresistible as fate, the Army marched on. At St. Albans it halted and issued a manifesto demanding the expulsion of eleven of its enemies from the Commons, and receiving no encouragement advanced to Uxbridge. There again it halted and spent three weeks in the hopeless effort to arrange a peaceful[233] settlement with the King; and finally it marched straight into London and occupied the capital.

Still the Commons persevered in opposition to the Army; and at last Cromwell, without the orders and in spite of the unwillingness of Fairfax, gave the Presbyterian majority a strong hint to convert itself into a minority. His arguments consisted of one regiment of horse, stationed in Hyde Park, and a small party of foot at the door of the House; and they were sufficient and conclusive. The House thus purged, Cromwell turned to the task which was to occupy the remainder of his life and drive him worn-out to his grave, a final settlement of the original quarrel. Wisely enough he thought that this could be effected only by agreement with the King; and it was to negotiation with Charles Stuart for this object that he now devoted the whole of his energy. But negotiation with a man who was constitutionally incapable of straightforward and honourable dealing could have but one end. The lower ranks of the Army, not more far-seeing but less sanguine than their leader, again interposed. A section of extremists, known at that time by the name of Levellers, began, as is usual at such times, to raise its head, and condemning all further traffic with the King boldly put forward a revolutionary scheme of its own.

Herein, however, the Levellers mistook their man. However Cromwell might be distracted by the difficult questions of a settlement, he was perfectly clear on one point, that the discipline of the Army must be maintained. Symptoms all too significant appeared that that discipline was impaired, and he lost no time in restoring it. One regiment refusing to obey his orders, Cromwell promptly drew his sword and rode single-handed straight into the middle of the malcontents. His resolution speedily convinced the men that he would not be trifled with; the mutineers yielded, and a single execution sufficed to re-establish order.
1648,
January.

Then as usual the portentous folly of the King united all parties not only in the Army but in England[234] against himself. He might have made honourable terms with Cromwell; he preferred to throw himself into the arms of the Scots. Both Houses of Parliament thereupon broke with their North British allies, and the dispute assumed the new phase of a quarrel between English and Scots. English refugees inflamed national feeling at Edinburgh, and on the 11th of April the Scottish Parliament pronounced the treaty between the two nations to be broken. By the first week in May the army which was to invade England began slowly to assemble, and on the 8th of July it crossed the border, ten thousand five hundred strong, and occupied Carlisle.
July.

Meanwhile the energies of the English had been distracted by Royalist risings in Kent and in Wales which kept Fairfax and Cromwell both busily employed; and it was not till the 11th of July that Cromwell was able to leave Pembroke and march to the north. Even then his force, after a trying campaign in very inclement weather, was in no very good state. He was entirely destitute of artillery, and his men were most of them both shoeless and stockingless. In one principal respect, however, the force was strong, for it was perfect in spirit and in discipline. I shall not dwell on the details of Cromwell's dash from Wales into Yorkshire. The Scots, embarrassed by a multitude of commanders, suffered him to attack their far more numerous army in detail, when it was divided on opposite banks of the Ribble; and after one sharp engagement at Preston the campaign resolved itself into a mere pursuit of the beaten Scots. How hotly Cromwell pressed the chase, and with what hardships to his own little army, may be read in his own despatches. Unfavourable weather, torrents of rain, and the miserable state of the roads brought men and horses to the last stage of exhaustion. "The Scots," wrote Cromwell, "are so tired and in such confusion that if my horse could but trot after them we could take them all, but we are so weary we can scarce [235]be able to do more than walk after them ... my horse are miserably beaten out, and we have ten thousand prisoners." The memory of this swift raid into Yorkshire, and of the unrelenting chase that followed it should be treasured by the British cavalry that fought through the Pindarri war and the Central Indian campaign of 1857-58.

With the close of the pursuit after Preston, the second Civil War came to an end. The operations of Fairfax in the south had shown him at his very best, swift, active, and resolute, and had been brilliantly successful. Those of Cromwell in the north, though they were directed against Royalist Scotland only, not yet the sterner Scotland of the Covenant, had been crushing. England was now completely under the sway of the Parliament; but it became a question whether Parliament was its own master. A movement arose in the Army for the punishment of the men who had brought all this bloodshed upon the country, and in particular of the chief delinquent, Charles Stuart, who was guiltiest of all. By a final overture for a settlement the Army gave the King a last chance, and on its failure appealed to Parliament to bring him to justice.
1649.

Ireton seems to have been the moving spirit in the actions that followed, though there can be no doubt that Cromwell was in full sympathy with them. Oliver was intensely English in spirit, and had been greatly exasperated by the English Royalists who had called the Scots over the border. He was vehement for justice upon them, and upon the King as the chief of them. Parliament, on the other hand, was engaged in nominal negotiations with Charles; and it was therefore not to be expected that it would comply with the Army's request that he should be brought to trial. But the Army was not to be stopped. The King's person was seized; the Parliament was purged of recalcitrant members; and from these actions to the High Court of Justice the march was short. One leading soldier, Fairfax, did indeed recoil from the final step, but the majority of the officers pressed on; and on the 30th of[236] January 1649, the King was brought out into the ring of red coats to meet his death. He had done his worst against the British Isles. He had invited foreign armies against England, and when he failed had roused Welsh, Scots, and Irish to a hopeless effort to subdue her. But he succeeded only in establishing her strength; and the fall of his head was but the first instalment of the great work done by Cromwell and the Army towards the unity of the islands under the supremacy of England.

We have a pleasant glimpse of Oliver in his lighter moods before he next unsheathed his sword. On the evening of the 23rd of February, as he and Ireton were returning from dinner with Bulstrode Whitelocke, their coach was stopped by the soldiers who were in charge of the streets. They explained who they were, but the captain of the guard would not believe them and threatened to put them into the guard-room. Ireton began to lose his temper, but Cromwell laughed, and pulling out twenty shillings gave them to the men as a reward for doing their duty. Less than three weeks later he was summoned to take command of the army that was collecting for the reconquest of Ireland; for that unlucky island had been chosen by the Royalists as the base of operations for the invasion of England. Rupert, now turned admiral, had already sailed to Kinsale to enlist Irish sailors, and the faithful Ormonde had invited Charles the Second to place himself at the head of the loyal party in Ireland. Cromwell was not unwilling to undertake the duty. He had no idea of yielding England either to Scots or Irish, least of all to the Irish, whose land was regarded rather as a colony than as an integral part of the realm, and was also a stronghold of papistry. Still he declined to accept the command until he had assured himself that all the wants of his troops should be satisfied; he loved his men and would not suffer them to be enticed by the magic of his name to thankless or unprofitable service.

Four regiments of foot and one of horse were then[237] chosen by lot, and the men were informed that they need not go to Ireland unless they wished, but that if they refused they would be discharged from the Army. Several hundred men thereupon at once threw down their arms and were dismissed; but by some blunder, which was none of Cromwell's, not a word was said about the payment of the arrears that were due to them. The idea spread through the ranks that they must either go to Ireland or forfeit those arrears; discontent was naturally aroused and presently burst out into formidable mutiny. Fairfax and Cromwell, however, could depend on their own regiments, and faced the danger with extraordinary swiftness and energy. The mutineers were suppressed with a strong hand. One ringleader was executed in St. Paul's Churchyard, a cornet and a corporal were shot before the eyes of their comrades against the walls of Burford Church, and discipline was again restored. Shortly after, Parliament passed an Ordinance to relieve the financial difficulties of the soldiers, and the preparations for the Irish campaign were resumed. It is curious to note the extreme slowness with which the civilians learned that soldiers were after all men of flesh and blood, not puppets to be hugged or broken according to the caprice of the hour.

The details of the preparations for the war in Ireland may still be read in the State Papers of the time. There are still to be seen the orders for fifteen thousand cassocks, "Venice-red colour, shrunk in water," the like number of pairs of breeches "of grey or other good colour," ten thousand shirts, ten thousand hats and bands,[176] one thousand iron griddles, fifteen hundred kettles, giving a curious picture of the equipment of the first English regular army for what was then esteemed to be foreign service. But I shall not follow the red coats through the terrible Irish campaign of 1649. It was not, like the later war with the Scots, an honourable[238] contest for supremacy: it was rather the stern suppression of a rebellion, wherein the spirit of the masters was inflamed by the insolence of long superiority, by the bitterness of religious hatred, and by the recollection of past outrages which, even if truly reported, would have kindled men to vengeance, and when exaggerated by rage and fear fairly blinded them to mercy. If any Englishman doubted whether the Irish could fight with desperate gallantry he was undeceived at the storm of Drogheda and at Clonmel: but they could not stand, untrained and unorganised as they were, against the veterans of the New Model. Much has been said about Cromwell's cruelty, and that he was ruthlessly severe there can be no question; but when we speak of cruelty we should take at any rate some account of the standard of humanity in the warfare of the seventeenth century. The Irish War was a war of races, a war of creeds, and a war of vengeance. That there should therefore have been such slaughter as at Drogheda and at Wexford is nothing surprising,[177] however deplorable. What is really remarkable in such a war is that Cromwell, from the moment of landing, should have paid his way, visited plunder with the sharpest penalties, and upheld the sternest and most inflexible discipline. Forty years later, when the conquest of Ireland was undertaken by a former marshal of France and a king long schooled in war against the first generals of the time, they were glad to search out Cromwell's plans for his Irish campaign and follow them at such a distance as they might.
1650,
January 8.
June 12.
June 26.

Cromwell was still in full career of victory when the alarming news of a treaty between Charles the Second and the Scots moved the Parliament to recall him to watch over its own safety. He arrived in London on the 1st of June, and was joyfully welcomed not only by Fairfax and the officers of the Army but by all ranks and all classes. It was now almost certain that the Scots would invade England in the King's[239] name, and no time was lost by the Council of State in appointing Fairfax and Cromwell to command the English army in the north. That they would work loyally together in the field no one could doubt; but when the Council consulted the two generals as to plan of campaign, their opinions were found to be diametrically opposed to each other. Cromwell was for taking the bull by the horns and carrying the war into Scotland before the Scots could cross the border; Fairfax, never quite at his ease since the establishment of the Commonwealth, thought such aggressive action unjustifiable. It is impossible to believe that this was his true military opinion, but not all the arguments of the Council nor the pressing entreaty of Cromwell could prevail with him to alter it. Despite all protests he resigned his commission on the plea of physical infirmity, and from this moment passes out of the history of the Army. Never perhaps has that Army possessed a more popular and deservedly popular commander-in-chief.

Only one man could be his successor. On the self-same 26th of June Cromwell received his commission as captain-general and commander-in-chief; and two days later he started on his journey to the north. Charles Fleetwood was his lieutenant-general, John Lambert, an excellent soldier, his major-general; and joined to his staff was another officer whom we saw fighting in the Low Countries many years ago, Colonel George Monk. He had served in the Civil War first with the Royalists, and had been taken prisoner by Fairfax at Nantwich in January 1645; he had then passed some time in confinement in the Tower, and finally had taken service with the Parliament in Ireland, where his merit had attracted the attention of Cromwell. Oliver was now anxious to provide him with a regiment; but the corps which he had designed for him was unwilling to receive a Royalist for colonel. Five companies were therefore taken from Sir Arthur Hazelrigg's regiment at Newcastle and as many more from Colonel Fenwick's at Berwick; and the ten companies[240] were united into Monk's regiment of foot. Thus was formed the oldest of our existing national regiments, the one complete relic of the famous New Model,[178] the one surviving corps which fought under Oliver Cromwell, itself more famous under its later name of the Coldstream Guards.

On the 19th of July Cromwell halted near Berwick, where he mustered sixteen thousand men, a third of them cavalry; and on the 22nd he crossed the Tweed and marched up the coast upon Edinburgh. A fleet on the east coast provided him with supplies as he advanced, which furnishes an interesting precedent for the system that was to be seen later under Wellington in the Peninsula. On the 28th of July he was at Musselburgh, and on the following morning he came in sight of the Scottish army, which was entrenched along the line from Leith to the Canongate.

The Scottish force comprehended a nominal total of twenty-six thousand men, of which eighteen thousand were foot and eight thousand horse. It was under the command, in deed if not in name, of David Leslie, the same excellent officer who had routed the brilliant Montrose at Philiphaugh and had handled his cavalry so efficiently at Marston Moor. His troops however were inferior in quality to the English. It is true that in 1647 the Scotch had followed the example of England in remodelling their army, but the total strength of this force was but five thousand foot and fifteen hundred horse; and this, even supposing the whole of it to have been efficient, was but a small leaven among twenty-six thousand men. Leslie therefore stood carefully on the defensive and resisted all Cromwell's temptations to a pitched battle. After a couple of days Cromwell was compelled to fall back to Musselburgh for supplies.[241] He then determined to march round Edinburgh and push on to Queensferry, where he could regain touch with his fleet on the northern side of the town. Political reasons, however, induced him to linger in the execution of this project; and the delay enabled Leslie to take up a position which rendered it impossible. Unable to force Leslie to an engagement, and not daring to attack him with inferior numbers, Cromwell found himself completely outman?uvred. Dysentery broke out in the English troops; supplies began to fail; and he was compelled to fall back by Haddington and Musselburgh to his ships at Dunbar. There he arrived on the 1st of September with "a poor, shattered, hungry, discouraged army." The Scots had pressed the pursuit very closely, the rearguard had been constantly engaged, and, most significant of all, the English discipline even under Oliver himself had begun to fail.[179] Having driven his enemy into the peninsula of Dunbar, Leslie sent forward a force to bar a defile on the road to Berwick at Cockburnspath, and cut off his retreat. The situation of the English was desperate, and Cromwell was at his wits' end. His army was reduced by sickness to eleven thousand men, while the Scots still numbered twenty-three thousand; he could expect no relief from Berwick; and Leslie lay in a strong position, from which it was hopeless to attempt to dislodge him, between him and the Tweed.
Sept. 2.

Leslie on his side might well feel confident that he held his enemy in the hollow of his hand. He had but to remain on his hill-side and watch the English army melt away, or wait for the most favourable moment to attack it either in the effort to embark or while struggling through the defile in retreat. He was, however, not his own master, but was controlled by an Aulic Council called the Committee of Estates, which urged him to descend from his weather-beaten position on the hill and move to the ground below, where he would not only find greater convenience of supplies but stand[242] within closer striking distance of his enemy. Down therefore he came, not altogether unwillingly, and took up a new position on a triangle of ground enclosed between the sea, the hill which he had just left, and a small stream called the Broxburn. This stream, which runs at the bottom of a course from forty to fifty feet deep, covered the whole of his front. On his extreme left it runs close under the steep declivity of the hill and forms with it, so to speak, the apex of the triangle; but further down it quits the slope and takes its own course to the sea, leaving plenty of space between it and the hill for a camping-ground. Half-way between the open space and the sea, by the grounds of Broxmouth House, the deep banks of the stream give place, as is usual with such waters, to gentle inclines, not unfavourable to the action of cavalry. This point by Broxmouth House formed Leslie's extreme right. The whole position, as he judged, was not ill suited to a force with great superiority in cavalry. He could post his foot on his centre and on his left behind the deep trench dug by the Broxburn, and mass his horse on the right where it could dash down the gradual incline and across the shallow water without risk or difficulty. By four o'clock in the afternoon of the 2nd of September his new dispositions were complete.
Sept. 3.

Cromwell from the other side of the stream followed every movement with intense attention. At last turning to Lambert he said that he thought the enemy gave him an opportunity. Lambert replied that the very same idea had occurred to him. Monk, who had probably received higher military training than any officer in the army, was next appealed to, and cordially agreed. If Leslie's right, at the base of the triangle, could be turned, the whole of his force must be pent up between the hills and the burn, his horse hurled on to the backs of his foot, and the entire army forced up to the gorge at the apex of the triangle in ever increasing confusion, and, in a word, lost. The time of attack was fixed for the morrow before dawn, and the[243] details of the English dispositions were entrusted to Lambert.

Rain fell in torrents all through the night, and the Scotch picquets laid themselves down to sleep with what comfort they could among the corn-shocks. The English, as ever even during the worst and most disorderly of retreats, had recovered themselves at the prospect of battle. At four the moon rose and found Lambert already hard at work. The bulk of the force, six out of eight regiments of horse and three and a half regiments of foot, was moved down to the extreme English left. Five regiments of horse under Lambert were to cross the burn by Broxmouth House and attack the Scottish cavalry in front; three regiments of foot and one of horse, all picked corps, were to cross the water farther down and sweep round upon its right flank. Cromwell himself took command of this turning movement, and the regiment of horse which he took with him was that which he had made six years before on the model of his own "lovely company." The remainder of the force with the artillery was stationed along the edge of the trench of the Broxburn to check any movement of the enemy's centre and left.

The light was beginning to creep over the sea before Lambert had posted the artillery to his liking. There was some stir in the Scotch camp; a trumpet sounded boute-selle; and Cromwell, fearful lest the enemy should gain time to change position, grew impatient for Lambert's coming. At last he came, and both columns moved off. Lambert's regiments of horse advanced to the burn; and then the trumpets rang out, and the troopers dashed across the water and poured up the opposite slope to the attack. The Scots, though unprepared, met them gallantly enough. Foreigners would have called them ill-equipped, for they carried lances, an obsolete weapon, in their front rank; but the lance was in place in the shock-combat which Cromwell had taught to the English cavalry, and the first onset of the English horse was borne back[244] across the burn. The supports came quickly up and the fight was renewed, though against heavy odds, for the Scots could bring infantry and guns to the aid of their horse, which the English could not yet. But while the combat of cavalry was still swaying to and fro, the infantry of Cromwell's turning column came up steady and inexorable upon the flank of the Scots. Still Leslie's gallant men fought on for a short time undismayed. They had been faultily disposed, as Cromwell had noted, and could not easily change front,[180] but they met the new attack as best they might and even checked the leading regiment of English infantry. But Cromwell's own regiment of foot came up in support, strode grimly forward straight to push of pike, and swept the stoutest corps of Scottish infantry into rout.

To face page 244
DUNBAR.
September 3rd 1650.

Then the Scots lost heart and wavered; the English, horse and foot, gathered themselves up for a final terrible charge; and the Scottish cavalry, reeling back upon the foot, carried it away in choking disorder towards the gorge. Meanwhile Cromwell was urging his third regiment of foot to the left, always farther to the left; and as, panting and breathless, they climbed the lower slopes of the hill they saw the whole length of the battle spread out before them and the Scotch all in confusion. "They run, I profess, they run!" cried Oliver as he looked down. And while he spoke the sun leaped up over the sea, and flashed beneath the canopy of smoke on darting pikes and flickering blades and glancing casques and swaying cuirasses, as the red-coats rolled the broken waves of the Scottish army before them. "Now let God arise and let His enemies be scattered," cried Cromwell in exultation, for the victory was won. The Scots, wedged tighter and tighter between hills and stream, were caught like rats in a pit, and like rats they ran desperately and aimlessly up the steep slope, only to be caught or turned back by the English skirmishers above them. Their horse fled as best they could with the English cavalry spurring[245] after them, till Cromwell ordered a rally. While the broken ranks were reforming he sang the hundred and seventeenth Psalm, the chorus swelling louder and louder behind him as trooper after trooper fell into his place. Then the psalm gave way to the sharp word of command, and the horse trotted away once more to the pursuit past Dunbar and Belhaven even to Haddington. Three thousand of the Scots fell in the field; ten thousand prisoners, with the whole of the artillery and baggage and two hundred colours, were taken. It was the greatest action fought by an English army since Agincourt.

Cromwell lost no time in following up his success. On the day after the battle he sent Lambert forward with six regiments of horse to Edinburgh, and occupied the port of Leith and the whole of the town, except the Castle, without resistance. Leaving sufficient men to blockade the Castle and hold the works at Leith he pushed on against Leslie, who had entrenched himself with five thousand men at Stirling; but finding his position unassailable he returned to Edinburgh and busied himself with the reduction of the Castle, while Lambert completed the subjugation of the West. In the middle of September the Castle surrendered, and therewith all Scotland south of the Forth and Clyde was subject to the English.
1651.

At Westminster the joy over the victory of Dunbar was enthusiastic, and found vent in the grant of a medal[181] and of a gratuity to every man who had fought in the campaign. This, the first medal ever issued to an English army, bore, in spite of his protests, the effigy of Cromwell upon the obverse, no unfitting memorial of the first founder of our Army of to-day. But the struggle even now was not yet over. Royalist Scotland had been beaten at Preston, the Scotland of the Covenant at Dunbar; but Charles Stuart was able, by[246] unscrupulous lying and shameless hypocrisy, to unite both for a last effort in his cause, and to gather a new army around that of David Leslie at Stirling. Accordingly on the 4th of February 1651 Cromwell left his winter-quarters for Stirling, but was compelled by the severity of the weather to retreat, with no further result to himself than a dangerous attack of fever and ague, which kept him on the sick-list until June.

On the 25th of June the English army was concentrated on the Pentland Hills, and from thence marched once more to Stirling. Leslie, true to the tactics which had proved so successful in the previous year, had occupied an impregnable position which no temptation could induce him to quit. After a fortnight's man?uvring, therefore, Cromwell decided, like Surrey before Flodden, to move round Leslie's left flank and to cut off his supplies from the north. It is plain, from the fact that Monk had been engaged in operations for the reduction of Inchgarvie and Burntisland on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth, that Cromwell's plans for this movement were fully matured.
July 19-20.

The first step was to send Lambert across the Firth with four thousand men to entrench himself at Queensferry. Leslie met this move by detaching a slightly inferior force against Lambert, which was utterly and disastrously routed, with a loss of five-sixths of its numbers. Ten days later Inchgarvie and Burntisland fell into Cromwell's hands, and, his new base being thus secured, he advanced quickly into Fife. Meanwhile he sent orders to General Harrison, whom he had left at Edinburgh with a reserve of three thousand horse, that he was to move at once to the English border in the event of Leslie's marching southward. By the 2nd of August he had received the surrender of Perth, but, even before he could sign the capitulation, intelligence reached him that the Scots had quitted Stirling two days before and were pouring down to the border. Leaving five or six thousand men with Monk to reduce Stirling, he at once hurried off in pursuit.

[247]
August 4.

Two days sufficed to bring his army to Edinburgh, where he halted for forty-eight hours. Harrison had already marched for the Border, and with ready intelligence had mounted some of his infantry to strengthen his little force. Lambert was now despatched with three thousand horse to hang upon the enemy's rear; a letter was despatched to the Speaker exhorting the Parliament to be of good heart; and on the 6th of August Cromwell resumed his advance. Both armies, English and Scots, were now fairly started on their race to the south. Charles, in the hope of picking up recruits, stuck to the western coast and the Welsh border, moving by Carlisle, Lancaster, and the ill-omened town of Preston. Cromwell's course lay farther east; he passed by Newburn, a scene of English defeat, and by the more famous field of Towton, where the south had first taught a lesson of respect to the north. Lambert and Harrison united, and on the 16th of August obtained contact with the enemy at Warrington, but not venturing to attack retired eastward to cover the London road and to draw closer to the line of Cromwell's march.
Sept 3.

The Ribble and the Aire once passed, the two armies began to converge. On the 22nd of August Charles halted with the Scots at Worcester and proceeded to fortify the town, and four days later Cromwell occupied Evesham. Charles had but sixteen thousand men; while Cromwell by a masterly concentration had collected no fewer than twenty-eight thousand. The militia, which had been reorganised by the Parliament in the previous year, had been called out and had answered admirably to the call. There could be little doubt of the issue of an action where the advantages both of numbers and of quality were all on one side, and there is no need to dwell on the battle fought on the anniversary of Dunbar at Worcester. It was a victory in its way as complete as Sedan: hardly a man of the Scottish army escaped. But it was also the crown of the great work of the Army, the establishment of England's supremacy in the British Isles.

CHAPTER III
The victory had not long been reported to Parliament when the House began to consider the question of reducing the forces. Silently and almost imperceptibly the strength of the Standing Army had grown since 1645 until it now amounted to thirty regiments of foot, eighteen of horse and one of dragoons, or close on fifty thousand men. Besides these there were independent companies in garrison to the number of seven thousand more, and several more regiments which were borne permanently on the Irish establishment. Five whole regiments, thirty independent companies, and two independent troops were ordered to be disbanded forthwith; other regiments were reserved for service in Ireland or to replace the disbanded companies in garrison; and the establishment for England and Scotland was fixed at eighteen regiments of foot and sixteen of horse. It appears too that the actual strength of companies was reduced from one hundred and twenty to eighty, and of troops from one hundred to sixty, thus diminishing the number of men while retaining the name of the corps intact. The system is no novelty in these days, but this is the first instance of its acceptance in the history of the Army.
1652.
1652-53.

A revolutionary Government, however, does not easily find peace. By June 1652 the recruiting officers were abroad again, and regiments were increasing their establishment owing to the outbreak of the Dutch War. The quarrel with the United Provinces was curious, inasmuch as the English commonwealth had expected[249] sympathy from the sister-republic which had been made by English soldiers, and had even sought to unite the two republics into one. But there is no such thing as national gratitude; and the discourtesy of the Dutch soon led the English to exchange friendly negotiations first for the Act of Navigation and very shortly after for war. The story of that war belongs to the naval history of England, wherein it forms one of its most glorious pages. Never perhaps has more desperate fighting been seen than in the six furious engagements which brought the Dutch to their knees. Yet in these too the red-coats to the number of some two thousand[182] took part, under the command of men who had made their mark as military officers—Robert Blake, Richard Deane and, not least, George Monk. The last named was so utterly ignorant of all naval matters that he gave his orders in military language—"Wheel to the right," "Charge"—but he made up for all shortcomings by his coolness and determination. When Deane, his better-skilled colleague, was cut in two by a round shot at his side he simply whipped his cloak over the mangled body and went on fighting his ship as though nothing had happened. Finally, in the last action of the war he boldly met the greatest admiral of the day, and one of the finest sailors of all time, with but ninety ships against one hundred and forty, fought him not only with superb gallantry but with skilful man?uvre, and wrenched from him the supremacy of the sea.
1653,
April 20.

And meanwhile the Army ashore had done the deed whereof the Nemesis has never ceased to pursue it. So far, except for a few intervals too brief to be worth noting, the Commonwealth had been occupied with the business of war, and the principal function of the Parliament had been to provide ways and means for the conduct of war. Incapable of dissolution save by its own act, the House of Commons had resolved just before the execution of the King that it would put an end to itself[250] in three months; but this had been rendered impossible by the Irish and Scotch campaigns. After the victory of Worcester Cromwell as a private member again brought forward the question of dissolution, but the Rump, as the small remnant that remained after several purgings was called, now showed no disposition to part with the authority which it had so long enjoyed. Frequent conferences were held between the officers of the Army and the members of the House, with the only result that the latter introduced a Bill which, while providing in some fashion or another for the settlement of the nation, reserved to themselves a perpetuity of power. The Army did not conceal its objections to this Bill; and the climax came when certain members tried to smuggle it through the House before the officers could interfere. Then Cromwell went down to Westminster, and with twenty or thirty musketeers quickly settled the whole matter.

It is difficult to see how things could have ended otherwise. The House had been sufficiently warned at the close of the first civil war that the Army would not submit to do all the hard work in order that a handful of civilians might reap the profits. The prestige of that Parliament rested and still rests on the achievements of its armed forces, and it depended for its life on the exertions of men who had subjected themselves for its sake to the restraint of military discipline and to the hardships and dangers of war. The Parliament itself had shown no such devotion and self-sacrifice. While soldiers were in distress for want of the wages due to them, corrupt members were making money; while soldiers were flogged and horsed for drunkenness or fornication, drunkards and lewd livers passed unpunished in the House. Even in matters of administration, if we judge by financial management, the Parliament had not shown extraordinary capacity. Its difficulties were certainly enormous, but not a few of them had been evaded rather than honestly met. The Army, on the other hand, for once contained more than its share of the[251] brains of the nation, and comprehended not less administrative talent and far more patriotic feeling than was to be found in the Parliament. It was therefore too much to expect that it would resign all share in the settlement of the nation to such a body as the Rump. If the question of legality be raised, a House of Commons indissoluble without its own consent, and working without the checks of lords and sovereign, was as unknown to the Constitution as a standing army, and at least as dangerous a menace to liberty. If the Long Parliament taught a salutary lesson to kings, the Army taught a lesson no less salutary to parliaments. It would have been better perhaps for the future of the British Army had Cromwell suffered the Rump to remain in power until it should be dissolved in anarchy and confusion, instead of taking the initiative and keeping stern order during the next five dangerous years. But it would have been incomparably worse for England.
Dec. 16.

Nine months later, after the Little Parliament had been summoned and had in despair resigned its powers, the soldier who had ousted the Rump and taken over its authority to himself was installed as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Since 1652 he had been Commander-in-Chief, the first in our history, of the forces in all three Islands; in virtue of that command he now took over the general government. As was to be expected, he chose his deputies and chief advisers from the officers of the Army; and if thereby he placed the realm under military rule we must not allow ourselves to be scared by the phrase from recognition of the worthiness of the administration. There is nothing to make a soldier blush, unless with pride, in the military government of the Protectorate.
1654.

Let us begin first with Scotland, which at the close of the Dutch War had been placed under the charge of George Monk. The country was as yet by no means quiet. Agents of Charles Stuart were busy making mischief in the Highlands: and the English found[252] themselves confronted for the first time with the difficulties of a mountain campaign. Monk's predecessor, Robert Lilburn, had essayed the task with but sorry results; Monk himself accomplished it with a success that suffices of itself to stamp him as a great soldier.

Without going into elaborate detail it is worth while to notice his plan for reducing the Highlands. The Royalist forces and their Highland allies were gathered together principally in two districts, in Lochaber under Glencairn, and in Sutherland under Middleton. Monk's design was to cut the Highlands in twain along the line of the present Caledonian Canal, that he might pen his enemy at his will into either half of the country thus divided, and deal with his forces in detail. North of this line the country was sufficiently circumscribed by nature; south of it he was compelled to fix his own boundaries. The east and south was already guarded by a strong chain of posts running from Inverness through Stirling to Ayr, while one corner to the south-west was secured by the neutrality of the Campbells, which had been gained by diplomacy. Monk now established three independent bases of operations, one at Kilsyth to southward, two more at Perth and Inverness. He then left one column at Dingwall, under Colonel Thomas Morgan, an officer of whom we shall hear more, to hinder the junction of Middleton and Glencairn; and arranged that another column, under Colonel Richard Brayne, of whom also we shall hear more, should sail with all secrecy from Ireland and seize Inverlochy, which was to be his fourth independent base to westward. This done he advanced himself with a third column into the hills from Kilsyth, attacked and defeated Glencairn, and closed the one gap in the net which he had drawn round the Highlands between Loch Lomond and the Clyde.

Then hearing that Middleton had eluded Morgan and passed into Lochaber, he suddenly shifted his base to Perth and advanced into the heart of the mountains.[253] In two days he had established an advanced magazine at Loch Tay, where the news reached him that the Northern clans had been summoned to assemble at Loch Ness. He at once gave orders that the enemy should be allowed to pass to the southward, and concerted a combined advance of himself, Brayne, and Morgan from the south-west and east to crush him. Unfortunately Morgan, in his eagerness to close in behind the Highlanders, arrived before them and headed them back again to northward. Monk, however, pursued them even thither, hunting them for a week from glen to glen by extraordinary marches, such as the Highlanders had not looked for from mere Englishmen.

Retiring after this raid to Inverness Monk sent Morgan away by sea to threaten the Royalist headquarters at Caithness. The feint was successful. Middleton, who was again in command in the north, at once came down towards the south. His march was seen and reported from the English station at Blair Athol, and Monk was presently on his track over the Grampians. The chase lay through the Drumouchter Pass, Badenoch, Athol, and Breadalbane, thence westward to the head of Loch Awe and back again into Perthshire and over the mountains to Glen Rannoch; and there, as Monk had arranged, Middleton ran straight into the jaws of Morgan's column and was utterly routed. He fled to Caithness with Morgan hard at his heels; while Monk dispersed the few remaining forces of Glencairn in the hills and destroyed every Highland fastness about Loch Lomond. By August 1654 the work was done; and the Highlands, if ever they may be said to have been conquered, were conquered by George Monk. The English who now wander in thousands over that rugged and enchanting land should remember that the first of their kind that were ever seen therein were Monk's red-coats.[183]

[254]

Such very briefly was the first English mountain campaign, admirably designed and admirably executed. The difficulties of military operations in so wild and mountainous a tract were extraordinarily great, and were increased by constant rain and tempest; yet Monk's movements were amazingly rapid. His column on one occasion covered sixty miles in the twenty-four hours. Still more remarkable is his recognition of the fact that in such a campaign success depends mainly on the efficiency of advanced parties and outposts. He never moved without a cloud of scouts on front and flanks; he made it a rule never to march after mid-day; and when he halted he marked out the camp, and posted every picquet and every sentry himself. He showed himself to be the first English exponent of the principle of savage warfare. He invaded the enemy's country, carrying his supplies with him, and sat down. If he was attacked he was ready in a strong position; if not, he made good the step that he had taken, left a magazine in a strong post behind him, and marched on, systematically ravaging the country and destroying the newly-sown crops. The enemy was obliged to move or starve, and wherever they went he swiftly followed. If they turned and fought, he asked for nothing better than the chance of dispersing them at a blow; if they dodged, he brought forward another column from another base to cut them off, while he destroyed the fastnesses which they had deserted. Finally, when his work was done he settled down quietly to govern the country in a conciliatory spirit. He was able gradually to reduce his military establishment, and, ruling at once with mildness, firmness, watchfulness, and unflagging industry, showed himself to be not less able as an administrator than as a general. Scotland has known many worse rulers and few better than her first English military governor.
1655.
1657.
1654-1658.

In Ireland, after Cromwell's departure, the reduction of the country to order was carried on also by a number of flying columns. Of their leaders but two of the[255] most successful need be named, namely Robert Venables and John Reynolds, the latter Cromwell's kinsman by marriage and sometime captain in his regiment of horse. Ireton had been appointed Lord Deputy on Cromwell's departure, but dying in November 1651 was succeeded by another soldier, Charles Fleetwood. Though a valuable man when under the command of a strong officer Fleetwood was soon found to be useless when invested with supreme control, and he was soon practically superseded by Henry Cromwell, the Protector's second surviving son. Henry had entered the army at sixteen, had fought with his father in Ireland, and had become a colonel at two-and-twenty. He was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland at the age of twenty-eight. The country was quiet enough at his accession so far as concerned open rebellion; the Tories had been mercilessly hunted down from bog to bog, and the Irish fighting men had been transported in thousands by recruiting officers to the armies of Spain and of France. What gallant service they did under Lewis the Fourteenth, for they did not greatly love the service of Spain, has been told with just pride by Irish writers; and we too shall encounter some of their regiments before long. Henry Cromwell's difficulties lay not with the native Irish but with his own officers, the veterans of the Civil War, who were alike jealous of his appointment and insubordinately minded towards the Protector. Immediately on Henry's arrival some of these malcontents held a meeting, wherein they put it to the question whether the present government were or were not according to the Word of God, and carried it in the negative. The very members of the Irish Council, old field-officers who should have known better, were disloyal to him, but being old comrades of Oliver's could not be dismissed. Young as he was, however, Henry gave them clearly to understand that he intended to be master, and therewith proceeded to the difficult, nay impossible, task of executing what is known as the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland. He[256] showed conspicuous ability in extremely trying circumstances, abundant firmness and foresight, and a tolerance of spirit towards the men of other creeds, even Catholics, which was as rare as it was politic. The military governor of Ireland under the Commonwealth was assuredly not a man of whom the British Army need feel ashamed.[184]

Lastly we come to England, where Oliver Cromwell himself sat at the head of the Provisional Government which he was honestly and unceasingly striving to settle on a permanent basis. He defined his own position accurately enough: he was a good constable set to preserve the peace of the parish. But that parish was in a terribly disturbed condition. All that the most visionary could have dreamed of in the subversion of the old order had been accomplished, had even been crowned by the execution of the King; yet still the expected millenium was not yet come. All factions of political and religious dissent, all descriptions of dreamers, of fanatics, of quacks, and of self-seekers had been welded together for the moment by the pressure of the struggle against Royalism and against the rule of alien races. That pressure removed, the whole mass fell asunder into incoherent atoms of sedition and discontent, for which Royalism, as the one element which strove for definite and attainable ends, formed a general rallying-point. Good and gallant soldiers who had followed Cromwell on many a field—Harrison, Okey, Overton—fell away into disloyalty. Sexby, who had brought the news of Preston to Westminster, became the most dangerous of conspirators. There is nothing more pathetic in history than the desertions; from Cromwell after the establishment of the Protectorate. Nevertheless the misfortune was inevitable, for an army which meddles with politics cannot hope to escape the diseases of politics. Yet, through all this,[257] Cromwell on one point was resolute; he would not allow successful rebellion to be followed by a riot in anarchy. Come what might, he would not suffer indiscipline.

To preserve the peace, however, in such a hot-bed of plots and conspiracies was no easy matter; and before he had been eighteen months Protector, Cromwell brought military government closer home to the people by parcelling England into at first ten and then twelve military districts, each under the command of a major-general. The force at the disposal of these officers for the suppression of disorder varied in the different districts from one hundred to fifteen hundred men, and was composed almost exclusively of cavalry. It amounted on the whole to some six thousand men, all drawn from the militia, who received pay to the amount of eighty thousand pounds annually. Strictly speaking, therefore, it was rather a force of mounted constabulary than of regular cavalry, and there can be no doubt that, if order was to be preserved, such a body of police was absolutely necessary. Yet it is probable that no measure brought such hatred on the Army as this. The magnates of the counties were of course furious at this usurpation of their powers, and the poorer classes resented the intrusion of a soldier and a stranger between themselves and their old masters. After little more than a year the major-generals were abolished, to the general relief and satisfaction. Their brief reign has been forgotten by the Army, which can hardly believe that it once took complete charge of the three kingdoms and administered the government on the whole with remarkable efficiency. But the major-generals have not been forgotten by the country. The memory of their dictatorship burned itself deep into the heart of the nation, and even now after two centuries and a half the vengeance of the nation upon the soldier remains insatiate and insatiable.
CHAPTER IV
It is now time to pass to the foreign wars of the Protectorate; for though they be little remembered they fairly launched the Army on its long career of tropical conquest, and of victory on the continent of Europe.
1654.

It is not easy to explain the motives that prompted Cromwell to make an enemy of Spain. He was eagerly courted by both French and Spaniards, and it was open to him to choose whichever he pleased for his allies. The probability is that he was still swayed by the old religious hatred of the days of Elizabeth, and, like her, looked to fill his empty treasury with the spoils of the Indies. He did not perceive that the religious wars of Europe were virtually ended, and that nations were tending already to their old friendships and antagonisms as they existed before the Reformation. Be that as it may, he was hardly firm in the saddle as Protector when he began to frame a great design against the Spanish possessions in the New World. His chief advisers were one Colonel Thomas Modyford of Barbados, who had his own reasons for wishing to ingratiate himself with the Protector, and Thomas Gage, a renegade priest, who had lived long in the Antilles and on the Spanish Main and had written a book on the subject. The most fitting base of operations was obviously Barbados, which, from its position to windward of the whole Caribbean Archipelago, possessed a strategic importance which it has only lost since the introduction of steam-vessels. It lay ready to Cromwell's[259] hand, having been an English possession since 1628, and was, if Modyford were to be believed, ready to give active assistance in the enterprise. There remained the question whether the expedition should be directed against an Island or against the Main. Gage was for the latter course, and named the Orinoco as the objective: Modyford recommended Cuba or Hispaniola,[185] and Modyford's opinion prevailed.

Gradually the design matured itself, and presently assumed gigantic proportions. A footing once established on one of the Spanish Islands to leeward, there was to be a general contest with the Spaniards for the whole of the South Atlantic. Two fleets were to be employed, one in seconding the army's operations on the Islands and making raids upon the Main, the other in cruising off the Spanish coast so as to interrupt both plate-fleets from the west and reinforcements from the east. Lastly, not England only, but New England was to play a part in the great campaign. Supplies would be one principal difficulty, but these could be furnished from English America, and not only supplies but settlers, who, trained to self-defence by Indian warfare, should be capable of holding the territory wrested from Spain. Thus the English from both sides of the Atlantic were to close in upon the Spanish dominions in the New World, and turn Nova Hispania into Nova Britannia. There was no lack of breadth and boldness in the design.

All through the latter half of 1654 mysterious preparations went forward with great activity in the English dockyards, and France, Spain, and Holland each trembled lest they might be turned against herself. But the existing organisation in England was unequal to the effort. To equip two fleets of forty and of twenty-five ships for a long and distant cruise was a heavy task in itself; but to add to this the transport of six thousand men over three thousand miles of ocean for an expedition to the tropics was to tax the resources of the naval and[260] military departments to excess. The burden of the duty fell upon John Desborough, major-general and commissioner of the Admiralty, who was not equal to thinking out the details of such an enterprise nor disposed to give himself much trouble about them. His difficulties were increased by the rascality of contractors, and by the composition of the expeditionary force. By a gigantic error, which has not yet been unlearned, Cromwell, instead of sending complete regiments under their own officers, made up new corps, partly of drafts selected by various colonels and probably containing the men of whom they were most anxious to be rid, and partly of recruits drawn from the most restless and worthless of the nation. He returned in fact to the old system that had so often been found wanting in the days of Elizabeth, of James, and of Charles.

The distribution of command was also faulty. The military commander-in-chief was Robert Venables, who had made a reputation as a hunter of Tories in Ireland; the Admiral joined with him was William Penn, who is unjustly remembered rather as the father of a not wholly admirable Quaker than as one of the ablest and bravest naval officers of his day. But as if two commanders were not already sufficient, there were joined with them three civil commissioners, one Gregory Butler, an officer who had served in the Civil War, Edward Winslow, a civilian and an official, and the Governor of Barbados, Daniel Searle. There was of course nothing new in the presence of civil commissioners on the staff, and a general's instructions since the days of Henry the Eighth had usually bound him to act by the advice of his Council of War only; but it is abundantly evident that Winslow was employed not only as a commissioner, but as a spy on his colleagues, or on some one of them whose loyalty was suspected. It is strange that so sensible a man as Cromwell should have made such a mistake as this. Monk was the man whom he had wished to send, could he have spared him from Scotland; but failing Monk, Penn and Venables were both of[261] them men who had shown ability in their previous service.

With immense difficulty the expedition was got to sea at the end of December 1654, just two months too late. Even so it sailed without a portion of its stores, which Desborough promised faithfully to send after it without delay. The fleet reached Barbados after a good passage on the 29th of January 1655; and then the troubles began. From too blind faith in the promises of Thomas Modyford, the Protector had trusted to Barbados in great part to equip his army, and to help it on its way. Barbados, from its Governor downwards, refused to move a finger. It had no desire to denude itself of arms or of men, and so far from assisting the English threw every possible obstruction in their way. The planter upon whom Venables had been instructed chiefly to depend was found to be entirely under the thumb of his wife. She was averse to the expedition; and the commissioners, observing her, as they said, to be very powerful and young, abandoned all hope of co-operation from that quarter. Every day too brought fresh evidence of the rotten composition of the force at large, which was without order, without coherency, and without discipline. Unfortunately Venables was not the man to set such failings right. He showed indeed some spasmodic energy, called the Barbadian planters a company of geese, improvised rude pikes of branches of the cabbage-palm, organised a regiment of negroes and a naval brigade, and after several weeks' stay sailed at last for St. Domingo. On the way he picked up a regiment of colonial volunteers which had been collected by Gregory Butler at St. Kitts, and on the 13th of April the expedition was in sight of St. Domingo.
1655.

The naval officers were for running in at once and taking the town by a sudden attack. Winslow, the civilian, objected: the soldiers, he said, would plunder the town, and he wanted all spoil for the English treasury. This order against plunder raised something like a mutiny among the troops; but eventually a new plan was chosen,[262] which was probably based on the precedent of Drake in 1586. Venables with three thousand five hundred men sailed to a landing-place thirty miles west of the town, and there disembarked; leaving fifteen hundred more men under a Colonel Buller to land to the eastward of it and march on it from that side. Buller, however, finding it impracticable to obey his instructions, after two days' delay also landed to the westward of the town, though but ten miles from it, at a point called Drake's landing. Elated by a trifling success against a handful of Spaniards who had opposed his disembarkation, he laid aside all thought of co-operation with Venables and pushed on hastily into the jungle to take St. Domingo by himself. No sooner was he gone, past call or view, when up came Venables to the identical spot where Buller had landed. He had for two days pursued a terrible march of thirty miles through jungle-paths, in the sultry steam of the tropical forest. The men's water-bottles had been left behind in England, and they were choked with thirst; they had torn the fruit from the trees as they passed and had dropped down by scores with dysentery. Hundreds had fallen out, sick and dead, and the column was not only weakened but demoralised.

Next day Venables effected a junction with Buller, and the force, though heartless and spiritless, made shift to creep up to a detached fort which covered the approach to the town. On the way it fell into an ambuscade, and though it beat off the enemy, it lost in the action the only guide who knew where water was to be found, and was compelled to retire ten miles to Drake's landing. There it remained for a week, eating bad food from some scoundrelly contractor's stores, drinking water that was poisoned by a copper mine, and soaked night after night by pouring tropical rain. Dysentery raged with fearful violence, and Venables himself did not escape the plague. Unfortunately, instead of sharing the hardship with his men in camp, he went on board ship to be nursed by Mrs. Venables, who[263] had accompanied him on the voyage. Thus arose open murmurs and scandalous tales, which cost him the confidence of the army.

Nevertheless after six days' rest he again advanced by the same line to the fort from which he had been forced to retreat. To prevent repetition of mishaps from ambuscades he gave strict orders that the advanced guard should throw out flanking parties on each side of the jungle-path. The injunction was disobeyed. The advanced guard walked straight into an ambuscade, two officers fell dead, the third, Adjutant-General Jackson, who was in command, turned and ran; the advanced guard fled headlong back on to the support; the support tumbled back on to the main body, and there, wedged tight in the narrow pass, the English were mown down like grass by the guns of the fort and the lances of the Spanish cavalry. At last an old colonel contrived to rally a few men in the rear, and advancing with them through the jungle fell upon the flank of the Spaniards and beat them back. He paid for his bravery with his life, but he assured the retreat of the rest of the force, which crept back beaten and crest-fallen to the ships, leaving several colours and three hundred dead men behind it.

Venables and his men were now thoroughly cowed by failure and disease. Penn in vain offered to take the town with his sailors, but Venables and Winslow would not hear of it. All ranks in the fleet now abused the army for rogues, and the worst feeling grew up between the two services. Finally, on the 7th of May, the expedition sailed away in shame to Jamaica. Arrived there, Penn, openly saying that he would not trust the army, led the way himself at the head of the boats of the fleet; and after a trifling resistance the Island was surrendered by capitulation. Then fleet and army began to fight in earnest, officers as well as men; and at last, after the commissioners in command had spent six weeks in incessant quarrelling, Venables and Penn sailed home, leaving the troops and a part of the squadron behind them.

[264]
1656.

Cromwell's disappointment and chagrin over the failure of his great enterprise were extreme. Both the returned commanders were forthwith sent to the Tower, and though presently released, remained throughout the whole of the Protectorate in disgrace. Still Jamaica had been won and must be held. The command after Venables' departure had devolved on Richard Fortescue, a colonel of the New Model, who, without concealing his infinite contempt for those who had gone home, set himself cheerfully to turn the new possession to account. To him Cromwell wrote letters of encouragement and thanks, with promise of speedy reinforcement. But now a new enemy appeared in Jamaica, one that has laid low many tens of thousands of red-coats, the yellow fever. In October 1655 the first reinforcements arrived, under command of Major Sedgwicke. He had hardly set foot on the island before Fortescue succumbed, and he could only report that the army was sadly thinned and that hardly a man of the survivors was fit for duty. Then the recruits began to fall down fast, and in a few days the men were dying at the rate of twenty a day. Sedgwicke was completely unnerved; he gave himself up for lost, and in nine months followed Fortescue to the grave. Fresh reinforcements, including all the vagabondage of Scotland, were hurried across the Atlantic to meet the same fate. Colonel Brayne, who had served with Monk in Scotland, arrived to succeed Sedgwicke in December 1656. He lasted ten months, surviving even so two thirds of the men that he brought with him, and then went the way of Sedgwicke and Fortescue. Finally a Colonel D'Oyley, who had sailed with the original expedition, took over the command, and being a healthy, energetic man, soon reduced things to such order that when in May 1658 the Spaniards attempted to recapture the island, he met and repulsed them with brilliant success. Thus at length was firmly established the English possession of Jamaica.

So ended the first great military expedition of the English to the tropics, the first of many attempts, nearly[265] all of them disastrous, to wrest from Spain her Empire in the West. I have dwelt upon it at some length, for it is the opening chapter of a long and melancholy story, whereof one recitation will almost serve for the whole. We have still to go with Wentworth to Carthagena and with Albemarle to Havanna; we shall accompany Abercromby and Moore to St. Vincent and St. Lucia, and other less noted officers to Demarara and Surinam; we shall even see Wellington himself drawing up a plan for operations on the Orinoco: but in spite of a hundred experiences and a thousand warnings we shall find the mistakes of Oliver Cromwell eternally repeated, and though we may never again have to tell so disgraceful a story as that of the repulse from St. Domingo, yet we shall seldom fail to encounter such mournful complaints as were made by Fortescue, Sedgwicke, and Brayne, of regiments decimated as soon as disembarked, and annihilated before the firing of a shot. We have now well-nigh learned how to conduct a tropical expedition, and life in the tropics is a thing familiar to tens of thousands of Englishmen; but it is worth while to give a thought to these poor soldiers of the Commonwealth. They were the first Englishmen who went to the tropics, not like Drake's crews as fellow-adventurers, but simply as hired fighting men. Yet the traditions of Drake's golden voyages were strong upon them, and they landed, big with expectations of endless gold told up in bags.[186] We can picture their joy at coming ashore, bronzed healthy Englishmen, and their open-mouthed wonder at all that they saw; and then after a few hours the first cases of sickness, the puzzled surgeons with busy lancets, the first death and the first grave; the instant spread of fever on the turning of the virgin soil, and then a hideous iteration of ghastly symptoms, and, sundown after sundown, the row of silent forms and shrouded faces. Englishmen had faced such terrors in the flooded leaguers of Flanders, but it was hard to find them in a fruitful and pleasant land, where the sun shone brighter[266] and the forest grew greener than in England, the loved England that lay so far away over the glorious mocking blue of the tropic sea.[187]
1655,
Sept. 9.
1657,
March.

The aggressive attack on St. Domingo at once decided the hostility of Spain towards the Commonwealth, and drove her to take Cromwell's most formidable enemy, Charles Stuart, to her heart. The Protector, on his side, hastened to make treaty of peace and friendship with France, which he presently expanded into an offensive and defensive alliance. Mazarin, who had to encounter not only Spain but Condé, was only too glad to welcome the English to his side. By the terms of the treaty it was agreed that the French should provide twenty thousand men, and the English six thousand men, as well as a fleet, for the coming campaign against the Spaniards in Flanders. Of the English six thousand half were to be paid by France, but the whole were to be commanded by English officers, and reckoned to be the Lord Protector's forces. The plan of campaign was the reduction of the three coast-towns of Mardyck, Dunkirk, and Gravelines, of which the two first were to be made over to England and the third retained by France. Cromwell's great object was to secure a naval station from which he could check any attempted invasion of England by Charles Stuart from Spanish Flanders, and he was therefore urgent that Dunkirk should be first attacked. Turenne disliked this design, and even threatened to throw up his command if it should be insisted on. To beleaguer Dunkirk without first securing Nieuport, Furnes, and Bergues would, he said, be to be besieged while conducting a siege. But Cromwell had made up his mind that the thing should be done, and, as shall soon be seen, it was done.
1657.

Throughout the spring of 1657 therefore preparations for the expedition kept both military and naval[267] departments busily employed, for the fleet was not only to supply the army but to second its operations. The six thousand men, though for the most part old soldiers, were made up of drafts and of new recruits, and were distributed into six regiments. Turenne would gladly have preferred complete corps from the standing Army, but in the existing menace of invasion Cromwell was indisposed to spare them. Nevertheless the new regiments were in perfect order and discipline when they embarked on the 1st of May from Dover for Boulogne. The general in command was Sir John Reynolds, whom we saw lately in Ireland; the major-general was Thomas Morgan, Monk's right-hand man in the Highland war, an impetuous little dragoon known by the name of the "little colonel,"[188] and justly reputed to be one of the best officers in the British Isles.

The arrival of the six thousand English foot, all dressed in new red-coats, created a great sensation in France. They were cried up for the best men that ever were seen in the French service; they took precedence of the whole French army, even of the famous Picardie, excepting the Swiss and Scottish body-guards; and they were welcomed by emissaries from the King and Mazarin and inspected by the royal family. It is significant of the difference between the French and English even in their civil wars that the six thousand were amazed to see all the villagers fly from their houses at their approach. They were told that the French soldiery were dreaded as much by their countrymen as by their enemies; and yet Reynolds admitted that the discipline of the French troops was good, for France. "But we," he added proudly, "can lie in a town four days without a single complaint." One thing alone went amiss with the English: they quarrelled with the French ammunition-bread, and clamoured loudly for beef and beer.

By the ill-faith of Mazarin, Reynolds' force instead of marching to Dunkirk was moved inland, and found[268] itself engaged at the siege of St. Venant. Here it gave the Spaniards a taste of its quality. It seems that the English, who were never very happy in handling the spade, were working in some confusion at the advanced trenches when Count Schomberg, a man whom readers should bear in mind, and a few more foreign officers came up and began to pass criticisms. Morgan, wincing under their remarks, impatiently called for a party of fifty men to come to him; whereupon every English soldier in the trenches, incontinently jumped up and without further ado assaulted the town, captured three redoubts, and forced the Spaniards to capitulate. Such blundering gallantry had distinguished the nation since Cocherel, and was to be repeated on a grander scale at Minden. But Cromwell was not the man to allow his regiments to be wasted in such operations as these. Dismissing all of Mazarin's excuses as "parcels of words for children," he insisted that the true business of the campaign should be taken in hand at once. In September, therefore, Turenne moved slowly up to the coast; and Cromwell to give him encouragement sent him a reinforcement of two thousand men. Mardyck was easily taken on the 29th of September; but there Turenne stopped. Lockhart, the English ambassador, in vain offered him five of the old regiments of the standing Army if he would proceed at once to the siege of Dunkirk;[189] the great General would not move; and with the capture of Mardyck the campaign of 1657 came to an end.
1657-1658.

The English undertook to garrison Mardyck and the town of Bourbourg close to it, and while engaged in this duty incurred the strong censure of Turenne. They kept, he complained, very bad guards, and seemed unable to stand the work of watching; and the failing, it seems, was no new one, for Monk expressed no surprise at hearing of it. Nevertheless, when on one night in October the Spaniards attempted to surprise Mardyck with five thousand men, they found this unwatchful garrison formidable enough and were repulsed[269] with heavy loss. The truth was that the condition of things in the town was what would now be thought appalling. The winter was unusually severe and the troops very imperfectly protected against it. Pestilence had broken out among them and men were dying at the rate of ten or twelve a day: once indeed the death-roll within twenty-four hours ran as high as fifty. Reynolds protested in vain, and at last in December he sailed for England to represent matters in person to the Protector. He was cast away on the Goodwin Sands and never seen again. By the time when the season opened for active operations the English had lost since their disembarkation their General and not far from five thousand men.
1658.

Lockhart, who took over the command after Reynolds' death, found the remnant of the army in a very bad state. Discipline was decidedly lax; and the French complained bitterly of the insolence of their allies. This of course was no new thing. So far back as 1603, in the wars of Dutch Independence, a dispute about some firewood had set an English and a French regiment fighting; and the quarrel had ended in the flight of the French to their ships, leaving their Colonel and sixteen of their comrades dead behind them.[190] The English now, probably on some equally trivial occasion, fell at variance with the French guards and killed several of them; nor could all the frenzy of French indignation avail to obtain the least redress. Lockhart attributed this insubordinate spirit to the dearth of chaplains; but the true explanation was that over eighty of the officers, disliking the tedium of winter-quarters, had absented themselves, as was customary, from their regiments. When they returned, and four thousand fresh troops with them, Morgan seems to have had little difficulty in restoring discipline.
March.
May 16 27 .
May 23
June 2.

Morgan opened the campaign before the arrival of Lockhart by the capture of two small redoubts that lay on the road to Dunkirk; but it was not till the 4th of[270] May that Turenne broke up his quarters at Amiens, and after a very difficult march to Dunkirk, on the 27th invested the town. A brilliant repulse of a Spanish sortie by the English put him in good humour with his allies, and he was fain to confess that they had done right well.[191] He was to appreciate them still higher within a week; for on the 2nd of June the Spanish army, fifteen thousand strong, under Don John of Austria, Condé, the Marquis Caracena, and James, Duke of York, drew down to within a mile of his headquarters, with the evident design of forcing the besiegers' lines.

We must pause for a moment over the composition of the motley Spanish host, for there is a part of it under James, Duke of York, with which we are nearly concerned. Five regiments in all, amounting to some two thousand men, were entrusted to the Duke's command. Three of these, James's own, Lord Ormonde's, and Lord Bristol's, were Irish, the relics of the loyal party that had been scattered by Cromwell; one, Middleton's, was Scotch, and represented fragments of the force that had been broken up by Monk; and one, which readers must not omit to mark, was English, made up of refugees mostly of gentle birth. It comprehended the last shreds of old English royalism, and was called the King's Regiment of Guards.

Nor must we omit to throw a passing glance at the army of Turenne. First and foremost there were the six regiments sent out by Cromwell. Then there was a regiment with which we parted last after the battle of Verneuil, the Scottish body-guard of the kings of France. Next, there was a regiment which we saw pass from the Swedish to the French service in 1635, Regiment Douglas, some time the Scots Brigade of King Gustavus Adolphus. It had passed through many campaigns and absorbed other corps of British within the past twenty years, and could now add the names of Rocroi, Lens and Fribourg to its records; but here it was, newly[271] recruited from Scotland by the Protector's permission, marching side by side with the red-coats, though quite unconscious how soon it was destined to take its place among them, to fight the battle of Dunkirk Dunes. Lastly, an Irish regiment, known by the name of Dillon, and made up of men who had fled from the wrath of Cromwell, completed the strange representation of the united Commonwealth.[192]

It was evening of the 2nd of June before Turenne could satisfy himself that the whole of the Spanish army was present before him, but no sooner was he assured of it than he resolved to fight on the morrow. The English were still at Mardyck, and the orders reached Lockhart so late and came as such a surprise that the marshal politely intimated his wish to give reasons for his determination. "I take the reasons for granted," answered Lockhart, "it will be time to hear them when the battle is over." At ten o'clock the English marched off, Lockhart, who was suffering agonies from stone, driving in his carriage at their head, and at daybreak reached Turenne's headquarters. The next three hours were spent in drawing up the line of battle, which was of the mathematical precise type that prevailed in those days. In the first line there were thirteen troops of cavalry on the right wing, as many on the left, and eleven battalions of infantry in the centre; in the second line there were ten troops on the right, nine on the left, and seven battalions in the centre. Five troops of horse were posted midway between the two lines of infantry, and four more were held in reserve. The whole force was reckoned at six thousand horse and nine thousand foot, of which latter the English contingent made more than half. The place assigned to the red-coats was the left centre, which, if not the post of honour, was assuredly the post of danger.
May 24
June 3.

Don John's line of battle was widely different. He[272] had taken up a strong position among the sand hills, facing west, his right resting on the beach, his left on the Bruges Canal; and the whole of his infantry was drawn up in his first line. A sand hill higher than the rest on his right was regarded as the key of the position, and was strongly held, as the place of honour, by four Spanish regiments. Next to them on their left stood the five regiments under the Duke of York, with one battalion in reserve, and the line was continued by battalions of Germans and Walloons. The Spanish horse was massed behind the foot in columns according as the sand hills permitted; and the whole force numbered between fourteen and fifteen thousand men.

To face page 272
DUNKIRK DUNES
May 24th June 3rd 1658

Notwithstanding that they had marched all night, and in spite of Turenne's orders that the line should dress by the right, the English outstrode the French in the advance and began the action alone. The position occupied by the Spaniards in their front was so strong, that Lockhart by his own confession despaired of carrying it. Lieutenant-Colonel Fenwick however, who commanded Lockhart's regiment, undertook the task without the General's instructions. Covered by a cloud of skirmishers he advanced steadily with his pikes to the foot of the sand hill, and while the musketeers wheeling right and left maintained a steady fire, he calmly halted the pikes to let the men take breath. Then with a joyful shout they swarmed up the treacherous sand and went straight at the Spaniards. Fenwick fell at once, mortally wounded by a musket shot; his major, Hinton, took his place, and was also shot down. Officer after officer fell, but the men were not to be checked, and though the Spaniards, backed by a company of the English guards, fought hard and well, they were fairly swept off the sand hill, and retired in confusion, leaving nine out of thirteen captains dead on the ground. James, Duke of York, tried to save the rout by charging Lockhart's victorious regiment with his single troop of horse, but he was beaten back, and though at a second attempt he succeeded in breaking[273] into its flank he met with so sturdy a resistance from every isolated man as convinced him that his effort was hopeless. Meanwhile the rest of the English regiments advanced quickly in support; the French horse on the left wing came up likewise, and the rout of the Spanish right was complete.

With the uncovering of its right flank the whole of Don John's line wavered, and few regiments, except those under the immediate direction of Condé, far away on the left, showed more than a feeble resistance to the advancing French. Very soon the whole force—Spaniards, Walloons and Germans, Scots and Irish—were in full retreat, and a single small corps of perhaps three hundred men stood isolated and alone in the position among the sand hills. A French officer rode forward and summoned the little party to surrender. "We were posted here by the Duke of York," was the answer, "and mean to hold our ground as long as we can." The Frenchman explained that resistance was hopeless. "We are not accustomed to believe our enemies," was the reply. "Then look for yourself," rejoined the Frenchman; and leading the commander to the top of a sand hill he showed him the retreating army of Spain. Thereupon the solitary regiment laid down its arms: it was the English King's Royal Regiment of Guards.[193]

The losses of the victorious English were very severe. In Lockhart's regiment but six out of the whole number of officers and sergeants had escaped unhurt; and the honours of the day were admitted by all to lie with the red-coats. The action led to the speedy fall of Dunkirk; and Lockhart, being reinforced by two regiments from England, was able to detach four to continue the campaign under the command of Morgan. Bergues, Dixmuyde, and Oudenarde fell in quick succession, and little opposition was encountered until the siege of Ypres, where the English delivered so daring and brilliant an assault that Turenne, overcome[274] with admiration, embraced their leader, Morgan, and called him one of the bravest captains of the time. The capture of Ypres was the last exploit of the six thousand—the immortal six thousand, as they were styled in the admiring pamphlets of the day. After an advance almost to the walls of Brussels, the campaign came to an end; Morgan returned to England to receive knighthood, and the English retired to Dunkirk to spend another winter in cold and misery and want, and worst of all in deep uncertainty for the future.[194]
1659,
April 21.

For even while Morgan was watching the Spanish garrison march out of Ypres, the soldier who had made the English Army was lying speechless and unconscious at St. James's, worn out with many campaigns and with the work of keeping the peace in England. Before tattoo sounded on the 3rd of September 1658, Oliver Cromwell was dead, and no man could say who should come after him. Richard Cromwell, his son, held two trump-cards in his hand—Henry Cromwell and the army in Ireland, George Monk and his army in Scotland. He was afraid to play either, and yielded up his power to a clique of his father's old officers—Fleetwood, Desborough, and others—who brought back the Rump of the Long Parliament to reign in his stead. Henry Cromwell resigned his command, and the power of the Cromwells was gone. The Rump now took over Cromwell's body-guard for its own protection, and to make the Army thoroughly subservient decided that all officers should be approved by itself, and all commissions signed by the Speaker. So large was the military establishment that this work of revising the list of officers was never completed. George Monk, however, accepted the Speaker's commission without a word.
October 17.

It was not in the nature of things that the English[275] generals should long submit to the junto of politicians which it had set over England. In a very short time the leaders of the Army for the second time cleared away the Rump, and took the supreme power into their own hands; but herein they overlooked the existence of the ablest soldier left in Great Britain. Monk was ready enough to take his orders from Oliver Cromwell, but not from such small men as Lambert and Desborough. No sooner did the news of the new departure reach him at Dalkeith than with amazing rapidity he secured every garrison in Scotland, seized the bridge over the Tweed at Berwick, purged his troops of all officers disloyal to the Parliament, and gave orders for his whole force to concentrate at Edinburgh. Morgan, with the glories of Flanders still fresh on him, presently came to help him in the reorganisation of his army, and by the middle of November he began to move slowly south. Negotiations with the English leaders had been in progress ever since Monk first took decided action, and, though fully aware that they must come to nothing, he was not sorry to gain a little time in order to establish discipline thoroughly in the force under his command. By the end of November he had fixed his headquarters at Berwick.

There, at one o'clock on the morning of the 7th of December, he was surprised by the news that, in spite of much peaceful profession, the English general Lambert had besieged Chillingham Castle and had marched within twenty miles of the Border. One hour sufficed for Monk to write the necessary orders for the movement of the troops, and at two o'clock he was in the saddle and away to inspect the fords of the Tweed. The night was stormy and pitch dark, and the roads were sheets of ice, but on he galloped, despite the entreaties of his staff, through wind and sleet, up hill and down, at dangerous speed. "It was God's infinite mercy that we had not our necks broke," wrote one who was an unwilling partaker of that ride.[195] By eleven[276] o'clock the inspection was over and headquarters were fixed at Coldstream. A regiment of foot had already arrived there to guard the ford before the General came, and had cleared away every scrap of provisions. His staff-officers dispersed to find food where they could, but George Monk put a quid of tobacco into his cheek and sat down contented with a good morning's work. He had occupied every pass from Berwick to Kelso, and had so thought out every detail that he could concentrate his whole force at any given point in four hours. The bulk of his troops under Morgan were stationed on the exposed flank at Kelso; he himself was in the centre at Coldstream. Lambert might attack his front or turn his flank if he dared.
1660.

For three weeks Monk's army lay in this position, four regiments of horse and six of foot,[196] waiting for the moment to advance. The cold was intense, and the quarters in the little village of Coldstream were very strait. The General occupied a hovel wherein he had hardly space to turn round, and the men suffered greatly from privation and hard weather, but Monk's spirit kept them all in cheerfulness, and those who had shared his hardships never ceased to boast themselves to be Coldstreamers. At last, on the 31st of December, came the news that the army which had deposed the Rump was up in mutiny; and at daybreak of the 1st of January 1660 Monk's army crossed the Tweed in two brigades and began its memorable march to the south. All day they tramped knee-deep through the snow, full fifteen miles to Wooler, while the advanced-guard of horse by a marvellous march actually covered the fifty miles to Morpeth. At York they were met by Fairfax, who had roused himself at such a crisis for a last turn of military duty, and picking up deserters on every side from Lambert's regiments they increased their strength at every march. On the 31st of January Monk received at St. Albans the Parliament's[277] confirmation of his commission as General, and three days later he occupied London. His own regiment of foot was quartered for the first time in and about St. James's.

It is unnecessary to dwell on the intricate movements in the political world during the three following months; it must suffice to say that Monk was finally obliged to coerce the Rump as all other soldiers had coerced it. In spite of all engagements to dissolve itself without delay, this pretentious little assembly still clung, notwithstanding its unpopularity, to power; but a letter from the General was sufficient to bring it to reason without a file of musketeers. Such a letter arrived on the 6th of April; and though the House resolved not to read it until it had gratified its vanity by a little further debating, yet it decided after opening it to make the question of dissolution its very next business. Before evening it had ceased to exist. One last desperate attempt of Desborough and Lambert to divide the Army was suppressed with Monk's habitual promptitude, and on the 1st of May the General, sitting as member for his native county in a new House of Commons, moved that the King should be invited to England. Three weeks later Monk's life-guard and five regiments of horse escorted the restored monarch into London; and the work of the New Model Army was done.
CHAPTER V
It is strange that our historians have for the most part taken leave of the New Model without a tinge of regret, without estimation of its merits or enumeration of its services. Mountains of eulogy have been heaped on the Long Parliament, but little has been spared for this famous Army; nay, even military historians by a strange perversity begin the history of the Army not from its foundation but from its dissolution. Much doubtless besides the creation of a standing Army dates from the great rebellion, though few things more important in our history, unless indeed it be the cant that denies its importance. The bare thought of militarism or the military spirit is supposed to be unendurable to Englishmen. As if a nation had ever risen to great empire that did not possess the military spirit, and as if England herself had not won her vast dominions by the sword. We are accustomed to speak of our rule as an earnest for the eternal furtherance of civilisation; but we try to conceal the fact that the first step to empire is conquest. It is because we are a fighting people that we have risen to greatness, and it is as a fighting people that we stand or fall. Arms rule the world; and war, the supreme test of moral and physical greatness, remains eternally the touchstone of nations.

Surely therefore the revival of the military spirit, and on the whole the grandest manifestation of the same in English history, are not matters to be lightly overlooked. The campaigns of the Plantagenets had shown how deep was the instinct of pugnacity that underlay the stolid[279] English calm, but since the accession of the Tudors no sovereign had given it an outlet ashore in any great national enterprise. Elizabeth never truly threw in her lot with the revolted Netherlands; James hated a soldier, and shrank back in terror from the idea of throwing the English sword into the scale of the Thirty Years' War; Charles's miserable trifling with warfare contributed not a little to the unpopularity which caused his downfall. The English were compelled to sate their military appetite in the service of foreign countries, and as fractions of foreign armies.

Then at last the door of the rebellion was opened and the nation crowded in. It is hardly too much to say that for at any rate the four years from 1642 to 1646 the English went mad about military matters. Military figures and metaphors abounded in the language and literature of the day, and were used by none more effectively than by John Milton.[197] Divines took words of command and the phrases of the parade ground as titles for their discourses, and were not ashamed to publish sermons under such a head as "As you were." If anything like a review or a sham fight were going forward, the people thronged in crowds to witness it; and one astute colonel took advantage of this feeling to reconcile the people to the prohibition of the sports of May-day. He drew out two regiments on Blackheath, and held a sham fight of Cavaliers and Roundheads, wherein both sides played their parts with great spirit and the Cavaliers were duly defeated; and the spectacle, we are assured, satisfied the people as well as if they had gone maying any other way. It is true that the sentiment did not endure, that the eulogy of the general and his brave soldiers was turned in time to abuse of the tyrant and his red-coats; but when a nation after beheading a king, abolishing a House of Lords, and welcoming freedom by the blessing of God restored, still finds that[280] the golden age is not yet returned, it must needs visit its disappointment upon some one. The later unpopularity of the strong military hand does not affect the undoubted fact of a great preliminary outburst of military enthusiasm. Nor indeed even at the end was there any feeling but of pride in the prowess of Morgan's regiments in Flanders.

The rapid advance of military reform in its deepest significance is not less remarkable. For two years it may be said that opposing factions of the Civil War fought at haphazard, after the obsolete fashion of the days of the Tudors. The most brilliant soldier on either side was a military adventurer of the type that Shakespeare had depicted, a man who

dreams of cutting Spanish throats,

Of trenches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades

And healths five fathoms deep.

Against the wild, impetuous Rupert the primitive armies of the Parliament were powerless. From the first engagement Cromwell perceived that such high-mettled dare-devils could be beaten only by men who took their profession seriously, who made some conscience of what they did, who drew no distinction between moral and military virtues, who believed that a bad man could not be a good soldier, nor a bad soldier a good man, who saw in cowardice a moral failing and in vice a military crime. Cromwell's system is generally summed up in the word fanaticism; but this is less than half of the truth. The employment of the phrase, moral force, in relation to the operations of war, is familiar enough in our language; but the French term morale is now pressed into the service to signify that indefinable consciousness of superiority which is the chief element of strength in an army. Such narrowing of old broad terms is in a high degree misleading. It should never be forgotten that military discipline rests at bottom on the broadest and deepest of moral foundations; its ideal is the organised abnegation of self. Simple fanaticism is in its nature undisciplined;[281] it is strong because it assumes its superiority, it is weak because it is content with the assumption; only when bound under a yoke such as that of a Zizka or of a Cromwell is it irresistible. Cromwell's great work was the same as Zizka's, to subject the fanaticism that he saw around him to discipline. He did not go out of his way to find fanatics. "Sir," he once wrote, "the State in choosing men for its service takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies." In forming his original regiment of horse he undoubtedly selected men of good character, just as any colonel would endeavour to do to-day. But Fairfax's was by no means an army of saints. One regiment of the New Model mutinied when its colonel opened his command with a sermon, and the Parliament with great good sense prohibited by Ordinance the preaching of laymen in the Army. It is time to have done with all misconceptions as to the work that Cromwell did for the military service of England, for it is summed up in the one word discipline. It was the work not of a preacher but of a soldier.

That the discipline was immensely strict and the punishments correspondingly severe followed necessarily from the nature of his system. The military code took cognisance not only of purely military offences, but of many moral delinquencies, even in time of peace, which if now visited with the like severity would make the list of defaulters as long as the muster-roll. Swearing was checked principally by fine, drunkenness by the wooden horse. This barbarous engine, imitated from abroad, consisted simply of a triangular block of wood, like a saddle-stand, raised on four legs and finished with a rude representation of a horse's head. On this the culprit was set astride for one hour a day for so many days, with from one to six muskets tied to his heels; and that degradation might be added to the penalty, drunkards rode the horse in some public place, such as Charing Cross, with cans about their necks. A soldier who brought discredit on his cloth by public misconduct[282] paid the penalty with public disgrace. Fornication was commonly punished with the lash, the culprit being flogged so many times up and down the ranks of his company or regiment according to the flagrancy of the offence. It is small wonder that men forced by such discipline to perpetual self-control should have scorned civilians who allowed themselves greater latitude, and despised a Parliament which, in spite of many purgings, was never wholly purged of loose livers.

Towards the unfortunate Royalists the feelings of the Parliamentary Army after 1645 were of unutterable contempt. It was not only that it felt its moral superiority over the unhappy cavaliers; it mingled with this the keenest professional pride. No sergeant-major of the smartest modern cavalry regiment could speak with more withering disdain of the rudest troop of rustic yeomanry than did the Parliamentary newspapers of the prisoners captured at Bristol.[198] It is instructive, too, to note the patronising tone adopted by Reynolds towards the army of Turenne, his criticism of the discipline that was "good, for France," and his observations as to the proverbial inefficiency of a French regiment at the end of a campaign. Beyond all doubt the English standing Army from 1646 to 1658 was the finest force in Europe. It is the more amazing that Cromwell should have suffered its fair fame to be tarnished by the rabble that he sent to the West Indies.

Such an army will never again be seen in England; but though its peculiar distinctions are for ever lost, the legacies bequeathed by it must not be overlooked.[283] Enough has been said of the institution of the new discipline, and of the virtual extinction of the old stamp of military adventurer; it remains now briefly to summarise the minor changes wrought by the creation of a standing Army. First comes the incipient organisation of a War-Department as seen in the Committee of the Army working with the Treasurers at War on one side and the ancient Office of Ordnance on the other, and in the appointment of a single commander-in-chief for all the forces in England, Scotland, and Ireland. And here it must be noted in passing that the division of the Army into an English, Scotch, and Irish establishment, which lasted until the three kingdoms were one by one united, becomes fully defined in the years of the Protectorate. Next must be mentioned the organisation of regiments with frames of a fixed strength, regiments of horse with six troops, and of foot and dragoons with ten companies, and the maintenance of a fixed establishment for services of artillery and transport.[199] Further, to combine the unity of the Army with the distinction of the various corps that composed it, there was the adoption of the historic scarlet uniform differenced by the facings of the several regiments.

Clothing however, leads us to the more complicated question of the pay of the Army. The regular payment of wages was, as has been seen, the first essential step towards the establishment of a standing force; and with it came concurrently the system of clothing, mounting and equipping soldiers at the expense of the State. It should seem, however, that the rules for regulating the system were sufficiently elastic, for we find quite late in the second Civil War that troopers generally still provided their own horses, and received a higher rate of pay, and that colonels were permitted to make independent contracts for the clothing and equipment of their regiments.[284] The stoppages from the soldiers' pay at this period are also instructive. The deduction of a fixed sum for clothing dates, as has been already told, from the days of Elizabeth if not from still earlier times. But to this was now added the principle of withholding a proportion of the wages, under the name of arrears, as security against misconduct and desertion; while it was a recognised rule that both men and officers should forfeit an additional proportion so long as they lived at free quarter. An allowance for billet-money, and a fixed tariff of prices to be paid by soldiers while on the march within the kingdom, contributed somewhat to lighten the burden of all these stoppages, and made a precedent for the Mutiny Act of a later day. It is worthy of remark that the garrison of Dunkirk found in the town special buildings, constructed by the Spaniards for their troops and called barracks,[200] and that it was duly installed therein in the autumn of 1659. The reader, if he have patience to follow me further, will be able to note for himself how long was the time before English soldiers exchanged life in alehouses for the Spanish system of life in barracks.

But there is another and more interesting aspect of the question of pay, when we pass from that of the men to that of the officers. The extinction of the old military adventurer brought with it the total abolition, for the time, of the system of purchase. In the Royalist regiments that gathered around Charles Stuart in Flanders, we find that companies and regiments still changed hands for money, but in the English standing Army the practice seems utterly to have disappeared. Promotion was regulated not necessarily by seniority but by the recommendation of superior officers, and, as external evidence seems to indicate, ran not in individual regiments but in the Army at large. The arrears of[285] officers, especially of those who possessed means of their own, often remained, through their patriotic forbearance, not only many months but many years overdue; and it is interesting to mark that their inability to watch over their own interests while they were engaged on active service led to the appointment of regimental agents, who drew their pay and transacted their financial business with the country on their behalf. The Army Agent may, therefore, justly boast himself to be a survival of the Civil War.

Nor can I leave this subject without reference to yet another remarkable feature in the New Model Army, which unfortunately has not passed into a tradition. I allude to the great and sudden check on the ancient evil of military corruption. To say that corruption came absolutely to an end would be an excessive statement, for the minutes of courts-martial on fraudulent auditors are still extant, but it is probable that during the Civil War it was reduced to the lowest level that it has touched in the whole of our Army's history. The abolition of purchase and the higher moral tone that pervaded the whole force doubtless contributed greatly to so desirable an end. It is, however, melancholy to record that the evil was evidently but scotched, not killed. Before the Protector had been dead a year, there was seen, at the withdrawal of part of the garrison of Dunkirk, a deliberate and disgraceful falsification of the muster-rolls, aggravated by every circumstance that could encourage fraud and injure good discipline. Contact with foreign troops was probably the immediate cause of this lamentable backsliding, but it furnishes a sad commentary on the fickleness of Puritan morality.

Finally, let us close with the greatest and noblest work of the New Model Army; the establishment of England's supremacy in the British Isles as a first step to their constitutional union. No achievement could have stood in more direct antagonism to the policy of Charles Stuart, who strove with might and main to set[286] nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and paid for his folly with his life. It may be that the greatness of this service will in these days be denied. There were not wanting in the Long Parliament men who intrigued with Scotland against England rather than suffer power to slip from their hands, and it is not perhaps strange that the type of such men should be imperishable. Those, however, who call England the predominant partner in the British Isles should not forget who were the men that made her predominant.[201] The Civil War was no mere rebellion against despotic authority. It accomplished more than the destruction of the old monarchy; it was the battle for the union of the British Isles, and it was fought and won by the New Model Army.

Authorities.—In so slight a sketch of the Civil War and the Protectorate as is given in these pages any lengthy enumeration of the authorities would be absurd. Readers will find them for themselves in the exhaustive history of Mr. Gardiner, to whose labours, as well as to those of Mr. C. H. Firth, I am very greatly indebted. Such collections of documents as the Calendars of State Papers, Rushworth, Thurloe, and Carlyle's Cromwell's Letters and Speeches are almost too obvious to call for mention. The Clarke Papers are of exceptional value for purposes of military history, and Sprigge's Anglia Rediviva is of course an indispensable authority as to the New Model. But even in such fields as the newspapers and the King's Pamphlets Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Firth have left little harvest ungleaned. Of the military writers of the time Barriffe is the most instructive, particularly in respect of certain comments added in the later editions. A French folio volume, Le Mareschal le Bataille (1647), gives excellent plates of the drill of pikemen and musketeers, and beautiful diagrams of the evolutions.
BOOK IV CHAPTER I
The restoration of the Stuarts had been to all outward semblance effected, Charles had been escorted through the streets of London by the horse of the New Model, and yet the power which had practically ruled England since 1647 was still unbroken. The problem which the Long Parliament had treated with such disastrous contempt in that year was still unsolved; and there could be no assurance of stability for the monarchy until the Army should be disbanded. As to the manner in which this most difficult task must be accomplished the events of 1647 had given sufficient warning, for an army of sixty-five thousand men was even less to be trifled with than the comparatively small force of the second year of the New Model. Disbandment must not be hurried, and all arrears of pay must be faithfully discharged. Still the work could not but be both delicate and dangerous, requiring good faith and a tact that could only be found in a soldier who understood soldiers and a man who understood men. Fortunately such a man and such a soldier was to hand in the person of George Monk.
1661.

His scheme was soon prepared and adopted by Parliament. The regiments were to be broken up gradually, the order of disbandment being determined by lot, with the reservation that Monk's own regiments of horse and foot, together with two others that had been taken over by the Dukes of York and Gloucester,[202] should be kept until the last. An Act copied from an[290] Ordinance of the Commonwealth was passed, to enable discharged soldiers to engage in trades without preliminary apprenticeship, and thus to facilitate their return to civil life. By extraordinary exertions the needful money was raised, and the work proceeded apace. It seemed as if the close of the year 1660, according to the old reckoning which began the new year on the 25th of March, would have seen it completed, for by the first week in January the hand of disbandment had reached Monk's regiment of horse.

There however it was stayed. On the 6th of January an insurrection of fifth-monarchy men, a fanatical sect which had felt the might of Cromwell's repressing arm, not only saved the last relic of the New Model, but laid the foundation stone of a new Army. The rising was not suppressed without difficulty, not indeed until the veterans of Monk's regiment of foot, to whom such work was child's play, came up and swept it contemptuously away. The outbreak showed the need of keeping a small permanent force for the security of the King's person. The disbandment of this regiment and of the troop of horse-guards which had been assigned to Monk on his first arrival in London was thereupon countermanded, and the King gave orders for the raising of a new regiment of Guards in twelve companies, to be commanded by Colonel John Russell; of a regiment of horse in eight troops to be commanded by the Earl of Oxford; and of a troop of horse-guards, to be commanded by Lord Gerard. The Duke of York's troop of horse-guards, the same which he had led to an unsuccessful charge at Dunkirk Dunes, was also summoned home from Dunkirk.

The first stones of the new army being thus laid, there remained nothing but formally to abolish, in accordance with the letter of the Act of Parliament, the last remnant of the New Model. On the 14th of February, 1661 Monk's regiment of foot was mustered on Tower Hill, where it solemnly laid down its arms, and as solemnly took them up again, with great rejoicing, as the Lord General's regiment of Foot-Guards. But to[291] England at large this corps had but one name, that which still survives in its present title of the Coldstream Guards. Though ranking second on the list of our infantry, this is the senior regiment of the British Army. Other corps may boast of earlier traditions, but this is the oldest national regiment and the sole survivor of the famous New Model. Well may it claim, in its proud Latin motto, that it is second to none.

Colonel Russell's regiment, being the King's own regiment of Guards, and raised specially for the protection of his person, obtained precedence not unnaturally of its earlier rival, and presently, by absorbing the handful of gallant men who had refused to surrender at Dunkirk Dunes, established its claim to represent the defeated cavaliers, as the Coldstream represent the victorious Roundheads, in the long contest of the Civil War. It is the regiment once called the First Guards, and now the Grenadier Guards, and it has known little of defeat since it ceased to fight against its countrymen.
1661-1662.

The two troops of Life-Guards—the first the King's, commanded by Lord Gerard, the second the Duke of York's own—took precedence in like manner of Monk's Life-Guard; and after long existence as independent troops, blossomed at last into the First and Second regiments of Life-Guards that now stand at the head of our Army list. They were composed of men of birth and education, and for more than a century were rightly called gentlemen of the Life-Guards. Cromwell too had possessed such a guard, for he knew the value of gentlemen who had courage, honour, and resolution in them. Thus they stood apart from Lord Oxford's regiment of horse, which is still known to us from the colour of its uniform by its original name of the Blues. This corps was almost certainly made up of disbanded troopers of the New Model, of which there was no lack at that time in England;[203] while its colonel brought to it[292] traditions of still earlier days in the honoured name of Vere.

But there was yet another regiment to be gathered in from the battlefield of Dunkirk Dunes, this time not from the defeated but from the victorious army. In view of the peril of the King from Vernier's insurrection, Lewis the Fourteenth was requested to restore to him the regiment of Douglas, the representative of the Scots Brigade of Gustavus Adolphus; and this famous corps, having duly arrived in the year 1662, became the Royal or Scots regiment, and took the place which it still occupies at the head of the infantry of the Line under the old title of the Royal Scots. It returned to France in 1662 and did not return permanently to the English service until 1670, but it retained its precedence and it retains it still.
1661,
October.

So far for the King's provision for his own safety. But it was also necessary for him to provide himself with money, and this he did in the simplest fashion by marrying an heiress, Catherine, Princess of Portugal, who brought him half a million of money, Bombay and Tangier, to say nothing of promises of pecuniary aid from Lewis the Fourteenth, who encouraged the match for his own ends. Tangier being in constant peril of recapture by the Moors was a troublesome possession, and required a garrison, for which duty a regiment of foot and a strong troop of horse were raised by the Earl of Peterborough, the recruits being furnished mainly by the garrison of Dunkirk. These corps also survive among us as the Second or Queen's regiment of Foot, and the First or Royal Dragoons.
1661-1665.

Concurrently in this same year 1661 an Act was passed for the re-organisation of the militia. The obligations to provide horse-men and foot-men were distributed, following the venerable precedent of the statute of Winchester, according to a graduated scale of property, and the complete control of each county's force was committed to the lord-lieutenant. To him also were entrusted powers to organise the force into regiments and companies, to appoint officers, and to levy[293] rates for the supply of ammunition. Finally, the supreme command of the militia, over which the Long Parliament had fought so bitterly with Charles the First, was restored to the King, together with that of all forces by sea and land.
1665,
February.

So much was accomplished in the first two years of Charles the Second. It sufficed for two years longer, when English commercial enterprise involved the restored monarchy in its first war. In truth it is hardly recognised how powerfully the spirit of adventure and colonisation had manifested itself under the Stuarts. The Empire indeed was growing fast. In 1661 England already possessed the New England States, Maryland and Virginia, as well as, for the time, Acadia, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. Off the American coast the Bermudas were hers; in the Caribbean Archipelago Barbados, Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, and Jamaica were settled; while Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago, though not yet wrested from the Caribs, were reckoned subject to the British Crown. In 1663 one Company received a charter for the settlement of Carolina, and another, the Royal African, which enjoyed the monopoly of the trade in negro slaves, had fixed its headquarters at Cape Coast Castle. Nor must it be omitted that the East India Company, originally incorporated in 1599, received in 1660 a second charter conferring ampler powers, most notably in respect of military matters.

England, however, had abundance of rivals in distant adventure, whereof none was more jealous and more powerful than the Dutch federation which her own good arm had created. Cromwell had read the Dutch a lesson in 1653, and had imposed upon them restrictions which, if observed, would have checked their encroachments on English trade; but the Dutch not only evaded these obligations, but added to this delinquency wanton aggression both on the Guinea Coast and in the East Indies. The African Company at once commenced reprisals on the Gold Coast, and an[294] expedition against the New Netherlands of America captured New Amsterdam and gave it its now famous name of New York. Meanwhile the complaints of English merchants were willingly heard by both King and Parliament. Charles had received no great kindness in his exile from the oligarchical faction which dominated the Dutch Republic; and now that the same faction had stripped the House of Nassau of its high dignities, to the prejudice of his nephew William, he was not sorry for the opportunity of revenge. Parliament voted liberal supplies for the war. A new regiment, called the Admiral's regiment, was raised by the Duke of York for service on board ship; large drafts were taken from the two regiments of Guards for the same purpose, and on the 3rd of June, James, Duke of York, won with them a great naval action off Lowestoft.

But there were English soldiers outside England who were troubled by this war. The descendants of the volunteers, who had followed Morgan in 1572 and had won an imperishable name under Francis Vere, were still in the Dutch service and were now comprised in seven regiments, three of them English and four Scotch, numbering in all three-and-fifty companies. As soon as war was declared the Pensionary De Witt forced upon the United Provinces a resolution that the British regiments must either take the oath of allegiance to the States-General or be instantly cashiered. This was the reward offered by the Dutch Republic to the brave foreigners who, with their predecessors, had done her better service than she could ever repay. Dismissal from the service meant ruin to the unfortunate officers, and want and misery to the men. Many Dutchmen were ashamed of the resolution, but they passed it; and it remained only to be seen whether British loyalty would stand the test. The English officers hesitated not a moment. They refused point blank to swear fealty to Holland, and were ruthlessly turned adrift. By the help of the English Ambassador, however, they made their way to England and were presently formed[295] into the Holland regiment, which now ranks as the Third of the Line and is known from the facings which it has worn for more than two centuries, by the honoured name of the Buffs.[204]

The Scottish regiments behaved very differently. Though Charles was a Stuart and a Scot, only two officers had the spirit to follow the English example. The rest, who at first had made great protestation of loyalty, remained with their Dutch masters and, like all shamefaced converts, professed exaggerated love for the Dutch service and extravagant willingness to invade Great Britain if required. A century hence these regiments will be seen begging in vain to be received into the British service, and only accepted at last, after enduring sad insult from the Dutch, in time to become not the Fourth but the Ninety-Fourth of the Line. The corps finally ceased to exist in 1815, while the Buffs are with us to this day. It was a hard fate, but there is a nemesis even for unfaithful regiments.
1666.

In the following year Lewis the Fourteenth, seeing therein an opportunity for furthering his darling project of extending his frontier to the Rhine, threw in his lot with the Dutch and declared war against England. The time is worthy of remark. For a century England in common with all Europe had abandoned traditional friendships and enmities, and sought out new allies by the guidance of religious sentiment. All this was now at an end, and the old jealousy of France was strong throughout the nation. But though the people were in earnest, the King was not; the policy of keeping France in check was after two years abandoned, and Charles, like a true Stuart, sold himself to Lewis the Fourteenth. False, wrong-headed, and unpatriotic, the dynasty was already preparing for itself a second downfall.
1672.

The next step was a declaration of war by France and England against Holland. One hundred and fifty thousand men, under the three great captains, Turenne,[296] Condé and Luxemburg, with Lewis in person at the head of all, swept down upon the United Provinces, mastered three of them almost without resistance, and actually crossed the Rhine. Six thousand English, grouped around a nucleus from the Guards, served with them under the command of James, Duke of Monmouth, and among the officers was a young captain named John Churchill. He had been born in 1650, less than three months before Dunbar, had been page to the Duke of York, and had received through him an ensigncy in the King's Guards. He had seen his first service, as became an English officer, in savage warfare at Tangier; he now enjoyed his first experience of a scientific campaign under the first General of the day. Soon he became known to Turenne himself not only as the handsomest man in the camp, but as an officer of extraordinary gallantry, coolness, and capacity. As Morgan had won the great captain's eulogy at Ypres, so did young Churchill at Maestricht; and it is worthy of note that on both of the two occasions when an English contingent served under Turenne the most brilliant little action of the war was the work of the red-coats.

But on the Dutch side also there was a young man, born in the same year as Churchill, who was to show lesser qualities indeed as an officer, though, as his opportunity permitted him, perhaps hardly inferior qualities as a man. William of Orange, long excluded by the jealousy of faction from the station and the duties of his rank, with firm resolution and unshaken nerve assumed the command of the United Provinces, and began the great work of his life, the work which was to be finally accomplished by the handsome English soldier in the enemy's camp, of taming the insolence of the French.
1674.

It is unnecessary to dwell further on the story of this campaign. The courage of William sufficed to tide Holland over the moment of supreme danger; and, the crisis once passed, Austria and Spain, alarmed at the designs of Lewis, hastened to her assistance.[297] Charles made peace with the Dutch in 1674, and, while declining to withdraw the English troops in the French service, promised to recruit them no further. Churchill came home to be colonel of the Second Foot; and from the troops disbanded at the close of the war, were formed three English regiments for the service of the Prince of Orange. Among their officers was James Graham of Claverhouse. We shall meet with him again, and we shall see two of the regiments also return in due time, like their prototype, the Buffs, to take their place in the English infantry of the Line.
1680.
1684.

With the treaty of 1674 the wars of Charles the Second came to an end. It was not that the people of England were unwilling to fight. They were heart and soul against the French; and the Commons cheerfully voted large sums for army and fleet while the war lasted, asking only that the money might be expended on its legitimate object. But the crookedness and untrustworthiness of the King were fatal to all military enterprise, and indeed to all honest administration. Though the military force of England was far too small for the safety of her possessions abroad, Parliament never ceased to denounce the evils of standing armies, and to clamour for the disbanding of all regiments. In the days of Cromwell the burden of the red-coats had been grievous to be borne, but Oliver had at all events made England respected in Europe. Charles sought to impose a like burden, but without sympathy for England's quarrels, and without care for England's glory. He made shift, nevertheless, to keep his existing regiments throughout his reign, and in 1680 even to add another to them for the service of Tangier. In 1684 that ill-fated possession, having cost many thousands of lives and witnessed as gallant feats of arms as ever were wrought by English soldiers, was finally abandoned; though not before the English had learned one secret of Oriental warfare. In March 1663, after long endurance of incessant harassing attacks from the Moors, the Governor, who had hitherto stood on the defensive, took the initiative and[298] launched the Royal Dragoons straight at them. So signal was the success of this first venture that it was repeated a fortnight later by the same regiment, and renewed on a grander scale after two months by a sally of the whole garrison, which after desperate fighting ended once more in victory. So much at least must be recorded of this first long lost settlement in Africa.[205] The new regiment, which had arrived too late for fighting, came home to take rank as the Fourth of the Line and to remain with us to this day.

In truth the little Army, which Parliament so bitterly hated, was busy enough from the day of the King's accession to the day of his death. In regiments or detachments it fought in Tangier, in Flanders, and in the West Indies; it did marines' duty in four great naval actions, one of them the fiercest ever fought by the English, and it suppressed an insurrection in Scotland and a rebellion in Virginia. The reign gave it a foretaste of the work that lay before it in the next two centuries, and showed good promise for the manner in which that work would be done.
1685.

Charles died on the 6th of February 1685. His brother James, who succeeded him, was a man of stronger military instincts than any English king since Henry the Eighth. He had served through four campaigns under Turenne and through two more with the Spaniards, and his narrative of his wars shows that he had studied the military profession with singular industry and intelligence of observation. Nor was he less interested in naval affairs. He had commanded an English fleet in two great actions without discredit as an Admiral, and with signal honour as a brave man. Moreover, he felt genuine pride in the prowess alike of the English sailor and the English soldier. Finally he had shown uncommon ability and diligence as an administrator. The Duke of Wellington a century and[299] a half later spoke with the highest admiration of the system which James had established at the Office of Ordnance, and actually restored it, as Marlborough had restored it before him, when he himself became Master-General. The Admiralty again acknowledges that his hand is still felt for good in the direction of the Navy. In fact, whatever his failings, James was an able, painstaking, and conscientious public servant, and as such has no little claim to the gratitude of the nation.

So far then the succession of a diligent and competent administrator to the shrewd but incorrigibly idle Charles promised advantages that were obvious enough. But there was another side to the question. Parliament had requited James's services to the public by excluding him as an avowed Catholic from all public employment, whether civil or military; and James was a narrow-minded, a vindictive, and, like all the Stuarts, essentially a wrong-headed man. Though valuable as the head of a department, he was totally unfit to administer a kingdom; though not devoid of constancy and patience in adversity, he was swift and unsatiable in revenge; though ambitious of military fame, proud of English valour, and not without jealousy for English honour, he saw no way to the greatness which he coveted in Europe except by the overthrow of English liberty. He longed to interfere effectively abroad, but with England crushed under his heel, not free and united at his back.

So he too sold himself to France, hoping to consolidate his power by her help and to turn it in due time to her own hurt; and meanwhile he sought to strengthen himself by the maintenance of a standing Army. For this design Monmouth's insurrection of 1685 afforded sufficient excuse.[206] The opportune return of the garrison of Tangier had already added two regiments of Foot and one of Horse to the English[300] establishment; and James seized the occasion of the outbreak to summon the six British regiments, three of them Scottish and three English, from Holland. These, though they presently returned to William's service, secured for two of their number on the invasion of England in 1688 the precedence of Fifth and Sixth of the Line. Simultaneously twelve new regiments of infantry and eight of cavalry were raised under the same pretext. Of the foot the first was an Ordnance-regiment, designed like the firelocks of the New Model to act as escort to the artillery, and was called from its armament the Regiment of Fusiliers. It is still with us as the Seventh of the Line. The remainder of the foot, some of them formed round the nucleus of independent garrison-companies, also abide with us, numbered the Eighth to the Fifteenth.[207] Of the cavalry six were regiments of horse, and are now known as the First to the Sixth Regiments of Dragoon Guards; the remaining two, which are now numbered the Third and Fourth, after having been successively dragoons and light dragoons, have finally become the two senior regiments of hussars. Add to these thirty independent companies of foot, borne for duties in garrison, and it will be seen that King James's army was increasing with formidable speed.

The King himself found genuine delight, not in the sinister spirit of an oppressor but in the laudable pride of a soldier, in reviewing his troops. In August 1685 he inspected ten battalions and twenty squadrons which were in camp at Hounslow, and wrote to his son-in-law, William of Orange, with significant satisfaction of their efficiency. In November he met Parliament, and required of it the continuance of the standing Army in lieu of the militia. The courtiers had received their cue, and pointed to the flight of the western militia before Monmouth's raw levies as proof sufficient of its[301] untrustworthiness. The fact indeed was self evident. But Parliament was not disposed to welcome a royal speech which submitted no further measures than the maintenance of a standing army and the admission of popish officers to command therein. The memories of Oliver and of his major-generals was still vivid, and the revocation of the edict of Nantes was but a month old. Red-coats as saints had been bad; red-coats as papists would doubtless be worse. Edward Seymour, the head of that historic house, put the matter as Englishmen love to put it. The militia, he confessed, was in an unsatisfactory state, but it might be improved, and with this and the navy the country would be secure; but a standing army there must not be. Then as now, it will be observed, the House of Commons never stinted the navy, nor doubted its ability to repel invasion; and then as now it refused to remember that the British possessions are not bounded by the British Isles, and that a successful war is something more than a war of defence. But unfortunately it had but too good ground for opposing the King in this case. The debate lasted long. James had asked for ￡1,400,000 for the Army; the Chancellor of the Exchequer expressed his willingness to accept ￡1,200,000; the House voted ￡700,000, and even then declined to appropriate the sum to any specific purpose.
December.
1686,
June.
1686-1688.

James was greatly annoyed. He answered the note of the Commons with a reprimand, and prorogued Parliament; nor did he summon it again during the remainder of his reign. He then concentrated from thirteen to sixteen thousand men at Hounslow Heath, and kept them encamped there for three years in the hope of overawing London. Never did man make a more complete mistake. The Londoners, after their first alarm had passed away, soon discovered that the camp was a charming place of amusement. A new generation had sprung up since a Parliamentary colonel had held a sham fight to compensate the people for the loss of the sports of May-day, and there was a certain[302] novelty in military display. Hounslow camp became the fashion, and the lines were thronged with a motley crowd of all classes of the people; for then as now the women loved a red-coat, and where the women led the men followed them. The troops were doubtless well worth seeing, for James flattered himself that they were the best paid, the best equipped, and the most sightly in Europe.

Still, merry as the camp might be, there were not wanting signs of a graver spirit beneath the new red-coats. There were early rumours of quarrels between protestant and catholic soldiers, ominous to the catholic officers whom James had set in command against the law. Agitators scattered tracts appealing to the Army to stand up in defence of the liberties of England and the protestant religion; and the Londoners perceived, what James did not, that consciences cannot be bought for eightpence a day, nor flesh and blood extinguished by a red coat and facings. The Buffs had been the earliest English volunteers in the cause of liberty and protestantism; the Royal Scots had rolled back papistry under the Lion of the North, and, as if one presbyterian regiment were not sufficient, there was another, just brought into England for the first time from Scotland, and known by its present name of the Scotch or Scots Guards. Again, monks in the habit of their Order were among the visitors to the camp; and it was easy to ask how long it was since such men had been seen in England, and what was the cause of their disappearance. Cromwell's soldiers had made short and cruel work of monks in Ireland; yet soldiers, only one generation younger, were to be called upon to fight against their kith and kin for a king who openly favoured them, a king, too, who in the face of all law openly thrust papists into all places of authority.
1688,
June.

It was not long before the seed sown by the agitators began to bear fruit. When the seven bishops who had refused to read the declaration which suspended the penal laws against catholics were committed to the[303] Tower, the guards drank their health; and when the news of their acquittal reached Hounslow Heath, it was received by the Army with boisterous delight. In alarm James broke up the camp and scattered the regiments broadcast over the country. Having thus isolated them he attempted to work upon them separately, and selected as the first subject for this experiment Lord Lichfield's Regiment, known to us as the Twelfth Foot. The men were drawn up on Blackheath in the King's presence, and were informed that they must either sign a pledge to carry out the royal policy of indulgence towards catholics, or leave his service forthwith. Whole ranks without hesitation took him at his word, and grounded their arms, while two officers and a few privates, all of them catholics, alone consented to sign. James stood aghast with astonishment and disgust. Dismissal meant something more than mere exclusion from the Army; it carried with it the forfeiture of all arrears of pay and of the price of the officers' commissions, but neither men nor officers took account of that. James eyed them in silence for a time, and then bade them take up their arms. "Another time," he said, "I shall not do you the honour to consult you."

Foiled in England, James turned, as his father had turned before him, to Ireland. The Irish speak of the curse of Cromwell; they might more justly speak of the curse of the Stuarts, for no two men have brought on them such woe as Charles and James. Already, in 1686, the King had sent a degenerate Irishman, the Earl of Tyrconnel, to ensure popish ascendency at any rate in Ireland; and no better man could have been found for such mischievous work than lying Dick Talbot. The army in Ireland consisted at the time of his arrival of about seven thousand men: within a few months Tyrconnel, by wholesale dismissal of all protestants, had turned it upside down. Five hundred men were discharged from a single regiment on the ground that they were of inferior stature, and their places shamelessly[304] filled by ragged, half-trained Irish, beneath them both in size and quality. In all four thousand soldiers were broken, stripped of the uniforms which they had bought by the stoppage of their pay, and dismissed half-naked to go whither they would. Three hundred protestant officers shared a like fate in circumstances of not less hardship. Many of them had fought bravely for the Stuarts in past days, the majority had purchased their commissions, yet all alike were turned adrift in ruin and disgrace. The disbanded took refuge in Holland, whence they presently returned under the colours of William of Orange, with such feelings against the Irish as may be guessed.

But James did not stop here. He now conceived the notion of surrounding himself with Irish battalions, and of moulding the English regiments to his will by kneading into them a leaven of Irish recruits. When we reflect that it was just such an importation of Irish that had turned all England against his father, we can only stand amazed at such folly. The English held the Irish for aliens and enemies; they knew them as a people who for centuries had risen in massacre and rebellion whenever the English garrison had been weakened, and that had sunk again into abject submission as soon as England's hands were free to suppress them. They did not know them, in spite of their occasional gallant resistance to Cromwell, as a great fighting race. They had not read, or, reading, had not believed, the testimony of Robert Munro to their merits as soldiers.[208] Lastly and chiefly the Irish were catholics and the English protestants.

The resentment against the new policy soon made itself manifest. The Duke of Berwick, the King's natural son, who had been appointed colonel of the Eighth Foot, gave orders that thirty Irish recruits should be enlisted in the regiment. The men said flatly that they would not serve with them, and the lieutenant-colonel with five of his captains openly[305] remonstrated with the Duke against the insult. They had raised the regiment, they said, at their own expense for the King's service, and could procure as many English recruits as they wanted; rather than endure to have strangers forced upon them they would beg leave to resign their commissions. James was furious. He tried the six officers by a court-martial, which sentenced them to be cashiered; but the culprits none the less received the sympathy and applause of the whole nation. The prevalent feeling against the Irish found vent in a doggrel ballad, known, from the gibberish of its burden, by the name of Lillibulero. Partly from the nature of its contents, still more probably from the rollicking gaiety of its tune,[209] it became a great favourite with the Army, and if we may judge from Captain Shandy's partiality for it, was the most popular marching song of the red-coats in Flanders.

But meanwhile William of Orange had received his invitation to come with an armed force for the delivery of England from the Stuarts, and for some months had been making preparations for an invasion. It was long before James awoke to his danger, but when at last he perceived it he hastened to strengthen the Army. Commissions were issued for the raising of new regiments, of which two are still with us as the Sixteenth and Seventeenth of the Line, and of new companies for existing regiments. Four thousand men in all were added to the English establishment; three thousand were summoned from Ireland, and as many more from Scotland; and James reckoned that he could meet the invader with forty thousand men. On the 2nd of November William, after one failure, got his expedition safely to sea, and by a feint movement induced James to send several regiments northward[306] to meet a disembarkation in Yorkshire. These regiments were hastily recalled on the intelligence that the armament had passed the Straits of Dover steering westward, and fresh orders were given for concentration at Salisbury.

In a short time twenty-four thousand men were assembled at the new rendezvous, but before James could join them, he received news that Lord Cornbury, the heir of his kinsmen the Hydes, had deserted to the enemy. Cornbury had attempted to take his own regiment, the Royal Dragoons, and two regiments of horse with him; but officers and men became suspicious, and with the exception of a few who fell into the hands of William's horse and took service in his army, all returned to Salisbury. Before setting out for the camp James summoned his principal officers to him—Churchill, since 1683 Lord Churchill, and recently promoted lieutenant-general; Henry, Duke of Grafton, colonel of the First Guards; Kirke and Trelawny, colonels of the Tangier Regiments. One and all swore to be faithful to him; and the King left London for Salisbury.

Arrived there, he learned from Lord Feversham, his general-in-chief, that though the men were loyal the officers were not to be trusted. It is said that Feversham proposed to dismiss all that he suspected and promote sergeants in their stead. His suspicions proved to be just. Within a week Churchill, Grafton, Kirke, and Trelawny had all deserted to the Prince of Orange. Other officers were less open in their treachery; and it is said that one battalion of the Foot Guards was led into William's camp by its sergeants and corporals. The desertion of his own children finally broke the spirit of James. On the 11th of December he signed an order for the disbandment of the Army, and took to flight; and on the 16th he returned to London to find on the following night that the battalions of the Prince of Orange were marching down St. James's Park upon Whitehall. The old colonel of the Coldstream Guards,[307] Lord Craven, though now in his eightieth year, was for resistance, but James forbade him. The Coldstream Guards filed off, and a Dutch regiment mounted guard at Whitehall. Five days later James left England for ever.
CHAPTER II
Before entering on the reign of William we must pause for a time to study the interior administration of the Army. The reign of the two last Stuarts is rightly considered as marking the end of a period of English general history—the final fall of the old monarchy first overthrown with King Charles the First. But in regard to military history the case is different. It is a critical time of uncertainty during which the Army, a relic barely saved from the ruins of a military government, struggled through twenty-eight years of unconstitutional existence, hardly finding permission at their close to stand on the foundation which Charles and James, using materials left by Cromwell, had made shift to establish for it. Precarious as that foundation was, it received little support for nearly a century, and little more even in the century that followed, thanks to the blind jealousy of the House of Commons. It will therefore be convenient at this point to examine it once for all.

Beginning, therefore, at the top, it must be noted that the first commander-in-chief under the restored Monarchy was a subject, George Monk, Duke of Albemarle. His appointment was inevitable, for he had already held that command as the servant of the Parliament over the undisbanded New Model, and he was the only man who could control that Army. Charles, in fact, lay at his mercy when he landed in 1660, and could not do less than confirm him in his old office. The powers entrusted to Monk by his commission were[309] very great. He had authority to raise forces, to fix the establishment, to issue commissions to all officers executive and administrative, and to frame Articles of War for the preservation of discipline; he signed all warrants for expenditure of money or stores, and, in a word, he exerted the sovereign's powers as the sovereign's deputy in charge of the Army. On his death in January 1670, Charles, by the advice of his brother James, did not immediately appoint his successor, and though in 1674 he issued a circular to all officers of horse and foot to obey the Duke of Monmouth, yet he expressly reserved to himself many of the powers formerly made over to Monk. Finally, when in 1678 he appointed Monmouth to be captain-general, he withheld from him the title of commander-in-chief. On Monmouth's disgrace in 1679 Charles appointed no successor, but became his own commander-in-chief, an example which was duly followed by James the Second and William the Third. Thus the supreme control of the Army, with powers far greater than have been entrusted to any English commander-in-chief of modern times, continued at first practically the same as it had been made by Oliver Cromwell. It was exclusively in military hands.

The special branch of military administration in the hands of the commander-in-chief was that relating to the men. The care of material of war was committed to the ancient and efficient Office of Ordnance. At the Restoration the old post of Master of the Ordnance was revived with the title of master-general; and in 1683 the Department was admirably reorganised, as has been seen, by the Duke of York. At the head stood, of course, the master-general; next under him were two officers of two distinct branches, the lieutenant-general and the surveyor-general. The lieutenant-general was charged with the duty of estimating the amount of stores required for the Navy and the Army, and of making contracts for the supply of the same; he was also responsible for the maintenance of marching trains[310] for service in the field, and for the general efficiency of the artillery both as regards guns and men. His first assistant was named the master-gunner. The surveyor-general was responsible for the custody and care of all stores, and for all services relative to engineering; his first assistant was called the principal engineer. Transport of ordnance by land was the care of a waggon-master, transport by water of a purveyor. The laboratory was committed to a fire-master, whose duties included the preparation of fireworks for festive occasions. The only weak point of the office was the exclusiveness of its jurisdiction over artillery and engineers, which was carried to such a pitch that all commissions in the two corps were signed by the master-general, though that functionary and his staff received their own commissions from the commander-in-chief.

I turn next to the department of finance. Here in place of the old treasurers at war there was created a new officer called the paymaster-general. Parliament, I must remind the reader, never recognised the existence of the Army under the Stuarts, nor voted a sixpence expressly for its service. The force was paid out of the King's privy purse, or, in the case of James, out of sums intended for the payment of the militia. Thus the House of Commons through sheer perversity lost its hold upon the paymaster-general, and when it came to examine his office a whole century later, found, as shall be told in place, a system of corruption and waste which is almost incredible. The first paymaster-general, Sir Stephen Fox, received a salary of four hundred pounds a year, but this he soon supplemented by becoming practically a farmer of a part of the revenue. Knowing that Charles was chronically deficient in cash, he undertook to advance funds on his own private credit for the weekly pay of the Army, in consideration of a commission of one shilling in the pound. At the end of every four months he applied to the Treasury for reimbursement, and if his claims were not immediately satisfied, he received eight per cent on the debt owing[311] to him, thus making a very handsome profit. This system was discontinued in 1684, but the deduction, or poundage as it was called, was still levied on the Army, for no reason whatever, for a full century and a half. For the care of all other military expenses there was an office called by the old title of Treasurer of the Armies.

So much for the broad divisions of the administration, under the three heads of men, military stores, and finance. It is now necessary to trace the rise of a new department, which was destined to give to civilians the excessive share that they still enjoy in the direction of military affairs. While Charles the Second was yet an exile in Flanders in 1657, he had appointed a civilian, Sir Edward Nicholas, who had been Secretary of Council to Charles the First, to be his Secretary at War. It was not uncommon for such civilian secretaries[210] to be attached to a general's staff, and we have already seen John Rushworth taking the field with the New Model as secretary to the Council of War. After the Restoration, and within six months of the date of Monk's commission, one Sir William Clarke was appointed to be secretary to the forces. Though a civilian, he received a commission couched in military terms, which were preserved for fully a century unchanged, bidding him obey such orders as he should from time to time receive from the King, or the general of the forces for the time being, according to the discipline of war. In effect he was a civilian wholly subordinated to the military authorities and subject to military discipline so far as that discipline existed; little more, indeed, than a secretary to the commander-in-chief. His services were not estimated at a very high rate, for he received at first but ten shillings, and after 1669 one pound a day, as salary for himself and clerks. The appointment was of so personal a nature that Clarke accompanied Monk to[312] sea in 1666, and was killed in the naval battle of the 1st of June, the first and last secretary at war who has fallen in action.

Monk then applied for the services of one Matthew Lock, whom he knew to be a good clerk, and Lock was appointed to be Clarke's successor with the title of sergeant or secretary at war. There is not a letter from him to be found in the State Papers until after Monk's death, which is sufficient proof that he was a person of no great importance; but in 1676, when there was no longer a single commander-in-chief, he was entrusted with the removal of quarters, the relief of the established corps, the despatch of convoys, and even with authority to quarter troops in inns, all of which duties had been previously fulfilled by military men. Thus early and insidiously arose once more that civil interference with military affairs which had with such difficulty been thrown off at the establishment of the New Model. The system was wholly unconnected with any question of Parliamentary control, for Parliament would have nothing to do with the standing Army. Most probably it was due simply to the indolence of the King, who would neither do the work of commander-in-chief himself nor appoint any other man to do it for him. Thus the Army was placed once and for all under the heel of a civilian clerk.

The staff at headquarters was based on the model of that which had prevailed under Cromwell, though of course on a scale reduced to the minute proportions of the Army. The duties must, at first, have been within the scope of a very few officials, and it is probable that Monk required little assistance. There was, however, a commissary of the musters, to whom in 1664 a scoutmaster-general, or head of the intelligence department, was added. The business of foreign intelligence in all its branches, diplomatic, naval, and military, had been conducted with admirable efficiency during the Protectorate by the Secretary of State, John Thurloe, but Pepys remarked a sad falling away in this department[313] after the Restoration, due, as he admits, to the scanty allowance of funds allotted to the service. Charles was not the man to face the difficulties of establishing a great administrative office on a sound basis. James, on the other hand, began to grapple with them very early after his accession. He strengthened the staff by the addition of adjutants and quartermasters-general of horse and foot, and strove hard to improve the efficiency of the office; but his time was too short and his distractions too manifold to permit him to do the work thoroughly. Had he reigned for ten years, his familiarity with the system of Louvois and his own administrative ability might have reduced our military system once for all to order. It is not too much to say that his expulsion was in this respect the greatest misfortune that ever befell the Army.

Even he, however, would have found it a hard task to overcome the obstacles raised by Parliament, namely, the difficulties of regular payment of wages and of maintaining discipline. It was impossible to enforce military law on the troops, since Parliament steadily withheld its sanction to the same.[211] Nothing therefore remained but the civil law. A soldier who struck his superior officer or got drunk on guard could legally only be haled before the civil magistrate for common assault or for drunkenness, while if he slept on his post or disobeyed orders or deserted he was subject to no legal penalty whatever. Parliament never seems to have been the least alive to the danger of such a state of things, nor to have weighed it against its fixed resolution not to recognise the standing Army. As a matter of fact, however, military offences seem to have been punished as such throughout the reign of Charles, though without ostentation; and discipline appears to have been maintained without serious difficulty. The[314] number of the troops was, after all, but small; many of the men were already inured to obedience; the traditions of Oliver and of George Monk were still alive; and the men probably accepted service with a tacit understanding that they were subject to different conditions from the civilian. But when the three regiments returned from foreign service and savage warfare at Tangier, and Monmouth's rebellion had brought about a multiplication of regiments, the situation was altogether changed. James, who knew the value of discipline, determined to arrogate the powers that Parliament denied to him, but, like all weak men, endeavoured to effect his purpose by half measures. To secure the punishment of certain deserters he packed the Court of King's Bench with unscrupulous men; and though the culprits were hanged, discipline was only preserved at the cost of the integrity of the courts of law, a proceeding which damaged him greatly both in the Army and the country at large. It will presently be seen how this question of discipline was forced upon Parliament in a fashion that allowed of no further trifling.

The subject of pay opens a melancholy chapter in the history of English administration. It has already been related that Charles the Second let out the payment of the Army to a contractor for a commission of a shilling in the pound. This commission of course came out of the pockets of officers and men; they paid, in fact, a tax of five per cent for the privilege of receiving their wages, and this not to the State, to which the officers still pay sometimes an equal amount under the name of income-tax, but for the benefit of a private individual. If the mulcting of the Army had ended there, the evil would not have been so serious, but as a matter of fact it was but one drop in a vast ocean of corruption. I have already alluded to the immense service wrought by the Puritans towards integrity of administration, and towards raising the moral standard of the military profession. The destruction of the old traditions and the substitution of new principles was a[315] magnificent stroke, but it was unfortunately premature. The new principles might indeed have endured had they but been cherished and encouraged for another generation, but unfortunately no man better fitted to starve them could have been found than the merry monarch. His difficulties were doubtless very great, but he brought but one principle to meet them, that come what might he must not be bored. His indolent selfishness was masked by an exquisite charm of manner, and being a kind-hearted man, he always heard complaints with a sympathetic word; but to redress them cost more trouble than he could afford. Any man who would save him trouble was welcome; any shift that would stave off an unpleasant duty was the right one. There was abundance of deserving suitors to be provided for, still greater abundance of importunate favourites to be satisfied; administration was a bore and money was sadly deficient. All difficulties could be solved by the simple process of providing alike the impecunious and the greedy with administrative offices, or, in other words, with licences to plunder the public. If they chose to purchase these offices for money, so much the better for the royal purse. Thus the whole fabric built up during the Commonwealth was shattered almost at a blow.

The effect on the Army was immediate. A great many of the returned exiles, including Charles and James themselves, had served in the French army, where the system of purchasing commissions had never been abandoned, and where the abuses which had been shaken off by the New Model were still in full vigour. The old corrupt traditions had not been killed in thirteen years, and, reviving under the general reaction against Puritan restraint, they sprang quickly into new life. The old military centralisation of Oliver, upheld for a time by Monk, rapidly perished, and what might have still been an army sank into a mere aggregate of regiments, the property of individual colonels, and of troops and companies, the property of individual[316] captains. Every civilian of the military departments hastened to make money at the expense of the officers, and every officer to enrich himself at the cost of the men. The flood-gates so carefully closed by the Puritans were opened, and the abuses of three centuries streamed back into their old channel to flow therein unchecked for two centuries more.

At its first renewal the system of purchase was carried to such lengths that the very privates paid premiums to the enlisting officers; but the practice was speedily checked by Monk in 1663. In March 1684 the system received a kind of royal sanction through the purchase by the King himself of a commission from one officer for presentation to another. Then nine months later Charles suddenly declared that he would permit no further purchase and sale of military appointments. Whether he would have abolished it if he had lived may be doubted, but it is certain that the system continued in full operation under James the Second, gathering strength of course with each new year of existence.

Let me now attempt briefly to sketch the organised system of robbery that prevailed in the military service under the two last of the Stuarts. The study may be unpleasant, but it is less pathological than historic. First, then, let us treat of the officer. On purchasing his commission he paid forthwith one fee to the Secretary at War, and a second, apparently, to one of the Secretaries of State. After the institution of Chelsea Hospital, as to which a word shall presently be said, he paid further five per cent on his purchase money towards its funds, the seller of the commission contributing a like proportion from the same sum to the same object. He then became entitled to the pay of his rank, but this by no means implied that it was regularly paid to him. In the first place, his pay was divided into two parts, termed respectively his subsistence and his arrears, or clearings. The former sum was a proportion of the full pay, which varied according to the grade of the[317] officer, it being obvious that an ensign, for instance, could not subsist if any large fraction was deducted from his daily pittance, whereas a major could be more heavily mulcted and yet not starve. This subsistence was therefore paid, or supposed to be issued, in advance from the pay-office and to be subject to no stoppage. The balance of the full pay, or arrears, was paid yearly after it became due, and after considerable deductions had been made from it. First of these deductions came the poundage, or payment of one shilling in the pound, to the paymaster-general, and the discharge of one day's full pay to Chelsea Hospital. These stoppages were more or less legitimate. Then the commissary-general of the musters stepped in to claim from the officer, as from every one else in the Army, one day's pay, a tax which caused much discontent, and was in 1680 reduced to one-third of a day's pay. Then came a vast number of irregular exactions. Every commissary of the musters claimed a fee, amounting sometimes to as much as two guineas for every troop or company passed at each muster, which, as musters were taken six times a year, was sufficiently exorbitant. Next the auditors demanded thirty shillings, or eight times their legal fee, for each troop and company on passing the accounts of the paymaster-general. Finally, fees to the exchequer, fees to the treasury, fees for the issue of pay-warrants, fees, in a word, to every greedy clerk who could make himself disagreeable, brought the tale of extortion to an end. Let the reader remember that this system of subsistence and arrears, with the same legitimate deductions and almost equal opportunities for irregular pilfering, was still in force when we began the war of the French Revolution, and let him not wonder that officers of the Army will still cherish unfriendly feelings towards the clerks at the War Office.[212]

[318]

Now comes the more distressing examinations of the officers' methods of indemnifying themselves. For this purpose let us study the pay of a private centinel, as he was called, of the infantry of the Line. This consisted, as it had been in Queen Mary's time, and was still to be in King George the Third's, of eightpence a day, or ￡12 : 13 : 4 a year. Of this, sixpence a day, or ￡9 : 2 : 6 a year, was set apart for his subsistence, and was nominally inviolable. The balance, ￡3 : 0 : 10 a year, was called the "gross off-reckonings," which were subject of course to a deduction of five per cent, or 12s. 2d., for the paymaster-general, and of one day's pay to Chelsea Hospital, whereby the gross off-reckonings were reduced to ￡2 : 8s. This last amount, dignified by the title of "net off-reckonings," was made over to the colonel for the clothing of the regiment, an item which included not only the actual garments, but also the sword and belt, and as time went on the bayonet and cartridge box. The system, as will be remembered, dated from the days of Queen Elizabeth, when half a crown a week was allowed to the men for subsistence and a total of ￡4 : 2 : 6 deducted for two suits a year. It is sufficiently plain that the sum now allowed for clothing was insufficient, and that a colonel who did his duty by his men must inevitably be a loser. Moreover, this was not his only expense. The clerical work entailed by his duties demanded assistance, for which he was indeed authorised to keep a clerk, but supplied with no allowance wherewith to pay him. This clerk presently became known as the colonel's agent, and though a civilian and the colonel's private servant, virtually performed the duties of a regimental paymaster.

The results of such an arrangement may easily be guessed. It was not in consonance with military tradition, certainly not in accordance with human nature, that colonels should lose money by their commands, and it is only too certain that they did not. The contractor was called in, and the door was opened[319] wide to robbery at the expense of the soldier. Colonels took commissions or even open bribes from the contractors; the agent took his fee likewise; and in at least one recorded case a colonel actually accepted a bribe from his own agent to give him the contract. It may easily be imagined how the soldiers fared for clothing. But the mischief did not end here. The subsistence-money, though in theory subject to no deduction, was practically at the mercy of the colonel and his agent, who, under various pretexts, appropriated a greater or smaller share of the poor soldier's sixpence. As an additional source of profit, it was not uncommon for colonels to abstain from reporting the vacancy caused by an officer's death, to continue to draw the dead man's pay and to put it into his own pocket.

Captains of companies, with such an example before them, were not slow to imitate it; and from them too the unfortunate soldiers suffered not a little. But their easiest road to plunder was the old beaten track of false musters, which was rendered all the easier by the corruption of the commissaries. Any vacancy in the ranks after one muster was left unfilled until the day before the next muster, and the captain drew pay for an imaginary man during the interval. Or again, the passe-volant, old as the days of Hawkwood, made his reappearance at musters and was passed, with or without the collusion of the commissaries, as a genuine soldier. Finally, Charles himself gave countenance after a manner to this fraud by reviving the practice of allowing officers so many imaginary men or permanent vacancies in each troop or company in order to increase their emoluments. And so the passe-volant became naturalised first as a "faggot," and later as a "warrant man" in the infantry and a "hautbois" in the cavalry, and survived to a period well within the memory of living men.[213] The remoter a regiment's quarters from[320] home the grosser were the abuses that prevailed in it, and in Ireland they seem to have passed all bounds. Captains calmly appropriated the entire pay of their companies, and turned the men loose to live by the plunder of the inhabitants. It was a reversion to the evils rampant in Queen Elizabeth's army in the Netherlands, and, in justice to the officers, it must be added that those evils were brought about in both cases by the same cause. Officers were simply forced into dishonesty by the withholding of their own pay by civilian officials in London.

It must not be thought that these scandals passed unnoticed at headquarters. As early as 1663 orders were issued to put a stop to fraudulent musters, and two years later the salaries of the officers of the Ordnance were increased almost threefold to check the sale of places and to diminish the temptation to accept bribes. Similar orders were respectively promulgated from time to time, but with little or no effect; possibly they were issued mainly as a matter of form, to stop the mouth of criticism. The root of the evil is to be traced to the civilian paymaster-general, who from the peculiarity of his position was accountable to no one, and enjoyed total irresponsibility for full forty years. The King no doubt flattered himself that the men were regularly paid; the abuses took some time to attain to their height, and in the short reign of James the Second it is probable that his attention to military business did somewhat to improve matters. But while Charles was on the throne the paymaster-general did as he pleased. Though wages were nominally paid after each muster, they were often withheld for months, and even for years. Finally, when payment was at last made, it was discharged not in cash but in tallies or debentures which could only be sold at a discount; while the colonels' agents seized the opportunity to deduct a percentage in consideration of the trouble to which they had been subjected to obtain any payment whatever.

So the old foundations of fraud were renovated,[321] and on them was built during the next century and a half a gigantic superstructure of rascality and corruption which is not yet wholly demolished. Let it not be thought that in the seventeenth century such malpractices were either new or confined to England. They were, as I have often repeated, as old almost as the art of war, and they were rampant all over Europe. The excuse of English officers for their dishonesty was always, "It is so in France," and in France, as the history of the French Revolution shows, the old evils endured and throve for another full century. But the sin and shame of England is, that though she had once put away the accursed thing from her, she returned to it again as the sow to her wallowing in the mire. In 1659 English soldiers were proud of their name and calling; in 1666 it had already become a scandal to be a Life Guardsman.[214] Recruits had been found without difficulty under the Commonwealth to make the military profession, as was the rule in those days, the business of their whole life; but after a very few years of the Stuarts the King was compelled to resort to the press-gang. The status of the soldier was lowered, and has never recovered itself to this day.

I turn from this melancholy tale of retrogression to contemplate the changes made in other departments of the service. Herein it will be most convenient to begin with the regimental organisation and equipment. First, then, let us glance at the cavalry, which at the Restoration appears definitely to have taken precedence as the senior service. The reader will remember that in the New Model the fixed strength of a regiment was six troops of one hundred men, which was reduced in time of peace to an establishment of sixty men. Setting aside the Life Guards, which were independent troops of two hundred gentlemen apiece, the regiment which first occupies our attention is the Blues, which began life with eight troops, each of sixty men. So far there was practically no change, but in 1680 the strength of the[322] Blues was diminished to fifty men in a troop; and in 1687 the newly raised regiments were established at an initial strength of six or seven troops of forty men only. Finally, as shall presently be seen in the campaigns that lie before us in Flanders, the establishment of a troop for war sinks to fifty men, and the establishment for peace to thirty-six. Here, therefore, is Cromwell's excellent system overthrown. The troop of cavalry is so far weakened as to be not worth assorting into three divisions, one to each of the three officers, and the seeds of enforced idleness are sown, to bear fruit an hundredfold. Hardly less significant is the appointment, in 1661, of regimental adjutants to help the majors in the duties which they had hitherto discharged without assistance.

The equipment of the Horse was likewise altered. The trooper retained the iron head-piece[215] and cuirass, the pistols and the sword of the New Model, but he was now further supplied with a carbine, which was slung at his back, and with a cartridge box for his ammunition. The new equipment was served out to the household troops in 1663, and to other regiments of Horse in 1677. It marks a new birth of the futile practice of firing from the saddle, which has wasted untold ammunition with infinitesimal results. As regards horses it was still the rule, which had been little modified during the Civil War, that the trooper should bring with him his own horse; if he had none the King supplied him with one, at an average price, and the money was stopped, if necessary, from the trooper's pay.

The drill still bore marks of Cromwell's influence, for the men were drawn up in three ranks only; and though the attack was opened by the discharge of carbines and pistols, yet it was distinctly laid down that when the fire-arms were empty, there must be no thought of reloading, but immediate resort to the sword.[323] Moreover, although the front was still increased or diminished by the doubling of ranks or files, there were already signs of the man?uvre by small divisions that was to displace it.

Passing next to the dragoons, the reader will have noticed that this arm was not represented in the original Army formed by Charles the Second. Notwithstanding the high reputation which dragoons had enjoyed during the Civil War, it was not until 1672 that a regiment of them was raised, and then only to be disbanded after a brief existence of two years. The Tangier Horse, now called the First Royal Dragoons, was converted into a regiment of dragoons on its return from foreign service in 1684; and four years later there was added to the establishment a Scotch regiment which bears a famous name. It was made up in 1681 of three independent troops that had been raised three years before, and was completed by three additional troops, under the name of the Royal Regiment of Dragoons of Scotland. It now ranks as the Second regiment of the Cavalry of the Line, and is known to all the world as the Scots Greys.

Dragoons still preserved their original character of mounted infantry. Twelve men of each troop besides the non-commissioned officers were armed with the halberd and a pair of pistols, while the remainder were equipped with matchlock muskets, bandoliers, and, after 1672, with bayonets. In 1687 this equipment was improved by the substitution of flintlocks for matchlocks, of cartridge boxes for bandoliers, and of buckets, in addition to the old slings, for the carriage of muskets. The tactical unit of the dragoons was still called the company, though at the close of the Civil War often denominated the troop; but the tendency of dragoons to assimilate themselves to horse is seen in the substitution of cornet for ensign as the title of the junior subaltern. This tendency was perhaps the stranger, since the companies of dragoons, eighty men strong, must have presented a favourable contrast to the weak and attenuated troops of horse.

[324]

A new description of mounted soldier appeared in 1683,[216] in the shape of the Horse-grenadier. I shall have more to say presently of grenadiers, when treating of the infantry, so it is sufficient to state here that Horse-grenadiers were practically only mounted men of that particular arm, who as a rule linked their horses for action and fought on foot like the dragoons. There were in all three troops of Horse-grenadiers, which were attached to the three troops of Life Guards. Their peculiarity was that the two junior officers of each troop were both lieutenants, instead of lieutenant and cornet.

The infantry, like the cavalry, suffered an alteration in the regimental establishments after the Restoration. The old strength of one hundred and twenty to a company was reduced to one hundred, and in time of peace sank to eighty, sixty, and even fifty men. The number of companies to a battalion was also altered. The First Guards began life with twelve companies; and though for a time the Coldstreamers and newly raised regiments retained the original number of ten, yet twelve gradually became the usual, and after the accession of James the Second, the accepted, strength of a battalion. It must be noted that after 1672 a battalion and a regiment of foot cease to be synonymous terms, the First Guards being in that year increased to twenty-four companies and two battalions, a precedent which was soon extended to sundry other regiments.

On the accession of James there was added to the twelve companies of every regiment an additional company of grenadiers. These were established first in 1678, and took their name from the grenade,[217] the new weapon with which they were armed. The hand grenade was simply a small shell of from one to two inches in diameter, kindled by a fuse and thrown by [325]the hand. Hence it was entrusted to the tallest and finest men in the regiment, who might reasonably be expected to throw it farthest. The white plume, supposed to be symbolic of the white smoke of the fuse, was not apparently used at first as the distinctive mark of grenadiers. They, and the fusiliers likewise, wore caps instead of broad-brimmed hats, to enable them to sling their firelocks over both shoulders with ease. These caps, which were at first of fur, were soon made of cloth, and assumed the shape of the mitre which Hogarth has handed down to us. Another peculiarity of grenadiers was that they were always armed with firelocks and with hatchets,[218] and that both of their subaltern officers were lieutenants.

Another new branch of the infantry was the regiment of Fusiliers, so called from the fusil or flintlock, as opposed to the matchlock, with which they were armed. They were, in fact, simply an expansion of the companies of firelocks which formed part of the New Model in the department of the Train; they were borne for duty with the artillery specially, and therefore included one company of miners. Miner-companies were armed with long carbines and hammer-hatchets peculiar to themselves, and they had but one subaltern officer, a lieutenant. Like the grenadiers, the fusiliers did not recognise the rank of ensign, and their junior subalterns were therefore called second lieutenants.[219]

It is somewhat remarkable that so much should have been made of a weapon so familiar as the firelock. Men who, like Gustavus Adolphus, saw that the whole future of warfare turned on the fire of musketry, had long accepted its superiority to the matchlock; and George Monk, on marching into London in 1660, had at once ordered the Coldstreamers to return their [326]matchlocks into store and to draw firelocks in their stead. Nor was this preference confined solely to military reformers, for we find the Assemblies of Barbados and Jamaica, remote islands in which old fashions might have been expected to die their hardest, uncompromisingly rejecting the matchlocks prescribed for them by the English Government and insisting on arming themselves with "fusees."[220] At home, however, jobbery and corruption were doubtless at work, for the Coldstream Guards reverted to the matchlock in 1665. Finally, after many compromises, the Guards were in 1683 armed exclusively with firelocks, while the other regiments carried a fixed proportion, probably not less than one-half, of the superior weapon among their matchlocks.

Correspondingly we find throughout these reigns a steady diminution in the use of the pike. In companies of grenadiers and regiments of fusiliers they were utterly abolished; in other corps the proportion, which had once been one-half, had already sunk at the Restoration to one-third, whence it speedily declined to one-fourth and one-fifth.[221] We find them, however, still in use during the wars of William the Third, and we shall see that they did not want advocates even at the close of the Seven Years' War, to say nothing of the part that they played in the French Revolution.[222] As a weapon for officers it survived for many generations under the form of the half-pike or spontoon,[223] even as the halberd prolonged its life as the peculiar weapon of sergeants. To the officers also was assigned by a singular coincidence the preservation of the memory of [327]the armour which had once been worn by all pikemen; and the gorget survived as a badge of rank on their breasts long after corslet and tassets had vanished from the world.[224]

None the less the pike had received its death-blow through the invention of the bayonet. This new and revolutionary weapon had been invented in 1640, when it consisted of a double-edged blade, like a pike-head, mounted on two or three inches of wooden haft, which could be thrust into the barrel of the musket. In this form the bayonet was issued first to the Tangier regiment[225] alone in 1663, and to all the infantry and dragoons in 1673, but only to be withdrawn, until in 1686 it was finally reissued to the Foot Guards. It was not until after the Revolution that bayonets were served out to the whole of the infantry.

In the matter of drill there was little or no change. The front was still increased or diminished by the doubling of ranks and of files, and the file still consisted of six men. The reduction of the numbers of pikemen, however, greatly increased the homogeneity of the infantry and contributed not a little to simplify its movements. Moreover, although the file might consist of six men, it is not likely, considering how far the musket and bayonet had superseded the pike, that the formation for action was greater than three ranks in depth. The platoon is not mentioned in the drill books, the probable reason being that it was not favoured by the French School, in which Charles and James had both of them received their training. But for this, there is every reason to suppose that the army encamped on Hounslow Heath would not have been found behind the times in the matter of exercise and equipment if it could have been transported without change to the field of Blenheim.

[328]

Of the artillery there is still little to be said. Until 1682 gunners seem to have enjoyed their original distribution into small, independent bodies, in charge of the various scattered garrisons. Even such small organisation as appeared in the New Model seems to have been lost, and field-guns appear to have been told off to battalions of infantry, or to have been worked by such of the escort of fusiliers as had been trained by the few expert gunners. The artilleryman had long looked upon himself as a superior mortal,[226] but in 1682 he was brought under the Ordnance, subjected to military discipline, and regularly exercised at his duty. The time was not far distant when the organisation of the gunners was to be improved. Of engineers I can say no more than the few details already given when describing the Ordnance Office and the fusiliers.

A word remains to be said of the foundation of Chelsea Hospital. It has been told that Queen Mary was the first of our sovereigns who showed any care for old soldiers, and that Elizabeth was intolerably impatient of such miserable creatures. Two generations, however, had bred a softer heart in English sovereigns, and when Charles the Second had been twenty years on the throne, and England was again thronged with maimed and infirm soldiers who had served their time in Tangier, in the West Indies, or in the Low Countries, it was felt to be a reproach that faithful fighting-men should be left to starve or to beg their bread. Kilmainham Hospital in Dublin was the first-fruit of this sentiment, and was founded in 1680; Chelsea followed it in the succeeding year. Sir Stephen Fox, the paymaster-general, was the man who was foremost in the work, and it is to his credit that, having made so much money out of the private soldier, he should have[329] chosen this method of repaying him. The scheme of the hospital was submitted to the King, who was asked to grant a piece of land for a building. Charles, always gracious, readily complied, and offered the site of St. James's College, Chelsea. "But odso!" he added, "I now recollect that I have already given that land to Mistress Nell here." Whereupon, so runs the story, whether true or untrue, Nell gracefully forewent her grant for so good a purpose; and Chelsea Hospital is the British soldier's to this day. It is painful to have to add that the officials of the pay-office seem to have begun at once to steal part of the money contributed by the Army to its maintenance, though the fact will astonish no reader who has followed me through this chapter. But the friends of the Army have always been few, and the best of them in former times, strange conjunction, were a queen and a harlot. Had they endowed a fund for supplying African negroes with Bibles, or even with mass-books, much would be forgiven them in England; but they thought more of saving old soldiers from want, so Mary Tudor is still Bloody Mary, and Eleanor Gwyn the unspeakable Nell.

Authorities.—The reader will find the fullest of references for the details in this chapter in Clifford Walton's History of the British Standing Army, with an index which will enable him to trace them without difficulty. Having myself perused the War Office books and papers in the Record Office, and the Calendars of the Domestic and Treasury State Papers independently, I can answer for the care and accuracy of the author in the preparation of this vast store of information, and gladly acknowledge my debt to it. The defect of the work is, of course, that it begins abruptly at the year 1660. Mr. Dalton's Army Lists and Commission Registers are also of great value, and claim the gratitude of all workers in the field of English military history. Sir Sibbald Scott's British Army is worth consulting occasionally for a few details, but is superseded by Hewitt's Ancient Armour on one side, and by Colonel Clifford Walton on the other. Mackinnon's Coldstream Guards contains a very valuable appendix of ancient documents. Sir F. Hamilton's History of the Grenadier Guards should be used only with extreme caution. The drill and exercise of the period may be studied in Venn's Military Observations, 1672.
BOOK V CHAPTER I
Seldom has a man been confronted with such difficulties as those that beset William of Orange when the Revolution was fairly accomplished. So long as his success was still uncertain he stood in his favourite position of a military commander doing his worst against the power of France, while to the English nation he was a champion and a deliverer. Once seated on the throne he found that he had to do with a disorganised administration and a demoralised people. Forty years of revolution, interrupted by twenty-five of corrupt government, had done their work; and chaos reigned alike in the minds of private men and in all departments of the public service. Finally, as if this were not sufficient, there was a war in Ireland, a war in Flanders, and the practical certainty of an insurrection in Scotland.

His first trouble came quickly enough. Amid the general rejoicing over the overthrow of King James the English Army stood apart, surly and silent. The regiments felt that they had been fooled. They had been concentrated to resist foreign invasion, but had been withdrawn without any attempt to strike a blow. During his advance, and after his arrival in London, William had detailed the British regiments in the Dutch service for all duties which, if entrusted to foreigners, might have offended national sentiment; but his prudence could not reconcile the Army. The troops felt their disgrace keenly, and the burden of their dishonour was aggravated by the taunts of the foreigners. Moreover, the discipline of the Dutch had been so[334] admirable that English folk had not failed to draw invidious comparisons between the well-conducted strangers and their own red-coats. Needless to say, they never reflected that Parliament, by withholding powers to enforce discipline, was chiefly responsible for the delinquencies of the English soldier. Discontent spread fast among the troops, and before the new king had been proclaimed a month, found vent in open mutiny.
1689.

On the news of William's expedition to England, France had declared war against the States-General; and England, pursuant to obligations of treaty, was called upon to furnish her contingent of troops for their defence. On the 8th of March accordingly Lieutenant-General Lord Marlborough was ordered to ship four battalions of Guards and six of the Line[227] for Holland. Among these battalions was the Royal Scots, to which regiment William, doubtless with the best intentions, had lately appointed the Duke of Schomberg to be colonel. Schomberg was by repute one of the first soldiers in Europe. He had held a marshal's baton in France and had sacrificed it to the cause of the Protestant religion. He had even fought by the side of the Royal Scots in more than one great action. But he was not a Scotsman, and the Scots had known no colonel yet but a Mackay, a Hepburn, or a Douglas. Moreover, the Parliament at Westminster, though not a Scottish Assembly, had, without consulting the regiment, coolly transferred its allegiance from James Stuart to William of Nassau.

With much grumbling the Scots marched as far as Ipswich on their way to their port of embarkation, and then, at a signal from some Jacobite officers, they broke into mutiny, seized four cannon, and, turning northward, advanced by forced marches towards Scotland. The alarm in London was great. "If you let this evil spread," said Colonel Birch, an old officer of Cromwell's[335] day, "you will have an army upon you in a few days." William at once detached Ginkell, one of his best officers, with a large force in pursuit; the mutineers were overtaken near Sleaford, and, finding resistance hopeless, laid down their arms. William, selecting a few of the ringleaders only for punishment, ordered the rest of the regiment to return to its duty, and the Royal Scots sailed quietly away to the Maas. There the men deserted by scores, and even by hundreds,[228] but recruits were found, as good as they, to uphold the ancient reputation of the regiment.

Meanwhile good came out of evil, for the mutiny frightened the House of Commons not only into paying the expenses of William's expedition, but into passing the first Mutiny Act. It is true that the Act was passed for six months only, and that it provided for no more than the punishment of mutiny and desertion; but it recognised at least that military crime cannot be adequately checked by civil law, and it gave the Army more or less of a statutory right to exist. But readers should be warned once for all against the common fallacy that the existence of the Army ever depended on the passing of the annual Mutiny Act. The statute simply empowered the King to deal with certain military crimes for which the civil law made no provision. It made a great parade of the statement that the raising or keeping of a standing army in time of peace is against law, but the standing army was in existence for nearly thirty years before the Mutiny Act was passed, and continued to exist, as will be seen, for two short but distinct periods between 1689 and 1701 without the help of any Mutiny Act whatever. If, therefore, the keeping of a standing army in time of peace be against the law, it can only be said that during those periods Parliament deliberately voted money for the violation of the law, as indeed it is always prepared to do when convenient to itself. The Mutiny Act was not a protection to liberty; Parliament for the present[336] reserved for itself no check on the military code that might be framed by the King; and the Act was therefore rather a powerful weapon placed in the hands of the sovereign. Nevertheless, the passing of the Mutiny Act remains always an incident of the first importance in the history of the Army, and the story of its origin is typical of the attitude of Parliament towards that long-suffering body. Every concession, nay, every commonest requirement, must be wrung from it by the pressure of fear.

It might have been thought that the news which came from Ireland a few days before the mutiny would have stirred the House of Commons to take some such measure in hand. Tyrconnel had already called the Irish to arms for King James, and on the 14th of March James himself, having obtained aid from the French king, had landed at Cork with some hundreds of officers to organise the Irish levies. The regular troops in the Irish establishment, already manipulated by Tyrconnel before the Revolution, were ready to join him. Some regiments went over to him entire; others split themselves up into Catholics and Protestants, and ranged themselves on opposite sides. It was evident that no less a task than the reconquest of Ireland lay before the English Government; and considering that several regiments had already been detached to Flanders, it was equally evident that the Army must be increased. Estimates were therefore prepared of the cost of six regiments of horse, two of dragoons, and twenty-five of foot, sixteen of which last were to be newly raised, for the coming campaign.

Of the new regiments a few lay ready to William's hand. The first was Lord Forbes's regiment, one of the many Irish corps brought over to England by King James in 1688, and the only one which, being made up entirely of Protestants, was not disbanded by William at his accession. It is still with us as the Eighteenth Royal Irish. The next three were corps which had been raised for the support of the Protestant cause at[337] the Revolution. The first of them was a regiment of horse raised by the Earl of Devonshire among his tenantry in Derbyshire, which, long known by the name of the Black Horse, now bears the title of the Seventh Dragoon Guards. The second was a regiment of foot that had been formed at Exeter to join the Prince of Orange on his march from Torbay, and is still known as the Twentieth East Devon; and the third also remains with us as the Nineteenth of the Line. Three more regiments date their birth from March 1689—one raised by the Duke of Norfolk, one enlisted in the Welsh Marches, and a third which was recruited in Ireland but almost immediately brought over to England. These are now the Twenty-second, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth of the Line. Six more regiments of infantry which were raised in the same year, but disbanded at the close of the war, were Drogheda's, Lisburn's, Kingston's, Ingoldsby's, Roscommon's, and Bolton's. Of these, curiously enough, no fewer than three were dressed in blue instead of scarlet coats, possibly in flattering imitation of King William's famous Blue Guards. Thus, with ten thousand men to be enlisted, drilled, trained, and equipped, there was no lack of work for the recruiting officer, or for the Office of Ordnance, in the spring of
May 10.

It was not long before William and Schomberg made the discovery that the old regiments would require as much watching as the new. There were significant symptoms of rottenness in the whole military system; and discontented spirits were already spreading false and calumnious reports as to the treatment of the English regiments in Flanders, with the evident design of kindling a mutiny. Moreover, there were loud complaints from citizens of oppression by the soldiery, from soldiers of the fraudulent withholding of their pay, and from every honest officer, not, alas! a very numerous body, of false musters, embezzlement, fraud, and every description of abuse. The King lost no time in appointing[338] nine commissioners, with Schomberg at their head, to make the tour of the quarters in England, to inquire into the true state of the case, and if possible to restore order and discipline.[229]
August 15 25 .

Still more disquieting news came from the Prince of Waldeck, who commanded the confederate army in Flanders. The English regiments were far below the strength assigned to them on paper, their officers were ill-paid, and many of them, even the colonels, ill-conducted; the men were sickly, listless,[230] undisciplined, and disorderly; their shoes were bad, their clothing miserable, their very arms defective. William, whose eyes always rested by preference on the eastern side of the German Ocean, lost no time in sending his best officer to Flanders; but even the Earl of Marlborough had much ado to reduce these unruly elements to order. Nevertheless he persevered; and in the one serious action wherein the British were engaged during the campaign, that against Marshal d'Humières at Walcourt, Marlborough opened the eyes of Waldeck to the qualities of his men and to his own capacity. This was Marlborough's first brush with a Marshal of France; and it would seem that it was never forgotten by William. With this we may dismiss the campaign in Flanders for 1689.

Meanwhile another soldier of remarkable talent, and an old comrade of William, had rushed into rebellion in Scotland. The dragoons with which Dundee had harried the Covenanters and earned the name of "Bloody Claver'se" were still ready to his hand, and to these, by fanning the undying flame of tribal feud, he presently added an array of Highland clans. The flight of Dundee from Edinburgh on his errand of insurrection warned the city to take speedy measures for its defence. Lord Leven caused the drums to beat, and within two hours, it is said, had raised eight hundred men; but [339]the work of these two hours has lasted for two centuries, for the regiment thus hastily enlisted is still alive as the Twenty-fifth of the Line. Shortly after, William sent up three Scotch regiments of the Dutch service under a veteran officer, Mackay; and the Highland war began in earnest. Skilful, however, as Mackay might be on the familiar battle-grounds of Flanders, he was helpless in the Highlands, where one week with George Monk would have helped him more than all the campaigns of Turenne. He crawled over the country conscientiously enough in pursuit of an enemy that he could never overtake, without further result than to exhaust the strength of both horses and men. It was not until one stage of a desultory campaign had been ended and a new one begun, that he at last met his enemy at Killiecrankie.
July 27.

There is no need for me to repeat the story told once for all by Lord Macaulay, of that romantic action; but it is worth while to glance at some few of its peculiarities. Mackay's force consisted of five battalions—the three Scottish regiments already mentioned, Hastings', now the Thirteenth Light Infantry, and the newly raised Twenty-fifth, together with two troops of horse. Of these the Scottish battalions, trained in the Dutch School by competent officers, should unquestionably have been the most efficient; yet all three of them broke before the charge of the Highlanders, threw down their arms, and would not be rallied. The two troops of horse took to their heels and disappeared; the Twenty-fifth broke like the other Scottish regiments, as was pardonable in such young soldiers, though they made some effort to rally. The only regiment that stood firm was the Thirteenth, which kept up a murderous fire to the end, and retired with perfect coolness and good order. Yet this was their first action, and Hastings, their colonel, was one of the most unscrupulous scoundrels, even in those days of universal robbery, that ever robbed a regiment.[231] Thus the troops[340] which should have done best did worst, and those that might have been expected to do worst did best; and the moral would seem to be that inexperienced troops are sometimes safer than troops trained in civilised warfare for the rough-and-ready fighting of a savage campaign.

A still more curious example of the same peculiarity was seen before the close of the war. At the end of the first stage of Mackay's campaign it was found necessary to raise fresh troops; and it was hoped that the Covenanters of Western Scotland, who of all men had most reason to detest bloody Claverhouse, might be willing to furnish recruits. But the Covenanters had scruples about joining the army of King William, wherein they might be set shoulder to shoulder with the immoral and, even worse, with the unorthodox. Even Mackay, a man of extreme piety,[232] was suspected by them. They held a tumultuous meeting, wherein the majority, little knowing probably how terribly true their words then were of the British Army, declared that military service was a sinful association. Nevertheless there was still a minority from which the Earl of Angus formed a body of infantry, twelve hundred strong, which, though now numbered Twenty-sixth of the Line, is still best known by its first name of the Cameronians. Their ideas of military organisation were peculiar. They desired that each company should furnish an elder, who with the chaplain should constitute a court for the suppression of immorality and heresy; and though the elders were never appointed, and the officers bore the usual titles of captain, lieutenant, and ensign, yet the chaplain, a noted hill-preacher, supplied in his own person fanaticism for all. So in spite of the ravings of the majority a true Puritan regiment once more donned the red coat, under the youngest colonel—for Angus was no more than eighteen—that had led such men since Henry Cromwell.
August 21.

Within four months they were engaged against four times their number of Highlanders at Dunkeld. They[341] were still imperfectly disciplined, still somewhat of a congregation that preferred elders to officers. They would not be satisfied that their mounted officers would not gallop away, until the lieutenant-colonel and major offered to shoot their horses before their eyes. Then they braced themselves, and fought such a fight as has seldom fallen to the lot of a regiment of recruits. The battle was fought amid the roar of a burning town. Angus was not present—short though his time was to be, it was not yet come—and his place was taken by Lieutenant-Colonel Cleland. The action was hardly opened before Cleland fell dead. The major stepped forward to his place, and a minute after was pierced by three mortal wounds. The men too fell fast; the musketry crackled round them, and the flames roared behind them; but still they fought on. Ammunition failed them at last; everything conspired to make the trial too hard for a young regiment to endure; but nothing could break the spirit of these men. At last, after four long hours, the Highlanders rolled back in disorder. The Cameronians had won their first battle and ended the Highland war.

But that war brought something more to the British Army even than two famous Scottish regiments. For Mackay had noticed that at Killiecrankie his Scotsmen had not had time to fix the clumsy plug-bayonets into the muzzles of their muskets, and had consequently been unable to meet the Highland charge. He therefore ordered bayonets to be made so that they could be screwed on to the outside of the barrel, thus enabling the men to fire with bayonets fixed. So finally was accomplished the blending of pike and musket into a single weapon, a great era in the history of the art of war.[233]

But while recruiting officers were beating their drums through the market towns of England, and Mackay was toiling in pursuit of the Highlanders, Protestant Ireland was standing desperately at bay[342] against King James at Londonderry and Enniskillen. There is no need for me to recall the triumph of the unconquerable defenders of Derry; and it would be pleasanter, were it possible, to pass over the somewhat discreditable behaviour of the Army in relation to their relief. Five days, indeed, before the city was invested two English regiments, the Ninth and Seventeenth Foot, had arrived in the bay, but had been persuaded by the treacherous governor, Lundy, to return and to leave Derry to its fate. Colonels Cunningham and Richards, who commanded these corps, were both of them superseded on their arrival in England; but no further help came until on the 15th of June General Kirke sailed into Lough Foyle with the Second, Ninth, and Eleventh Foot. Even then he would not stir for six whole weeks, when he received positive orders from home to relieve the city.
July 31.

Meanwhile all operations of the Irish Protestants that were not wholly defensive were directed from Enniskillen, which was filled with refugees from Munster and Connaught. With extraordinary energy these Protestants organised a body of horse and another of foot, with which they kept up an incessant harassing warfare against the insurgent Irish. On Kirke's arrival they applied to him for reinforcements. These he refused to give; but he sent them arms and he sent them officers, one of whom, Colonel Wolseley, equalled at Newtown Butler Dundee's feat of Killiecrankie, of beating trained soldiers with raw but enthusiastic levies. After this action the force of the Enniskilleners was reorganised into two regiments of dragoons and three of foot, which are represented among us to this day by the Fifth Royal Irish Dragoons, now Lancers, the Sixth Enniskillen Dragoons, and the Twenty-seventh Enniskillen regiment of the infantry of Line.

The time was now come when the great English expedition for the reconquest of Ireland should set sail. The untrained Irish Protestant had played his part gallantly, and it was the turn of the English[343] soldier. For months great preparations had been going forward; the new regiments had been raised; and on paper at any rate there were not only horse, foot, and dragoons, but a respectable train of artillery and of transport. Moreover, the failure of Cunningham and Richards had led Parliament to inquire into the conduct of that expedition; and it had been discovered that the supply of transport-ships had been so insufficient that the men had not had space even to lie down, while the biscuit provided for them had been mouldy and uneatable, and the beer so foul and putrid that they preferred to drink salt water. These shortcomings had occurred in the dispatch of a couple of battalions only; it remained to be seen how the military departments could cope with the transport and maintenance of an entire army. The total force to be employed in Ireland was close on nineteen thousand men, of which about one-fourth was already on the spot.
August 13.

William had chosen Marshal Schomberg to command the expedition. Though past fourscore, the veteran was still active and fit for duty; and in reputation there was no better officer in Europe. On the 13th of August he landed with his army at Bangor and detached twelve regiments to besiege Carrickfergus. The garrison held out for a week, and was then permitted to capitulate and to march away to Newry. But that week was sufficient to open Schomberg's eyes. The new regiments proved to be mobs of undisciplined boys. Their officers were ignorant, negligent, and useless. The arms served out from the Tower were so ill-made, and the men so careless in the handling of them, that nearly every regiment required to be re-armed. The officers of artillery were not only ignorant and lazy, but even cowardly,[234] while their guns were so defective that a week of easy work had sufficed to render most of them unserviceable.[235] Senior officers were as deficient as [344]junior: there was not one qualified to command a brigade; and the commissary, in spite of reports that he had made all needful provision, had failed to supply sufficient stores. Lastly, in spite of the warning given by the experience of Cunningham and Richards, the transport across St. George's Channel was so shamefully conducted that one regiment of horse, that now known as the Queen's Bays, lost every charger and troop-horse in the passage.[236] The result was that all was confusion, and that every detail in every department required the personal supervision of the Commander-in-Chief.

Fortunately James's Irish were so far demoralised by previous failures that his officer at Belfast thought it prudent to evacuate that town. Schomberg therefore threw a garrison into it, and marched with his whole force upon Newry. The Duke of Berwick, who was guarding the road, fell back on his approach to Drogheda, where James had collected twenty thousand men; and Schomberg, advancing through a wasted and deserted country, halted, and entrenched himself at Dundalk. James struggled forward to within a league of him to try and tempt him to an action, but Schomberg was not to be entrapped; and by the second week in September the campaign was over.

The fact was that a month's service in the field had completely broken the English Army down. By the time when it reached Dundalk it was on the brink of starvation. The Commissary-General, one Shales, was a man of experience, for he had been purveyor to King James's camp at Hounslow; and he had accumulated stores—bad stores, it is true, but nevertheless stores—at the base, Belfast. But he had made no provision for carrying any part of them with the Army. He had bought up large numbers of horses in Cheshire, but,[345] instead of transporting them to Ireland, had let them out to the farmers of the district for the harvest, and pocketed their hire.[237] Again, the artillery could not be moved because the Ordnance Department looked to Shales to provide horses, while Shales declared the artillery to be no business of his. Moreover, had the horses been on the spot, there was not a shoe ready for their feet.[238] No measures had been taken, in spite of Schomberg's representations, to victual the troops by sea, though Cromwell had shown forty years before, in Scotland, how readily the work could be done. But indeed the expedition would have been better managed than it was by following the guidance of so old a master as King Edward the Third.[239] Never was there a more signal example of English ignorance, neglect, and sloth in respect of military administration.

By the 18th of September victuals at Dundalk were at famine price, and the men began to perish by scores and by hundreds. It was hardly surprising, for they were not only unfed but unclothed; there was not so much as a greatcoat in the whole of the English infantry; the cavalry were without cloaks, boots, and belts, and almost the entire force wanted shoes. Moreover, the English were shiftless; when ordered to build themselves huts they could not be at the pains to obey, even with the example of their Dutch and Huguenot comrades before them. Sickness spread rapidly among them, and there was no hospital; and had there been a hospital there were no medicines. Finally, the behaviour of the officers was utterly shameful. "The lions in Africa," wrote one who was on the spot, "are not more barbarous than some of our officers are to the sick."[240] "I never saw officers more wicked and more interested," wrote Schomberg almost on the same day.[241] The [346]Commander-in-Chief did his best to interpose on behalf of the men, but his hands were already overfull. The colonels were perhaps the worst of all the officers; they understood pillage better than the payment of their men, and filled their empty ranks with worthless Irish recruits, simply because these were more easily cheated than English.[242] It cost Schomberg a week's work to ensure that the pay of the soldiers went into their own and not into their captains' pockets.

Yet on the whole it was not the military officers that were chiefly to blame. The constant complaint of Schomberg was that he could get no money; and for this the Treasurer of the Army was responsible. This functionary, William Harbord, a civilian and a member of the House of Commons, appears to have been on the whole the most shameless of all the officials in Ireland. By some jobbery he had contrived to obtain an independent troop of cavalry, for which he drew pay as though it were complete, though the troop in reality consisted of himself, two clerks whom he put down as officers, and a standard which he kept in his bedroom.[243] This was the only corps which was regularly paid. The other regiments he turned equally to his own advantage by sending home false muster-rolls[244] in order to draw the pay of the vacancies; but whenever the question of payment of the men was raised, he evaded it and went to England, pleading the necessity of attending to his duties in the House of Commons. It was Harbord again who was responsible for the failure of the hospital. He admitted, indeed, that if he had known as much about hospitals at the beginning as at the end of the campaign, he might have saved two-thirds of the men; but the truth was that he would never at any time supply a penny for it.[245] By Christmas Schomberg began to relent towards his officers, for he discovered that they [347]were penniless, not having received a farthing of pay for four months.[246] Meanwhile civilians were growing fat. Shales was buying salt at ninepence a pound and selling it at four shillings;[247] and junior commissaries were acting as regimental agents and advancing money to the unhappy officers at exorbitant interest.[248]
Nov. 5.

In such a state of affairs Schomberg, rightly or wrongly, considered himself powerless. William ordered him from time to time to advance on Dublin; and Harbord, with incredible impertinence, urged him to march against the enemy.[249] Schomberg answered William by a plain statement of his condition, and Harbord by a surly and contemptuous growl. In truth his Dutch and Huguenot regiments, which alone were well clad and well looked after by their officers, were the only troops on which he could rely. The English continued to die like flies. Schomberg wisely endeavoured to distract their thoughts from their own misery by keeping them at drill. He found that not one in four had the slightest idea how to load or fire his musket, while the muskets themselves fell to pieces in the handling. Pestilence increased, and with it callousness and insubordination. The men used the corpses of their comrades to stop the draughts under their tent-walls, and robbed any man whose appearance promised hope of gain. Nor was this indiscipline confined to Dundalk. The Enniskilleners, who have generally been represented as superior to the English, were quite as fond of plunder, and robbed William Harbord himself, despite his protestations, in broad daylight.[250] Happily for Schomberg, James's forces were in as ill condition as his own, so that he was able to retire into winter quarters from Dundalk without molestation. Of fourteen thousand men in the camp, upwards of six thousand had perished.[251]

[348]

Gradually and painfully the winter wore away, but without abatement in the mortality of the troops. Meanwhile the House of Commons, awaking to the terrible state of things in Ireland, addressed the King for the arrest of Shales. William replied that he had already put him under arrest; and the name of Shales was accordingly constantly before the House in the course of the next few months, but without any result. He seems to have escaped scot-free; and indeed there was no lack of men as corrupt as he in the House of Commons and in all places of trust. William then took the extraordinary step of asking the House to appoint seven members to superintend the preparations for the next campaign; but this it very wisely declined to do. It appointed a Committee, however, to examine into the expenses of the war,[252] and finally passed a Mutiny Act with new clauses against false musters and other abuses—clauses which were as old as King Edward the Sixth, and for all practical purposes as dead. It was not legislation that was wanted, but enforcement of existing laws. William, however, appears early to have abandoned in despair the hope of finding an honest man in England.
1690.

And now, with the experience of 1689 before them, the King and Schomberg began to arrange their plans for the campaign of 1690. In the matter of troops Schomberg was vehement against further employment of regiments of miserable English and Irish boys;[253] and it was therefore decided to transport twenty-seven thousand seasoned men, seventeen thousand of them British and the remainder Dutch and Danish, from England and Holland. Artillery and small arms were imported from Holland, since the Office of Ordnance had been found wanting; and as a daring experiment, [349]which proved to be a total failure, the King took the clothing of several regiments out of their colonels' hands into his own.[254] Finally care was taken for the proper organisation of the transport-service. The plan of campaign in its broad lines was mapped out by a civilian, Sir Robert Southwell,[255] the secretary for Ireland. The country, he said, must be attacked simultaneously from north and south, for while the ports of Munster were open France could always pour in reinforcements and supplies. While, therefore, Schomberg advanced from the north, a descent should be made on the south, and Cork should be the objective. Finally, Southwell or some other sensible man did what William should have done the year before, and drew out a succinct account of the principles followed in Ireland with such signal success by that forgotten General, Oliver Cromwell.[256]

I shall not dwell further on the Irish campaigns of 1690 and 1691. There is little of importance to the History of the Army to be found in them; and the reader will more readily follow Lord Macaulay than myself over this familiar ground. The battle of the Boyne was won without great credit to William's skill, and paid for rather dearly by the death of gallant old Schomberg. The troops learned something of active service, and something, though not nearly so much as they should have learnt, of discipline. The lesson of Cromwell was not taken to heart; and the Protestant Irish were allowed to set an example of plunder which was but too readily followed by the English. Ginkell's final campaign of 1691 was more successful, more brilliant, and more satisfactory in every respect, inasmuch as the Irish fought with distinguished gallantry. For the rest, the English showed at Aghrim and at Athlone their usual desperate valour; succeeding, even when experienced commanders, like St. Ruth, confessed with [350]admiration that they had thought their success impossible. But in the matter of skill the quiet and unostentatious captures of Cork and Kinsale in 1690 were far the most brilliant achievements of the war; and these were the work of John, Earl of Marlborough.
CHAPTER II
October.

I pass now to Flanders, which is about to become for the second time the training ground of the British Army. The judicious help sent by Lewis the Fourteenth to Ireland had practically diverted the entire strength of William to that quarter for two whole campaigns; and though, as has been seen, there were English in Flanders in 1689 and 1690, the contingents which they furnished were too small and the operations too trifling to warrant description in detail. After the battle of the Boyne the case was somewhat altered, for, though a large force was still required in Ireland for Ginkell's final pacification of 1691, William was none the less at liberty to take the field in Flanders in person. Moreover, Parliament with great good-will had voted seventy thousand men for the ensuing year, of which fully fifty thousand were British,[258] so that England was about to put forth her strength in Europe on a scale unknown since the loss of Calais.

But first a short space must be devoted to the theatre of war, where England was to meet and break down the overweening power of France. Few studies are more difficult, even to the professed student, than that of the old campaigns in Flanders, and still fewer more hopeless of simplification to the ordinary reader. Nevertheless, however desperate the task, an effort must be made once for all to give a broad idea of the scene of innumerable great actions.

Taking his stand on the northern frontier of France[352] and looking northward, the reader will note three great rivers running through the country before him in, roughly speaking, three parallel semicircles, from south-east to north-west. These are, from east to west, the Moselle, which is merged in the Rhine at Coblentz, the Meuse, and the Scheldt, all three of which discharge themselves into the great delta whereof the southern key is Antwerp. But for the present let the reader narrow the field from the Meuse in the east to the sea in the west, and let him devote his attention first to the Meuse. He will see that, a little to the north of the French frontier, it picks up a large tributary from the south-west, the Sambre, which runs past Maubeuge and Charleroi and joins the Meuse at Namur. Thence the united rivers flow on past the fortified towns of Huy, Liège, and Maestricht to the sea. But let the reader's northern boundary on the Meuse for the present be Maestricht, and let him note another river which rises a little to the west of Maestricht and runs almost due west past Arschot and Mechlin to the sea at Antwerp. Let this river, the Demer, be his northern, and the Meuse from Maestricht to Namur his eastern, boundary.

Returning to the south, let him note a river rising immediately to the west of Charleroi, the Haine, which joins the Scheldt at Tournay, and let him draw a line from Tournay westward through Lille and Ypres to the sea at Dunkirk. Let this line from Dunkirk to Charleroi be carried eastward to Namur; and there is his southern boundary. His western boundary, is, of course, the sea. Within this quadrilateral, Antwerp (or more strictly speaking the mouth of the Scheldt), Dunkirk, Namur, and Maestricht, lies the most famous fighting-ground of Europe.

Glancing at it on the map, the reader will see that this quadrilateral is cut by a number of rivers running parallel to each other from south to north, and flowing into the main streams of the Demer and the Scheldt. The first of these, beginning from the east, are the Great and Little Geete, which become one before they[353] join the main stream. It is worth while to pause for a moment over this little slip of land between the Geete and the Meuse. We shall see much of Namur, Huy, Liège, and Maestricht, which command the navigation of the greater river, but we shall see still more of the Geete, and of two smaller streams, the Jaar and the Mehaigne, which rise almost in the same table-land with it. On the Lower Jaar, close to Maestricht, stands the village of Lauffeld, which shall be better known to us fifty years hence. On the Little Geete, just above its junction with its greater namesake, are the villages of Neerwinden and Landen. In the small space between the heads of the Geete and the Mehaigne lies the village of Ramillies. For this network of streams is the protection against an enemy that would threaten the navigation of the Meuse from the north and west, and the barrier of Spanish Flanders against invasion from the east; and the ground is rich with the corpses and fat with the blood of men.

The next stream to westward is the Dyle, which flows past Louvain to the Demer, and gives its name, after the junction, to that river. The next in order is the Senne, which flows past Park and Hal and Brussels to the same main stream. At the head of the Senne stands the village of Steenkirk; midway between the Dyle and Senne are the forest of Soignies and the field of Waterloo.

Here the tributaries of the Demer come to an end, but the row of parallel streams is continued by the tributaries of another system, that of the Scheldt. Easternmost of these, and next in order to the Senne, is the Dender, which rises near Leuse and flows past Ath and Alost to the Scheldt at Dendermond. Next comes the Scheldt itself, with the Scarpe and the Haine, its tributaries, which it carries past Tournay and Oudenarde to Ghent, and to the sea at Antwerp. Westernmost of all, the Lys runs past St. Venant, where in Cromwell's time we saw Sir Thomas Morgan and his immortal six thousand, past Menin and Courtrai, and is merged in the Scheldt at Ghent.

[354]

The whole extent of the quadrilateral is about one hundred miles long by fifty broad, with a great waterway to the west, a second to the east, and a third, whereof the key is Ghent, roughly speaking midway between them. The earth, fruitful by nature and enriched by art, bears food for man and beast, the waterways provide transport for stores and ammunition. It was a country where men could kill each other without being starved, and hence for centuries the cockpit of Europe.

A glance at any old map of Flanders shows how thickly studded was this country with walled towns of less or greater strength, and explains why a war in Flanders should generally have been a war of sieges. Every one of these little towns, of course, had its garrison; and the man?uvres of contending forces were governed very greatly by the effort on one side to release these garrisons for active service in the field, and on the other to keep them confined within their walls for as long as possible. Hence it is obvious that an invading army necessarily enjoyed a great advantage, since it menaced the fortresses of the enemy while its own were unthreatened. Thus ten thousand men on the Upper Lys could paralyse thrice their number in Ghent and Bruges and the adjacent towns. On the other hand, if an invading general contemplated the siege of an important town, he man?uvred to entice the garrison into the field before he laid siege in form. Still, once set down to a great siege, an army was stationary, and the bare fact was sufficient to liberate hostile garrisons all over the country; and hence arose the necessity of a second army to cover the besieging force. The skill and subtlety manifested by great generals to compass these different ends is unfortunately only to be apprehended by closer study than can be expected of any but the military student.

A second cause contributed not a little to increase the taste for a war of sieges, namely the example of France, then the first military nation in Europe.[259] The[355] Court of Versailles was particularly fond of a siege, since it could attend the ceremony in state and take nominal charge of the operations with much glory and little discomfort or danger. The French passion for rule and formula also found a happy outlet in the conduct of a siege, for while there is no nation more brilliant or more original, particularly in military affairs, there is also none that is more conceited or pedantic. The craving for sieges among the French was so great that the King took pains, by the grant of extra pay and rations, to render this species of warfare popular with his soldiers.[260]

Again, it must be remembered that the object of a campaign in those days was not necessarily to seek out an enemy and beat him. There were two alternatives prescribed by the best authorities, namely, to fight at an advantage or to subsist comfortably.[261] Comfortable subsistence meant at its best subsistence at an enemy's expense. A campaign wherein an army lived on the enemy's country and destroyed all that it could not consume was eminently successful, even though not a shot was fired. To force an enemy to consume his own supplies was much, to compel him to supply his opponent was more, to take up winter-quarters in his territory was very much more. Thus to enter an enemy's borders and keep him marching backwards and forwards for weeks without giving him a chance of striking a blow, was in itself no small success, and success of a kind which galled inferior generals, such as William of Orange, to desperation and so to disaster. The tendency to these negative campaigns was heightened once more by French example. The French ministry of war interfered with its generals to an extent that was always dangerous, and eventually proved calamitous. [356]Nominally the marshal commanding-in-chief in the field was supreme; but the intendant or head of the administrative service, though he received his orders from the marshal, was instructed by the King to forward those orders at once by special messenger to Louvois, and not to execute them without the royal authority. Great commanders such as Luxemburg had the strength from time to time to kick themselves free from this bondage, but the rest, embarrassed by the surveillance of an inferior officer, preferred to live as long as possible in an enemy's country without risking a general action. It was left to Marlborough to advance triumphant in one magnificent campaign from the Meuse to the sea.

Next, a glance must be thrown at the contending parties. The defenders of the Spanish Netherlands, for they cannot be called the assailants of France, were confederate allies from a number of independent states—England, Holland, Spain, the Empire, sundry states of Germany, and Denmark, all somewhat selfish, few very efficient, and none, except the first, very punctual. From such a heterogeneous collection swift, secret, and united action was not to be expected. King William held the command-in-chief, and, from his position as the soul of the alliance, was undoubtedly the fittest for the post. But though he had carefully studied the art of war, and though his phlegmatic temperament found its only genuine pleasure in the excitement of the battlefield, he was not a great general. He could form good plans, and up to a certain point could execute them, but up to a certain point only. It would seem that his physical weakness debarred him from steady and sustained effort. He was strangely incapable of conducting a campaign with equal ability throughout; he would man?uvre admirably for weeks, and forfeit all the advantage that he had gained by the carelessness of a single day. In a general action, of which he was fonder than most commanders of his day, he never shone except in virtue of conspicuous personal bravery. He lacked[357] tactical instinct, and above all he lacked patience; in a word, to use a modern phrase, he was a very clever amateur.

France, on the other hand, possessed the finest and strongest army in Europe,—well equipped, well trained, well organised, and inured to work by countless campaigns. She had a single man in supreme control of affairs, King Lewis the Fourteenth; a great war-minister, Louvois; one really great general, Luxemburg; and one with flashes of genius, Boufflers. Moreover she possessed a line of posts in Spanish Flanders extending from Dunkirk to the Meuse. On the Lys she had Aire and Menin; on the Scarpe, Douay; on the Upper Scheldt, Cambray, Bouchain, Valenciennes, and Condé; on the Sambre, Maubeuge; between Sambre and Meuse, Philippeville and Marienburg; and on the Meuse, Dinant. Further, in the one space where the frontier was not covered by a friendly river, between the sea and the Scheldt, the French had constructed fortified lines from the sea to Menin and from thence to the Scheldt at Espierre. Thus with their frontier covered, with a place of arms on every river, with secrecy and with unity of purpose, the French enjoyed the approximate certainty of being able to take the field in every campaign before the Allies could be collected to oppose them.
1691.

The campaign of 1691 happily typifies the relative positions of the combatants in almost every respect. The French concentrated ten thousand men on the Lys. This was sufficient to paralyse all the garrisons of the Allies on and about the river. They posted another corps on the Moselle, which threatened the territory of Cleves. Now Cleves was the property of the Elector of Brandenburg, and it was not to be expected that he should allow his contingent of troops to join King William at the general rendezvous at Brussels, and suffer the French to play havoc among his possessions. Thus the Prussian contingent likewise was paralysed. So while William was still ordering his troops to concentrate[358] at Brussels, Boufflers, who had been making preparations all the winter, suddenly marched up from Maubeuge and, before William was aware that he was in motion, had besieged Mons. The fortress presently surrendered after a feeble resistance, and the line of the Allies' frontier between the Scheldt and Sambre was broken. William moved down from Brussels across the Sambre in the hope of recovering the lost town, outman?uvred Luxemburg, who was opposed to him, and for three days held the recapture of Mons in the hollow of his hand. He wasted those three days in an aimless halt; Luxemburg recovered himself by an extraordinary march; and William, finding that there was no alternative before him but to retire to Brussels and remain inactive, handed over the command to an incompetent officer and returned to England. Luxemburg then closed the campaign by a brilliant action of cavalry, which scattered the horse of the Allies to the four winds. As no British troops except the Life Guards were present, and as they at any rate did not disgrace themselves, it is unnecessary to say more of the combat of Leuse. It, had however, one remarkable effect: it increased William's dread of the French cavalry, already morbidly strong, to such a pitch as to lead him subsequently to a disastrous military blunder.

The campaign of 1691 was therefore decidedly unfavourable to the Allies, but there was ground for hope that all might be set right in 1692. The Treasurer, Godolphin, was nervously apprehensive that Parliament might be unwilling to vote money for an English army in Flanders; but the Commons cheerfully voted a total of sixty-six thousand men, British and foreign; which, after deduction of garrisons for the safety of the British Isles, left forty thousand free to cross the German Ocean.
1692.

Of these, twenty-three thousand were British, the most important force that England had sent to the Continent since the days of King Henry the Eighth. The organisation was remarkably like that of the New Model. William was, of course, commander-in-chief,[359] and under him a general of horse and a general of foot, with a due allowance of lieutenant-generals, major-generals, and brigadiers. There is, however, no sign of an officer in command of artillery or engineers, nor any of a commissary in charge of the transport.[262] The one strangely conspicuous functionary is the Secretary-at-War, who in this and the following campaigns for the last time accompanied the Commander-in-Chief on active service. But the most significant feature in the list of the staff is the omission of the name of Marlborough. Originally included among the generals for Flanders, he had been struck off the roll, and dismissed from all public employment, in disgrace, before the opening of the campaign. Though this dismissal did not want justification, it was perhaps of all William's blunders the greatest.
May.
May 10 20 .
May 13 23 .
May 16 26 .

As usual, the French were beforehand with the Allies in opening the campaign. They had already broken the line of the defending fortresses by the capture of Mons; they now designed to make the breach still wider. All through the winter a vast siege-train was collecting on the Scheldt and Meuse, with Vauban, first of living engineers, in charge of it. In May all was ready. Marshal Joyeuse, with one corps, was on the Moselle, as in the previous year, to hold the Brandenburgers in check. Boufflers, with eighteen thousand men, lay on the right bank of the Meuse, near Dinant; Luxemburg, with one hundred and fifteen thousand more, stood in rear of the river Haine. On the 20th of May, King Lewis in person reviewed the grand army; on the 23rd it marched for Namur; and on the 26th it had wound itself round two sides of the town, while Boufflers, moving up from Dinant, completed the circuit on the third side. Thus Namur was completely invested; unless William could save it, the line of the Sambre and one of the most important fortresses on the Meuse were lost to the Allies.

[360]
May 26
June 5.

William, to do him justice, had strained every nerve to spur his indolent allies to be first in the field. The contingents, awaked by the sudden stroke at Namur, came in fast to Brussels; but it was too late. The French had destroyed all forage and supplies on the direct route to Namur, and William's only way to the city lay across the Mehaigne. Behind the Mehaigne lay Luxemburg, the ablest of the French generals. The best of luck was essential to William's success, and instead of the best came the worst. Heavy rain swelled the narrow stream into a broad flood, and the building of bridges became impossible. There was beautiful fencing, skilful feint, and more skilful parry, between the two generals, but William could not get under Luxemburg's guard. On the 5th of June, after a discreditably short defence, Namur fell, almost before William's eyes, into the hands of the French.
July 23
August 2.

Then Luxemburg thought it time to draw the enemy away from the vicinity of the captured city; so recrossing the Sambre, and keeping Boufflers always between himself and that river, he marched for the Senne as if to threaten Brussels. William followed, as in duty bound; and French and Allies pursued a parallel course to the Senne, William on the north and Luxemburg on the south. The 2nd of August found both armies across the Senne, William at Hal, facing west with the river in his rear, and Luxemburg some five miles south of him with his right at Steenkirk, and his centre between Hoves and Enghien, while Boufflers lay at Manny St. Jean, seven miles in his rear.

The terrible state of the roads owing to heavy rain had induced Luxemburg to leave most of his artillery at Mons, and as he had designed merely to tempt the Allies away from Namur, the principal object left to him was to take up a strong position wherein his worn and harassed army could watch the enemy without fear of attack. Such a position he thought that he had found at Steenkirk.[263] The country at this point is more[361] broken and rugged than is usual in Belgium. The camp lay on high ground, with its right resting on the river Sennette and its right front covered by a ravine, which gradually fades away northward into a high plateau of about a mile in extent. Beyond the ravine was a network of wooded defiles, through which Luxemburg seems to have hoped that no enemy could fall upon him in force unawares. It so happened, however, that one of his most useful spies was detected, in his true character, in William's camp at Hal; and this was an opportunity not to be lost. A pistol was held at the spy's head, and he was ordered to write a letter to Luxemburg, announcing that large bodies of the enemy would be in motion next morning, but that nothing more serious was contemplated than a foraging expedition. This done, William laid his plans to surprise his enemy on the morrow.
July 23
August 3.

An hour before daybreak the advanced guard of William's army fell silently into its ranks, together with a strong force of pioneers to clear the way for a march through the woods. This force consisted of the First Guards, the Royal Scots, the Twenty-first, Fitzpatrick's regiment of Fusiliers, and two Danish regiments of great reputation, the whole under the command of the Duke of Würtemberg. Presently they moved away, and as the sun rose the whole army followed them in two columns, without sound of drum or trumpet, towards Steenkirk. French patrols scouring the country in the direction of Tubise saw the two long lines of scarlet and white and blue wind away into the woods, and reported what they had seen at headquarters; but Luxemburg, sickly of constitution, and, in spite of his occasional energy, indolent of temperament, rejoiced to think that, as his spy had told him, it was no more than a foraging party. Another patrol presently sent in another message that a large force of cavalry was[362] advancing towards the Sennette. Once more Luxemburg lulled himself into security with the same comfort.

Meanwhile the allied army was trailing through narrow defiles and cramped close ground, till at last it emerged from the stifling woods into an open space. Here it halted, as the straitness of the ground demanded, in dense, heavy masses. But the advanced guard moved on steadily till it reached the woods over against Steenkirk, where Würtemberg disposed it for the coming attack. On his left the Bois de Feuilly covered a spur of the same plateau as that occupied by the French right, and there he stationed the English Guards and the two battalions of Danes. To the right of these, but separated from them by a ravine, he placed the three remaining British battalions in the Bois de Zoulmont. His guns he posted, some between the two woods, and the remainder on the right of his division. These dispositions complete, the advanced party awaited orders to open the attack.

It was now eleven o'clock. Luxemburg had left his bed and had ridden out to a commanding height on his extreme right, when a third message was brought to him that the Allies were certainly advancing in force. He read it, and looking to his front, saw the red coats of the Guards moving through the wood before him, while beyond them he caught a glimpse of the dense masses of the main body. Instantly he saw the danger, and divined that William's attack was designed against his right. His own camp was formed, according to rule, with the cavalry on the wings; and there was nothing in position to check the Allies but a single brigade of infantry, famous under the name of Bourbonnois, which was quartered in advance of the cavalry's camp on his extreme right. Moreover, nothing was ready, not a horse was bridled, not a man standing to his arms. He despatched a messenger to summon Boufflers to his aid, and in a few minutes was flying through the camp with his staff, energetic but perfectly self-possessed, to set his force in order of battle. The[363] two battalions of Bourbonnois fell in hastily before their camp, with a battery of six guns before them. The dragoons of the right wing dismounted and hastened to seal up the space between Bourbonnois and the Sennette. The horse of the right was collected, and some of it sent off in hot speed to the left to bring the infantry up behind them on their horses' croups. All along the line the alarm was given, drums were beating, men snatching hastily at their arms and falling into their ranks ready to file away to the right. Such was the haste, that there was no time to think of regimental precedence, a very serious matter in the French army, and each successive brigade hurried into the place where it was most needed as it happened to come up.

Meanwhile Würtemberg's batteries had opened fire, and a cunning officer of the Royal Scots was laying his guns with admirable precision. French batteries hastened into position to reply to them with as deadly an aim, and for an hour and a half the rival guns thundered against each other unceasingly. All this time the French battalions kept massing themselves thicker and thicker on Luxemburg's right, and the front line was working with desperate haste, felling trees, making breastworks, and lining the hedges and copses while yet they might. But still Würtemberg's division remained unsupported, and the precious minutes flew fast. William, or his staff for him, had made a serious blunder. Intent though he was on fighting a battle with his infantry only, he had put all the cavalry of one wing of his army before them on the march, so that there was no room for the infantry to pass. Fortunately six battalions had been intermixed with the squadrons of this wing, and these were now with some difficulty disentangled and sent forward. Cutts's, Mackay's, Lauder's, and the Twenty-sixth formed up on Würtemberg's right, with the Sixth and Twenty-fifth in support; and at last, at half-past twelve, Würtemberg gave the order to attack.

His little force shook itself up and pressed forward[364] with eagerness. The Guards and Danes on the extreme left, being on the same ridge with the enemy, were the first that came into action. Pushing on under a terrible fire at point-blank range from the French batteries, they fell upon Bourbonnois and the dragoons, beat them back, captured their guns, and turned them against themselves. On their right the Royal Scots, Twenty-first, and Fitzpatrick's plunged down into the ravine into closer and more difficult ground, past copses and hedges and thickets, until a single thick fence alone divided them from the enemy. Through this they fired at each other furiously for a time, till the Scots burst through the fence with their Colonel at their head and swept the French before them. Still further to the right, the remaining regiments came also into action; muzzle met muzzle among the branches, and the slaughter was terrible. Young Angus, still not yet of age, dropped dead at the head of the Cameronians, and the veteran Mackay found the death which he had missed at Killiecrankie. He had before the attack sent word to General Count Solmes, that the contemplated assault could lead only to waste of life, and had been answered with the order to advance. "God's will be done," he said calmly, and he was among the first that fell.

Still the British, in spite of all losses, pressed furiously on; and famous French regiments, spoiled children of victory, wavered and gave way before them. Bourbonnois, unable to face the Guards and Danes, doubled its left battalion in rear of its right; Chartres, which stood next to them, also gave way and doubled itself in rear of its neighbour Orleans. A wide gap was thus torn in the first French line, but not a regiment of the second line would step into it. The colonel of the brigade in rear of it ordered, entreated, implored his men to come forward, but they would not follow him into that terrible fire. Suddenly the wild voice ceased, and the gesticulating figure fell in a heap to the ground: the colonel had been shot dead, and the gap was still unfilled.

[365]

The first French line was broken; the second and third were dismayed and paralysed: a little more and the British would carry the French camp. Luxemburg perceived that this was a moment when only his best troops could save him. In the fourth line stood the flower of his infantry, the seven battalions of French and Swiss Guards. These were now ordered forward to the gap; the princes of the blood placed themselves at their head, and without firing a shot they charged down the slope upon the British and Danes. The English Guards, thinned to half their numbers, faced the huge columns of the Swiss and stood up to them undaunted, till by sheer weight they were slowly rolled back. On their right the Royal Scots also were forced back, fighting desperately from hedge to hedge and contesting every inch of ground. Once, the French made a dash through a fence and carried off one of their colours. The Colonel, Sir Robert Douglas, instantly turned back alone through the fence, recaptured the colour, and was returning with it when he was struck by a bullet. He flung the flag over to his men and fell to the ground dead.

Slowly the twelve battalions retired, still fighting furiously at every step. So fierce had been their onslaught that five lines of infantry backed by two more of cavalry[264] had hardly sufficed to stop them, and with but a little support they might have won the day. But that support was not forthcoming. Message after message had been sent to the Dutch general, Count Solmes, for reinforcements, but there came not a man. The main body, as has been told, was all clubbed together a mile and a half from the scene of action, with the infantry in the rear; and Solmes, with almost criminal folly, instead of endeavouring to extricate the foot, had ordered forward the horse. William rectified the error as soon as he could, but the correction led to further delay and to the increased confusion which[366] is the inevitable result of contradictory orders. The English infantry in rear, mad with impatience to rescue their comrades, ran forward in disorder, probably with loud curses on the Dutchman who had kept them back so long; and some time was lost before they could be re-formed. Discipline was evidently a little at fault. Solmes lost both his head and his temper. "Damn the English," he growled; "if they are so fond of fighting, let them have a bellyful"; and he sent forward not a man. Fortunately junior officers took matters into their own hands; and it was time, for Boufflers had now arrived on the field to throw additional weight into the French scale. The English Horse-grenadiers, the Fourth Dragoons, and a regiment of Dutch dragoons rode forward and, dismounting, covered the retreat of the Guards and Danes by a brilliant counter-attack. The Buffs and Tenth advanced farther to the right, and holding their fire till within point-blank range, poured in a volley which gave time for the rest of Würtemberg's division to withdraw. A demonstration against the French left made a further diversion, and the shattered fragments of the attacking force, grimed with sweat and smoke, fell back to the open ground in rear of the woods, repulsed but unbeaten, and furious with rage.

William, it is said, could not repress a cry of anguish when he saw them; but there was no time for emotion. Some Dutch and Danish infantry was sent forward to check further advance of the enemy, and preparations were made for immediate retreat. Once again the hardest of the work was entrusted to the British; and when the columns were formed, the grenadiers of the British regiments brought up the rear, halting and turning about continually, until failing light put an end to what was at worst but a half-hearted pursuit. The retreat was conducted with admirable order; but it was not until the chill, dead hour that precedes the dawn that the Allies regained their camp, worn out with the fatigue of four-and-twenty hours.

To face page 366
STEENKIRK
July 23rd Aug. 3rd 1692

The action was set down at the time as the severest[367] ever fought by infantry, and the losses on both sides were very heavy. The Allies lost about three thousand killed and the same number wounded, besides thirteen hundred prisoners, nearly all of whom were wounded. Ten guns were abandoned, the horses being too weary to draw them; the English battalions lost two colours, and the foreign three or four more. The British, having borne the brunt of the action, suffered most heavily of all, the Guards, Cutts's, and the Sixth being terribly punished. The total French loss was about equal to that of the Allies, but the list of the officers that fell tells a more significant tale. On the side of the Allies four hundred and fifty officers were killed and wounded, no fewer than seventy lieutenants in the ten battalions of Churchill's British brigade being killed outright. The French on their side lost no less than six hundred and twenty officers killed and wounded, a noble testimony to their self-sacrifice, but sad evidence of their difficulty in making their men stand. In truth, with proper management William must have won a brilliant victory; but he was a general by book and not by instinct. Würtemberg's advanced guard could almost have done the work by itself but for the mistake of a long preliminary cannonade; his attack could have been supported earlier but for the pedantry that gave the horse precedence of the foot in the march to the field; the foot could have pierced the French position in a dozen different columns but for the pedantry which caused it to be first deployed. Finally, William's knowledge of the ground was imperfect, and Solmes, his general of foot, was incompetent. The plan was admirably designed and abominably executed. Nevertheless, British troops have never fought a finer action than Steenkirk. Luxemburg thought himself lucky to have escaped destruction; his troops were much shaken; and he crossed the Scheldt and marched away to his winter-quarters as quietly as possible. So ended the campaign of 1692.
CHAPTER III
November.

In November the English Parliament met, heartened indeed by the naval victory of La Hogue, but not a little grieved over the failure of Steenkirk. Again, the financial aspect was extremely discouraging; and Sir Stephen Fox announced that there was not another day's subsistence for the Army in the treasury. The prevailing discontent found vent in furious denunciations of Count Solmes, and a cry that English soldiers ought to be commanded by English officers. The debate rose high. The hardest of hard words were used about the Dutch generals, and a vast deal of nonsense was talked about military matters. There were, however, a great number of officers in the House of Commons, many of whom had been present at the action. With great modesty and good sense they refused to join in the outcry against the Dutch, and contrived so to compose matters that the House committed itself to no very foolish resolution. The votes for the Army were passed; and no difficulty was made over the preparations for the next campaign. Finally, two new regiments of cavalry were raised—Lord Macclesfield's Horse, which was disbanded twenty years later; and Conyngham's Irish Dragoons, which still abides with us as the Eighth (King's Royal Irish) Hussars.
1693.

Meanwhile the French military system had suffered an irreparable loss in the death of Louvois, the source of woes unnumbered to France in the years that were soon to come. Nevertheless, the traditions of his rule were strong, and the French once more were first in[369] the field, with, as usual, a vast siege-train massed on the Meuse and on the Scheldt. But a late spring and incessant rain delayed the beginning of operations till the beginning of May, when Luxemburg assembled seventy thousand men in rear of the Haine by Mons, and Boufflers forty-eight thousand more on the Scheldt at Tournay. The French king was with the troops in person; and the original design was, as usual, to carry on a war of sieges on the Meuse, Boufflers reducing the fortresses while Luxemburg shielded him with a covering army. Lewis, however, finding that the towns which he had intended to invest were likely to make an inconveniently stubborn defence, presently returned home, and after detaching thirty thousand men to the war in Germany, left Luxemburg to do as he would. It had been better for William if the Grand Monarch had remained in Flanders.

The English king, on his side, assembled sixty thousand men at Brussels as soon as the French began to move, and led them with desperate haste to the Senne, where he took up an impregnable position at Park. Luxemburg marched up to a position over against him, and then came one of those deadlocks which were so common in those old campaigns. The two armies stood looking at each other for a whole month, neither venturing to move, neither daring to attack, both ill-supplied, both discontented, and as a natural consequence both losing scores, hundreds, and even thousands of men through desertion.
June 26
July 6.
July.

At last the position became insupportable, and on the 6th of July Luxemburg moved eastward as if to resume the original plan of operations on the Meuse. William thereupon resolved to create a diversion by detaching a force to attack the French lines of the Scheldt and Lys, a project which was brilliantly executed by Würtemberg, thanks not a little to three British regiments, the Tenth, Argyll's, and Castleton's, which formed part of his division. But meanwhile Luxemburg, quite ignorant of the diversion, advanced to the[370] Meuse and laid siege to Huy, in the hope of forcing William to come to its relief. He judged rightly. William left his impregnable camp at Park and hurried to the rescue. But he came too late, and Huy fell after a trifling resistance. Luxemburg then made great seeming preparations for the siege of Liège, and William, trembling for the safety of that city and of Maestricht, detached eight thousand men to reinforce those garrisons, and then withdrew to the line of the Geete. Luxemburg watched the whole proceeding with grim delight. Würtemberg's success was no doubt annoying, but William had weakened his army by detaching this force to the Lys, and had been beguiled into weakening it still further by reinforcing the garrisons on the Meuse, which was exactly what he wanted. If he could bring the Allies to action forthwith he could reasonably hope for success.

The ground occupied by William was a triangular space enclosed between the Little Geete and a stream called the Landen Beck, which joins it at Leuw. The position was not without features of strength. The camp, which faced almost due south, was pitched on a gentle ridge rising out of a vast plain.[265] This ridge runs parallel to the Little Geete and has that river in its rear. The left flank was protected by marshy ground and by the Landen Beck itself, while the villages of Neerlanden and Rumsdorp, one on either side of the beck and the latter well forward on the plain, offered the further security of advanced posts. The right rested on a little stream which runs at right angles to the Geete and joins it at Elixheim, and on the villages of Laer and Neerwinden, which stand on its banks. From Neerlanden on the left to Neerwinden on the right the position measured close on four miles; and to guard this front, to say nothing of strong[371] garrisons for the villages, William had little more than fifty thousand men. Here then was one signal defect: the front was too long to permit troops to be readily moved from flank to flank, or to be withdrawn, without serious risk, from the centre. But this was not all. The depth of the position was less than half of its frontage, and thus allowed no space for the action of cavalry. This William ignored: he was afraid of the French horse, and was anxious that the action should be fought by infantry only. Finally, retreat was barred by the Geete, which was unfordable and insufficiently bridged, and therefore the forcing of the allied right must inevitably drive the whole army into a pinfold, as Leslie's had been driven at the battle of Dunbar.
July 18 28 .

Luxemburg, who knew every inch of the ground, was now anxious only lest William should retire before he could catch him. On the 28th of July, by a great effort and a magnificent march, he brought the whole of his army, eighty thousand strong, before William's position. He was now sure of his game, but he need not have been anxious, for William, charmed with the notion of excluding the French cavalry from all share in the action, was resolved to stand his ground. Many officers urged him to cross the Geete while yet he might, but he would not listen. Fifteen hundred men were told off to entrench the open ground between Neerwinden and Neerlanden. The hedges, mud-walls, and natural defences of Neerwinden and Laer were improved to the uttermost, and the ditches surrounding them were enlarged. Till late into the night the King rode backward and forward, ordering matters under his own eyes, and after a few hours' rest began very early in the morning to make his dispositions.

The key of the position was the village of Neerwinden with the adjoining hamlet of Laer, and here accordingly he stationed the best of his troops. The defence of Laer was entrusted to Brigadier Ramsey with the Scots Brigade, namely, the Twenty-first, Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, Mackay's and Lauder's[372] regiments, reinforced by the Buffs and the Fourth Foot. Between Laer and Neerwinden stood six battalions of Brandenburgers, troops already of great and deserved reputation, of whom we shall see more in the years before us. Neerwinden itself was committed to the Hanoverians, the Dutch Guards, a battalion of the First and a battalion of the Scots Guards. Immediately to the north or left of the village the entrenchment was lined by the two remaining battalions of the First and Scots Guards, the Coldstream Guards, a battalion of the Royal Scots, and the Seventh Fusiliers. On the extreme left of the position Neerlanden was held by the other battalion of the Royal Scots, the Second Queen's, and two Danish regiments, while Rumsdorp was occupied by the Fourteenth, Sixteenth, Nineteenth, and Collingwood's regiments. In a word, every important post was committed to the British. The remainder of the infantry, with one hundred guns, was ranged along the entrenchment, and in rear of them stood the cavalry, powerless to act outside the trench, and too much cramped for space to man?uvre within it.

Luxemburg also was early astir, and was amazed to find how far the front of the position had been strengthened during the night. His centre he formed in eight lines over against the Allies' entrenchments between Oberwinden and Landen, every line except the second and fourth being composed of cavalry. For the attack on Neerlanden and Rumsdorp he detailed fifteen thousand foot and two thousand five hundred dismounted dragoons. For the principal assault on Neerwinden he told off eighteen thousand foot supported by a reserve of two thousand more and by eight thousand cavalry; while seventy guns were brought into position to answer the artillery of the Allies.
July 19 29 .

Shortly after sunrise William's cannon opened fire against the heavy masses of the French centre; and at eight o'clock Luxemburg moved the whole of his left to the attack of Neerwinden. Six battalions, backed by dragoons and cavalry, were directed against Laer, and[373] three columns, counting in all seven brigades, were launched against Neerwinden. The centre column, under the Duke of Berwick, was the first to come into action. Withholding their fire till they reached the village, the French carried the outer defences with a rush, and then meeting the Hanoverians and the First Guards, they began the fight in earnest. It was hedge-fighting, as at Steenkirk, muzzle to muzzle and hand to hand. Every step was contested; the combat swayed backwards and forwards within the village; and the carnage was frightful. The remaining French columns came up, met with the like resistance, and made little way. Fresh regiments were poured by the French into the fight, and at last the First Guards, completely broken by its losses, gave way. But it was only for a moment. They rallied on the Scots Guards; the Dutch and Hanoverians rallied behind them, and though the French had been again reinforced, they resumed the unequal fight, nine battalions against twenty-six, with unshaken tenacity. At Laer, on the extreme right, the fight was equally sharp. Ramsey for a time was driven out of the village, and the French cavalry actually forced its way into the Allies' position. There, however, it was charged in flank by the Elector of Bavaria, and driven out with great slaughter. Ramsey seized the moment to rally his brigade. The French columns, despite their success, still remained isolated and detached, and presented no united front. The King placed himself at the head of the Guards and Hanoverians, and with one charge British, Dutch, and Germans fell upon the Frenchmen and swept them out of both villages.

The first attack on Neerwinden had failed, and a similar attack on the allied left had been little more successful. At Neerlanden the First and Second Foot had successfully held their own against four French battalions until reinforcements enabled them to drive them back. At Rumsdorp the British, being but three thousand against thirteen thousand, were pushed out of the village, but being reinforced, recovered a part of it[374] and stood successfully at bay. Luxemburg, however, was not easily discouraged. The broken troops in the left were rallied, fresh regiments were brought forward, and a second effort was made to carry Neerwinden. Again French impetuosity bore all before it, and again the British and Germans, weakened and weary though they were, rallied when all seemed lost, and hurled the enemy back not merely repulsed but in confused and disorderly retreat.

On the failure of the second attack the majority of the French officers urged Luxemburg to retire; but the marshal was not to be turned from his purpose. The fourteen thousand men of the Allies in Laer and Neerwinden had lost more than a third of their numbers, while he himself had still a considerable force of infantry interlined with the cavalry in the centre. Twelve thousand of them, including the French and Swiss Guards, were now drawn off to the left for a third attack. When they were clear of the cavalry, the whole six lines of horse, which had stood heroically for hours motionless under a heavy fire, moved forward at a trot to the edge of the entrenchments;[266] but the demonstration, for such it seems to have been, cost them dear, for they were very roughly handled and compelled to retire. But now the French reinforcements supported by the defeated battalions drew near, and a third attack was delivered on Neerwinden. British and Dutch still made a gallant fight, but the odds against their weakened battalions were too great, and ammunition began to fail. They fought on indomitably till the last cartridge was expended before they gave way, but they were forced back, and Neerwinden was lost. Five French brigades then assailed the central entrenchment at its junction with Neerwinden, where stood the Coldstream Guards and the[375] Seventh Fusiliers. Wholly unmoved by the overwhelming numbers in their front and the fire from Neerwinden on their flank, the two regiments stood firm and drove their assailants back over the breastwork. Even when the French Household Cavalry came spurring through Neerwinden and fell upon their flank they fought on undismayed, and the Coldstreamers not only repelled the charge but captured a colour.

Such fighting, however, could not continue for long. William, on observing Luxemburg's preparations for the final assault, had ordered nine battalions from his left to reinforce his right. These never reached their destination. The Marquis of Feuquières, an officer even more celebrated for his acuteness as a military critic than for skill in the field, watched them as they moved and suddenly led his cavalry forward to the weakest point of the entrenchment. The battalions hesitated, halted, and then turned about to meet this new danger, but too late to save the forcing of the entrenchment. The battle was now virtually over. Neerwinden was carried, Ramsey after a superb defence had been driven out of Laer, the Brandenburgers had perforce retreated with him, the infantry that lined the centre of the entrenchment had forsaken it, and the French cavalry was pouring in and cutting down the fugitives by scores. William, who had galloped away in desperation to the left, now returned at headlong speed with six regiments of English cavalry,[267] which delivered charge after charge with splendid gallantry, to cover the retreat of the foot. On the left Tolmach and Bellasys by great exertion brought off their infantry in good order, but on the right the confusion was terrible. The rout was complete, the few bridges were choked by a heaving mass of guns, waggons, pack-animals, and men, and thousands of fugitives were cut down, drowned, or trampled to death. William did all that a gallant man could do to save the day, but in[376] vain. His troops had done heroic things to redeem his bad generalship; and against any living man but Marlborough or Luxemburg they would probably have held their own. It was the general not the soldiers that failed.

The losses on both sides were very severe. That of the French was about eight thousand men; that of the Allies about twelve thousand, killed, wounded, and prisoners, and among the dead was Count Solmes, the hated Solmes of Steenkirk. The nineteen British battalions present lost one hundred and thirty-five officers killed, wounded, and taken. The French captured eighty guns and a vast quantity of colours, but the Allies, although beaten, could also show fifty-six French flags. And, indeed, though Luxemburg won, and deserved to win, a great victory, yet the action was not such as to make the allied troops afraid to meet the French. They had stood up, fifty thousand against eighty thousand, and if they were beaten they had at any rate dismayed every Frenchman on the field but Luxemburg. In another ten years their turn was to come, and they were to take a part of their revenge on the very ground over which many of them had fled.

The campaign closed with the surrender of Charleroi, and the gain by the French of the whole line of the Sambre. William came home to meet the House of Commons and recommend an augmentation of the Army by eight regiments of horse, four of dragoons, and twenty-five of foot. The House reduced this list by the whole of the regiments of horse, and fifteen of foot, but even so it brought the total establishment up to eighty-three thousand men. There is, however, but one new regiment of which note need be taken in the campaign of 1694, namely the Seventh Dragoons, now known as the Seventh Hussars, which, raised in 1689-90 in Scotland, now for the first time took its place on the English establishment and its turn of service in the war of Flanders.

To face page 376
LANDEN
July 19th 29th 1693
1694.

I shall not dwell on the campaign of 1694, which is memorable only for a marvellous march by which Luxemburg upset William's entire plan of campaign.[377] Nor shall I speak at length of the abortive descent on Brest, which is remembered mainly for the indelible stain which it has left on the memory of Marlborough. It is only necessary to say that the French, by Marlborough's information, though not on Marlborough's information only, had full warning of an expedition which had been planned as a surprise, and that Tolmach,[268] who was in command, unfortunately though most pardonably lacked the moral courage to abandon an attack which, unless executed as a surprise, was hopeless of success. He was repulsed with heavy loss, and died of wounds received in the action, a hard fate for a good soldier and a gallant man. But it is unjust to lay his death at Marlborough's door. For the failure of the expedition Marlborough was undoubtedly responsible, and that is quite bad enough; but Tolmach alone was to blame for attempting an enterprise which he knew to be hopeless. Marlborough cannot have calculated that he would deliberately essay to do impossibilities and perish in the effort, so cannot be held guilty of poor Tolmach's blunders.
1695.
January.

Before the new campaign could be opened there had come changes of vital importance to France. The vast expense of the war had told heavily on the country, and the King's ministers were at their wit's end to raise money. Moreover, the War Department had deteriorated rapidly since the death of Louvois; and to this misfortune was now added the death of Luxemburg, a loss which was absolutely irreparable. Lastly, with the object of maintaining the position which they had won on the Sambre, the French had extended their system of fortified lines from Namur to the sea. Works so important could not be left unguarded, so that a considerable force was locked up behind these entrenchments, and was for all offensive purposes useless. We[378] shall see before long how a really great commander could laugh at these lines, and how in consequence it became an open question whether they were not rather an encumbrance than an advantage. The subject is one which is still of interest; and it is remarkable that the French still seem to cling to their old principles in the works which they have constructed for defence against a German invasion.

His enemy being practically restricted to the defensive, William did not neglect the opportunity of initiating aggressive operations. Masking his design by a series of feints, he marched swiftly to the Meuse and invested Namur. This fortress, more famous through its connection with the immortal Uncle Toby even than as the masterpiece of Cohorn carried to yet higher perfection by Vauban, stands at the junction of the Sambre and the Meuse, the citadel lying in the angle between the two rivers, and the town with its defences on the left bank of the Meuse. To the northward of the town outworks had been thrown up on the heights of Bouge by both of these famous engineers; and it was against these outworks that William directed his first attack.

To face page 378
NAMUR
June 26th July 6th 1695
June 23
July 3.
June 26
July 6.

Ground was broken on the 3rd of July, and three days later an assault was delivered on the lines of Bouge. As usual, the hardest of the work was given to the British, and the post of greatest danger was made over, as their high reputation demanded, to the Brigade of Guards. On this occasion the Guards surpassed themselves alike by the coolness of their valour and by the fire of their attack. They marched under a heavy fire up to the French palisades, thrust their muskets between them, poured in one terrible volley, the first shot that they had yet fired, and charged forthwith. In spite of a stout resistance, they swept the French out of the first work, pursued them to the second, swept them out of that, and gathering impetus with success, drove them from stronghold to stronghold, far beyond the original design of the engineers, and actually to the gates of the[379] town. In another quarter the Royal Scots and the Seventh Fusiliers gained not less brilliant success; and in fact it was the most creditable action that William had fought during the whole war. It cost the Allies two thousand men killed and wounded, the three battalions of Guards alone losing thirty-two officers. The British were to fight many such bloody combats during the next twenty years—combats forgotten since they were merely incidents in the history of a siege, and so frequent that they were hardly chronicled and are not to be restored to memory now. I mention this, the first of such actions, only as a type of many more to come.

The outworks captured, the trenches were opened against the town itself, and the next assault was directed against the counterguard of St. Nicholas gate. This again was carried by the British, with a loss of eight hundred men. Then came the famous attack on the counterscarp before the gate itself, where Captain Shandy received his memorable wound. This gave William the possession of the town. Then came the siege of the citadel, wherein the British had the honour of marching to the assault over half a mile of open ground, a trial which proved too much even for them. Nevertheless, it was they who eventually stormed a breach from which another of the assaulting columns had been repulsed, and ensured the surrender of the citadel a few days later. For their service on this occasion the Eighteenth Foot were made the Royal Irish; and a Latin inscription on their colours still records that this was the reward of their valour at Namur.
1697.

Thus William on his return to England could for the first time show his Parliament a solid success due to the British red-coats; and the House of Commons gladly voted once more a total force of eighty-seven thousand men. But the war need be followed no further. The campaign of 1696 was interrupted by a futile attempt of the French to invade England, and in 1697 France, reduced to utter exhaustion, gladly concluded the Peace of Ryswick. So ended, not without honour,[380] the first stage of the great conflict with King Lewis the Fourteenth. The position of the two protagonists, England and France, was not wholly unlike that which they occupied a century later at the Peace of Amiens. The British, though they had not reaped great victories, had made their presence felt, and terribly felt, on the battlefield; and as the French in the Peninsula remembered that the British had fought them with a tenacity which they had not found in other nations, not only in Egypt but even earlier at Tournay and Lincelles, so, too, after Blenheim and Ramillies they looked back to the furious attack at Steenkirk and the indomitable defence of Neerwinden. "Without the concurrence of the valour and power of England," said William to the Parliament at the close of 1695, "it were impossible to put a stop to the ambition and greatness of France." So it was then, so it was a century later, and so it will be again, for though none know better the superlative qualities of the French as a fighting people, yet the English are the one nation that has never been afraid to meet them. With the Peace of Ryswick the 'prentice years of the standing Army are ended, and within five years the old spirit, which has carried it through the bitter schooling under King William, will break forth with overwhelming power under the guiding genius of Marlborough.

Authorities.—The leading authority for William's campaigns on the English side is D'Auvergne, and on the French side the compilation, with its superb series of maps, by Beaurain. Supplementary on one side are Tindal's History, Carleton's Memoirs, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy; and on the other the Mémoires of Berwick and St. Simon, Quincy's Histoire Militaire de Louis XIV., and in particular the Mémoires of Feuquières. Many details as to Steenkirk, in particular as to the casualties, are drawn from Present State of Europe, or Monthly Mercury, August 1692; and as to Landen from the official relation of the battle, published by authority, 1693. Beautiful plans of both actions are in Beaurain, rougher plans in Quincy and Feuquières. All details as to the establishment voted are from the Journals of the House of Commons. Very elaborate details of the operations are given in Colonel Clifford Walton's History of the British Standing Army.
CHAPTER IV
Peace having been signed, there arose the momentous question, what should be done with the Army. To understand aright the attitude of Parliament towards it, a brief sketch must be given of its relations therewith apart from the mere question of voting supplies. It has been seen that the scandals of Schomberg's first campaign had opened the eyes of Parliament to the iniquities that were then going forward; but, though a scape-goat had been made of the Commissary-General, the matter had not been sifted to the bottom.

The primary and principal difficulty was, of course, lack of money. In the case of the Irish war this had been overcome by grants of the Irish estates which had been forfeited after the conquest, the mere expectation and hope of which had sufficed to set the minds of many creditors at rest. For the war in Flanders, however, there was no such resource. The treasury was empty, and the funds voted by Parliament were so remote that they could only be assigned to creditors in security for payment at some future time. Many of these creditors, however, were tradesmen who could not afford to wait until tallies should be issued in course of payment, and were therefore compelled to dispose of these securities at a ruinous discount. The mischief naturally did not end there. Capitalists soon discovered that to buy tallies at huge discount was a much more profitable business than to lend money direct to the State at the rate of seven per cent, and accordingly devoted all their money to it. Thus the "tally-traffic,"[382] as it was called, grew so formidable that the Lord Treasurer, Godolphin, was obliged secretly to offer larger interest for loans than was authorised by Parliament.[269]

The result of this financial confusion was that the close of every campaign found the Army in Flanders in a miserable state, owing to the exhaustion of its money and its credit. When it is remembered that a large proportion of the pay of officers and men was kept on principle one year in arrear, that they had to pay discount for anticipation of its payment at the best of times, and that to this charge was now added the further discount on the tallies of the State, it will be seen that their loss became very serious. The incessant difficulties of all ranks from want of their pay and arrears gave rise to much discontent and frequently hampered active operations. Officers were obliged to sell the horses, which they had bought for purposes of transport, before the campaign opened, and were very often driven to supply not only themselves but their men out of their own pockets.

Of all this it is probable that the House of Commons knew little, and as in 1691 it had appointed Commissioners to inquire into the public accounts, it doubtless awaited their report before taking any active step. In 1694, however, the House was rudely surprised by certain revelations respecting a notorious crimp of London, named Tooley, who went so far in his zeal to procure recruits that he not only forced the King's shilling on them when they were drunk—a practice which was common in France and has not long been extinct in England—but resorted to kidnapping pure and simple.[270] Here was one gross infringement of the liberty of the subject; and this scandal was quickly followed by another. At the end of 1694 there came a petition from the inhabitants of Royston, complaining [383]that the troops quartered there were exacting subsistence from the townsfolk on a fixed scale. Inquiry proved the truth of the allegation: the troops were unpaid, and had taken their own measures to save themselves from starvation. Almost simultaneously the Commissioners of Public Accounts reported that their inquiries had been baffled by the refusal of several regimental agents to show their books; and they gave at the same time an unvarnished relation of the shameful extortion practised by agents towards officers and men, and of one case of glaring misconduct on the part of a colonel. The House brought the recalcitrant agents to their senses by committing them to custody, and addressed the King with an earnest prayer that he would put a stop to these iniquities.[271] The King accordingly cashiered the colonel[272] and promised amendment, which promise was discharged so far as orders could fulfil it. But the case demanded not new orders but execution of existing regulations.

There, however, the matter rested for the time, the Commons being occupied with the task of purging corruption from their own body, which was very inadequately performed by the expulsion of the Speaker. Nevertheless, to the end of the war fresh petitions continued to come in from towns, from widows of officers, and from private soldiers, all complaining of the dishonesty of officers and of agents; and the House thus established itself as in some sort a mediator between officers and men. Such a mediator, it must be confessed, was but too sadly needed, but in the interests of discipline it was a misfortune that the House should ever have accepted the position. The immediate result was to overwhelm the Commons with a vast amount of business which they were incompetent to transact, and to suggest an easy remedy for soldiers' grievances in the abolition of all soldiers.
Dec. 11.

William was not unaware of the danger, and had [384]taken measures to meet it. Before meeting Parliament in December 1697, he had already disbanded ten regiments, and having thrown this sop to English prejudice, he delivered it as his opinion in his speech from the throne that England could not be safe without a land-force. But agitators and pamphleteers had been before him. The old howl of "No Standing Army" had been raised, and reams of puerile and pedantic nonsense had been written to prove that the militia was amply sufficient for England's needs. The arguments on the other side were stated with consummate ability by Lord Somers; but the old cry was far too pleasant in the ears of the House to be easily silenced. Another reason which may well have swayed the House was that, though his English soldiers had fought for William as no other troops in the world, he had never succeeded in winning a victory. Be that as it may, within eight days the House, on the motion of Robert Harley, resolved that all forces raised since September 1680 should be disbanded.
Dec. 13.
1698.

The resolution, in the existing condition of European affairs, was a piece of malignant folly; but the accounts submitted two days later by the Paymaster-General probably did much to confirm it. The arrears of pay due to the Army since April 1692 amounted to twelve hundred thousand pounds, and the arrears of subsistence to a million more, while yet another hundred thousand was due to regiments on their transfer from the Irish to the English establishment.[273] To meet this debt there was eighty thousand pounds in tallies which no one would discount at any price, while to make matters worse, taxation voted by the House to produce three millions and a half had brought no more than two millions into the treasury. Attempts were made in January 1698 to rescind the resolution, but in vain. The Government yielded, and after struggling hard to[385] obtain four hundred thousand pounds, was fain to accept fifty thousand pounds less than that sum for the service of the Army in the ensuing year.
May 28.

The effect of the vote was immediate. The enemies of the Army were exultant, and heaped abuse and insult on the soldiers who for five years had spent their blood and their strength for a people that had not paid them so much as their just wages. All William's firmness was needed to restrain the exasperated officers from wreaking summary vengeance on the most malignant of these slanderers. It was the old story. Men who had grown fat on the "tally-traffic" could find nothing better than bad words for the poor broken lieutenant who borrowed eighteenpence from a comrade to buy a new scabbard for his sword, being ashamed to own that he wanted a dinner.[274] The distress in the Army soon became acute. Petitions poured in from the disbanded men for arrears, arrears, arrears. Bad soldiers tried to wreak a grudge against good officers, good soldiers to obtain justice from bad officers; all military men of whatever rank complained loudly of the agents.[275] Then came unpleasant reminders that the expenses of the Irish war were not yet paid. Colonel Mitchelburne, the heroic defender of Londonderry, claimed, and justly claimed, fifteen hundred pounds which had been owing to him since 1690.[276] The House strove vainly to stem the torrent by voting a gratuity of a fortnight's subsistence to every man, and half-pay as a retaining fee to every officer, until he should be paid in full. The claims of men and officers continued to flow in, and at last the Commons addressed the King to appoint persons unconnected with the Army to examine and redress just grievances, and to punish men who complained without cause.

[386]

On the 7th of July the House was delivered from further importunities by a dissolution; and William returned to his native Holland. Before his departure he left certain instructions with his ministers concerning the Army. The actual number of soldiers to be maintained was not mentioned in the Act of Parliament, but was assumed, from the proportion of money granted, to be ten thousand men. William's orders were to keep sixteen thousand men, for he still had hopes that Parliament might reconsider the hasty votes of the previous session.[277] These expectations were not realised. The clamour against the Army had been strengthened by a revival of the old outcry against the Dutch, and against the grant of crown-lands in general, and to Dutchmen in particular. Moreover, the House had no longer the pressure of the war to unite it in useful and patriotic work. The inevitable reaction of peace after long hostilities was in full vigour. All the selfishness, the prejudice, and the conceit that had been restrained in the face of great national peril was now let loose; and the House, with a vague idea that there were many things to be done, but with no clear perception what these things might be, was ripe for any description of mischief.
Dec. 12.
Dec. 17.

William's speech was tactful enough. Expressing it as his opinion that, if England was to hold her place in Europe, she must be secure from attack, he left the House to decide what land-force should be maintained, and only begged that, for its own honour, it would provide for payment of the debts incurred during the war. The speech was not ill-received; and William, despite the warnings of his ministers, was sanguine that all was well. Five days later a return of the troops was presented to the House, showing thirty thousand men divided equally between the English and Irish establishments. Then Harley, the mover of the foolish resolution of the previous year, proposed that the English establishment should be fixed at seven thousand men, all of them to be British subjects. This was confirmed[387] by the House on the following day, together with an Irish establishment of twelve thousand men to be maintained at the expense of the sister island. The words of the Act that embodied this decision were peremptory; it declared that on the 26th March 1699 all regiments, saving certain to be excepted by proclamation, were actually disbanded. Finally, the Mutiny Act, which had expired in April 1698, was not renewed by the House, so that even in this pittance of an Army the officers had no powers of enforcing discipline.

There is no need to dilate further on this resolution, which for three years placed England practically at the mercy of France. It was an act of criminal imbecility, the most mischievous work of the most mischievous Parliament that has ever sat at Westminster. William was so deeply chagrined that he was only with difficulty dissuaded from abdication of the throne. Apart from the madness of such wholesale reduction of the Army, the clause restricting the nationality of the seven thousand was directly aimed at the King's favourite regiment, the Dutch Blue Guards. He submitted, however, with dignity enough, merely warning the House that he disclaimed all responsibility for any disaster that might follow. Just at that moment came a rare opportunity for undoing in part the evil work of the Commons. The death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria brought the question of the succession to the Spanish throne to an acute stage; and the occasion was utilised to ask Parliament for the grant of a larger force. William, however, with an unwisdom which even his loyalty to his faithful troops cannot excuse, pleaded as a personal favour for the retention of his Dutch Guards. The request preferred on such grounds was refused, and a great opportunity was lost.

Nothing, therefore, remained but to make the most of the slender force that was authorised by the Act of Disbandment. The ministers with great adroitness contrived to extort from the Commons an additional three thousand men under the name of marines, for the[388] collective wisdom of the nation will often give under one name what it refuses under another; but as regards the Army proper, the only expedient was to preserve the skeleton of a larger force. Thus finally was established the wasteful and extravagant system which has been followed even to the present day. The seven thousand troops for England were distributed into nineteen, and the twelve thousand for Ireland into twenty-six, distinct corps, with an average proportion of one officer to ten men.[278] In addition to these, three corps of cavalry and seven of infantry were maintained in Scotland, while the Seventh Fusiliers were retained apparently in the Dutch service, or at any rate in Holland. The Artillery was specially reserved on a new footing by the name of the regimental train, first germ of the Royal Regiment that was to come,[389] and contained four companies, each of thirty men, with the usual proportion of an officer to every ten men. To these were added ten officers of engineers.[279] Within the next two years the principle of a skeleton army was pushed still further, and in each of the regiments of dragoons thirty-three officers and thirty sergeants and corporals looked minutely to the training of two hundred and sixteen men. Large numbers of officers, who were retained for emergencies by the allowance of half-pay, also drew heavily on the niggardly funds granted by the Commons; and it was a current jest of the time that the English Army was an army of officers.[280]
1699.
November.

The sins of Parliament soon found it out. Before it had sat a month petitions from officers and men began to pour in, as during the previous sessions, with claims for arrears and with complaints of all kinds. As the Commons were the fountain of pay, it was natural and right that the clamour for wages should be directed at them; but the fashion had been set for soldiers to resort to them for redress of all grievances, and it would seem that men used the petition to Parliament as a means of openly threatening their officers.[281] Moreover, by some extraordinary blunder the grant of half-pay had been limited to such officers only as at the time of disbandment were serving in English regiments. This regulation naturally caused loud outcry from officers who, after long service in English regiments, had been transferred to Scottish corps on promotion. A prorogation at the end of April brought relief to the Commons for a time; but no sooner was it reassembled than the petitions streamed in with redoubled volume. The House thus found itself converted almost into a military tribunal. Appeal was made to it on sundry [390]points that were purely of military discipline, and private soldiers sought to further their complaints by alleging that their officers had spoken disrespectfully and disdainfully of the House itself.[282]
1700.

To do them justice, the Commons were woefully embarrassed by these multitudinous petitions. Once they interfered actively by taking up the cause of an officer, whom they knew, or should have known, to be a bad character,[283] and threatened his colonel with their vengeance unless the wrongs of the supposed sufferer were redressed. The reply of the colonel was so disconcerting as effectually to discourage further meddling of this kind. Nevertheless the grievances urged by the men must many of them have been just, while some of the allegations brought forward were most scandalous. In one of the disbanded regiments, Colonel Leigh's, it was roundly asserted that the officers had made all the men drunk, and then caused them to sign receipts in full for pay which had not been delivered to them.[284] Finally, in despair, a bill was introduced to erect a Court of Judicature to decide between officers and men. This measure, however, was speedily dropped, and the more prudent course was adopted of appointing Commissioners to inquire into the debt due to the Army.
April 11.

But meanwhile another question had been raised, which brought matters into still greater confusion. A parliamentary inquiry as to the disposition of the Irish forfeited estates had revealed the fact that William had granted large shares of the same, not only in reward and compensation to deserving officers, which was just and right, but also to his discarded mistress, Elizabeth Villiers, and to his Dutch favourites, Portland and Albemarle. The King's conduct herein was the less defensible, inasmuch as the Irish government had [391]counted upon these estates to defray the expenses, still unpaid, of the Irish war, and had thrown up its hands in despair when it found that this resource was to be withheld.[285] The House of Commons took up the question viciously, passed a sweeping and shameful bill resuming all property that had belonged to the Crown at the accession of James the Second, tacked it to a money-bill, and sent it up to the Lords. The Upper House, to save a revolution, yielded, after much protest, and passed the bill; and then none too soon William sent this most mischievous House of Commons about its business.
1701,
February 14.

It was not until early in the following year that the King met the Parliament, more distinctly even than the last a Tory Parliament, which had been elected in the autumn. Once more he was obliged to remind it that, amid the all-important questions of the English succession and the Spanish succession, provision should be made for paying the debts incurred through the war. There could be no doubt about these debts, for the petitions which had formerly dropped in by scores, now, in consequence of the interference with the Irish grants, flowed in by hundreds. The Commons had flattered themselves that they had disposed of this disagreeable business by their appointment of commissioners, but they found that, owing to their own faulty instructions, the commissioners were powerless to deal with many of the cases presented to them. The complaints of officers against the Government became almost as numerous as those of men against officers, and every day came fresh evidence of confusion of military business worse confounded by the imbecility and mismanagement of the House.[286]

[392]

Where the matter would have ended, and whether it might not have led ultimately to a dangerous military riot, it is difficult to say. All, however, was cut short by the despatch of English troops to the Low Countries, and the evident approach of war; for the prospect of employment for every disbanded soldier and reduced officer sufficed in itself to quiet a movement which might easily have become formidable. Two more sessions such as those of 1698 and 1699 might have brought about a repetition of Cromwell's famous scene with the Long Parliament.

It is, however, impossible to leave these few stormy years of peace without taking notice of the apparent helplessness of the military administration. The War Office was in truth in a state of transition. The Secretary-at-War was still so exclusively the secretary to the Commander-in-Chief that he accompanied him on his campaigns; and it is difficult to say with whom, except with the Commander-in-Chief, rested the responsibility for the government of the Army. No ordinary standard should be used in judging of a man who was confronted with so many difficulties as King William the Third. His weak frame, the vast burden of his work in the department of foreign affairs, his failure to understand and his inability to sympathise with the English character, all these causes conspired to make the task of governing England and of commanding her Army too heavy for him. Still, making all[393] possible allowance, and accepting as true Sterne's pictures of his popularity among the soldiers, it is difficult wholly to acquit him of blame for the misconduct of the military administration. His mind in truth was hardly well-suited for administrative detail. He could handle a great diplomatic combination with consummate skill and address, even as he could sketch the broad features of a movement or of a campaign; but he was a statesman rather than an administrator, a strategist rather than a general. In war his impatience guided him to a succession of crushing defeats, in peace his contempt for detail made his period of the command-in-chief one of the worst in our history. That, amid the corruption which he found in England, he should have despaired of finding an honest man is pardonable enough, but he took no pains to cure that corruption, preferring rather to conduct his business through his Dutch favourites than through the English official channels. Finally, his behaviour in the matter of the Irish forfeitures suggests that he was not averse to jobbery himself, nor over-severe towards the same weakness in others; and in truth the Dutch have no good reputation in the matter of corruption. Stern, hard, and cold, he had little feeling for England and Englishmen except as ministers to that hostility for France which was his ruling passion. Probably he felt more kindly towards the English soldier than towards any other Englishman; the iron nature melted at the sight of the shattered battalions at Steenkirk, and, if we are to believe Burnet, the cold heart warmed sufficiently towards the red-coat to prompt him to relieve the starving men, so shamefully neglected by Parliament, out of his own pocket. On the whole, it may be said that no commander was ever so well served by British troops, nor requited that service, whatever his good intent, so unworthily and so ill.
BOOK VI CHAPTER I
A European quarrel over the succession to the Spanish throne,[287] on the death of the imbecile King Charles the Second, had long been foreseen by William, and had been provided against, as he hoped, by a Partition Treaty in the year 1698. The arrangement then made had been upset by the death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, and had been superseded by a second Partition Treaty in March 1700. In November of the same year King Charles the Second died, leaving a will wherein Philip, Duke of Anjou, and second son of the Dauphin, was named heir to the whole Empire of Spain. At this the second Partition Treaty went for naught. Lewis the Fourteenth, after a becoming interval of hesitation, accepted the Spanish crown for the Duke of Anjou under the title of King Philip the Fifth.
1701.

The Emperor at once entered a protest against the[398] will, and Lewis prepared without delay for a campaign in Italy. William, however, for the present merely postponed his recognition of Philip the Fifth; and his example was followed by the United Provinces. Lewis, ever ready and prompt, at once took measures to quicken the States to a decision. Several towns[288] in Spanish Flanders were garrisoned, under previous treaties, by Dutch troops. Lewis by a swift movement surrounded the whole of them, and having thus secured fifteen thousand of the best men in the Dutch army, could dictate what terms he pleased. William expected that the House of Commons would be roused to indignation by this aggressive step, but the House was far too busy with its own factious quarrels. When, however, the States appealed to England for the ten thousand men, which under the treaty of 1677 she was bound to furnish, both Houses prepared faithfully to fulfil the obligation.

Then, as invariably happens in England, the work which Parliament had undone required to be done again. Twelve battalions were ordered to the Low Countries from Ireland, and directions were issued for the levying of ten thousand recruits in England to take their place. But, immediately after, came bad news from the West Indies, and it was thought necessary to despatch thither four more battalions from Ireland. Three regiments[289] were hastily brought up to a joint strength of two thousand men, and shipped off. Thus, within fifteen months of the disbandment of 1699, the garrison of Ireland had been depleted by fifteen battalions out of twenty-one; and four new battalions required to be raised immediately. Of these, two, namely Brudenell's and Mountjoy's, were afterwards disbanded, but two more, Lord Charlemont's and Lord Donegal's, are still with us as the Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth of the Line.

[399]

In June the twelve battalions[290] were shipped off to Holland, under the command of John, Earl of Marlborough, who since 1698 had been restored to the King's favour, and was to fill his place as head of the European coalition and General of the confederate armies in a fashion that no man had yet dreamed of. He was now fifty years of age; so long had the ablest man in Europe waited for work that was worthy of his powers; and now his time was come at last. His first duties, however, were diplomatic; and during the summer and autumn of 1701 he was engaged in negotiations with Sweden, Prussia, and the Empire for the formation of a Grand Alliance against France and Spain. Needless to say he brought all to a successful issue by his inexhaustible charm, patience, and tact.
September.

Still the attitude of the English people towards the contest remained doubtful, until, on the death of King James the Second, Lewis made the fatal mistake of recognising and proclaiming his son as King of England. Then the smouldering animosity against France leaped instantly into flame. William seized the opportunity to dissolve Parliament, and was rewarded by the election of a House of Commons more nearly resembling that which had carried him through the first war to the Peace of Ryswick. He did not fail to rouse its patriotism and self-respect by a stirring speech from the throne, and obtained the ratification of his agreement with the Allies that England should furnish a contingent of forty thousand men, eighteen thousand of them to be British and the remainder foreigners. So the country was committed to the War of the Spanish Succession.

It was soon decided that all regiments in pay must be increased at once to war-strength, and that six more battalions, together with five regiments of horse and[400] three of dragoons, should be sent to join the troops already in Holland. Then, as usual, there was a rush to do in a hurry what should have been done at leisure; and it is significant of the results of the late ill-treatment of the Army that, though the country was full of unemployed soldiers, it was necessary to offer three pounds, or thrice the usual amount of levy-money, to obtain recruits. The next step was to raise fifteen new regiments—Meredith's, Cootes', Huntingdon's, Farrington's, Gibson's, Lucas's, Mohun's, Temple's, and Stringer's of foot; Fox's, Saunderson's, Villiers', Shannon's, Mordaunt's and Holt's of marines. Of the foot Gibson's and Farrington's had been raised in 1694, but the officers of Farrington's, if not of both regiments, had been retained on half-pay, and, returning in a body, continued the life of the regiment without interruption. Both are still with us as the Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth of the Line. Huntingdon's and Lucas's also survive as the Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth, and Meredith's and Cootes', which were raised in Ireland, as the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-ninth, while the remainder were disbanded at the close of the war. Of the marines, Saunderson's had originally been raised in 1694, and eventually passed into the Line as the Thirtieth Foot, followed by Fox's and Villiers' as the Thirty-first and Thirty-second. Nothing now remained but to pass the Mutiny Act, which was speedily done; and on the 5th of May, just two months after the death of King William, the great work of his life was continued by a formal declaration of war.

The field of operations which will chiefly concern us is mainly the same as that wherein we followed the campaigns of King William. The eastern boundary of the cock-pit must for a time be extended from the Meuse to the Rhine, the northern from the Demer to the Waal, and the southern limit must be carried from Dunkirk beyond Namur to Bonn. But the reader should bear in mind that, in consequence of the Spanish alliance, Spanish Flanders was no longer hostile, but[401] friendly, to France, so that the French frontier, for all practical purposes, extended to the boundary of Dutch Brabant. Moreover, the French, besides the seizure, already related, of the barrier-towns, had contrived to occupy every stronghold on the Meuse except Maestricht, from Namur to Venloo, so that practically they were masters so far of the whole line of the river.

A few leagues below Venloo stands the fortified town of Grave, and beyond Grave, on the parallel branch of the Rhine, stands the fortified city of Nimeguen. A little to the east of Nimeguen, at a point where the Rhine formerly forked into two streams, stood Fort Schenk, a stronghold famous in the wars of Morgan and of Vere. These three fortresses were the three eastern gates of the Dutch Netherlands, commanding the two great waterways, doubly important in those days of bad roads, which lead into the heart of the United Provinces.
1702.
May 30
June 10.

It is here that we must watch the opening of the campaign of 1702. There were detachments of the French and of the Allies opposed to each other on the Upper Rhine, on the Lower Rhine, and on the Lower Scheldt; but the French grand army of sixty thousand men was designed to operate on the Meuse, and the presence of a Prince of the blood, the Duke of Burgundy, with old Marshal Boufflers to instruct him, sufficiently showed that this was the quarter in which France designed to strike her grand blow. Marlborough being still kept from the field by other business, the command of the Allied army on the Meuse was entrusted to Lord Athlone, better known as that Ginkell who had completed the pacification of Ireland in 1691. His force consisted of twenty-five thousand men, with which he lay near Cleve, in the centre of the crescent formed by Grave, Nimeguen, and Fort Schenk, watching under shelter of these three fortresses the army of Boufflers, which was encamped some twenty miles to south-east of him at Uden and Xanten. On the 10th of June Boufflers made a sudden dash to cut off Athlone[402] from Nimeguen and Grave, a catastrophe which Athlone barely averted by an almost discreditably precipitate retreat. Having reached Nimeguen Athlone withdrew to the north of the Waal, while all Holland trembled over the danger which had thus been so narrowly escaped.
June 21
July 2.
July 15 26 .

Such was the position when Marlborough at last took the field, after long grappling at the Hague with the difficulties which were fated to dog him throughout the war. In England his position was comparatively easy, for though Prince George of Denmark, the consort of Queen Anne, was nominally generalissimo of all forces by sea and land, yet Marlborough was Captain-General of all the English forces at home and in Holland, and in addition Master-General of the Ordnance. But it was only after considerable dispute that he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the allied forces, and then not without provoking much dissatisfaction among the Dutch generals, and much jealousy in the Prince of Nassau-Saarbrück and in Athlone, both of whom aspired to the office. These obstacles overcome, there came the question of the plan of campaign. Here again endless obstruction was raised. The Dutch, after their recent fright, were nervously apprehensive for the safety of Nimeguen, the King of Prussia was much disturbed over his territory of Cleve, and all parties who had not interests of their own to put forward made it their business to thwart the Commander-in-Chief. With infinite patience Marlborough soothed them, and at last, on the 2nd of July, he left the Hague for Nimeguen, accompanied by two Dutch deputies, civilians, whose duty it was to see that he did nothing imprudent. Arrived there he concentrated sixty thousand men, of which twelve thousand were British,[291] recrossed the Waal and encamped at Ober-Hasselt over against Grave, within two leagues of the French. Then once more the obstruction of his colleagues caused[403] delay, and it was not until the 26th of July that he could cross to the left bank of the Meuse. "Now," he said to the Dutch deputies, as he pointed to the French camp, "I shall soon rid you of these troublesome neighbours."
July 22
August 2.

Five swift marches due south brought his army over the Spanish frontier by Hamont. Boufflers thereupon in alarm broke up his camp, summoned Marshal Tallard from the Rhine to his assistance, crossed the Meuse with all haste at Venloo, and pushed on at nervous speed for the Demer. On the 2nd of August he lay between Peer and Bray, his camping-ground ill-chosen, and his army worn out by a week of desperate marching. Within easy striking distance, a mile or two to the northward, lay Marlborough, his army fresh, ready, and confident. He held the game in his hand; for an immediate attack would have dealt the French as rude a buffet as they were to receive later at Ramillies. But the Dutch deputies interposed; these Dogberries were content to thank God that they were rid of a rogue. So Boufflers was allowed to cross the Demer safely at Diest, and a first great opportunity was lost.
August 11 22 .

Marlborough, having drawn the French away from the Meuse, was now at liberty to add the garrison of Maestricht to his field-force, and to besiege the fortresses on the river. Boufflers, however, emboldened by his escape, again advanced north in the hope of cutting off a convoy of stores that was on its way to join the Allies. Marlborough therefore perforce moved back to Hamont and picked up his convoy; then, before Boufflers could divine his purpose he had moved swiftly south, and thrown himself across the line of the French retreat to the Demer. The French marshal hurried southward with all possible haste, and came blundering through the defiles before Hochtel on the road to Hasselt, only to find Marlborough waiting ready for him at Helchteren. Once again the game was in the Englishman's hand. The French were in great disorder, their left in particular being hopelessly entangled[404] in marshy and difficult ground. Marlborough instantly gave the order to advance, and by three o'clock the artillery of the two armies was exchanging fire. At five Marlborough directed the whole of his right to fall on the French left; but to his surprise and dismay, the right did not move. A surly Dutchman, General Opdam, was in command of the troops in question and, for no greater object than to annoy the Commander-in-Chief, refused to execute his orders. So a second great opportunity was lost.
August 12 23 .

Still much might yet be won by a general attack on the next day; and for this accordingly Marlborough at once made his preparations. But when the time came the Dutch deputies interposed, entreating him to defer the attack till the morrow morning. "By to-morrow morning they will be gone," answered Marlborough; but all remonstrance was unavailing. The attack was perforce deferred, the French slipped away in the night, and though it was still possible to cut up their rearguard with cavalry, a third great opportunity was lost.
August 18 29 .

Marlborough was deeply chagrined; but although with unconquerable patience and tact he excused Opdam's conduct in his public despatches, he could not deceive the troops, who were loud in their indignation against both deputies and generals. There was now nothing left but to reduce the fortresses on the Meuse, a part of the army being detached for the siege while the remainder covered the operations under the command of Marlborough. Even over their favourite pastime of a siege, however, the Dutch were dilatory beyond measure. "England is famous for negligence," wrote Marlborough, "but if Englishmen were half as negligent as the people here, they would be torn to pieces by Parliament."[292] Venloo was at length invested on the 29th of August,[293] and after a siege of eighteen [405] days compelled to capitulate. The English distinguished themselves after their own peculiar fashion. In the assault on the principal defence General Cutts, who from his love of a hot fire was known as the Salamander, gave orders that the attacking force, if it carried the covered way, should not stop there but rush forward and carry as much more as it could. It was a mad design, criminally so in the opinion of officers who took part in it,[294] but it was madly executed, with the result that the whole fort was captured out of hand.
Sept. 26
October 7.
Oct. 1 12 .

The reduction of Stevenswaert, Maseyk, and Ruremond quickly followed; and the French now became alarmed lest Marlborough should transfer operations to the Rhine. Tallard was therefore sent back with a large force to Cologne and Bonn, while Boufflers, much weakened by this and by other detachments, lay helpless at Tongres. But the season was now far advanced, and Marlborough had no intention of leaving Boufflers for the winter in a position from which he might at any moment move out and bombard Maestricht. So no sooner were his troops released by the capture of Ruremond than he prepared to oust him. The French, according to their usual practice, had barred the eastern entrance to Brabant by fortified lines, which followed the line of the Geete to its head-waters, and were thence carried across to that of the Mehaigne. In his position at Tongres Boufflers lay midway between these lines and Liège, in the hope of covering both; but after the fall of so many fortresses on the Meuse he became specially anxious for Liège, and resolved to post himself under its walls. He accordingly examined the defences, selected his camping-ground, and on the 12th of October marched up with his army to occupy it. Quite unconscious of any danger he arrived within cannon-shot of his chosen position, and there stood Marlborough, calmly awaiting him with a superior force. For the fourth time Marlborough held his enemy within his grasp, but the Dutch deputies, as usual,[406] interposed to forbid an attack; and Boufflers, a fourth time delivered, hurried away in the night to his lines at Landen. Had he thrown himself into Liège Marlborough would have made him equally uncomfortable by marching on the lines; as things were the French marshal perforce left the city to its fate.
Oct. 12 23 .

The town of Liège, which was unfortified, at once opened its gates to the Allies; and within a week Marlborough's batteries were playing on the citadel. On the 23rd of October the citadel was stormed, the English being first in the breach, and a few days later Liège, with the whole line of the Meuse, had passed into the hands of the Allies. Thus brilliantly, in spite of four great opportunities marred by the Dutch, ended Marlborough's first campaign. Athlone, like an honest man, confessed that as second in command he had opposed every one of Marlborough's projects, and that the success was due entirely to his incomparable chief. He at any rate had an inkling that in Turenne's handsome Englishman there had arisen one of the great captains of all time.

Nevertheless the French had not been without their consolations in other quarters. Towards the end of the campaign the Elector of Bavaria had declared himself for France against the Empire, and, surprising the all-important position of Ulm on the Danube, had opened communication with the French force on the Upper Rhine. Villars, who commanded in that quarter, had seconded him by defeating his opponent, Prince Lewis of Baden, at Friedlingen, and had cleared the passages of the Black Forest; while Tallard had, almost without an effort, possessed himself of Treves and Trarbach on the Moselle. The rival competitors for the crown of Spain were France and the Empire, and the centre of the struggle, as no one saw more clearly than Marlborough, was for the present moving steadily towards the territory of the Empire.

While Marlborough was engaged in his operations on the Meuse, ten thousand English and Dutch, under[407] the Duke of Ormonde and Admiral Sir George Rooke, had been despatched to make a descent upon Cadiz. The expedition was so complete a failure that there is no object in dwelling on it. Rooke would not support Ormonde, and Ormonde was not strong enough to master Rooke; landsmen quarrelled with seamen, and English with Dutch. No discipline was maintained, and after some weeks of feeble operations and shameful scenes of indiscipline and pillage, the commanders found that they could do no more than return to England. They were fortunate enough, however, on their way, to fall in with the plate-fleet at Vigo, of which they captured twenty-five galleons containing treasure worth a million sterling. Comforted by this good fortune Rooke and Ormonde sailed homeward, and dropped anchor safely in Portsmouth harbour.

Meanwhile a mishap, which Marlborough called an accident, had gone near to neutralise all the success of the past campaign. At the close of operations the Earl, together with the Dutch deputies, had taken ship down the Meuse, with a guard of twenty-five men on board and an escort of fifty horse on the bank. In the night the horse lost their way, and the boat was surprised and overpowered by a French partisan with a following of marauders. The Dutch deputies produced French passes, but Marlborough had none and was therefore a prisoner. Fortunately his servant slipped into his hand an old pass that had been made out for his brother Charles Churchill. With perfect serenity Marlborough presented it as genuine, and was allowed to go on his way, the French contenting themselves with the capture of the guard and the plunder of the vessel, and never dreaming of the prize that they had let slip. The news of his escape reached the Hague, where on his arrival rich and poor came out to welcome him, men and women weeping for joy over his safety. So deep was the fascination exerted on all of his kind by this extraordinary man.

A few days later he returned to England, where a[408] new Parliament had already congratulated Queen Anne on the retrieving of England's honour by the success of his arms. The word retrieving was warmly resented, but though doubtless suggested by unworthy and factious animosity against the memory of William, it was strictly true. The nation felt that it was not in the fitness of things that Englishmen should be beaten by Frenchmen, and they rejoiced to see the wrong set right. Nevertheless party spirit found a still meaner level when Parliament extended to Rooke and Ormonde the same vote of thanks that they tendered to Marlborough. This precious pair owed even this honour to the wisdom and good sense of their far greater comrade, for they would have carried their quarrel over the expedition within the walls of Parliament, had not Marlborough told them gently that the whole of their operations were indefensible and that the less they called attention to themselves the better. The Queen, with more discernment, created Marlborough a Duke and settled on him a pension of ￡5000 a year. With the exaggerated bounty of a woman she wished Parliament to attach that sum forthwith permanently to the title, but this the Commons most properly refused to do. Moreover, the House was engaged just then on a work of greater utility to the Army than the granting of pensions even to such a man as Marlborough.
Nov 11.

On the 11th of November, the day before the public thanksgiving for the first campaign, the Committee of Public Accounts presented its report on the books of Lord Ranelagh, the paymaster-general. Ranelagh, according to their statement, had evinced great unwillingness to produce his accounts, and had met their inquiries with endless shuffling and evasion. In his office, too, an unusual epidemic of sudden illness, and an unprecedented multitude of pressing engagements, had rendered his clerks strangely inaccessible to examination. The commissioners, however, had persisted, and were now able to tell a long story of irregular book-keeping,[409] false accounts, forged vouchers, and the clumsiest and most transparent methods of embezzlement and fraud.

Ranelagh defended himself against their charges not without spirit and efficiency, but the commissioners declined to discuss the matter with him. The Commons spent two days in examination of proofs, and then without hesitation voted that the Paymaster-General had been guilty of misappropriation of public money. It was thought by many at the time that Ranelagh was very hardly used; and it is certain that factious desire to discredit the late Government played a larger part than common honesty in this sudden zeal against corruption. Whig writers[295] assert without hesitation that there was no foundation whatever for the charges; and it is indubitable that many of the conclusions of the commissioners were strained and exaggerated. It is beyond question too that much of the financial confusion was due to the House of Commons, which had voted large sums without naming the sources from whence they should be raised, and where it had named the source had absurdly over-estimated the receipts. But it is none the less certain that Ranelagh's accounts were in disorder, and that, though his patrimony was small, he was reputed to have spent more money on buildings, gardens, and furniture than any man in England. Without attempting to calculate the measure of his guilt, it cannot be denied that his dismissal was for the good of the Army.

Had the House of Commons followed up this preliminary inquiry by further investigation much good might have been done, but its motives not being pure its actions could not be consistent. Ranelagh, for instance, had made one statement in self-defence which gravely inculpated the Secretary-at-War; but the House showed no alacrity to turn against that functionary. Very soon the question of the accounts degenerated into a wrangle with the House of Lords; and in March[410] 1704 the Commons were still debating what should be done with Ranelagh, while poor Mitchelburne of Londonderry, a prisoner in the Fleet for debt, was petitioning piteously for the arrears due to him since 1689.
1705,
May 10.
Commission
dated April
20, 1704.

It will, however, be convenient to anticipate matters a little, and to speak at once of the reforms that were brought about by this scandal in the paymaster's office. First, on the expulsion of Ranelagh the office was divided and two paymasters-general were appointed, one for the troops abroad, the other for those at home. Secondly, two new officers were established, with salaries of ￡1500 a year and the title of Controllers of the Accounts of the Army, Sir Joseph Tredenham and William Duncombe being the first holders of the office. Lastly, the Secretary-at-War definitely ceased to be mere secretary to the Commander-in-Chief, and became the civil head of the War Department. In William's time he had taken the field with the King, but from henceforth he stayed at home; while a secretary to the Commander-in-Chief, not yet a military secretary, accompanied the general on active service on a stipend of ten shillings a day. William Blathwayt, who had been Secretary-at-War since the days of Charles the Second, was got rid of, with no disadvantage to the service, and his place was taken by the brilliant but unprofitable Henry St. John.
CHAPTER II
The force voted by Parliament for the campaign of 1703 consisted, as in the previous year, of eighteen thousand British and twenty-two thousand Germans. There had been much talk of an increase of the Army, and indeed Parliament had agreed to make an augmentation subject to certain conditions to be yielded by the Dutch; but when the session closed no provision had been made for it, and the details required to be settled, as indeed such details generally were, by Marlborough himself. Four new British regiments formed part of the augmentation, and accordingly five new battalions were raised, which, as they were all disbanded subsequently, remain known to us only by the names of their colonels, Gorges, Pearce, Evans, Elliott, and Macartney. Finally, small contingents from a host of petty German states brought the total of mercenaries to twenty-eight thousand, which, added to twenty thousand British, made up a nominal total of fifty thousand men in the pay of England. But none of these additional troops could take the field until late in the campaign.

Such efforts were not confined to the side of the Allies. The French successes to the eastward of the Rhine had encouraged them to projects for a grand campaign, so their army too was increased, and every nerve was strained to make the preparations as complete as possible. The grand army under Villeroy and Boufflers, numbering fifty-four battalions and one hundred and three squadrons, was designed to recapture the strong places on the Meuse and to threaten the[412] Dutch frontier. The frontiers towards Ostend and Antwerp were guarded by flying columns under the Marquis of Bedmar, Count de la Mothe, and the Spanish Count Tserclaes de Tilly. The entire force of the Bourbons in the Low Countries, including garrisons and field-army, included ninety thousand men in infantry alone.[296] With such a force to occupy the Allies in Flanders and with Marshal Tallard to hold Prince Lewis of Baden in check at Stollhofen on the Upper Rhine, Marshal Villars was to push through the Black Forest and join hands with the Elector of Bavaria. Finally, the joint forces of France and Savoy were to advance through the Tyrol to the valley of the Inn and combine with Villars and the Elector for a march on Vienna.
March 6 17 .
May 7 18 .

The design was grand enough in conception; but Marlborough too had formed plans for striking at the enemy in a vital part. A campaign of sieges was not to his mind, for he conceived that to bring his enemy to action and beat him was worth the capture of twenty petty fortresses; and accordingly on his arrival at the Hague he advocated immediate invasion of French Flanders and Brabant. But the project was too bold for the Dutch, whose commanders had changed and changed for the worse. Old Athlone was dead, and in his stead had risen up three new generals—Overkirk, who had few faults except mediocrity and age; Slangenberg, who combined ability with a villainous temper; and Opdam, who was alike cantankerous and incapable. Very reluctantly Marlborough was compelled to undertake the siege of Bonn, he himself commanding the besiegers, while Overkirk handled the covering army. Notwithstanding Dutch procrastination, Marlborough's energy had succeeded in bringing the Allies first into the field; and before Villeroy could strike a blow to hinder it, Bonn had capitulated, and Marlborough had rejoined Overkirk and was ready for active operations in the field.

[413]

The Duke now reverted to his original scheme of carrying the war into the heart of Brabant and West Flanders, and with this view ordered every preparation to be made for an attack on Antwerp. Cohorn, the famous engineer, was to distract the French by the capture of Ostend on the west side, a second force was to be concentrated under Opdam at Bergen-op-Zoom to the north, while Marlborough was to hold Villeroy in check in the east until all was ready.

The Duke's own share of the operations was conducted with his usual skill. Pressing back Villeroy into the space between the heads of the Jaar and the Mehaigne he kept him in continual suspense as to whether his design lay eastward or westward, against Huy or against Antwerp. Unfortunately, in an evil hour he imparted to Cohorn that he thought he might manage both.[297] The covetous old engineer had laid his own plans for filling his pockets; and no sooner did he hear of Marlborough's idea of attacking Huy than, fearful lest Villeroy should interrupt his private schemes for making money, he threw the capture of Ostend to the winds, and marched into West Flanders to levy contributions before it should be too late.
June 15 26 .

Still Marlborough was patient. He had hoped for Ostend first and Antwerp afterwards, but a reversal of the arrangement would serve. Cohorn having filled his pockets returned to the east of the Scheldt at Stabrock; Spaar, another Dutch general, took up his position at Hulst; Opdam remained at Bergen-op-Zoom; and thus the three armies lay in wait round the north and west of Antwerp, ready to move forward as soon as Marlborough should come up on the south-east. The Duke did not keep them long waiting. On the night of the 26th of June he suddenly broke up his camp, crossed the Jaar, and made for the bridge over the Demer at Hasselt. Villeroy, his eyes now thoroughly opened, hastened with all speed for Diest in order to be before him; and the two armies raced for Antwerp.[414] The Duke had hastened his army forward on its way by great exertions for six days, when the news reached him that Cohorn, unable to resist the temptation of making a little more money, had made a second raid into West Flanders, leaving Opdam in the air on the other side of the Scheldt. The Dutch were jubilant over Cohorn's supposed success, but Marlborough took a very different view. "If Opdam be not on his guard," he said, "he will be beaten before we can reach him"; and he despatched messengers instantly to give Opdam warning. As usual he was perfectly right. Villeroy hit the blot at once, and detached a force under Boufflers to take advantage of it. Opdam, in spite of Marlborough's warning, took no precautions, and finding himself surprised took to his heels, leaving Slangenberg to save his army. Thus the whole of Marlborough's combinations were broken up.[298]

The quarrels of the Dutch generals among themselves[415] left no hope of success in further operations. Failing to persuade the Dutch to undertake anything but petty sieges he returned to the Meuse, and after the capture of Huy and Limburg closed the campaign. Thus a second year was wasted through the perversity of the Dutch.
Sept. 9 20 .

Meanwhile things had gone ill with the Grand Alliance in other quarters. The King of Portugal had indeed been gained for the Austrian side and had offered troops for active operations in Spain, an event which will presently lead us to the Peninsula. The Duke of Savoy again had been detached from the French party, and the intended march over the Tyrol had been defeated by the valour of the Tyrolese; but elsewhere the French arms had been triumphant. Early in March Villars had seized the fort and bridge of Kehl on the Rhine, had traversed the Black Forest, joined hands with the Elector of Bavaria, and in spite of bitter quarrels with him had won in his company the victory of Hochst?dt. Tallard too, though he took the field but late, had captured Old Brisach on the Upper Rhine, defeated the Prince of Hessen-Cassel at Spires, and recaptured Landau. The communications between the Rhine and the Danube were thus secured, and the march upon Vienna could be counted on for the next year. With her armies defeated in her front, and the Hungarian revolt eating at her vitals from within, the situation of the Empire was well-nigh desperate.
[1697.]

Marlborough, for his part, had made up his mind to resign the command, for he saw no prospect of success while his subordinates systematically disobeyed his orders. "Our want of success," he wrote, "is due to the want of discipline in the army, and until this is remedied I see no prospect of improvement."[299] Nevertheless a short stay in England seems to have restored him to a more contented frame of mind, while even before the close of the campaign he had begun to plan[416] a great stroke for the ensuing year, and to discuss it with the one able general in the Imperial service, Prince Eugene of Savoy. Frail and delicate in constitution, Eugene had originally been destined for the Church, and for a short time had been known as the Abbé of Savoy, but he had early shown a preference for the military profession and had offered his sword first to Lewis the Fourteenth. It was refused. Then Eugene turned to the Imperial Court, and after ten years of active service against Hungarians, Turks, and French, found himself at the age of thirty a field-marshal. At thirty-four he had won the great victory of Zenta against the Turks, and in the War of the Succession had made himself dreaded in Italy by the best of the French marshals. He was now forty years of age, having spent fully half of his life in war, and fully a quarter of it in high command. Marlborough was fifty-three, and until two years before had never commanded an army in chief.

Marlborough's design was nothing less than to commit the Low Countries to the protection of the Dutch, and, leaving the old seat of war with all its armies and fortresses in rear, to carry the campaign into the heart of Germany. The two great captains decided that it could and must be done; but it would be no easy task to persuade the timid States-General and a factious House of Commons to a plan which was bold almost to rashness.

Marlborough began his share of the work in England forthwith. Without dropping a hint of his great scheme he contrived to put some heart into the English ministers, and so into their supporters in Parliament. The Houses met on the 9th of November, and the Commons, after just criticism of the want of concert shown by the Allies, cheerfully voted money and men for the augmented force that had been proposed in the previous session. Then came a new difficulty which had been added to Marlborough's many troubles in the autumn. The treaty lately concluded with Portugal[417] required the despatch of seven thousand troops to the Peninsula; and these it was decided to draw from the best British regiments in the Low Countries.[300] It was therefore necessary to raise one new regiment of dragoons and seven new battalions of foot,[301] a task which was no light one from the increasing difficulty of obtaining recruits.
1704.
January 15.

But while the recruiting officers were busily beating their drums, and convicted felons were awaiting the decision which should send them either in a cart to Tyburn or in a transport to the Low Countries, the indefatigable Marlborough crossed the North Sea in the bitterest weather to see how the Dutch preparations were going forward. He found them in a state which caused him sad misgivings for the coming campaign, but he managed to stir up the authorities to increase supplies of men and money, and suggested operations on the Moselle for the next campaign. The same phrase, operations on the Moselle, was passed on to the King of Prussia and to other allies, and was repeated to the Queen and ministers on his return to England. Finally, early in April the Duke embarked for the Low Countries once more in company with his brother Charles, with general instructions in his pocket to concert measures with Holland for the relief of the Emperor.
April 24
May 5.
May 7 18 .

Three weeks were then spent in gaining the consent of the States-General to operations on the Moselle, a consent which the Duke only extorted by threatening to march thither with the British troops alone, and in consultation with the solid but slow commander of the Imperial forces, Prince Lewis of Baden. To be quit of Dutch obstruction Marlborough asked only for the auxiliary troops in the pay of the Dutch, and obtained for his brother Charles the rank of General with the [418] command of the British infantry. In the last week of April the British regiments began to stream out of their winter quarters to a bridge that had been thrown over the Meuse at Ruremonde, and a fortnight later sixteen thousand of them made rendezvous at Bedbourgh. Not a man of them knew whither he was bound, for it was only within the last fortnight that the Duke had so much as hinted his destination even to the Emperor or to Prince Lewis of Baden.

It is now time to glance at the enemy, who had entered on the campaign with the highest hopes of success. The dispositions of the French were little altered from those of the previous year. Villeroy with one army lay within the lines of the Mehaigne; Tallard with another army was in the vicinity of Strasburg, his passage of the Rhine secured by the possession of Landau and Old Brisach; and the Count of Coignies was stationed with ten thousand men on the Moselle, ready to act in Flanders or in Germany as occasion might demand. At Ulm lay the Elector of Bavaria and his French allies under Marsin, who had replaced Villars during the winter. The whole of this last force, forty-five thousand men in all, stood ready to march to the head-waters of the Danube, and there unite with the French that should be pushed through the Black Forest to meet it. The Elector, by the operations of the past campaign, had mastered the line of the Danube from its source to Linz within the Austrian frontier; he held also the keys of the country between the Iller and the Inn; and he asked only for a French reinforcement to enable him to march straight on Vienna.

To the passage of this reinforcement there was no obstacle but a weak Imperial force under Prince Lewis of Baden, which made shift to guard the country from Philipsburg southward to Lake Constance. The principal obstruction was certain fortified lines, of which the reader should take note, on the right bank of the Rhine, which ran from Stollhofen south-eastward to Bühl, and, since they covered the entrance into[419] Baden from the north-west, were naturally most jealously guarded by Prince Lewis. From that point southward the most important points were held by weak detachments of regular troops, but a vast extent of the most difficult country was entrusted to raw militia and peasantry. To escort a reinforcement successfully through the defiles from Fribourg to Donaueschingen and to return with the escort in safety was no easy task, but it was adroitly accomplished by Tallard within the space of twelve days. The feat was lauded at the time with ridiculous extravagance, for, apart from the fact that Prince Lewis of Baden was remarkable neither for swiftness nor for vigilance, Tallard had hustled his unhappy recruits forward so unmercifully, along bad roads and in bad weather, that the greater part of them perished by the way.[302] Nevertheless the French had scored the first point of the game and were proportionately elated, while poor Tallard's head was, to his great misfortune, completely turned.
May 8 19 .

Marlborough meanwhile had begun his famous march, the direction lying up the Rhine towards Bonn. On the very day after he started he received urgent messages from Overkirk that Villeroy had crossed the Meuse and was menacing Huy, and from Prince Lewis that Tallard was threatening the lines of Stollhofen, both commanders of course entreating him to return to their assistance. Halting for one day to reassure them, the Duke told Overkirk that Villeroy had no designs against any but himself, and that the sooner reinforcements were sent to join the British the better. Prince Lewis he answered by giving him a rendezvous where his Hessians and Danes might also unite with his own army. This done he continued his march.
May 12 23 .
May 18 29 .
May 21
June 1.
May 20 31 .
May 23
June 3.

Marlborough's information was good. Villeroy had received strict orders to follow him to the Moselle, the French Court being convinced that he meditated operations[420] in that quarter. The Duke stepped out of his way to inspect Bonn in order to encourage this belief, and then pushed on in all haste to Coblentz with his cavalry only, leaving his brother to follow him with the infantry, while the artillery and baggage was carried up the Rhine to Mainz. Once again all his movements seemed to point to operations on the Moselle, unless indeed (for the French never knew what such a man might do next) he designed to double back down the river for operations near the sea. But wherever he might be going he did not linger, but crossing the Rhine and Moselle pushed constantly forward with his cavalry. Starting always before dawn and bringing his men into camp by noon he granted them no halt until he reached the suburbs of Mainz at Cassel. Here he improved his time by requesting the Landgrave of Hesse to send the artillery, which he had prepared for a campaign on the Moselle, to Mannheim. Again the French were puzzled. Was Alsace, and not the Moselle, to be the scene of the next campaign; and if not, why was the English general bridging the Rhine at Philipsburg, and why was his artillery moving up the river? Tallard moved up to Kehl, crossed to the left bank of the Rhine and took up a position on the Lauter, and Villeroy sent to Flanders for reinforcements; but meanwhile Marlborough had crossed the Main, and still, struggling on by rapid and distressing marches over execrable roads, was within three more days across the Neckar at Ladenburg and out of their reach.
May 26
June 6.
May 30
June 10.
June 2 13 .

His plans were now manifest enough, but it was too late to catch him. He therefore halted two days by Ladenburg to give orders for the concentration of the troops that were on march to join him from the Rhine, and then striking south-eastward across the great bend of the Neckar, traversed the river for the second time at Lauffen, and by the 10th of June was at Mondelheim. Halting here for three days to allow his infantry to come nearer to him, he was joined by Prince Eugene whom he now met for the first time in the flesh. The[421] Prince inspected the English horse and was astonished at the condition of the troops after their long and trying march. "I have heard much," he said, "of the English cavalry, and find it to be the best appointed and finest that I have ever seen. The spirit which I see in the looks of your men is an earnest of victory." Hither three days later came also a less welcome guest, Prince Lewis of Baden; and the three commanders discussed their plans for the future. Marlborough in vain tried to keep Eugene for his colleague, but it was ultimately decided that Eugene should take command in the lines of Stollhofen, to prevent the French if possible from crossing the Rhine, and to follow them at all hazards if they should succeed in crossing, while Baden should remain on the Danube and share the command of the allied army by alternate days with Marlborough.
June 3 14 .
June 9 20 .
June 11 22 .

Then the march was resumed south-eastward upon Ulm; and after one day's halt to perfect the arrangements for the junction with Prince Louis, the army reached the mountain-chain that bounded the valley of the Danube. The Pass of Geislingen, through which its road lay, could not in the most favourable circumstances be passed by any considerable number of troops in less than a day, and was now rendered almost impracticable by incessant heavy rain. To add to Marlborough's troubles the States-General, learning that Villeroy was astir, became frightened for their own safety and entreated for the return of their auxiliary troops. The Duke, to calm them, ordered boats to be ready to convey forces down the Rhine, and went quietly on with his own preparations, establishing magazines to the north of the Danube, and not forgetting to send a reinforcement of foreign troops to Eugene. At last the news came that Baden's army was come within reach; the British cavalry plunged into the defile, and two days later the junction of the two forces was effected at Ursprung.
June 14 25 .

The joint armies presently advanced to within eight miles of Ulm, whereupon the Elector of Bavaria withdrew[422] to an entrenched camp further down the Danube between Lavingen and Dillingen. The Allies therefore turned northward to await the arrival of the British infantry at Gingen; for Charles Churchill, with the foot and the artillery, had found it difficult to march at great speed in the perpetual pouring rain. His troubles had begun from the moment when Marlborough had gone ahead with the cavalry from Coblentz. The ascent of a single hill in that mountainous country often cost the artillery[303] a whole day's work, and would have cost more but for the indefatigable exertions of the officers.[304] Marlborough's care for the comfort and discipline of these troops was incessant. A large supply of shoes, for instance, was ready at Heidelberg to make good defects, while constant injunctions in his letters to his brother testify to his anxiety that nothing should be omitted to lighten the burden of the march. Finally, anticipating Wellington in the Peninsula, he insisted that the men should pay honestly for everything that they took, and took care to provide money to enable them to do so. Such a thing had never been known in all the innumerable campaigns of Germany.
June 18 29 .
June 20
July 1.

The joint armies after the arrival of Churchill amounted to ninety-six battalions, two hundred and two squadrons, and forty-eight guns; but a large contingent of Danish cavalry was still wanting, and not all Marlborough's entreaties could prevail with its commander, the Duke of Würtemberg, to hasten his march. Nevertheless it was necessary to move at once. Marlborough's objective had from the first been Donauw?rth, which would give him at once a bridge over the Danube and a place of arms for the invasion of Bavaria. His move northward had revealed his intentions; and the Elector of Bavaria had detached Count d'Arco with ten thousand foot and twenty-five hundred [423] horse to occupy the Schellenberg, a commanding height which covers Donauw?rth on the north bank of the Danube. Marlborough pressed Baden hard to attack this detachment before it could be reinforced; and accordingly the army broke up from Gingen, and advancing parallel to the Danube encamped on the 1st of July at Amerdingen.
June 21
July 2.

The next day was Marlborough's turn for command. It had not yet dawned when Quartermaster-General Cadogan was up and away with a party of cavalry, pioneers, and pontoons. At three o'clock marched six thousand men from the forty-five battalions of the left wing,[305] three regiments of Imperial Grenadiers, and thirty-five squadrons of horse. At five o'clock the rest of the army, excepting the artillery, followed in two columns along the main road towards a height that overhangs the river W?rnitz between Obermorgen and W?rnitzstein. By eight o'clock Cadogan was at Obermorgen, had driven back the enemy's picquets, and was engaged in marking out a camp; and at nine appeared the Duke himself, who, taking Cadogan's escort, went forward to reconnoitre the position.

The Schellenberg, as its name implies, is a bell-shaped hill, some two miles in circumference at the base and with a flat top about half a mile wide, whereon was pitched the enemy's camp. On the south side, where the hill falls down to the Danube, the ascent is steeper than elsewhere; on the north-west the slope is gradual and about five hundred yards in length. To the south-west the hill joins the town of Donauw?rth, from the outworks of which an entrenchment had been carried for nearly two miles round the summit to the river. This defence was strongest and most complete to the north-east, where a wood gave shelter for the formation of an attacking force; and at this point was[424] stationed a battery of cannon. To the north-west the works though incomplete were well advanced, and were strengthened by an old fort wherein the enemy had mounted guns. Marlborough, as he conned the position, could see that the enemy before him was so disposed as if expecting an attack on the northern and western sides. But looking to his right beyond Donauw?rth, and across the Danube, he could see preparations of a more ominous kind, a camp with tents pitched on both wings and a blank space in the centre, sure sign that cavalry was already present and that infantry was expected. Closer and closer he drew to the hill, Prince Lewis and others presently joining him; and then puffs of white smoke began to shoot out from various points in the enemy's works as his batteries opened fire.

Finishing his survey undisturbed, Marlborough turned back to meet the advanced detachment of the army; for it was plain to him that the Schellenberg must be carried at once before more of the enemy's troops could reach it. So bad, however, was the state of the roads, that though the distance was but twelve miles, the detachment did not reach the W?rnitz until noon. It was then halted to give the men rest, for there were still three miles of bad road before them, and to allow the main body to come up. The cavalry was sent forward to cut fascines in the wood, pontoon bridges were thrown across the W?rnitz, and at three o'clock the advanced detachment passed the river. While this was going forward a letter arrived from Eugene that Villeroy and Tallard were preparing to send strong reinforcements to the Elector; and this intelligence decided Marlborough to take the work in hand forthwith. Without waiting for the rear of the main body to arrive he drew out sixteen battalions only, five of them British,[306] and led them and the advanced detachment straight on to the attack. The infantry[425] of the detachment was formed in four lines, the English[307] being on the extreme left by the edge of the wood, and the cavalry was drawn up in two lines behind them. Eight battalions more were detailed to support the detachment or to deploy to its right if need should be, and yet eight more were held in reserve.

It was six o'clock in the evening before Marlborough gave the order to attack. Every foot-soldier took a fascine from the cavalry, and the columns, headed by two parties of grenadiers from the First Guards under Lord Mordaunt and Colonel Munden, marched steadily up the hill. The hostile batteries at once opened a cross-fire of round shot from the intrenchment and from the walls of Donauw?rth, but the columns pressed on unheeding to within eighty yards of the intrenchment before they fired a shot. Then the enemy continued the fire with musketry and grape, and the slaughter became frightful. The grenadiers of the Guards fell down right and left, and very soon few of them were left. Still Mordaunt and Munden, the one with his skirts torn to shreds and the other with his hat riddled by bullets, stood up unhurt and kept cheering them on. General Goor, a gallant foreigner who commanded the attack, was shot dead, and many other officers fell with him under that terrible fire. The columns staggered, wavered, recovered, and went on. But now came an unlucky accident. In front of the intrenchment ran a hollow way worn in the hill by rain, into which the foremost men, mistaking it for the intrenchment, threw down their fascines, so that on reaching the actual lines they found themselves unable to cross them. Thus checked they suffered so heavily that they began to give way; and the enemy rushed out rejoicing to finish the defeat with the bayonet. But the English Guards, though they had suffered terribly, stood immovable as rocks, the Royal Scots and the Welshmen of the Twenty-third[426] stood by them, and the counter-attack after desperate fighting was beaten back.

Meanwhile the enemy, finding the western face of the hill unthreatened, withdrew the whole of their force from thence to the point of assault. Their fire increased; the attacking columns wavered once more, and General Lumley was obliged to move up the entire first line of cavalry into the thick of the fire to support them. So the fight swayed for another half-hour, when the remainder of the Imperial army at last appeared on Marlborough's right, and finding the intrenchments deserted passed over them at once with trifling loss. Repulsing a charge of cavalry which was launched against them, they hurried on and came full on the flank of the French and Bavarians; yet even so this gallant enemy would not give way, and the allied infantry still failed to carry the intrenchment. Lumley now ordered the Scots Greys to dismount and attack on foot; but before they could advance the infantry by a final effort at last forced their way in. Then the Greys remounted with all haste and galloped forward to the pursuit, while Marlborough, halting the exhausted foot, sent the rest of the cavalry to join the Greys. The rout was now complete. Hundreds of men were cut off before they could reach Donauw?rth, many were driven into the Danube, many more, flying to a temporary bridge to cross the river, broke it down by their weight and miserably perished. Of twelve thousand men not more than one-fourth rejoined the Elector's army.

To face page 426
SCHELLENBERG
June 21st July 2nd 1704

The whole affair had lasted little more than an hour and a half, but the loss of the Allies in overcoming so gallant a defence cost them no fewer than fourteen hundred killed and three thousand eight hundred wounded. The losses of the British[308] were very heavy,[427] amounting to fifteen hundred of all ranks, or probably more than a third of the numbers engaged. The First Guards, Royal Scots, and the Twenty-third suffered most severely, every battalion of them having lost two hundred men or more, while the Guards at the close of the day could count but five officers unhurt out of seventeen. Of these five, wonderful to say, were Mordaunt and Munden, the one with three bullets through his clothes, the other with five through his hat, but neither of them scratched; but of eighty-two men whom they led to the assault only twenty-one returned. When it is remembered that the main body had been on foot fourteen hours, and the advanced detachment for sixteen hours, the exhaustion of the troops at the end of the day may be imagined. Nevertheless Donauw?rth was taken and the enemy was not only beaten but demoralised.
July 11 22 .

The Elector of Bavaria on hearing the news broke down the bridge over the Lech, and entrenched himself at Augsburg. Marlborough on his part crossed the Danube, and set himself to cut off the Elector's supplies. The passage of the Danube he severed at Donauw?rth, the road to the north by the capture of Rain, and that to the north-east by an advance south-eastward to Aichach, from which he presently moved on to Friedberg, hemming his enemy tightly into his entrenched camp. The Elector was at first inclined to come to terms, but hearing that the French were about to reinforce him he thought himself bound in honour to hold out. Marlborough was therefore compelled to put pressure on him by ravaging the country, a work which his letters show that he detested but felt obliged in duty to perform. The destruction was carried to the very walls of Munich; indeed, nothing but want of artillery, for which Prince Lewis of Baden was responsible, prevented an attack upon the city itself.[309] The prospect of the arrival of a French army gave the Duke little disquiet: if Bavaria were to[428] become the seat of war, so much the worse for Bavaria and for the cause of the Bourbons. So after sending thirty squadrons to reinforce Eugene, he prepared in the interim for the siege of Ingolstadt, which would give him command of the Danube from Ulm to Passau, and free access at all times into Bavaria. The Elector's country should feel the stress of war at any rate, and if fortune were propitious the French might feel it also. It is now time to return to the movements of those French.
CHAPTER III
May 29
June 9.
June 21
July 2.
July 5-10 16-21 .
July 23
August 3.

We left Villeroy with his army in the Low Countries endeavouring not very successfully to obey the orders which he had received, to watch Marlborough. On the 29th of May, when the Duke had already crossed the Neckar and fixed his quarters at Mondelheim, Villeroy was still at Landau waiting for him to repass the Rhine. On the following day, however, he took counsel with Tallard, with the result that, while Marlborough was marching to the attack of the Schellenberg the French armies were streaming across the Rhine at Kehl. Tallard then moved south towards Fribourg, close to which he received intelligence of the Elector's defeat. Thereupon both he and Villeroy entered the defiles of the Black Forest, uniting at Horneberg, from which point Tallard pushed on eastward alone. Advancing to Villingen he wasted five precious days in an unsuccessful effort to take that town, a mistake which was not lost on Marlborough and Eugene. Called to his senses by an urgent message from the Elector, Tallard at last marched on by the south bank of the Danube, encamped before Augsburg on the 23rd of July, and three days later effected his junction with the Elector and Marsin a few miles to the north of the city.
July 26
August 6.

Tallard was no sooner fairly on his way than Eugene, leaving a small garrison to hold the lines of Stollhofen, hurried on parallel with him along the north bank of the Danube, reaching Hochst?dt on the day of the enemy's junction at Augsburg. Marlborough meanwhile, at the news of Tallard's arrival, had fallen back[430] northward in the direction of Neuburg on the Danube, and was lying at Schobenhausen some twelve miles to the south of the river. Hither came Eugene from Hochst?dt to concert operations. The French and Bavarians were united to the south of the Danube; the Allies were divided on both sides of the river. If Marlborough fell back to Neuburg to join Eugene, the enemy could pass the Lech and enter Bavaria; if Eugene crossed the river to join Marlborough the enemy could pass to the north of the river and cut them off from Franconia, their only possible source of supplies. It was agreed that Prince Lewis of Baden should be detached with fifteen thousand men for the siege of Ingolstadt; and, as it was reported that the French were moving towards the Danube, Marlborough advanced closer to the river, so as to be able to cross it either at Neuburg or by the bridges which he had thrown over it by the mouth of the Lech at Merxheim.
July 29
August 9.
July 30
August 10.
July 31
August 11.

On the 9th of August Prince Lewis marched off to Ingolstadt, to the unspeakable relief of his colleagues, and Eugene took his leave. Two hours later, however, Eugene hurried back to report that the French were in full march to the bridge of Dillingen, evidently intending to cross the river and overwhelm his army. The Prince hastened back and withdrew his army eastward from Hochst?dt to the Kessel. Marlborough, on his side, at midnight sent three thousand cavalry over the Danube to reinforce him, while twenty battalions under Churchill followed them as far as the bridge of Merxheim, with orders to halt on the south bank of the river. Next morning the Duke brought the whole of the army up to Rain, within a league of the Danube, where he received fresh messages from Eugene urging him to hasten to his assistance. At midnight Churchill received his orders to pass the river and march for the Kessel, and two hours later the whole army moved off in two columns, one to cross the Danube at Merxheim, the other to traverse the Lech at Rain and the Danube at Donauw?rth. At five on the same afternoon[431] the whole of them were filing across the W?rnitz; by ten that night the junction was complete, and the united armies encamped on the Kessel, their right resting on Kessel-Ostheim, their left on the village of Munster and the Danube. Row's brigade of British was pushed forward to occupy Munster; and then the wearied troops lay down to rest. The main body had been on foot for twenty hours, though it had covered no more than twenty-four miles. Both columns had passed the Danube and the W?rnitz, and the left column the Ach and the Lech in addition. It is easy to imagine how long and how trying such a march must have been; it is less easy to appreciate the foresight and arrangement which enabled it to be performed at all.
August 1 12 .

The artillery, which had perforce been left to come up in the rear of the army, was by great exertions brought up at dawn on the following morning. A little later the Duke and Eugene rode forward with a strong escort to reconnoitre the ground before them, but perceiving the enemy's cavalry at a distance, ascended the church-tower of Tapfheim, from whence they descried the French quartermasters marking out a camp between Blenheim and Lutzingen, some three or four miles away. This was the very ground that they had designed to take up themselves, and it was with no small satisfaction that they perceived it to be occupied by the enemy. The French and Bavarian commanders had decided, after their junction on the Lech, that their best policy would be to cross the Danube, take up a strong position, and wait until want of supplies, by which Marlborough had already been greatly embarrassed, should compel the Allies to withdraw from the country. Tallard had no idea of offering battle; Marlborough indeed did not expect it of him, and had not dared to hope that the marshal would allow an action to be forced on him. But now that he had the chance, the Duke resolved not to let it slip. Men were not wanting to urge upon him the dangers of an attack[432] on a superior force. "I know the difficulties," he answered, "but a battle is absolutely necessary, and I rely on the discipline of my troops."

The two camps lay some five miles apart, the ground between them consisting of a plain of varying breadth confined between a chain of woods and the Danube. This plain is cut by a succession of streams running down at right angles to the Danube, no fewer than three crossing the line of the march between the Kessel and the French position. The first of these, the Reichen, cuts a ravine through which the road passed close to the village of Dapfheim; and Marlborough, seeing that at this point the enemy could greatly embarrass his advance, sent forward pioneers to level the ravine, and occupied the village with two brigades of British and Hessian infantry.

Meanwhile the enemy entered their camp, Tallard taking up his quarters on the right, Marsin in the centre, and the Elector of Bavaria on the left. Tallard's force consisted of thirty-six battalions and forty-four squadrons of the best troops of France, his colleague's of forty-six battalions and one hundred and eight squadrons; yet notwithstanding this unequal distribution of the cavalry, the force was encamped not as one army but as two. The rule that infantry should be massed in the centre and the cavalry divided on each wing was followed, not for the entire host, but for each army independently. Thus the centre was made up of the cavalry of both armies without unity of command; the infantry was distributed on each flank of it; and on each flank of the infantry was yet another body of cavalry. Yet it was an axiom in those days that an army which ran the least risk of an engagement should be encamped as nearly as possible according to the probable disposition for action. This violation of rules was not unperceived by Marlborough.

The camp itself was situated at the top of an almost imperceptible slope, which descends for a mile, without affording the slightest cover, to a brook called the[433] Nebel. Its right rested on the village of Blenheim, little more than a furlong from the Danube; and here were Tallard's headquarters. The village having an extended front, and being covered by hedges and palisades, could easily be converted into a strong position. Half a mile above it a little boggy rivulet, called the Maulweyer, which was destined to play an important part in the next day's work, rises and flows down through the village to the Danube. About two miles up the Nebel from Blenheim, but on the opposite or left bank of the stream, stands the village of Unterglau; and a mile above this, on the same side of the stream as Blenheim, and about a hundred yards from the water, is another village called Oberglau. This Oberglau was the centre of the position, and Marsin's headquarters. A mile upward from Oberglau is another village, Lutzingen, resting on wooded country much broken by ravines. Here were the Elector's headquarters and the extreme left of the enemy's position. The Nebel, though no more than four yards broad at its mouth, was a troublesome obstacle, its borders being marshy, especially between Oberglau and Blenheim, and in many places impassable. Below Unterglau this swampy margin extended for a considerable breadth, while opposite Blenheim the stream parted in twain and flowed on each side of a small boggy islet. At the head of this islet was a stone bridge, over which ran the great road from Donauw?rth to Dillingen. This had been broken down, or at least damaged, by Tallard; but herewith had ended his measures for obstructing the passage of the Nebel.
August 2 13 .

At two o'clock on the morrow morning, amid dense white mist, the army of the Allies broke up its camp, and passed the Kessel in eight columns, the two outermost on each flank consisting of cavalry, the four innermost of infantry. For this day the stereotyped formation was to be reversed; the cavalry was to form the centre and the infantry the wings. On reaching Tapfheim the army halted, and the two outlying[434] brigades, reinforced by eleven more battalions as well as by cavalry, formed a ninth column on the extreme left, to cover the march of the artillery along the great road and in due time to attack Blenheim. The new column was conspicuous from the red-coats of fourteen British battalions, with Cutts the Salamander at its head.

Then Marlborough, who commanded on the left, directed his generals to occupy the ground from the Danube to Oberglau, while Eugene's should prolong the line from Oberglau upwards to Lutzingen. The columns resumed the advance, spreading out like the sticks of a fan, wider and wider, as the Imperial troops streamed away to their appointed positions on the right. Fifty-two thousand men in all were tramping forward, and fifty-two guns groaning and creaking after them. Far in advance of all Marlborough and Eugene pushed on with a strong escort. At six o'clock they met and drove back the French advanced posts, and at seven they were on high ground within a mile of the Nebel and in full view of the enemy's camp.

Meanwhile Marshal Tallard was taking things at his ease, and had dispersed his cavalry to gather forage. Even while his vedettes were falling back before Marlborough's escort, he was calmly writing that the enemy had turned out early and was almost certainly on the march for N?rdlingen. The morning was foggy, no uncommon thing on the banks of great and marshy rivers, and a dangerous enemy was within striking distance; yet no precautions had been taken against surprise. Then at seven o'clock the fog rolled away, and there, in great streaks of blue and white and scarlet, were the allied columns in full view, preparing to deploy on the other side of the Nebel. Presently the village of Unterglau and two mills farther down the stream burst into smoke and flame, and the outlying posts of the French came hurrying back across the stream. Then all was hurry and confusion in the French camp. Staff-officers flew off in all directions with orders, signal-guns brought the foragers galloping[435] back, drums beat the assembly from end to end of the line, and the troops fell in hastily before their tents.

Tallard's eyesight was very defective, but he had no difficulty in making out the red coats of Cutts's column, and he knew by this time that where the British were, there the heaviest fighting was to be expected. He therefore lost no time in occupying Blenheim. Four regiments of French dragoons trotted down to seal up the space between the village and the Danube, and presently almost the entire mass of the infantry faced to the right, and the white coats began striding away towards Blenheim itself. Eight squadrons of horse in scarlet, easily recognisable by Marlborough as the Gendarmerie, began Tallard's first line leftward from the village, and other squadrons presently prolonged it to Marsin's right wing. More cavalry supported these in a second line, together with nine battalions, which, being raw regiments, were not trusted to stand in the first line. Then the artillery came forward into position, ninety pieces in all, French and Bavarian. Four twenty-four pounders were posted before Blenheim, while a chain of batteries covered the line from end to end.

These dispositions completed, Tallard galloped off to the left, for Marsin had never yet commanded more than five hundred men in the field. Marsin's cavalry was already drawn up in two lines; his infantry and the Elector's was in rear of Oberglau and to the left of it, and the village itself was strongly occupied. Beyond this the left wing of cavalry stood in front of Lutzingen, and beyond them again a few battalions doubled back en potence protected the Elector's extreme left flank.

Marlborough on his side was equally busy. Blenheim and Oberglau were, as he saw, too far apart to cover the whole of the intervening ground with a cross-fire, and the French cavalry on the slope above were too remote to bar the passage of the Nebel. Officers were sent down to sound the stream, the stone bridge was repaired, and five pontoon bridges were laid, one[436] above Unterglau, the rest below it. Cutts formed his column into six lines, the first of Row's British brigade, the second of Hessians, the third of Ferguson's British brigade, and the fourth of Hanoverians, with two more lines in reserve. The four remaining columns of Marlborough's army were deployed between Wilheim and Oberglau in four lines, the first and fourth of infantry, with two lines of cavalry between them. The French esteemed this a "bizarre"[310] formation, but they understood its purport before the day was over.

At eight o'clock Tallard's batteries opened fire, though with little effect. Eugene thereupon took leave of Marlborough and hurried away to the right, while the Duke occupied himself with the posting of his artillery, every gun of which was stationed under his own eye. The chaplains came forward to the heads of the regiments and read prayers; and then the Duke mounted and rode down the whole length of his line. As he passed a round shot struck the ground under his horse and covered him with dust. For a moment every man held his breath, but in a few seconds the calm figure with the red coat and the broad blue ribbon reappeared, the horse moving slowly and quietly as before, and the handsome face unchangeably serene.

The inspection over, the Duke dismounted and waited till Eugene should be ready. The delay was long, and messenger after messenger was despatched to ask the cause. The answer came that the ground on the right was so much broken by wood and ravine that the columns had been compelled to make a long detour, and that formation had been hampered by the fire of the enemy's artillery as well as by the necessity for altering preconcerted dispositions. Marlborough waited with impatience, for, whether he hoped to carry Blenheim or not, every hour served to place it in a better state of defence. The French dragoons by the river had entrenched themselves behind a leaguer of waggons, and the infantry in the village had turned every wall[437] and hedge and house to good account. Moreover Marlborough had seen how strong the garrison of Blenheim was, having probably counted every one of the twenty-seven battalions into it, and identified them by their colours as the finest in the French army.

At last, at half-past twelve, an aide-de-camp galloped up from Eugene to say that all was ready. Cutts was instantly ordered to attack Blenheim, while the Duke moved down towards the bridges over the Nebel. By one o'clock Cutts's two leading lines were crossing the stream by the ruins of the burnt mills under a heavy fire of grape. On reaching the other side they halted to reform under shelter of a slip of rising ground. There the Hessians remained in reserve; and the First Guards, Tenth, Twenty-first, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth, with Brigadier Row on foot at their head, advanced deliberately against Blenheim. They were received at thirty paces distance by a deadly fire from the French, but Row's orders were, that until he struck the palisades not a shot must be fired, and that the village must be carried with the steel. The British pressed resolutely on, Row struck his sword into the palisades, and the men pouring in their volley rushed forward, striving to drag down the pales by main strength in the vain endeavour to force an entrance. In a few minutes a third of the brigade had fallen, Row was mortally wounded, his lieutenant-colonel and major were killed in the attempt to bring him off, and the first line, shattered to pieces against a superior force in a very strong position, fell back in disorder. As they retired, three squadrons of the Gendarmerie swept down upon their flank and seized the colours of the Twenty-first, but pursuing their advantage too far were brought up by the Hessians, who repulsed them with great gallantry and recaptured the colours.

Cutts observing more of the Gendarmerie preparing to renew the attack asked for a reinforcement of cavalry to protect his flank, whereupon five English squadrons were ordered by General Lumley to cross the Nebel.[438] Floundering with the greatest difficulty through the swamp, these were immediately confronted by the Gendarmerie, who, however, with astonishing feebleness opened a fire of musketoons from the saddle. The English promptly charged them sword in hand and put them to flight, but pursuing as usual too far were galled by the flank fire from Blenheim and compelled to retire.

Cutts's two remaining lines now crossed the Nebel for a fresh attack on Blenheim. The enemy had by this time brought forward more artillery to sweep the fords with grape-shot, but the British made good their footing on the opposite bank and compelled the guns to retire. Then Ferguson's brigade advanced together with Row's against the village once more, carried the outskirts, but could penetrate no further in spite of several desperate attacks, and were finally obliged to fall back with very heavy loss. The subordinate generals would have thrown away more lives[311] had not Marlborough given orders that the regiments should take up a sheltered position and keep up a feigned attack by constant fire of platoons. Then, withdrawing the Hanoverian brigade to the infantry of the centre, the Duke turned the whole of his attention to that quarter.

During these futile attacks on Blenheim, the four lines of Marlborough's main army were struggling with much difficulty across the Nebel. The first line of infantry passed first, and drew up at intervals to cover the passage of the cavalry; while eleven battalions, under the Prince of Holstein-Beck, were detached to carry the village of Oberglau. Then the cavalry filed down to the stream, using fascines and every other means that they could devise to help them through the treacherous miry ground. The British cavalry had the hardest of the work, being on the extreme left, and therefore not only confronted with the worst of the ground, but exposed to the fire of the artillery at Blenheim. With immense difficulty the squadrons[439] extricated themselves and, with horses blown and heated, was forming up in front of the infantry, when the squadrons of the French right, fresh and favoured by the ground, came down full upon them. The first line of the British was borne back to the very edge of the stream, but the pursuit was checked by the fire of the infantry. Then the Prussian General Bothmar fell upon the disordered French with the second line of cavalry, and drove them in confusion behind the Maulweyer. Reinforced by additional squadrons he held the line of the rivulet and kept them penned in behind it, for the French could not cross it, and dared not pass round the head of it for fear of being charged in flank. It was not until two battalions had been sent from Blenheim to ply the allied squadrons with musketry that Bothmar retired, and some, but not all, of the French cavalry on this side was released.

Meanwhile General Lumley had rallied his broken troops, and the squadrons further to the right had successfully crossed the Nebel. Still further up the water the Danish and Hanoverian cavalry had been put to the same trial as the British, being exposed to the fire from Oberglau and to the charges of Marsin's horse. While the combat was still swaying at this point the Prince of Holstein-Beck delivered his attack on Oberglau. He was instantly met by a fierce counterattack from the Irish Brigade, which was stationed in the village. His two foremost battalions were cut to pieces, he himself was mortally wounded, and affairs would have gone ill had not Marlborough hastened up with fresh infantry and artillery, and forced the enemy back into Oberglau. Thus the passage for the central line of the allied cavalry was secured.

It was now three o'clock; and Marlborough sent an aide-de-camp to Eugene to ask how things fared with him. The Prince was holding his own and no more. His infantry had behaved admirably, but his horse had supported them but ill; and three consecutive attacks though brilliantly begun had ended in failure. The[440] fact was that the Elector, with better judgment than Tallard, had moved his troops down towards the water, and was straining every nerve to prevent his enemy from crossing. Meanwhile Marlborough, having at last brought the whole of his force across the Nebel, formed the cavalry in two grand lines for the final attack, the infantry being ranged at intervals to the left rear as rallying-points for any broken squadron. Tallard, on his side, brought forward the nine battalions of his centre from the second line to the first, a disposition which was met by Marlborough by the advance of three Hanoverian battalions and a battery of artillery. For a time these young French infantry stood firm against the rain of great and small shot, closing up their ranks as fast as they were broken; but the trial was too severe for them. Tallard strove hard to relieve them by a charge of the squadrons on their left, but his cavalry would not move; and Marlborough's horse crashed into the hapless battalions, cut them down by whole ranks, and swept them out of existence.

Then Tallard's sins found him out. The cavalry of Marsin's right, seeing their flank exposed, swerved back upon Marsin's centre; a wide gap was cut in the French line; and Tallard's army was left isolated and alone. The marshal sent urgent messages to Marsin for reinforcements, and to Blenheim for the withdrawal of the infantry; but Marsin could not spare a man, and the order reached Blenheim too late. Marlborough was riding along the ranks of his cavalry from right to left, and presently the trumpets sounded the charge, and the two long lines swept sword in hand up the slope. The French stood firm for a brief space, and then, after a feeble volley from the saddle, they broke, wheeled round upon their supports, and carried all away with them in confusion. Thirty squadrons fled wildly in rear of Blenheim towards the river. General Hompesch's division of horse by the Duke's order brought up their right shoulders and galloped after them; and the fugitives in panic madness plunged[441] down the slope towards the Danube. The great river was before them, another stream and a swamp to their right; and there was no escape. Some dashed into the water and tried to swim away, others crept along the bank and over the morass towards Hochst?dt, others again broke back over the slope towards Morselingen; but the relentless Hompesch left them no rest. Those that reached Hochst?dt found themselves cut off, for another division of fugitives had fled thither straight from the field with Marlborough himself hard at their heels. Hundreds were drowned, hundreds were cut down, and a vast number taken prisoners. A few only preserving some semblance of order made good their retreat.

Meanwhile Marsin and the Elector, seeing the collapse of Tallard's army, set fire to Oberglau and Lutzingen, and began their retreat, with Eugene in full march after them. Marlborough thereupon recalled Hompesch and prepared to break up this army also by a flank attack; but in the dusk Eugene's troops were mistaken for the enemy, so Marsin was permitted to escape, though with an army much shaken and demoralised. But there were still the French battalions in Blenheim, which Churchill, after the defeat of Tallard's cavalry, had made haste to envelope with his infantry and dragoons. Tallard had been captured while on his way to them, and the finest troops of France were locked up in the village without orders of any kind, helpless and inactive, and too much crowded together for effective action. At last they tried to break out to the rear of the village, but were headed back by the Scots Greys; they made another attempt on the other side, and were checked by the Irish Dragoons. Churchill was just about to attack them with infantry and artillery in overwhelming force, when the French proposed a parley. Churchill would hear of nothing but unconditional surrender. Regiment Navarre in shame and indignation burnt its colours rather than yield them, but there was no help for it;[442] and twenty-four battalions of infantry together with four regiments of dragoons laid down their arms, many of them not having fired a shot. The officers were stupefied by their misfortune, and could only ejaculate "Oh, que dira le Roi, que dira le Roi!" Seldom has harder fate overtaken brave men.

The day was closing when Marlborough borrowed a leaf from a commissary's pocket-book and wrote a note in pencil to his wife, the message and the handwriting both those of a man who is quite tired out.

"13th August 1704.

"I have not time to say more, but to beg you will give my duty to the queen, and let her know her army has had a glorious victory, Monsr. Tallard and two other generals are in my coach and I am following the rest. The bearer, my aide-de-camp, Colonel Parke, will give her an account of what has pass'd. I shall doe it in a day or two by another more at large.

"Marlborough."

So Colonel Parke galloped away with the news to England, and the broad Danube bore the same tale to the east as it rolled the white-coated corpses in silence towards the sea.

To face page 442
BLENHEIM
Aug. 2nd 13th 1704

The total loss of the Allies amounted to four thousand five hundred killed and seven thousand five hundred wounded, of which the British numbered six hundred and seventy killed and over fifteen hundred wounded. No regimental list of the casualties seems to exist, but judging from their loss in officers the Tenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, Twenty-first, and Twenty-sixth regiments of Foot, and the Third, Sixth, and Seventh Dragoon Guards were the corps that suffered most severely—the Twenty-sixth in particular losing twenty officers, the Carabiniers ten officers and seventy-four horses, and the Seventh Dragoon Guards six officers and seventy-five horses. But most remarkable, and perhaps most splendid of all, is the record of the regiments which had been so terribly shattered at the Schellenberg.[443] The Guards lost their colonel and seven other officers; the two battalions of the Royal Scots lost twelve, and the Twenty-third nine officers, notwithstanding that the former had already lost thirty and the latter sixteen little more than a month before. Troops that will stand such punishment as this twice within a few weeks are not to be found in every army.

The losses of the French and their allies in killed, wounded, and prisoners, on the day of the battle and during the subsequent pursuit, fell little short of forty thousand men. Marlborough and Eugene divided eleven thousand prisoners, while the trophies included one hundred guns of various calibres, twenty-four mortars, one hundred and twenty-nine colours, one hundred and seventy-one standards and other less important items, together, of course, with the whole of the French camp.
August 3 14 .

The Allies lay on their arms on the field during the night after the battle, moved on for a short march on the morrow, and then halted for four days. The troops were very greatly fatigued, and Marlborough was much embarrassed by the multitude of his prisoners, so the pursuit, if pursuit it can be called, was left to the hussars of the Imperial Army. The Elector, however, needed no spur. On the night of the battle he crossed the Danube at Lavingen, and destroying the bridge behind him hurried back toward Ulm. Then, without pausing for a moment or attempting to obtain aid from Villeroy, he hastened on by forced marches, rather in flight than retreat, through the Black Forest to the Rhine. The sufferings of his troops were terrible. He had carried with him a thousand wounded officers and six thousand wounded men; and there was not a village on the line of march that had not its churchyard choked with the graves of those that had succumbed. The Imperial hussars too hung restlessly round his skirts, cutting off every straggler and bringing back multitudes of prisoners and deserters. Altogether it was a disastrous retreat.

[444]
August 8 19 .
August 28
  Sept. 8.

On the 19th of August Marlborough resumed his march up the Danube, having first recalled Prince Lewis of Baden from Ingolstadt, and occupied Augsburg. On arrival at Ulm a force was detached to besiege the town, while the main army marched back in three columns by the line of its original advance. By the 8th of September the whole force, strengthened by a reinforcement from Stollhofen, had crossed the Rhine and was concentrated at Philipsburg.
Sept. 5 16 .
Nov. 12 23 .

Villeroy, who with his own army and the remains of the Elector's had taken post in the Queich to cover Landau, now fell back without pausing to the Lauter, very much to the relief of Marlborough, who found it difficult to understand such feebleness even after such a defeat as that of Blenheim. Landau was accordingly invested by Prince Lewis of Baden, while Marlborough and Eugene covered the operations. The siege lasted long, and in October Marlborough, weary of such slow work, made a sudden spring upon Treves, gave orders for the siege of Trarbach, and so secured his winter quarters on the Moselle. The fall of Trarbach and the capture of Landau closed the campaign; and the occupation of Consaarbrück at the confluence of the Moselle and Saar showed what was to be the starting-point for the next year. A full week before the fall of Landau the English troops, so much weakened that their fourteen battalions had been temporarily reorganised into seven, were sent into winter quarters for the rest that they had earned so well.

Thus ended the famous campaign of Blenheim, a name which is rightly grouped with Cre?y, Poitiers, Agincourt, and Waterloo. For well-nigh forty years the French arms had triumphed in every quarter of Europe, checked indeed by an occasional reverse, such as that of Namur, but by no failure that could be counted against the long succession of victories. But now an English general had rudely broken the chain of successes by a crushing defeat, with every circumstance of humiliation. First, the French marshals had been[445] wholly outwitted by Marlborough's march to the Danube. Next, when they approached him it was without an idea of offering battle, but in full confidence that their man?uvres, added to their superior numbers, would compel him to withdraw. Yet to their astonishment the despised enemy had attacked them without hesitation, utterly destroyed one complete army and driven the relics of another in headlong flight to the Rhine. The dismay in Paris was profound; but mighty was the exultation in England, for the nation felt that the old traditions were right after all, and that the English were still better men than the French.[312] "Welcome to England, Sir," said an English butcher to Tallard, as the captured marshal was escorted with[446] every mark of respect into Nottingham. "Welcome to England. I hope to see your master here next year." It was the revival of this feeling in all its old intensity, after a pause of nearly three centuries, that was to win for England her empire in East and West.

Yet amid all the noise of triumph and jubilation there were two men who preserved their modesty and tranquillity unmoved; and these were Marlborough and Eugene. Each quietly disclaimed credit for himself, each eagerly welcomed praise for the other. The French prisoners were comforted by Eugene's testimony to their gallant resistance to his own army, while even the unfortunate officers who had been swept into the net in the village of Blenheim found consolation in the thoughtful and generous courtesy of the great Duke.
CHAPTER IV
Our attention is now claimed for a time by the Peninsula, where the War of the Spanish Succession was to be carried forward on Spanish soil. In January 1704 the Imperial claimant to the throne, the Archduke Charles of Austria, otherwise King Charles the Third of Spain, arrived in England, and was sent away with an English fleet and an English army to possess himself of his kingdom. Portugal had offered to help him with twenty-eight thousand men, to which the Dutch had added two thousand under General Fagel, and the British six thousand five hundred men,[313] under Mainhard, Duke of Schomberg, a son of the old marshal. The campaign of 1704 need not detain us. It was speedily found that the Portuguese army was ill-equipped and inefficient, the magazines empty, the fortresses in ruins, the transport not in existence. To add to these shortcomings, Schomberg and Fagel quarrelled so bitterly that they went off, each with his own troops, in two different directions.

The result might have been foreseen. King Philip, sometime Duke of Anjou, and the Duke of Berwick with twelve thousand French, marched down to the fortresses on the Portuguese frontier, and took them one after another without difficulty. So ready and eager were the Portuguese to surrender these strongholds that they made over not only themselves as prisoners of war, but also to their extreme indignation[448] two British regiments, the Ninth and Eleventh Foot, which had the misfortune to be in garrison with them. Marlborough, in all the press of his work on the Danube, was called upon to nominate a successor to the incompetent Schomberg and selected the Huguenot Ruvigny, Earl of Galway, for the post. With this appointment we may for the present take leave of the Peninsula.
July 26
August 6.

Meanwhile, however, the fleet under Sir George Rooke, and a handful of marines under Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, brought a new and unexpected possession to England by the surprise of Gibraltar, which, though captured for King Charles the Third, was kept for Queen Anne. The intrinsic value of the Rock in those days was small, and its value as a military position was little understood in England; but it was at any rate a capture and very soon it became a centre of sentiment.
Sept. 23
October 4.

After the surrender of Gibraltar the fleet sailed away, leaving Prince George with a good store of provisions and about two thousand men to hold it. These troops, though now numbered the Fourth, Thirty-first, and Thirty-second of the Line, were at that time Marines, a corps which, despite brilliant and incessant service by sea and land in all parts of the world, still contents itself with the outward record of a single name, Gibraltar. Prince George lost no time in repairing the fortifications, and with good reason, for at the end of August a Spanish force of eight thousand men marched down to the isthmus, while a month later four thousand Frenchmen were disembarked at the head of the bay. These joint forces then began the siege of Gibraltar.
December.

The operations were pushed forward with great vigour, and the besieged were soon hard beset. At the end of October Admiral Leake contrived to throw stores and a couple of hundred men on to the Rock, together with an officer of engineers, one Captain Joseph Bennett, whose energy and ability were of priceless value. The siege dragged on for another month,[449] the British repulsing an attack from the eastern side with heavy loss; but by the end of November the garrison had dwindled to one thousand men, exhausted by the fatigue of incessant duty. At last, in the middle of December a stronger reinforcement of two thousand men,[314] having first narrowly escaped capture by a French fleet, was successfully landed on the Rock; and then Prince George turned upon the besiegers, and by a succession of brilliant sorties almost paralysed further progress on their side.
1705.
Jan. 27
Feb. 7.

In the middle of January, however, a reinforcement of four thousand men reached the enemy's camp; their batteries renewed their fire, and a great breach was made in the Round Tower, which formed one of the principal defences on the western side. On the morning of the 27th an assault was delivered, and thirteen hundred men swarmed up to the attack of the Round Tower. They were met by a brave resistance by one-fifth of their number of British, but after a severe struggle they overpowered them, drove them out, and pressed on to gain possession of a gate leading into the main fortress. There, however, they were checked by a handful of Seymour's Marines,[315] just seventeen men, under Captain Fisher. Few though they were, this gallant little band held its own, until the arrival of some of the Thirteenth and of the Coldstream Guards enabled them to force the enemy back and drive them headlong out of the Round Tower.
March 10 21 .

This brilliant little affair marked practically the close of the siege. Further reinforcements arrived for the garrison, and Marshal Tessé, who had taken command of the siege, fell back on the bombardment of the town, which was speedily laid in ruins. The advent of a French squadron seemed likely at one moment to hearten the besiegers to renewed efforts, but Bennett, [450] who ever since his arrival had been the soul of the defence, had by that time constructed fresh batteries and was fully prepared. Finally, in March Admiral Leake's fleet appeared on the scene, destroyed a third of the French squadron, and definitely relieved the fortress. By the middle of April the last of the Frenchmen had disappeared and Gibraltar was safe. Though the scale of the operations may seem small the siege had cost the enemy no fewer than twelve thousand men.
1704.
1705.

Meanwhile Parliament had met on the 29th of the previous October, full of congratulations to the Queen on the triumphs of the past campaign. There were not wanting, of course, men who, in the madness of faction, doubted whether Blenheim were really a victory, for the very remarkable reason that Marlborough had won it, but they were soon silenced by the retort that the King of France at any rate had no doubts on the point.[316] The plans for the next campaign were designed on a large scale, and were likely to strain the resources of the Army to the uttermost. The West Indies demanded six battalions and Gibraltar three battalions for garrison; Portugal claimed ten thousand men, Flanders from twenty to twenty-five thousand; while besides this a design was on foot, as shall presently be seen, for the further relief of Portugal by a diversion in Catalonia. Five millions were cheerfully voted for the support of the war, and six new battalions were raised, namely, Wynne's, Bretton's, Lepell's, Soames's, Sir Charles Hotham's, and Lillingston's, the last of which alone has survived to our day with the rank of the Thirty-eighth of the Line.[317]

To face page 450
GIBRALTAR
1705
From a contemporary Plan
by
Col. D'Harcourt
May 15 26 .
June 6 17 .

Marlborough's plan of campaign had been sufficiently [451] foreshadowed at the close of the previous year, namely, to advance on the line of the Moselle and carry the war into Lorraine. The Emperor and all the German Princes promised to be in the field early, the Dutch were with infinite difficulty persuaded to give their consent, and after much vexatious delay Marlborough joined his army at Treves on the 26th of May. Here he waited until the 17th of June for the arrival of the German and Imperial troops. Not a man nor a horse appeared. In deep chagrin he broke up his camp and returned to the Meuse, having lost, as he said, one of the fairest opportunities in the world through the faithlessness of his allies.[318]
May 21.
June 14 25 .
June 21
July 2.

His presence was sorely needed on the Meuse. Villeroy, who commanded the French in Flanders, finding no occasion for his presence on the Moselle, had moved out of his lines, captured Huy, and then marching on to Liège had invested the citadel. The States-General in a panic of fright urged Marlborough to return without delay, and Overkirk, who commanded the Dutch on the Meuse, added his entreaties to theirs. Marlborough, when once he had made up his mind to move, never moved slowly, and by the 25th of June he was at Düren, to the eastward of Aix-la-Chapelle. Here he was still the best part of forty miles from the Meuse, but that was too near for Villeroy, who at once abandoned Liège and fell back on Tongres. Marlborough, continuing his advance, crossed the Meuse at Visé on the 2nd of July, and on the same day united his army with Overkirk's at Haneff on the Upper Jaar. Villeroy thereupon retired ignominiously within his fortified lines.

These lines, which had been making during the past three years, were now complete. They started from the Meuse a little to the east of Namur, passed from thence to the Mehaigne and the Little Geete, followed the Little Geete along its left bank to Leuw and thence[452] along the Great Geete to the Demer; from thence they ran up the Demer as far as Arschot, from which point a new line of entrenchments carried the barrier through Lierre to Antwerp. Near Antwerp Marlborough had already had to do with these lines in 1703, but hitherto he had made no attempt to force them. Villeroy and the Elector of Bavaria now lay before him with seventy thousand men, a force superior to his own, but necessarily spread over a wide front for the protection of the entrenchments. The marshal's headquarters were at Meerdorp, in the space between the Geete and the Mehaigne, which he probably regarded as a weak point. Marlborough posted himself over against him at Lens-les-Beguines, detaching a small force to re-capture Huy while Overkirk with the Dutch army covered the siege from Vignamont. Thus, as if daring the French to take advantage of the dispersion of his army, he quietly laid his plans for forcing the lines.

The point that he selected was on the Little Geete between Elixheim and Neerhespen, exactly in rear of the battlefield of Landen. The abrupt and slippery banks of the river, which the English knew but too well, together with the entrenchments beyond it, presented extraordinary difficulties, but the lines were on that account the less likely to be well guarded at that particular point. Marlborough had already obtained the leave of the States-General for the project, but he had now the far more difficult task of gaining the consent of the Dutch generals at a Council of War. Slangenberg and others opposed the scheme vehemently, but were overruled; and the Duke was at length at liberty to fall to work.
June 30
July 11.
July.

Huy fell on the 11th of July, but to the general surprise the besieging force was not recalled. Six days later Overkirk and the covering army crossed the Mehaigne from Vignamont and pushed forward detachments to the very edge of the lines between Meffle and Namur. Villeroy fell into the trap, withdrew troops from all parts of the lines and concentrated[453] forty thousand men at Meerdorp. Marlborough then recalled the troops from Huy, and made them up to a total of about eight thousand men, both cavalry and infantry,[319] the whole being under the command of the Count of Noyelles. The utmost secrecy was observed in every particular. The corps composing the detachment knew nothing of each other, and nothing of the work before them; and, lest the sight of fascines should suggest an attack on entrenchments, these were dispensed with, the troopers only at the last moment receiving orders to carry each a truss of forage on the saddle before them.
July 6 17 .
July 6-7 17-18 .

At tattoo the detachment fell in silently before the camp of the right wing, and at nine o'clock moved off without a sound in two columns, the one upon Neerhespen, the other upon the Castle of Wange before Elixheim. An hour later the rest of the army followed, while at the same time Overkirk, under cover of the darkness, crossed the Mehaigne at Tourines and joined his van to the rear of Marlborough's army. The distance to be traversed was from ten to fifteen miles; the night though dry was dark; and the guides, frequently at fault, were fain to direct themselves by the trusses dropped on the way by the advanced detachment. Twelve years before to the very day a French army had toiled along the same route, wearied out and stifled by the sun, and only kept to its task by an ugly little hunch-backed man whom it had reverenced as Marshal Luxemburg. Now English and Dutch were blundering on to take revenge for Luxemburg's victory at the close of that march. The hours fled on, the light began to break, and the army found itself on the field of Landen, William's entrenchment grass-grown before it, Neerwinden and Laer lying silent to the left, and before the villages the mound that hid the corpses of the dead. Then some at least of the soldiers knew the work that lay before them.

[454]
July 7 18 .

At four o'clock the heads of the columns halted within a mile of the Geete, wrapped in a thick mist and hidden from the eye of the enemy. The advanced detachment quickly cleared the villages by the river, seized the bridge before the Castle of Wanghe, which had not been broken down, and drove out the garrison of the Castle itself. Then the pontoniers came forward to lay their bridges; but the infantry would not wait for them. They scrambled impatiently through hedges and over bogs, down one steep bank of the river and up the other, into the ditch beyond, and finally, breathless and dripping, over the rampart into the lines. So numerous were the hot-heads who thus broke in that they forced three regiments of French dragoons to retire before them without attempting resistance. Then the cavalry of the detachment began to file rapidly over the pontoon-bridges; but meanwhile the alarm had been given, and before the main army could cross, the French came down in force from the north, some twenty battalions and forty squadrons, in all close on fifteen thousand men, with a battery of eight guns.

To face page 454
LINES OF THE GEETE.
July 7 18 1705.

The enemy advanced rapidly, their cavalry leading, until checked by a hollow way which lay between them and the Allies, where they halted to deploy. Marlborough took in the whole situation at a glance. Forming his thirty-eight squadrons into two lines, with the first line composed entirely of British, he led them across the hollow way and charged the French sword in hand. They answered by a feeble fire from the saddle and broke in confusion, but presently rallying fell in counter-attack upon the British and broke them in their turn. Marlborough, who was riding on the flank, was cut off and left isolated with his trumpeter and groom. A Frenchman galloped up and aimed at him so furious a blow that, failing to strike him, he fell from his horse and was captured by the trumpeter. Then the allied squadrons rallied, and charging the French once more broke them past all reforming and captured the guns. The French infantry now retired[455] very steadily in square, and the Duke sent urgent messages for his own foot. But by some mistake the battalions had been halted after crossing the Geete, so that the French were able to make good their retreat.

By this time Villeroy, who had spent the night in anxious expectation of an attack at Meerdorp, had hurried up with his cavalry, only to find that the Duke was master of the lines. Hastily giving orders for his scattered troops to pass the Geete at Judoigne he began his retreat upon Louvain. Presently up came Marlborough's infantry at an extraordinary pace, the men as fresh and lively after fifteen hours of fatigue as if they had just left camp. The Duke was anxious to follow up his success forthwith, a movement which the French had good reason to dread, but the Dutch generals opposed him, and Marlborough was reluctantly constrained to yield. The loss of the French seems to have been about two thousand men, most of them prisoners, a score of standards and colours, of which the Fifth Dragoon Guards claimed four as their own, and eighteen guns, eight of which were triple-barrelled and were sent across the Channel to be copied in England.[320]
July 8 19 .

The Allies halted for the night at Tirlemont, and advancing next day upon Louvain struck against the rear of the French columns and captured fifteen hundred prisoners. That night they encamped within a mile to the east of Louvain, while the French, once again distributing their force along a wider front, lined the left bank of the Dyle from the Demer to the Yssche, with their centre at Louvain. Marlborough had hoped to push in at once, but he was stopped by heavy rains that rendered the Dyle impassable; and it was not until ten days later that, after infinite trouble with the Dutch, he was able to pursue his design.
July 18 29 .

The operations for the passage of the Dyle were conducted in much the same way as in the forcing of the lines. An advanced detachment was pushed forward[456] from each wing of the army, that from the right or English[321] flank being appointed to cross the river under the Duke of Würtemberg at Corbeek Dyle, that from the left under General Heukelom to pass it at Neeryssche. The detachments fell in at five in the evening, reached their appointed destination at ten, and effected their passage with perfect success. The main bodies started at midnight, and went somewhat astray in the darkness, though by three o'clock the Dutch army was within supporting distance of its detachment and the British rapidly approaching it. The river had been in fact forced, when suddenly the Dutch generals halted their main body. Marlborough rode up to inquire the cause, and was at once taken aside by Slangenberg. "For God's sake, my Lord—" began the Dutchman vehemently, and continued to protest with violent gesticulations. No sooner was Marlborough's back turned than the Dutch generals, like a parcel of naughty schoolboys, recalled Heukelom's detachment. Thus the passage won with so much skill was for no cause whatever abandoned, without loss indeed, but also not without mischievous encouragement to the French, who boasted loudly that they had repulsed their redoubtable adversary.
August 5 16 .
August 6 17 .
August 7 18 .

Deeply hurt and annoyed though he was, the Duke, with miraculous patience, excused in his public despatches the treachery and imbecility which had thwarted him, and prepared to effect his purpose in another way. His movements were hastened by news that French reinforcements, set free by the culpable inaction of Prince Lewis of Baden, were on their way from Alsace. Unable to pass the Dyle he turned its head-waters at Genappe, and wheeling north towards the forest of Soignies encamped between La Hulpe and Braine l'Alleud.[322] The French at once took the alarm [457] and posted themselves behind the river Yssche, with their left at Neeryssche, and their right at Overyssche resting on the forest of Soignies. Marlborough at once resolved to force the passage of the river. On the evening of the 17th of August he detached his brother Churchill with ten thousand foot and two thousand horse to advance through the forest and turn the French right; while he himself marched away at daybreak with the rest of the army and emerged into the plain between the Yssche and the Lasne. The Duke quickly found two assailable points, and choosing that of Overyssche, halted the army pending the arrival of the artillery. The guns were long in arriving, Slangenberg having insisted, despite the Duke's express instructions, on forcing his own baggage into the column for the express purpose of causing delay. At last about noon the artillery appeared, and Marlborough asked formal permission of the Dutch deputies to attack. To his surprise, although Overkirk had already consented, they claimed to consult their generals. Slangenberg with every mark of insolence condemned the project as murder and massacre, the rest solemnly debated the matter for another two hours, the auspicious moment passed away exactly as they intended, and another great opportunity was lost. The French reinforcements arrived, and having been the weaker became the stronger force. Nothing more could be done for the rest of the campaign, but to level the French lines from the Demer to the Mehaigne.

Thus for the third time a brilliant campaign was spoilt by the Dutch generals and deputies. Fortunately the public indignation both in England and in Holland was too strong for them, and Slangenberg, though not indeed hanged as he deserved, was deprived of all further command. Jealousy, timidity, ignorance, treachery, and flat imbecility seem to have been the motives that inspired these men, whose conduct has[458] never been reprobated according to its demerit. It was they who were responsible for the prolongation of the war, for the burden that it laid on England, and for the untold misery that it wrought in France. Left to himself Marlborough would have forced the French to peace in three campaigns, and the war would not have been ended in shame and disgrace by the Treaty of Utrecht.[323]

Consolation for the disappointment in Flanders came from an unexpected quarter. In Portugal, indeed, comparatively little was done. An army was made up of about three thousand British[324] under Lord Galway, two thousand Dutch under General Fagel, and twelve thousand Portuguese under the Spanish General de Corsana; and to avoid friction it was arranged that these [459]three generals should hold command alternately for a week at a time. In such circumstances it was surprising that they should even have accomplished the siege and capture of three weak fortresses, Valenza, Albuquerque, and Badajoz, with which achievements the campaign came to an end.[325]
June 9 20 .
August 12 23 .

But in Catalonia the operations were of a more brilliant kind. The Catalans were known to favour the Austrian side; and it was accordingly resolved in this year to send a fleet and an army to back them under Admiral Leake and Lord Peterborough, the latter to be joint admiral at sea as well as commander-in-chief ashore. The character of Peterborough is one of the riddles of history. He was now forty years of age, and had so far distinguished himself chiefly by general eccentricity, not always of a harmless kind, and, in common with most prominent men of his age, by remarkable pliancy of principle. His experience of active service was slight and had been gained afloat rather than ashore, and though he had long held the colonelcy of a regiment, he had never commanded in war nor in peace. His force consisted of six British[326] and four Dutch battalions, or about six thousand five hundred men in all. The expedition arrived at Lisbon early in June, when after some delay it was decided that the fleet should proceed to Barcelona. Galway lent his two regiments of dragoons, the Royals and the Eighth; and with them Peterborough sailed to Gibraltar, where he picked up the eight battalions[327] of the garrison, leaving two of his own in their place, and proceeded to his destination. On the way up the Spanish coast a detachment was landed to capture Denia, and on the 23rd of August the main force was disembarked before [460] Barcelona and took up a position to the north-east of the town with its left flank resting on the sea.
Sept. 2 13 .

The reports sent to England had represented Barcelona as ill-fortified and ill-garrisoned. Ill-fortified it may have been if compared with a creation of Vauban or Cohorn, but it was none the less a formidable fortress, well stocked with supplies and garrisoned by seven thousand troops under an energetic governor, by name Velasco. Peterborough, who grasped the situation, wished to abandon the project of a regular siege for operations of a livelier kind, but was prevailed upon to give it a trial for eighteen days, at the close of which he ordered the re-embarkation of the army. He was, however, again induced to change his mind, and then suddenly, on the evening of the 13th of September, he produced an original scheme of his own.

About three-quarters of a mile to south-west of Barcelona stood the small fort of Montjuich, crowning a hill seven hundred feet above the fortress, strong by nature and strengthened still further by outworks, which though incomplete were none the less formidable. This Peterborough resolved to capture by escalade. Not a word was said to the men of the work before them. No further orders were issued than that twelve hundred English and two hundred Dutch should be ready in the afternoon to march towards Tarragona, while thirteen hundred men under Brigadier Stanhope were secretly detailed to cover the rear of the assaulting columns from any attack from Barcelona. At six o'clock the attacking force moved off under Lord Charlemont towards the north-west, continuing the march in this false direction for four hours, till Peterborough at last gave the order to turn about to southward. The night was dark, and much of the ground so rocky as to show no track, so that when the columns at length came up before Montjuich one complete body of two hundred was found to be missing, having evidently strayed away from the path of the remainder.
Sept. 3 14 .

Half the force however was told off for simultaneous[461] assault on the eastern and western extremities of the fort, Peterborough and Prince George of Hessen-Darmstadt accompanying the eastern column, which, since it was expected to meet with the sternest of the work, was made the stronger. The other moiety of the troops was held in reserve between the two columns. A little after daybreak the signal was given; the storming parties dashed up the glacis under a heavy and destructive fire, and plunging in among the enemy drove them headlong from the outworks. Following the fugitives in hot pursuit Peterborough and Prince George captured the eastern bastion of the fort itself, threw up a barricade of loose stones in the gorge and entrenched themselves behind it. The western attack had met with equal success, and had likewise entrenched itself in a demi-bastion in that flank of the fort. Both parties being thus under cover the fire ceased, and Peterborough sent orders to Stanhope to bring up his reserve.

Meanwhile the Governor of Barcelona, being in communication with Montjuich, had at the sound of the firing despatched four hundred dragoons in all haste to reinforce the garrison. As they entered the fort they were received with loud shouts of welcome by the Spanish. Prince George, mistaking the sound for a cry of surrender, at once started up and advanced with all his men into the inner works. They were no sooner in the ditch than the Spaniards swept round them to cut them off. Two hundred were taken prisoners, Prince George fell mortally wounded, and the rest fell back in confusion. This was a severe blow; but worse was to come. Peterborough hearing that fresh reinforcements were on their way to the enemy from Barcelona, rode out of the bastion to look for himself, and no sooner was he gone than the troops were seized with panic. Lord Charlemont was powerless to check it; and in a few minutes the whole of the men, with Charlemont at their head, came running with unseemly haste out of the captured position.

[462]

They had not run far when up galloped Peterborough in a frenzy of rage. What he said no writer has dared to set down; but he snatched Charlemont's half-pike from his hand and waved the men back to the fort with a torrent of rebuke. Rallying instantly they regained their post without the loss of a man before the enemy had discovered their retreat; and the appearance of Stanhope with the reserve presently banished all further idea of panic. Meanwhile the Spanish reinforcements from Barcelona had met the English prisoners, and learning from them that Peterborough and Prince George were present in person before Montjuich, assumed that the British were attacking in overwhelming force. They therefore returned to Barcelona, leaving the fort to its fate. Three days of bombardment sufficed to overcome the resistance of the weakened garrison; and thus by a singular chapter of accidents Peterborough's design proved to be a success, and Montjuich was taken.
Sept. 28
October 9.

The siege of Barcelona was then pushed forward in form, aided by the guns of the fleet; and on the 9th of October the garrison capitulated with the honours of war. A fortnight later King Charles the Third made his public entry into the city; Peterborough scattered dollars with a liberal hand, and all was merriment and rejoicing. The picture would not be complete without the figure of a drunken English grenadier, whose vagaries afforded inexhaustible amusement to the populace;[328] but Peterborough was a disciplinarian, and the troops as a whole behaved remarkably well. Stanhope was at once sent home with the good news, and England awoke to the fact that she possessed a second officer who, though not to be named in the same breath with Marlborough, possessed a natural, if eccentric, genius for war.

To face page 462
BARCELONA
1705.

The capture of Barcelona, and the subsequent reduction of Tarragona by the fleet, brought practically the whole of Catalonia to the side of King Charles.[463] But now further operations were checked by lack of money and supplies. Peterborough, who saw the difficulty of supporting a large force in the field, was for dividing his little army into flying columns, and making good the deficiency of numbers by extreme mobility; but he could not gain acceptance for his views. He wrote piteous letters of his state of destitution, reviling, as his custom was, all his colleagues and subordinates with astonishing freedom. Very soon the troops in Barcelona became so sickly that he was compelled to distribute them in the fortresses of Catalonia, leaving further operations to the Catalan guerillas. By the exertions of these last the close of the year saw not only Catalonia but Valencia gained over, though on no very certain footing, to the side of King Charles. So ended the first serious campaign of the first Peninsular war.
CHAPTER V
It is now time to revert to England and to the preparations for the campaign of 1706. Marlborough, as usual, directly that the military operations were concluded, had been deputed to visit the courts of Vienna and of sundry German states in order to keep the Allies up to the necessary pitch of unity and energy. These duties detained him in Germany and at the Hague until January 1706, when he was at last able to return to England. There he met with far less obstruction than in former years, but none the less with an increasing burden of work. The vast extension of operations in the Peninsula, and the general sickliness of the troops in that quarter, demanded the enlistment of an usually large number of recruits. One new regiment of dragoons and eleven new battalions of foot were formed in the course of the spring, to which it was necessary to add yet another battalion before the close of the year.[329] Again the epidemic sickness among the horses in Flanders had caused an extraordinary demand for horses. The Dutch, after their wonted manner, had actually taken pains to prevent the supply of horses to the British,[330] though, even if they had not, the Duke had a prejudice in favour of English horses, as of English men, as superior to any other. Finally, the stores of the Ordnance were unequal to the constant [465]drain of small arms, and it was necessary to make good the deficiency by purchases from abroad. All these difficulties and a thousand more were of course referred for solution to Marlborough.
April 14 25 .

When in April he crossed once more to the Hague he found a most discouraging state of affairs. The Dutch were backward in their preparations; Prussia and Hanover were recalcitrant over the furnishing of their contingents; Prince Lewis of Baden was sulking within his lines, refusing to communicate a word of his intentions to any one; and everybody was ready with a separate plan of campaign. The Emperor of course desired further operations in the Moselle for his own relief; but after the experience of the last campaign the Duke had wisely resolved never again to move eastward to co-operate with the forces of the Empire. The Dutch for their part wished to keep Marlborough in Flanders, where he should be under the control of their deputies; but the imbecile caprice of these worthies was little more to his taste than the sullen jealousy of Baden. Marlborough himself was anxious to lead a force to the help of Eugene in Italy, a scheme which, if executed, would have carried the British to a great fighting ground with which they are unfamiliar, the plains of Lombardy. He had almost persuaded the States-General to approve of this plan, when all was changed by Marshal Villars, who surprised Prince Lewis of Baden in his lines on the Motter, and captured two important magazines. The Dutch at once took fright and, in their anxiety to keep Marlborough for their own defence, agreed to appoint deputies who should receive rather than issue orders. So to the Duke's great disappointment it was settled that the main theatre of war should once again be Flanders.
May 8 19 .
May 9 20 .
May 11 22 .

Villeroy meanwhile lay safely entrenched in his position of the preceding year behind the Dyle, from which Marlborough saw little hope of enticing him. It is said that an agent was employed to rouse Villeroy by telling him that the Duke, knowing that the French[466] were afraid to leave their entrenchments, would take advantage of their inaction to capture Namur.[331] Be that as it may, Villeroy resolved to quit the Dyle. He knew that the Prussian and Hanoverian contingents had not yet joined Marlborough, and that the Danish cavalry had refused to march to him until their wages were paid; so that interest as well as injured pride prompted the hazard of a general action. On the 19th of May, therefore, he left his lines for Tirlemont on the Great Geete. Marlborough, who was at Maestricht, saw with delight that the end, for which he had not dared to hope, was accomplished. Hastily making arrangements for the payment of the Danish troops, he concentrated the Dutch and British at Bilsen on the Upper Demer, and moved southward to Borchloen. Here the arrival of the Danes raised his total force to sixty thousand men, a number but little inferior to that of the enemy. On the very same day came the intelligence that Villeroy had crossed the Great Geete and was moving on Judoigne. The Duke resolved to advance forthwith and attack him there.
May 12 23 .

At one o'clock in the morning, of Whitsunday the 23rd of May, Quartermaster-General Cadogan rode forward from the headquarters at Corswarem with six hundred horse and the camp-colours towards the head of the Great Geete, to mark out a camp by the village of Ramillies. The morning was wet and foggy, and it was not until eight o'clock that, on ascending the heights of Merdorp, they dimly descried troops in motion on the rolling ground before them. The allied army had not marched until two hours later than Cadogan, but Marlborough, who had ridden on in advance of it, presently came up and pushed the cavalry forward through the mist. Then at ten o'clock the clouds rolled away, revealing the whole of the French army in full march towards them.

Villeroy's eyes were rudely opened, for he had not expected Marlborough before the following day; but[467] he knew the ground well, for he had been over it before with Luxemburg, and he proceeded to take up a position which he had seen Luxemburg deliberately reject. The table-land whereon he stood is the highest point in the plains of Brabant. To his right flowed the Mehaigne; in his rear ran the Great Geete; across his centre and left the Little Geete rose and crept away sluggishly in marsh and swamp.[332] In his front lay four villages: Taviers on the Mehaigne to his right, Ramillies, less advanced than Taviers, on the source of the Little Geete to his right centre, Offus parallel to Ramillies but lower down the stream to his left centre, Autréglise or Anderkirch between two branches of the Little Geete and parallel to Taviers to his left. Along the concave line formed by these villages Villeroy drew up his army in two lines facing due east.

The Mehaigne, on which his right rested, is at ordinary times a rapid stream little more than twelve feet wide, with a muddy bottom, but is bordered by swampy meadows on both sides, which are flooded after heavy rain. From this stream the ground rises northward in a steady wave for about half a mile, sinks gradually and rises into a higher wave at Ramillies, sinks once more to northward of that village and rolls downward in a gentler undulation to Autréglise. Between the Mehaigne and Ramillies, a distance of about a mile and a half, the ground east and west is broken by sundry hollows of sufficient inclination to offer decided advantage or disadvantage in a combat of cavalry. A single high knoll rises in the midst of these hollows, offering a place of vantage from which Marlborough must almost certainly have reconnoitred the disposition of the French right. The access to Ramillies itself is steep and broken both to north and south, but on the eastern front the ground rises to it for half a mile in a gentle, unbroken slope, which modern rifles would make impassable by the bravest troops. In rear, or to westward of the French position, the table-land is[468] clear and unbroken, and to the right rear or south-west stands a mound or barrow called the tomb of Ottomond, still conspicuous and still valuable as a key to the actions of the day.[333] The full extent of the French front from Taviers to Autréglise covered something over four miles.

Having chosen his position, Villeroy lost no time in setting his troops in order. His left, consisting of infantry backed by cavalry,[334] extended from Autréglise to Offus, both of which villages were strongly occupied. His centre from Offus to Ramillies was likewise composed of infantry. On his right, in the expanse of sound ground which stretches for a mile and a half from the marshes of the Geete at Ramillies to those of the Mehaigne, were massed more than one hundred and twenty squadrons of cavalry with some battalions of infantry interlined with them, the famous French Household Cavalry (Maison du Roi), being in the first line. The left flank of this expanse was covered by the village of Ramillies, which was surrounded by a ditch and defended by twenty battalions and twenty-four guns. On the right flank not only Taviers but Franquinay, a village still further in advance, were occupied by detachments of infantry, while Taviers was further defended by cannon.

Marlborough quickly perceived the defects of Villeroy's dispositions, which were not unlike those of Tallard at Blenheim. Taviers was too remote from Ramillies for the maintenance of a cross-fire of artillery. Again, the cavalry of the French left was doubtless secure against attack behind the marshes of the Geete, but for this very reason it was incapable of aggressive action. The French right could therefore be turned, provided that it were not further reinforced; and [469]accordingly the Duke opened his man?uvres by a demonstration against the French left.

Presently the infantry of the allied right moved forward in two lines towards Offus and Autréglise, marching in all the pomp and circumstance of war, Dutch, Germans, and British, with the red coats conspicuous on the extreme right flank. Striding forward to the river they halted and seemed to be very busy in laying their pontoons. Villeroy marked the mass of scarlet, and remembering its usual place in the battlefield, instantly began to withdraw several battalions from his right and centre to his left. Marlborough watched the white coats streaming away to their new positions, and after a time ordered the infantry of his right to fall back to some heights in their rear. The two lines faced about and retired accordingly over the height until the first line was out of sight. Then the second line halted and faced about once more, crowning the ascent with the well-known scarlet, while the first marched away with all speed, under cover of the hill and unseen by the French, to the opposite flank. Many British battalions[335] stood on that height all day without moving a step or firing a shot, but none the less paralysing the French left wing.

About half-past one the guns of both armies opened fire, and shortly afterwards four Dutch battalions were ordered forward to carry Franquinay and Taviers, and twelve more to attack Ramillies, while Overkirk advanced slowly on the left with the cavalry. Franquinay was soon cleared; Taviers resisted stoutly for a time but was carried, and a strong reinforcement on its way to the village was intercepted and cut to pieces. Then Overkirk, his left flank being now cleared, pushed forward his horse and charged. The Dutch routed the first French line, but were driven back in confusion by the second; and the victorious French were only[470] checked by the advance of fresh squadrons under Marlborough himself. Even so the Allies were at a decided disadvantage; and Marlborough, after despatching messengers to bring up every squadron, except the British, to the left, plunged into the thick of the melée to rally the broken horse. He was recognised by some French dragoons, who left their ranks to surround him, and in the general confusion he was borne to the ground and in imminent danger of capture. His aide-de-camp, Captain Molesworth, dismounted at once, and giving him his own horse enabled him to escape. The cavalry, however, encouraged by the Duke's example, recovered themselves, and Marlborough took the opportunity to shift from Molesworth's horse to his own. Colonel Bringfield, his equerry, held the stirrup while he mounted, but Marlborough was hardly in the saddle before the hand that held the stirrup relaxed its hold, and the equerry fell to the ground, his head carried away by a round shot.[336]

Meanwhile the attack of the infantry on Ramillies was fully developed, and relieved the horse from the fire of the village. Twenty fresh squadrons came galloping up at the top of their speed and ranged themselves in rear of the reforming lines. But before they could come into action the Duke of Würtemberg pushed his Danish horse along the Mehaigne upon the right flank of the French, and the Dutch guards advancing still further fell upon their rear. These now emerged upon the table-land by the tomb of Ottomond, and the rest of the Allied horse dashed themselves once against the French front. The famous Maison du Roi after a hard fight was cut to pieces, and the whole of the French horse, despite Villeroy's efforts to stay them, were driven in headlong flight across the rear of their line of battle, leaving the battalions of infantry helpless and alone to be ridden over and trampled out of existence.

Villeroy made frantic efforts to bring forward the[471] cavalry of his left to cover their retreat, but the ground was encumbered by his baggage, which he had carelessly posted too close in his rear. The French troops in Ramillies now gave way, and Marlborough ordered the whole of the infantry that was massed before the village to advance across the morass upon Offus, with the Third and Sixth Dragoon Guards in support. The French broke and fled at their approach; and meanwhile the Buffs and Twenty-first, which had so far remained inactive on the right, forced their way through the swamps before them, and taking Autréglise in rear swept away the last vestige of the French line on the left. Five British squadrons followed them up and captured the entire King's Regiment (Regiment du Roi). The Third and Sixth Dragoon Guards also pressed on, and coming upon the Spanish and Bavarian horse-guards, who were striving to cover the retreat of the French artillery, charged them and swept them away, only narrowly missing the capture of the Elector himself, who was at their head.[337] On this the whole French[472] army, which so far had struggled to effect an orderly retreat, broke up in panic and fled in all directions.

The mass of the fugitives made for Judoigne, but the ways were blocked by broken-down baggage-waggons and abandoned guns, and the crush and confusion was appalling. The British cavalry, being quite fresh, quickly took up the pursuit over the table-land. The guns and baggage fell an easy prey, but these were left to others, while the red-coated troopers, not without memories of Landen, pressed on, like hounds running for blood, after the beaten enemy. The chase lay northwards to Judoigne and beyond it towards the refuge of Louvain. Not until two o'clock in the morning did the cavalry pause, having by that time reached Meldert, fifteen miles from the battlefield; nay, even then Lord Orkney with some few squadrons spurred on to Louvain itself, rekindled the panic and set the unhappy French once more in flight across the Dyle.
May 13 24 .
May 14 25 .
May 15 26 .
May 16 27 .

Nor was the main army far behind the horse. Marching far into the night, the men slept under arms for two or three hours, started again at three o'clock, and before the next noon had also reached Meldert and were preparing to force the passage of the Dyle. Marlborough, who had been in the saddle with little intermission for nearly twenty-eight hours, here wrote to the Queen that he intended to march again that same night, but, through the desertion of the lines of the Dyle by the French, the army gained some respite. The next day he crossed the Dyle at Louvain and encamped at Betlehem, the next he advanced to Dieghem, a few miles north of Brussels, the next he passed the Senne at Vilvorde and encamped at Grimberghen, and here at last, after six days of incessant marching, the Duke granted his weary troops a halt, while the French, hopelessly beaten and demoralised, retired with all haste to Ghent.

To face page 472
RAMILLIES
May 12th   "   23rd 1706.

So ended the fight and pursuit of Ramillies, which effectually disposed of the taunt levelled at Marlborough[473] after Blenheim, that he did not know how to improve a victory. The loss of the French in killed, wounded, and prisoners was thirteen thousand men, swelled by desertion during the pursuit to full two thousand more. The trophies of the victors were eighty standards and colours, fifty guns, and a vast quantity of baggage. The loss of the Allies was from four to five thousand killed and wounded, which fell almost entirely on the Dutch and Danes, the British, owing to their position on the extreme right, being but little engaged until the close of the day. The chief service of the British, therefore, was rendered in the pursuit, which they carried forward with relentless thoroughness and vigour. The Dutch were delighted that their troops should have done the heaviest of the work in such an action, and the British could console themselves with the performance of their cavalry, and above all, with the reflection that the whole of the success was due to their incomparable chief.
May-June.

The effect of the victory and of the rapid advance that followed it was instantaneous. Louvain and the whole line of Dyle fell into Marlborough's hands on the day after the battle; Brussels, Malines, and Lierre surrendered before the first halt, and gave him the line of the Senne and the key of the French entrenchments about Antwerp; and one day later, the surrender of Alost delivered to him one of the strongholds on the Dender. Never pausing for a moment, he sent forward a party to lay bridges on the Scheldt below Oudenarde in order to cut off the French retreat into France, a movement which obliged Villeroy forthwith to abandon the lines about Ghent and to retire up the Lys to Courtrai. Ghent, Bruges, and Damme thereupon surrendered on the spot; Oudenarde followed them, and after a few days Antwerp itself. Thus within a fortnight after the victory the whole of Flanders and Brabant, with the exception of Dendermond and one or two places of minor importance, had succumbed to the Allies, and the French had fallen back to their own frontier.
June.

Nor was even this all. A contribution of two[474] million livres levied in French Flanders brought home to the Grand Monarch that the war was now knocking at his own gates. Villars, with the greater part of his army, was recalled from the Rhine to the Lys, and a number of French troops were withdrawn to the same quarter from Italy. Baden had thus the game in his own hand on the Rhine, and though he was too sulky and incapable to turn the advantage to account, yet his inaction was no fault of Marlborough's. We are hardly surprised to find that in the middle of this fortnight the Duke made urgent request for fresh stores of champagne; he may well have needed the stimulant amid such pressure of work and fatigue.[338]
June 6 17 .

He now detached Overkirk to besiege Ostend and another party to blockade Dendermond, at the same time sending off five British battalions, which we shall presently meet again, for a descent on the Charente which was then contemplated in England. This done he took post with the rest of the Army at Rouslers, to westward of the Lys, whence he could at once cover the siege of Ostend and menace Menin and Ypres. The operations at Ostend were delayed for some time through want of artillery and the necessity of waiting for the co-operation of the Fleet; but the trenches were finally opened on the 17th of June, and a few weeks later the town surrendered.
June 27
July 8.
Aug. 11 22 .

Three days after this the army was reassembled for the siege of Menin. This fortress was of peculiar strength, being esteemed one of Vauban's masterpieces, and was garrisoned by five thousand men. Moreover, the French, being in command of the upper sluices of the Lys, were able greatly to impede the operations by cutting off the water from the lower stream, and thus rendering it less useful for purposes of transport. But all this availed it little; for three weeks after the opening of the trenches Menin surrendered. The British battalions[339] which had been kept inactive at [475] Ramillies took a leading share in the work, and some of them suffered very heavily, but had the satisfaction of recapturing four of the British guns that had been taken at Landen.
Aug. 25
Sept. 5.
Sept. 12 23 .
Sept. 21
Oct. 2.

A few days later Dendermond was attacked in earnest and was likewise taken, after which Marlborough fell back across the Scheldt to secure the whole line of the Dender by the capture of Ath. Ten days sufficed for the work, after which Ath also fell into the hands of the Allies. The apathy of the French throughout these operations sufficiently show their discouragement. Owing to the supineness of Prince Lewis of Baden Villars had been able to bring up thirty-five thousand men to the assistance of Marshal Vend?me, who had now superseded Villeroy, but even with this reinforcement the two commanders only looked on helplessly while Marlborough reduced fortress after fortress before their eyes. They were, indeed, more anxious to strengthen the defences of Mons and Charleroi, lest the Duke should break into France by that line, than to approach him in the field. Nor were they not wholly unreasonable in their anxiety, for Marlborough's next move was upon the Sambre; but incessant rain and tempestuous weather forbade any further operations, so that Ath proved to be the last conquest of the year. Thus ended the campaign of Ramillies, one of the most brilliant in the annals of war, wherein Marlborough in a single month carried his arms triumphant from the Meuse to the sea.
CHAPTER VI
From Flanders it is necessary to return to the Peninsula, where we left Peterborough bewailing his enforced inaction. Nothing is more remarkable in the story of these Peninsular campaigns than the utter want of unity in design between the forces of the Allies in Catalonia and in Portugal. Even in England the British troops in these two quarters were treated, for purposes of administration, as two distinct establishments, which might have been divided by the whole breadth of the Atlantic instead of by twice the breadth of England. Yet the fault could hardly be attributed to any English functionary, civil or military. Galway was as anxious as Peterborough to advance to Madrid; but the Portuguese were terrified at the prospect of moving far from their frontier, while the eyes of King Charles ever rested anxiously on the passes by which French reinforcements might advance into Catalonia. In such circumstances it was not easy to accomplish an effective campaign.
Dec. 26,
1705.
Jan. 6,
1706.

The Spaniards of the Austrian party, as has been told, had by the winter of 1705 gained a precarious hold on the whole province of Valencia. Just before the close of the year came intelligence that the Spanish General de las Torres had crossed the northern frontier from Arragon into Valencia and had laid siege to San Mateo. The town was important, inasmuch as it commanded the communications between Catalonia and Valencia, but it was held by no stronger garrison than thirty of the Royal Dragoons and a thousand Spanish[477] irregular infantry under Colonel Jones. This officer defended himself as well as he could, but at once begged urgently for reinforcements. King Charles thereupon appealed for help to Peterborough, who forthwith ordered General Killigrew to march with his garrison from Tortosa and cross the Ebro, while he himself, riding night and day from Barcelona, caught up the column at the close of the first day's march. King Charles had represented the force of Las Torres as but two thousand strong, and had added that thousands of peasants were up in arms against it. Peterborough now discovered that the Spaniards numbered four thousand foot and three thousand horse, while the thousands of armed peasantry were wholly imaginary. His own force consisted of three weak British battalions, the Thirteenth, Thirty-fifth, and Mountjoy's Foot, together with one hundred and seventy of the Royal Dragoons, in all thirteen hundred men. With such a handful his only hope of success must lie in stratagem.
Dec. 28,
1705.
Jan. 8,
1706.

Advancing southward with all speed he split up his minute army into a number of small detachments, and pushing them forward by different routes arrived early in the morning, unseen and unsuspected, at Traguera, within six miles of the enemy's camp. That same day a spy was captured by the enemy and brought before Las Torres. On him was found a letter from Peterborough to Colonel Jones, written in the frankest and easiest style. "I am at Traguera," so it ran in effect, "with six thousand men and artillery. You may wonder how I collected them; but for transport and secrecy nothing equals the sea. Now, be ready to pursue Las Torres over the plain. It is his only line of retreat, for I have occupied all the passes over the hills. You will see us on the hill-tops between nine and ten. Prove yourself a true dragoon, and have your miquelets (irregulars) ready for their favourite plunder and chase." The spy, being threatened with death, offered to betray another messenger of Peterborough's who was lying concealed in the hills. This[478] second spy was captured, and a duplicate of the same letter was found on him. The pair of them were questioned, when the first protested that he knew nothing of the strength of Peterborough's force, while the other declared that the despatch spoke truth. Suddenly came intelligence from the Spanish outposts that the enemy was advancing in force in several columns, and presently the red-coats appeared at different points on the hill-tops, making a brave show against the sky. Las Torres became uneasy. His depression was increased by the accidental explosion of one of his own mines before San Mateo; and he hastily ordered an immediate retreat. Whereupon out came Jones with his garrison, and turned the retreat into something greatly resembling a flight; while Peterborough with his thirteen hundred men walked quietly into San Mateo and took possession of the whole of the enemy's camp and material of war. The trick, for the whole incident of the captured spies had been carefully preconcerted, had proved a brilliant success.

Las Torres, though disagreeably shaken, was recovering his equanimity when, on the second day of the retreat, a friendly spy came to warn him that an English force was marching parallel to his left flank, was already in advance of him, and was likely to cut off his retreat by seizing the passes into the plain of Valencia. The warning was scouted as ridiculous, but the spy offered, if two or three officers would accompany him, to prove that he was right. Two officers, disguised as peasants, were accordingly guided to a point already indicated by the spy, where they were promptly captured by a picquet of ten of the Royal Dragoons. The spy, however, undertook to produce liquor, the dragoons succumbed or seemed to succumb to their national failing, and the three captives slipped out, took three of the dragoons' horses and galloped back with all speed to Las Torres to confirm the spy's story. Their escape did not prompt them to make the least of their adventure; the housings of the horses testified incontestably[479] to the actual presence of English dragoons; and Las Torres broke up his camp on the spot and hurried away once more. Once again the tricks of the eccentric Englishman had been successful; for the friendly spy was in reality a Spanish officer in his own army; and though there were undoubtedly ten English dragoons, who had been specially sent for the purpose, in advance of Las Torres at that particular moment, yet there were no more English within twenty miles of them.
Jan. 1 12 .

Las Torres was still retreating southward by the coast-road, and Peterborough was making a show of pursuit by marching wide on his right flank, when a pressing message reached him from King Charles. A French force of eight thousand men was advancing into Catalonia from Roussillon; a second force of four or five thousand men under Count Tserclaes de Tilly was threatening Lerida, and a third under Marshal Tessé was marching through Arragon upon Tortosa. Seeing that the King was urgent for help in Catalonia, but intent on pursuing his own design in Valencia, Peterborough resolved to send his infantry to the coast at Vinaroz, to be transported if necessary by sea. The men, though ragged, shoeless, and much distressed by long marches through the wintry days, left him very unwillingly. Then summoning the garrison of Lerida[340] and a reinforcement of Spaniards to follow him to Valencia, Peterborough resumed the pursuit of Las Torres with one hundred and fifty dragoons.
January.

He was too late to save Villa Real, which Las Torres took by treachery, and having taken massacred the entire male population; but while always concealing his own weakness he contrived by incessant harassing of the enemy's rear to inflict considerable loss and annoyance. Thus in due time he reached Nules, three days' march from the city of Valencia, a town of considerable strength, where Las Torres had left arms sufficient to equip a thousand of the townsmen. Peterborough[480] marched straight up to the gate with his handful of dragoons. The townspeople manned the walls and opened fire, but were speedily checked by a message from Peterborough, bidding them send out a priest or a magistrate instantly on pain of having their walls battered down and every soul put to the sword, in revenge for Villa Real. Some priests who knew him at once came out to him. "I give you six minutes," said Peterborough to the trembling cassocks. "Open your gates or I spare not a soul of you." The gates were quickly opened, and the General, riding in at the head of his tattered dragoons, demanded immediate provision of rations and forage for several thousand men.

The news soon reached Las Torres, who was little more than an hour ahead, and for the third time his unfortunate army was hurried out of camp and condemned to a weary retreat from an imaginary enemy. Peterborough, however, after taking two hundred horses from Nules, left the town to ponder over its fright and retired to Castallon de la Plana. Having there raised yet another hundred horses he ordered the Thirteenth Foot to march from Vinaroz to Oropesa and went thither himself to inspect them. The men marched in but four hundred strong, with red coats ragged and rusty, yellow facings in tatters, yellow breeches faded and torn, shoes and stockings in holes or more often altogether wanting. "I wish," said Peterborough when the inspection was over, "that I had horses and accoutrements for you, to try if you would keep up your good reputation as dragoons." The men doubtless glanced at their sore and unshod feet, and silently agreed. Presently they were marched up to the brow of a neighbouring hill, where to their amazement they found four hundred horses awaiting them, all fully equipped. The officers received commissions according to their rank in the mounted service, two or three only being detached to raise a new battalion in England; and thus within an hour Barrymore's Foot became Pearce's Dragoons.

[481]
January.
January 24
February 4.

Peterborough now called in such additional weak battalions of British as he could, and having collected a total force of three thousand men, one-third of it mounted, prepared to outwit a new general, the Duke of Los Arcos, who had superseded Las Torres. The relief of Valencia was Peterborough's first object, but to effect this he had first to gain possession of Murviedro, which lay on his road and was occupied by the enemy, and that, too, in such a way that Los Arcos should not move out against him in the open plain and crush him by superior numbers. It was a difficult problem, and it was only solved by a trick too elaborate and lengthy to be detailed here. The plan was very clever, so clever as almost to transcend the bounds of what is fair in war, but it was completely successful; and on the 4th of February Peterborough marched into Valencia without firing a shot.
March 23
April 3.
April.
April 30
May 11.

He now cultivated the friendship of the priests and something more than the friendship of the ladies of Valencia, thereby combining pleasure with business and obtaining the best of information. Las Torres, who had once more superseded Los Arcos, presently appeared on the scene again, bringing four thousand men by land and a powerful siege-train by sea for the reduction of the city. Peterborough pounced upon the train directly after it had been landed and captured the whole of it; then sending twelve hundred men against the four thousand he surprised them, routed them, and took six hundred prisoners. But the pleasant and exciting life at Valencia was interrupted by an urgent summons to assist in the defence of Barcelona. King Lewis, at the entreaty of his grandson Philip, had resolved to make a great effort to recover it; and thus it was that at the beginning of April Marshal Tessé appeared before the city with twenty-five thousand men, and three days later began the siege in form. The garrison consisted of less than four thousand regular troops, the backbone of which were eleven hundred British of the Guards and the Thirty-fourth Foot.[482] Weak as it was this little force made a gallant resistance, but the odds were too great against it, and but for the arrival of Peterborough it could not have held out for more than a fortnight. Even after his coming it was well-nigh overpowered; for of the three thousand troops that he brought with him the most part were employed chiefly in harassing Tessé's communications from the rear. The siege was finally raised on the advent of a relieving squadron under Admiral Leake, which so much discouraged Tessé that he abandoned the whole of his siege-train and retired once more over the French frontier.

Nothing now remained but to take advantage of this piece of good fortune. Peterborough had always favoured a dash on Madrid, and had twice urged this course upon King Charles in vain. He now pressed it for a third time with success, and presently sailed for Valencia with eleven thousand men. With immense trouble he procured horses and accoutrements to convert some of his infantry into dragoons, and then pushing forward a detached force of English he succeeded by the beginning of July in capturing Requena and Cuen?a and opening the road for King Charles to Madrid.
March 20 31 .
May 27
June 7.
June 16 27 .

Meanwhile, after enormous delay, the English and Portuguese had actually begun operations from the side of Portugal against Marshal Berwick. On the 31st of March Lord Galway and General das Minas left Elvas with nineteen thousand men[341] and advanced slowly northward, forcing back Berwick, whose army was much inferior in number, continually before them. Alcantara, Plasencia, and Ciudad Rodrigo yielded to them after slight resistance; and by the 7th of June the Allied army had reached Salamanca, a country which two regiments, the Second and the Ninth, were to know better a century later. Then turning east it marched straight upon Madrid and entered the city on the 27th of June. So far all was well. The advance[483] from Portugal had been singularly slow, but the capital had been reached. King Philip had retired to Burgos, and King Charles had been proclaimed in Madrid. The object of the War of the Succession seemed to have been fulfilled in Spain.
July 4 15 .
July 7 18 .
July 26
August 6.

At this juncture, however, the operations for no particular reason came to an end. Galway, without a thought apparently of following up Berwick, halted for a fortnight in Madrid, where the Portuguese troops behaved disgracefully, and then moving a short distance north-eastward took up a strong position at Guadalaxara. King Charles after immense delay suddenly altered the route which Peterborough had marked out for him and insisted on marching to Madrid through Arragon, even so not reaching Saragossa till the 18th of July. Meanwhile the whole of the country through which Galway had marched rose in revolt against the House of Austria. Berwick, reinforced from France to twice the strength of Galway, cut him off from Madrid, and reproclaimed King Philip; and when Charles and Peterborough with three thousand men at last joined Galway on the 6th of August, the Archduke found that he must prepare not for triumphant entry into Madrid, but for what promised to be a difficult and perilous retreat.
Sept. 17 28 .

Peterborough was for a sudden spring at Alcala and so on Madrid, but being over-ruled retired to Italy to raise a loan for the army. Galway, whose army had been so much reduced by sickness as to number, with Peterborough's reinforcement, but fourteen thousand men, still lingered close to Madrid for nearly a month in the vain hope of seeing the tide turn in his favour. Finally, being cut off from his base in Portugal, he marched for Valencia and the British fleet, Berwick troubling him no further than by occasional harassing of his rearguard. On crossing the Valencian frontier he distributed his force into winter quarters; an example which, after the reduction of Carthagena and of sundry small strongholds, was imitated by Berwick at the end of November.

[484]

So closed the year 1706, memorable for two of the most brilliant, even if in some respects disappointing, campaigns ever fought simultaneously by two British generals.
1707.

Unexpected reinforcements from Britain came opportunely to revive the hopes of the Archduke Charles at the opening of the new year. It will be remembered that in the summer of 1706 a project for a descent on the Charente had been matured in England, for which Marlborough had detached certain of his battalions after Ramillies. The plan being considered doubtful of success, the destination of the expedition was altered to Cadiz. A storm in the Bay of Biscay, however, dispersed the fleet, which was only reassembled at Lisbon after very great delay, and after waiting in that port for two months was directed to place its force at the disposal of Galway.[342] In December 1706 Peterborough returned from Italy to Valencia to attend the councils of war respecting the next campaign. The general outlook in the Peninsula was not promising. Marlborough indeed opined that nothing could save Spain but an offensive movement against France from the side of Italy, and Peterborough, adopting the same view, strongly advocated a defensive campaign. He was overruled, and since his endless squabbles with his colleagues and his military conduct in general had been called in question in England, he was shortly after relieved of his command and returned to England.
March.
March 30
April 10.
April.

After his departure the Archduke Charles and the English commanders fell at variance over their alternative plans, with the result that Charles withdrew with the whole of the Spanish troops to Catalonia. Galway and Das Minas then decided first to destroy Berwick's magazines in Murcia, and this done to march up the[485] Guadalaviar, turn the head-waters of the Tagus, and so move on to Madrid. Though the reinforcements had reached the Valencian coast in January it was not until the 10th of April that Galway crossed the Murcian frontier and after destroying one or two magazines laid siege to Villena. While thus engaged he heard that Berwick having collected his army was advancing towards Almanza, some five and twenty miles to the north-east, and that the Duke of Orleans was on his way to join him with reinforcements. Thereupon Galway and Das Minas resolved to advance and fight him at once, apparently without taking pains to ascertain what the numbers of his army might actually be. Berwick had with him twenty-five thousand men, half French, half Spanish, besides a good train of artillery. Galway, owing to the frightful mortality on board the newly-arrived transports, had but fifteen thousand, of which a bare third were British, half were Portuguese, and the remainder Dutch, German, and Huguenot. Considering how poorly the Portuguese had behaved on every occasion so far, the result of an open attack against such odds could hardly be doubtful.
April 14 25 .

Berwick on his side drew up his army in the usual two lines on a plain to the south of Almanza, his right resting on rising ground towards Montalegre, his left on a height overlooking the road to Valencia, while his right centre was covered by a ravine which gradually lost itself on level ground towards his extreme right flank. The force was formed according to rule with infantry in the centre and cavalry on each flank, the Spaniards taking the right and the French the left. At midday, after a march of eight miles, Galway approached to within a mile of the position, and formed his line of battle according to the prescribed methods. The Portuguese, with poor justice, claimed the post of honour on the right wing, so that the British and Dutch took the left, though with several Portuguese squadrons among them in the second line. But finding himself weak in cavalry Galway made good[486] the deficiency, after the manner of Gustavus Adolphus, by interpolating battalions of foot among his horse.[343]

At three o'clock in the afternoon Galway opened the attack without preliminary fire of artillery by leading an advance of the horse on his left wing. He was driven back at first by sheer weight of numbers; but the Sixth and Thirty-third Foot, which were among the interpolated battalions, came up, and by opening fire on the left flank of the Spanish horse gave the English squadrons time to rally and by an effective charge to drive the Spaniards back in confusion. Meanwhile, the rest of the English foot on the left centre fell, heedless of numbers, straight upon the hostile infantry and drove them back in confusion upon their second line. The Guards and the Second Foot following up their success broke through the second line also and pursued the scattered fugitives to the very walls of Almanza. So far as the Allied left was concerned the battle was going well.

But meanwhile the Portuguese on the right remained motionless; and Berwick lost no time in launching his left wing of horse upon them. Then the first line of Portuguese horse turned and ran, the second line also turned and ran, and the first line of infantry was left to bear the brunt alone. For a time the battalions stood up gallantly enough, but the odds were too great, and they were presently overwhelmed and utterly dispersed. Then Berwick brought up his French, both horse and foot, against the victorious British on his right. The British cavalry had suffered heavily in the first attack, all four regiments having lost their commanding officers, and in spite of all their efforts they were borne back and swept away by the numbers of the French squadrons. The infantry, surrounded on all sides, fought desperately and repeatedly repulsed the enemy's onset, but being overpowered by[487] numbers, were nearly all of them, English, Dutch, and Germans, cut down or captured. By great exertions Galway, who was himself wounded, brought off some remnant of them in good order and retreated unpursued to Ontiniente, some twenty miles distant. The guns also were saved; but a party of two thousand infantry which had been brought off the field by General Shrimpton was surrounded on the following day and compelled to lay down its arms.

In this action, which lasted about two hours, Galway lost about four thousand killed and wounded and three thousand prisoners. The British alone lost eighty-eight officers killed, and two hundred and eighty-six captured, of whom ninety-two were wounded. The Sixth regiment had but two officers unhurt out of twenty-three, the Ninth but one out of twenty-six, and other regiments[344] suffered hardly less severely. The simple fact was that, as the bulk of the Portuguese would not fight, the action resolved itself into an attack of eight thousand British, Dutch, and Germans upon thrice their number of French and Spaniards, in an open plain; and the defeat, though decisive, was in no sense disgraceful except to the Portuguese. The most singular circumstance in this fatal day was that the French were commanded by an Englishman, Berwick, and the English by a Frenchman, the gallant but luckless Ruvigny. The battle of course put an end to further operations on the side of the Allies. Galway, with such troops as he could collect, retired to the Catalonian frontier, and set himself to reorganise a force to defend the lines of the Segre and Ebro, while Berwick methodically pursued the reduction of Valencia and in December retired, according to rule, into winter quarters. So[488] swiftly did disaster follow on the first brilliant successes in the Peninsula.

Since we shall not again see Peterborough in the field this chapter should not be closed without a few sentences as to his peculiar methods. These were outwardly simple enough. Good information to discover his enemy's weak points, deception to put him off his guard, the deepest secrecy lest that enemy should grow suspicious, most careful thinking out of details so that every unit of an insignificant force should know its duty precisely and do it, exact divination of the probable results of each successive step, and extreme suddenness and rapidity in execution; such were, so far as they can be set down, the secrets of his success. In a word, his was the principle of making war by moral rather than by physical force,[489] by scaring men into the delusion that they were beaten rather than by actually beating them. It is a difficult art, of which the highest exponent was produced by the Navy a century later in the person of Lord Dundonald; and it is curious to note that both men were troubled by exactly the same defects. Peterborough was difficult, cantankerous, quarrelsome and eaten up by exaggerated appreciation of self. His letters were so interminably long and tedious, containing indeed little besides abuse of his colleagues, that they exhausted the patience even of Marlborough. In fact, it seems to be impossible for this type of man to work harmoniously with his equals, however he may be adored by his subordinates. The Duke of Wellington summed up Peterborough as a brilliant partisan, but his contemporaries thought more highly of him. Eugene declared that he thought like a general, and Marlborough himself acknowledged that he had predicted the ill consequences of the operations which, contrary to his advice, were undertaken in Spain. But whatever his merit as a general and a leader, he, like all of his kind, is a man of whom we take leave without regret, turning gladly from the fitful, if dazzling flashes of his eccentric genius, to the steady glowing light which illuminates every action of the great Duke of Marlborough.

Authorities.—It is well known that the exploits of Peterborough rest principally on Carleton's Memoirs, and that the authority of these Memoirs is disputed. Colonel Frank Russell in his Life of Peterborough of course makes him a hero, Colonel Arthur Parnell in his War of the Succession in Spain refuses to allow him any merit. Mr. Stebbing in his Peterborough (Men of Action Series) treats the controversy with strong good sense, and I have not hesitated to follow his view. I must none the less acknowledge my obligations to all three of these writers, and particularly to Colonel Parnell, who has gone deeply into the history of the war, taken immense pains to ascertain which British regiments were engaged at every action, and has furnished a most copious list of authorities. The Mémoires de Berwick are most trustworthy on the French side, and the Richards Papers (Stowe Coll. B.M.), as Colonel Parnell says, most important.

CHAPTER VII
Almanza was a bad opening for the new year, but worse was to follow. Throughout the winter Marlborough had, as usual, been employed in diplomatic negotiations, which nothing but his skill and fascination could have carried to a successful issue. But on one most important point the Duke was foiled by the treachery of the Emperor, who, to further his own selfish designs on Naples, secretly concluded a treaty with France for the neutrality of Italy, and thus enabled the whole of the French garrisons in Italy to be withdrawn unmolested. The forces thus liberated were at once brought up to the scene of action on the Rhine and in Flanders, and the French were enabled to bring a superior force in the field against Marlborough. Again the Duke had hoped to save Spain by an invasion of France from the side of Savoy, but this project again had been deferred until too late, owing to the Emperor's cupidity for the possession of Naples. Finally, though Prince Lewis of Baden had died during the winter, he had been replaced on the Rhine by a still more incompetent prince, the Margrave of Bayreuth, who, far from making any diversion in the Duke's favour, never ceased pestering him to come to his assistance. So flagrant was this deplorable person's incapacity that he too was superseded before the close of the campaign, though too late for any effective purpose. His successor, however, deserves particular notice, being none other than the Elector[491] of Hanover, afterwards our own King George the First, no genius in the field, but, as shall be seen in due time, an extremely sensible and clear-headed soldier.

The result of these complications was that Marlborough spent the greater part of the summer encamped, in the face of a superior French force, at Meldert, on a branch of the Great Geete, to cover his conquests in Flanders and Brabant. At last the Emperor, having accomplished his desires in Naples, made a diversion towards Provence which drew away a part of the French force to that quarter and enabled the Duke to move. But then bad weather intervened to prevent any successful operations. Twice Marlborough was within an ace of surprising Vend?me, who had superseded Villeroy in Flanders, and twice the marshal decamped in haste and confusion only just in time to save his army. Even so the Duke would have struck one heavy blow but for the intervention of the Dutch deputies. But fortune favoured the French; the rain came down in torrents, and the country was poached into such a quagmire by the cavalry that many of the infantry were fairly swallowed up and lost.[345] Thus tamely ended the campaign which should have continued the work of Ramillies.[346]

[492]

Returning home in November Marlborough found difficulties almost as great as he had left behind him in Flanders. There were quarrels in the Cabinet, already foreboding the time when the Queen and the people should turn against him. The Court of France was reverting to its old methods and endeavouring to divide England by providing the Pretender with a force for invasion. Again the hardships of the campaign in Flanders and the defeat of Almanza had not only created discontent, but had enormously increased the demand for recruits. The evil work of the Dutch deputies and the incorrigible selfishness and jealousy of the Empire had already prolonged the war beyond the limit assigned by the short patience of the English people.

Happily Parliament was for the present still loyal to the war, and voted not only the usual supplies but money for an additional ten thousand men. Five new battalions[347] were raised, and three more of the old establishment were detailed for service in Flanders.[348] But far more satisfactory was the fact that in 1708 all regiments took the field with new colours, bearing the cross of St. Andrew blended with that of St. George, pursuant to the first article of the Treaty of union, passed in the previous year between England and Scotland.
1708.
March 29
April 9.

The early spring of 1708 was wasted by the French in a futile endeavour to set the Pretender afoot in Scotland with a French force at his back; nor was it until the 9th of April that Marlborough sailed for the Hague, where Eugene was already awaiting him. There the two agreed that the Duke should as usual command in Flanders, while Eugene should take charge of an army on the Moselle, nominally for operations on that river, but in reality to unite with [493] Marlborough by a rapid march and give battle to the French before they could call in their remoter detachments. There was a considerable difficulty with the Elector of Hanover, who was to command on the Rhine, owing to his jealousy of Eugene, but this trouble was satisfactorily settled, as were all troubles of the time, by the intervention of Marlborough. Thereupon the Electoral Prince, true to the quarrelsome traditions of his family, at once insisted on taking service with Eugene, simply for the sake of annoying his father; thus adding one more to the many causes of friction which, but for Marlborough, would soon have brought the Grand Alliance to a standstill. This Electoral Prince will become better known to us as King George the Second.

The French on their part had made extraordinary exertions in the hope of a successful campaign. Since Ramillies they had drawn troops from all quarters to Flanders; and from thenceforth the tendency in every succeeding year grew stronger for all operations to centre in that familiar battle-ground. On the Rhine the Elector of Bavaria held command, with Berwick, much exalted since Almanza, to help him. The French main army in Flanders numbered little less than a hundred thousand men, and was under the orders of Vend?me, with the Duke of Burgundy in supreme command. The presence of the heir to the throne, of his brother the Duke of Berry, and of the Chevalier de St. George, as the Pretender called himself, all portended an unusual effort.
May.
May 24
June 4
  to
June 24
July 5.
June 23
July 4.

Marching up at the end of May from their rendezvous on the south of the Haine, the French army moved north to the forest of Soignies. Marlborough thereupon at once concentrated at Hal and summoned Eugene to him with all haste. His own army numbered but eighty thousand men, and though as usual he showed a bold front he knew that such disparity of numbers was serious. The French then man?uvred towards Waterloo as if to threaten Louvain, a movement[494] which the Duke met by a forced march to Park on the Dyle. Here he remained perforce inactive for a whole month, waiting for Eugene, who was delayed by some petty formalities which were judged by the Imperial Court to be far more important than military operations. Suddenly, on the night of the 4th of July, the French broke up their camp, marched westward to cross the Senne at Hal and detached small corps against Bruges and Ghent. Unable to meet the Allies with the sword, the French had substituted gold for steel and had for some time been tampering with the new authorities in these towns. The gold had done its work. Within twenty-four hours Ghent and Bruges had opened their gates, and the keys to the navigation of the Scheldt and Lys were lost.
June 24
July 5.
June 25
July 6.

Marlborough, who was quite ready for a march, was up and after the French army immediately. At two o'clock in the morning his army was in motion, streaming off to pass the Senne at Anderlecht. The march was long and severe, the roads being in so bad a state that the right wing did not reach its halting-ground until six o'clock in the evening, nor the left wing till two o'clock on the following morning; but this great effort brought the Allies almost within reach of the French army. In the night intelligence was brought to Marlborough that the enemy was turning back to fight him. He was in the saddle at once, to form his line of battle; but the news was false. The French in reality were making off as fast as they could; and before the truth could reach Marlborough they were across the Dender. Marlborough's cavalry was instantly on their track, but could do no more than capture a few hundred prisoners together with most of the French baggage. That same day came definite information of the loss of Ghent and Bruges, and of the investment of the citadel of Ghent. Brussels took the alarm at once. The French, as they feared, had for once got the better of the Duke. The French army was encamped at Alost, where, like a king between two pieces at draughts, it[495] threatened both the citadel of Ghent and Brussels; and all was panic in the capital. The Duke was fain to move on to Assche, midway between Alost and Brussels, to restore the confidence of the fearful city.
June 28
July 9.

Here Eugene joined him. Finding it hopeless to arrive in time with his army, he had pushed on alone; nor could he have arrived more opportunely, for the Duke was so much weakened by an attack of fever that he was hardly fit for duty. It was indeed a trying moment. The next design of the French was evidently aimed at Oudenarde for the recovery of the line of the Scheldt. They were already across the Dender and ahead of Marlborough on the road to it, and moreover had broken down the bridges behind them; yet Marlborough dared not move lest he should expose Brussels. He sent orders to the Governor of Ath to collect as many troops as he could and throw himself into Oudenarde, which that officer punctually did; and then there was nothing to be done but to wait. Two days sufficed to place the citadel of Ghent in the hands of the French, and to set their army free for further operations. Accordingly on the 9th of July Vend?me sent forward detachments to invest Oudenarde, and moved with the main army up the Dender to Lessines, from which point he intended to cover the siege. Great was his astonishment on approaching the town on the following day to find that Marlborough had arrived there before him, and was not only within reach of Oudenarde but interposed between him and his own frontier.
June 29
July 10.

For at two o'clock on the morning of the 9th of July the Allied army had marched off in beautiful order in five columns, and by noon had covered fifteen miles to Herfelingen on the road to the Dender. Four hours later Cadogan was sent forward with eight battalions and as many squadrons to occupy Lessines and throw bridges over the Dender; and when tattoo beat that night the army silently entered on a march of thirteen further miles to the same point. Before dawn came the welcome intelligence that Cadogan had reached[496] his destination at midnight, laid his bridges, and made his disposition to cover the passage of the troops. The army tramped on, always in perfect order, crossed the river and was taking up its camping-ground, when the heads of the enemy's columns appeared on the distant heights and were seen first to halt and then to retire. Marlborough on the curve of the arc had outmarched Vend?me on the chord.
June 30
July 11.

The French, finding the whole of their plans disconcerted, now wheeled about north-westward towards Gavre on the Scheldt, to shelter themselves behind the river and bar the advance of the allies on Bruges. But the Duke had no intention to let them off so easily. Burgundy and Vend?me were not on good terms; their differences had already caused considerable confusion in the army; and Marlborough was fully aware of the fact. At dawn on the morning of the 11th the unwearied Cadogan started off with some eleven thousand men[349] and twenty-four guns to prepare the roads, construct bridges, and make dispositions to cover the passage of the Scheldt below Oudenarde. By half-past ten he had reached the river, just above the village of Eyne, and on ascending the low heights above the stream and looking westward he saw before him a kind of shallow basin or amphitheatre, seamed by little ditches and rivulets, and broken by hedges and enclosures. To the south the rising ground on which he stood swept round almost to the glacis of Oudenarde, thence curved westward from the village of Bevere into another broad hill called the Boser Couter to the village of Oycke and beyond, thence round northward across the valley of the river Norken to Huysse, whence trending still to northward it died away in the marshes of the Scheldt. Near Oycke two small streams rise which, after pursuing for some way a parallel course,[497] unite to run down into the Scheldt at Eyne; beyond them the Norken runs beneath the heights of Huysse in a line parallel to the Scheldt.

Presently parties of French horse appeared on the ground to the north. Vend?me's advanced-guard, under the Marquis of Biron, had crossed the Scheldt leisurely at Gavre, six miles farther down the river, and was now moving across his front with foragers out, in happy unconsciousness of the presence of an enemy. A dash of Cadogan's squadrons upon the foragers quickly brought Biron to Eyne and beyond it, where he caught sight of Cadogan's detachment of scarlet and blue battalions guarding the bridge, and presently of a body of cavalry in the act of crossing; for Marlborough, uneasy while his advanced-guard was still in the air, had caught up a column of Prussian horse and galloped forward with it in all haste. Biron at once reported what he had seen to Vend?me, who, perceiving that the mass of the Allied army was still on the wrong side of the Scheldt, gave orders to take up a position parallel to the river; the line to rest its left on the village of Heurne and extend by Eyne and Beveren to Mooregem on the right. In pursuance of his design he directed seven battalions to occupy Heurne forthwith; but at this point the Duke of Burgundy interposed. The heights of Huysse in rear of the Norken from Asper to Wannegem formed in his judgment a preferable position; and there, two miles from the Scheldt, he should form his line of battle, facing south-east. So the army was guided to the left bank of the Norken, while the seven battalions, obeying what they conceived to be their orders, marched down to the village not of Heurne but of Eyne, and backed by a few squadrons, took up the position assigned to them by Vend?me.

Meanwhile, responding to urgent messages from Marlborough, the main body of the Allies was hurrying forward, and by two o'clock the head of the infantry had reached the Scheldt. Part of the cavalry passed through Oudenarde to take advantage of the town[498] bridge; the foot began to cross by the pontoons, and Cadogan, whose eye had marked the march of the French into Eyne, at once summoned the whole of his advanced-guard across to the left bank. Sabine's brigade supported by the other two crossed the rivulet against Eyne, while the Hanoverian cavalry moved up to the rear of the village and cut off all hope of retreat. Presently Sabine's British were hotly engaged; but the French made but a poor resistance. It is the weakness of the French soldier that he apprehends too quickly when his officers have not given him a fair chance. Three battalions out of the seven were captured entire, the remaining four were killed or taken piecemeal in their flight. The cavalry, flushed by their success, then advanced under Prince George against the few French squadrons in rear of the village, charged them, routed them, and drove them across the Norken. The Prince had his horse shot under him in this encounter, for his family has never wanted for courage, and he remembered the day of Oudenarde to the end of his life.

The Duke of Burgundy now made up his mind to a general action, and made every preparation for defence of the position behind the Norken. But when four o'clock came and the Allied army was not yet in order of battle, he changed his plan, pushed a body of cavalry from his right across the stream, and set the whole of his centre and right in motion to advance likewise. Marlborough, perceiving the movement, judged that the attack would be directed against his left, in the hope that Cadogan's battalions about Eyne would be left isolated and open to be crushed by an advance of the French left. Two of Cadogan's regiments, Prussians, which had been pushed forward half a mile beyond Eyne to Groenewald were at once reinforced by twelve more of the advanced guard; the British cavalry was formed up on the heights at Bevere, and the Prussian horse further to the Allied right near Heurne. No more could be done until the rest of the army should gradually cross the river which divided it from the battlefield.

[499]

At length about five o'clock thirty French battalions debouched upon Groenewald, which was as yet held only by Cadogan's two advanced regiments, and began the attack. The Prussians stuck to their post gallantly and held their own among the hedges, until presently Cadogan's reinforcement, and later on twenty more battalions under the Duke of Argyll,[350] came up to their assistance. Forming in succession on the left of the Prussians as they reached the fighting line, these regiments extended the field of action as far south as Schaerken; and the combat was carried on with great spirit. The ground was so strongly enclosed that the fight resolved itself into duels of battalions, the cream of the infantry on both sides being engaged. At one moment the French outflanked the left of the Allies and drove them back, but fresh battalions of Marlborough's army kept constantly streaming into action, which recovered the lost ground and prolonged the line of fire always further to the south.

Marlborough and Eugene, who had hitherto remained together, now parted, and the Duke handing over eighteen battalions to the Prince entrusted him with the command of the right. This accession of strength enabled Eugene to relieve Cadogan's corps, which had been forced to give way before Groenewald, and even to pierce through the first line of the enemy's infantry. General Natzmar thereupon seized the moment to throw the Prussian cavalry against the second line. His squadrons were received with a biting fire from the hedges as they advanced; and the French Household Cavalry watching the favourable moment for a charge drove back the Prussians with very heavy loss.

Meanwhile Marlborough with the Hanoverian and Dutch infantry was pressing forward slowly on his left, the French fighting with great stubbornness and gallantry, and contesting every inch of ground from hedge to hedge. At last the enemy being forced back to Diepenbeck, a few hundred yards in rear of Schaerken, stood[500] fast, and refused despite all the Duke's efforts to give way for another foot. But Marlborough had still twenty battalions of Dutch and Danes with almost the entire cavalry of the left at his disposal, and he had noticed that the French right flank rested on the air. He now directed Marshal Overkirk to lead these troops under cover of the Boser Couter round the French right and to fall with them upon their rear. The gallant old Dutchman, though infirm and sick unto death, joyfully obeyed. Two brigades were thrown at once on the flank of the troops that were so stoutly opposing Marlborough; while the cavalry advanced quickly on the reverse slope of the Boser Couter,[351] and then wheeling to the right fell on the rear of the unsuspecting French. A part of the Household Cavalry and some squadrons of dragoons tried bravely to stand their ground, but they were borne back and swept away. Overkirk's troops pressed rapidly on; and the French right was fairly surrounded on all sides.

To face page 500
OUDENARDE
June 30th July 11th 1708.

Now at last an effort was made to bring forward the French left, which through Burgundy's perversity or for some inscrutable reason, had been left motionless on the other side of the Norken; but it was too late. The infantry, though led by Vend?me himself, failed to make the slightest impression, and the cavalry dared not advance. The ground before them was intricate and swampy, and the whole of the British cavalry, withdrawn from their first position by Eugene, stood waiting to plunge down upon them directly they should move. The daylight faded and the night came on, but the musketry flashed out incessantly in an ever narrowing girdle of fire, as the Allies wound themselves closer and closer round the enveloped French right. At length at nine o'clock Marlborough and Eugene, fearful lest their own troops should engage each other in the darkness, with some difficulty enforced the order to halt and cease firing. Vast numbers of the French seized the[501] moment to escape, but presently all the drums of the Allies began with one accord to beat the French retreat, while the Huguenot officers shouted "A moi, Picardie! A moi, Roussillon!" to gather the relics of the scattered regiments of the enemy around them. In this way some thousands of prisoners were gleaned, but the harvest which would have been reaped in another hour of daylight was lost. In the French army all was confusion. Vend?me tried in vain to keep the troops together till the morning, but Burgundy gave the word for retreat; and the whole ran off in disorder towards Ghent.
July 1 12 .
July 2-3 13-14 .

So ended the battle of Oudenarde, presenting on one side a feature rare in these days, namely, a general engagement without an order of battle.[352] It was undoubtedly the most hazardous action that Marlborough ever fought. His troops were much harassed by forced marches. They had started at two o'clock on Monday morning and had covered fifty miles, including the passage of two rivers, when they came into action at two o'clock on Wednesday afternoon. It would be reckoned no small feat in these days to move eighty thousand men over fifty miles in sixty hours, but in those days of bad roads and heavy packs the effort must have been enormous. Finally, the army had to pass the Scheldt in the face of the enemy, and ran no small risk of being destroyed in detail. Yet the hazard was probably less than it now seems to us, and generals in our own day have not hesitated to risk similar peril with success. The French commanders were at variance; the less competent of them, being heir-apparent, was likely to be toadied by officers and supported by them against their better judgment; and finally the whole French army was very much afraid of Marlborough. Notwithstanding their slight success in Ghent and Bruges, their elation had evaporated speedily when they found Marlborough before them at Lessines.[502] All this Marlborough knew well, and knew also that if an impromptu action, if one may use the term, must be fought, there was not a man on the other side who had an eye for a battlefield comparable to Eugene's and his own. The event justified his calculations; for the victory was one of men who knew their own minds over men who did not. Another hour of daylight, so Marlborough declared, would have enabled him to finish the war. The total loss of the Allies in the battle was about three thousand killed and wounded, the British infantry though early engaged suffering but little, while the cavalry, being employed to watch the inactive French left, hardly suffered at all.[353] The French lost six thousand killed and wounded and nine thousand prisoners only, but they were thoroughly shaken and demoralised for the remainder of the campaign. The wearied army of the Allies lay on its arms in the battlefield, while Marlborough and Eugene waited impatiently for the dawn. As soon as it was light forty squadrons, for the most part British, were sent forward in pursuit, while Eugene returned to his own army to hasten its march and to collect material for a siege. The main army halted to rest for two days where it lay, during which time the intelligence came that Berwick had been summoned with his army from the Moselle, and was marching with all haste to occupy certain lines constructed by the French to cover their frontier from Ypres to the Lys. At midnight fifty squadrons and thirty battalions under Count Lottum, a distinguished Prussian officer, started for these lines; the whole army followed at daybreak, and while on the march the Duke received the satisfactory news that Lottum had captured the lines without difficulty. Next day the whole of Marlborough's army was encamped along the Lys between Menin and Commines, within the actual territory of France.
July.

Detached columns were at once sent out to forage[503] and levy contributions. The suburbs of Arras were burnt, and no effort was spared to bring home to the French that war was hammering at their own gates. But the Allies were still doubtful as to the operations that they should next undertake. So long as the French held Bruges and Ghent they held also the navigation of the Scheldt and Lys, so that it was of vital importance to tempt Vend?me, if possible, to evacuate them. The British Government was preparing a force[354] under General Erie for a descent upon Normandy by sea, and Marlborough was for co-operating with this expedition, masking the fortress of Lille, and penetrating straight into France—a plan which the reader should, if possible, bear in mind. But the proposal was too adventurous to meet with the approval of the Dutch, and was judged impracticable even by Eugene unless Lille were first captured as a place of arms. Ultimately it was decided, notwithstanding the closing of the Scheldt and Lys, to undertake the siege of Lille; and all the energies of the Allies were turned to the collection of sixteen thousand horses to haul the siege-train overland from Brussels.

During the enforced inaction of the army for the next few weeks, the monotony was broken only by the arrival of a distinguished visitor, Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, together with one of his three hundred and sixty-four bastards, a little boy of twelve named Maurice, who had run away from school to join the army. We shall meet with this boy again as a man of fifty, under the name of Marshal Saxe, at a village some twenty miles distant called Fontenoy.
Aug. 1 12 .

At length the preparations for the siege were complete, and the huge convoy set out from Brussels for its long march. Now, if ever, was the time for the French to strike a blow. Vend?me in the north at[504] Ghent and Berwick in the south at Douay had, between them, one hundred and ten thousand men: the distance to be traversed by the convoy was seventy-five miles, and the way was barred by the Dender and the Scheldt. Such, however, was the skill with which the march was conducted that the French never succeeded even in threatening the vast, unwieldy columns, which duly reached their destination without the loss even of a single waggon. Of all the achievements of Marlborough and Eugene, this seems to have been judged by contemporary military men to be the greatest.[355]

Lille, the capital of French Flanders, was one of the early conquests of Lewis the Fourteenth, and, if the expression may be allowed, the darling town of the Court of Versailles. Situated in a swampy plain and watered by two rivers, the Deule and Marque, its natural position presented difficulties of no ordinary kind to a besieging force, and, in addition, it had been fortified by Vauban with his utmost skill. The garrison, which had been strengthened by Berwick, amounted to fifteen thousand men, under the command of brave old Marshal Boufflers, who had solicited the honour of defending the fortress. To the north, as we have seen, lay Vend?me, and to the south Berwick, with a joint force now amounting to about ninety-four thousand men.[356] It was for Marlborough and Eugene with an inferior strength of eighty-four thousand men[357] to hold them at bay and to take one of the strongest fortresses in the world before their eyes.
Aug. 2 13 .

A detailed account even of so famous a siege would be wearisome, the more so since the proportion of British troops detailed for regular work in the trenches was but five battalions,[358] but there are a few salient features which cannot be omitted. The point selected [505] for attack was the north side, the first advance to which was opened by a single English soldier, Sergeant Littler of the First Guards,[359] who swam across the Marquette to a French post which commanded the passage of the stream and let down the drawbridge. Two days later the town was fully invested, and Marlborough took post with the covering army at Helchin on the Scheldt.

The investment had not been accomplished for more than a fortnight when the Duke was informed that Berwick and Vend?me were advancing towards the Dender to unite their forces at Lessines. After man?uvring at first to hinder the junction Marlborough finally decided to let it come to pass, being satisfied that, if the French designed to relieve Lille, they could not break through in the face of his army on the east side, but must go round and approach it from the south. In this case, as both armies would move in concentric circles around Lille as a centre, Marlborough being nearer to that centre could be certain of reaching any given point on the way to it before the French. Moreover, the removal of the enemy from the east to the south would free the convoys from Brussels from all annoyance on their march to the siege.
Aug. 22
Sept. 2.

As he had expected, the French moved south to Tournay, and then wheeling northward entered the plain of Lille, where they found Marlborough and Eugene drawn up ready to receive them.[360] Vend?me and Berwick had positive orders to risk a battle; and [506] there had been much big talk of annihilating the Allies. Yet face to face with their redoubtable enemies they hesitated. Finally, after a week's delay, which enabled Marlborough greatly to strengthen his position by entrenchment, they advanced as if to attack in earnest, but withdrew ignominiously after a useless cannonade without accepting battle. Had not Marlborough and Eugene been restrained by the Dutch deputies, the marshals would have had a battle forced on them whether they liked it or not, but, as things were, they were permitted to retire. To such depth of humiliation had Marlborough reduced the proud and gallant French army.
Aug. 27-28
Sept. 7-8.
Sept. 9-10 20-21 .

The retreat left Eugene free to press the siege with vigour; but a great assault, which cost him three thousand men,[361] failed to give him the advantage for which he had hoped, and a week later Marlborough was called in from the covering army to give assistance. For the next assault, on the counterscarp, the Duke lent the Prince five thousand English, and it is said that English and French never fought more worthily of their reputation than on that day; but the assault was thrice repelled, and it was only through the exertions of Eugene himself that a portion of the works was at last captured after a desperate effort and at frightful cost of life. Altogether the siege was not going well. The engineers had made blunders; a vast number of men had been thrown away to no purpose; and ammunition and stores were beginning to run short. Lastly, Boufflers maintained always a very grand and extremely able defence.
Sept. 16 27 .

Vend?me and Berwick could now think of no better expedient than to throw themselves into strong positions along the Scarpe and Scheldt, from Douay to Ghent, in order to cut off all convoys from Brussels. But Marlborough was prepared for this, and had not[507] captured Ostend after Ramillies for nothing. England held command of the sea; and Erle's expedition, which had effected little or nothing on the coast of Normandy, was at hand to help in the transport of supplies from the new base. Erle, who had considerable talent for organisation, soon set Ostend in order, seized two passages over the Newport Canal at Leffinghe and Oudenburg and prepared to send off his first convoy. As its arrival was of vital importance to the maintenance of the siege, the French were as anxious to intercept as the English to forward it. Vend?me accordingly sent off Count de la Mothe with twenty-two thousand men to attack it on its way, while Marlborough despatched twelve battalions and fifteen hundred horse to Ostend itself, twelve battalions more under General Webb to Thourout, and eighteen squadrons under Cadogan to Roulers, at two different points on the road, to help it to its destination.
Sept. 17 28 .

The convoy started at night, and in the morning Cadogan sent forward Count Lottum with a hundred and fifty horse to meet it. At noon Lottum returned to Thourout with the intelligence that he had struck against the advanced-guard of a French force at Ichtegem, two miles beyond Wynendale and some four miles from Thourout on the road to Ostend. Webb at once collected every battalion within his reach, twenty-two in all, and marched with all speed for Ichtegem, with Lottum's squadron in advance. The horse, however, on emerging from the defile of Wynendale, found the enemy advancing towards them into the plains that lay beyond it. Lottum retired slowly, skirmishing, while Webb pushed on and posted his men in two lines at the entrance to the defile. The strait was bounded on either hand by a wood, and in each of these woods Webb stationed a battalion of Germans to take the French in flank. The dispositions were hardly complete when the enemy came up and opened fire from nineteen pieces of artillery. Lottum and his handful of horse then retired, while just in the nick of[508] time three more battalions reach Webb from the rear and formed his third line.

The French cannonade was prolonged for nearly two hours, but with little effect, for Webb had ordered his men to lie down. At length at five o'clock the French advanced in four lines of infantry backed by as many of horse and dragoons. They came on with great steadiness and entered the space between the two woods, their flank almost brushing the covert as they passed, serenely unconscious of the peril that awaited them. Then from right and left a staggering volley crashed into them from the battalions concealed in the woods. Both flanks shrank back from the fire, and huddled themselves in confusion upon their centre. De la Mothe sent forward some dragoons in support; and the foot, recovering themselves, pressed on against the lines before them. So vigorous was their attack that they broke through two battalions of the first line, but the gap being instantly filled from the second, they were forced back. Again they struggled forward, trusting by the sheer weight of eight lines against two to sweep their enemy away. But the eternal fire on front and flank became unendurable, and notwithstanding the blows and entreaties of their officers the whole eight lines broke up in confusion, while Webb's battalions, coolly advancing by platoons "as if they were at exercise," poured volley after volley into them as they retired. Cadogan, who had hastened up with a few squadrons to the sound of the firing, was anxious to charge the broken troops, but his force was considered too weak; and thus after two hours of hot conflict ended the combat of Wynendale. The French engaged therein numbered almost double of the Allies, and lost close on three thousand men, while the Allies lost rather less than a thousand of all ranks. The signal incapacity displayed by the French commander did not lessen the credit of Webb, and Wynendale was reckoned one of the most brilliant little affairs of the whole war.[362]

[509]
Oct. 11 22 .

The safe arrival of the convoy before Lille raised the hopes of the besiegers; and Vend?me, now fully alive to the importance of cutting off communication with Ostend, marched towards that side with a considerable force, and opening the dykes laid the whole country under water. Marlborough went quickly after him, but the marshal would not await his coming; and the Duke by means of high-wheeled vehicles and punts contrived to overcome the difficulties caused by the inundation. At last, after a siege of sixty days the town capitulated; and the garrison retired into the citadel, where Eugene proceeded to beleaguer it anew.
Nov. 13 24 .
Nov. 15 26 .
Nov. 17 28 .

While the new siege was going forward the Elector of Bavaria arrived on the scene from the Rhine, from whence the apathy of the Elector of Hanover had most unpardonably allowed him to withdraw, and laid siege to Brussels with fifteen thousand men. This was an entirely new complication; and since the French held the line of the Scheldt in force, it was difficult to see how Marlborough could parry the blow. Fortunately the garrison defended itself with great spirit, the English regiments[363] setting a fine example, and the Duke, in no wise dismayed, laid his plans with his usual secrecy and decision. Spreading reports, which he strengthened by feint movements, that he was about to place his troops in cantonments, he marched suddenly and silently eastward on the night of the 26th of November, crossed the Scheldt at two different points before the enemy[510] knew that he was near them, took a thousand prisoners, and then remitting the bulk of his force to the siege of Lille, pushed on with a detachment of cavalry and two battalions of English Guards to Alost. On his arrival he learned that the Elector had raised the siege of Brussels and marched off with precipitation. The bare name of Marlborough had been sufficient to scare him away.
Nov. 28
Dec. 9.

Meanwhile Eugene's preparations before the citadel of Lille were in rapid progress, and Marlborough was already maturing plans for a further design before the close of the campaign. It had been the earnest desire of both commanders to reduce Boufflers to unconditional surrender; but time was an object, so on the 9th of December the gallant old marshal and his heroic garrison marched out with the honours of war. So ended the memorable siege of Lille. It had cost the garrison eight thousand men, or more than half of its numbers, and the Allies no fewer than fourteen thousand men. The honours of the siege rested decidedly with Boufflers, and were paid to him by none more ungrudgingly than Marlborough and Eugene. Yet as an operation of war, conducted under extraordinary difficulties in respect of transport, under the eyes of a superior force and subject to diversions, such as that of the Elector of Bavaria, it remains one of the highest examples of consummate military skill.

The fall of Lille was a heavy blow for France, but it was not the last of the campaign. Within eight days Marlborough and Eugene had invested Ghent, which after a brief resistance surrendered with the honours of war. The capitulation of Bruges quickly followed, and the navigation of the Scheldt and Lys having been regained, the two commanders at last sent their troops into winter quarters.
Sept. 13 24 .

But even this did not close the sum of English successes for 1708, for from the Mediterranean had come news of another conquest, due to the far-seeing eye and far-reaching hand of Marlborough. Early in[511] the year Galway had withdrawn from Catalonia to Lisbon, and the command in Catalonia had been given at Marlborough's instance to Field-Marshal von Staremberg, an Imperial officer of much experience and deservedly high reputation. Staremberg, however, could do little with but ten thousand men against the Bourbon's army of twice his strength, so by Marlborough's advice the troops were used to second the operations of the Mediterranean squadron. Sardinia, the first point aimed at, was captured almost without resistance, and the fleet then sailed for Minorca. Here somewhat more opposition was encountered; but after less than a fortnight's work, creditably managed by Major-General Stanhope, the Island was taken at a trifling cost of life.[364] Thus the English gained their first port in the Mediterranean; and the news of the capture of Minorca reached London on the same day as that of the fall of Lille.

Note.—I have been unable to discover any Order of Battle for the campaign of 1708. The regiments that bear the name of Oudenarde on their appointments are the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th Dragoon Guards, the 2nd Dragoons, 5th Lancers, Grenadier Guards, Coldstream Guards, 1st, 3rd, 8th, 10th, 15th, 16th, 18th, 21st, 23rd, 24th, 26th, 37th Foot.
CHAPTER VIII
The successes of the past campaign were sufficient to set the British Parliament in good humour, and to prompt it to vote a further increase of ten thousand German mercenaries for the following year. Nevertheless political troubles were increasing, and there were already signs that the rule of Godolphin and Marlborough was in danger. The death of the Prince Consort had been a heavy blow to the Duke. Prince George may have deserved Lord Macaulay's character for impenetrable stupidity, but there can be little doubt that his heavy phlegmatic character was of infinite service to steady the weak and unstable Queen Anne.
1709.

In the spring of 1709, however, it seemed reasonable to hope that peace, which would have set all matters right, was well-nigh assured. France, already at the last gasp through the exhaustion caused by the war, was weakened still further by a severe winter which had added famine to all her other troubles; and Lewis sought anxiously, even at the price of humiliation, for peace. He approached Marlborough, reputed the most avaricious and corruptible of men, with a gigantic bribe to obtain good terms, but was unhesitatingly rebuffed. The Duke stated the conditions which might be acceptable to England; and had the negotiations been trusted to him, there can be little doubt but that he would have obtained the honourable peace which he above all men most earnestly desired. He was, however, overruled by instructions from home imposing terms which Lewis could not be expected to grant; the war was continued;[513] and Marlborough, who had striven his hardest to bring it to an end, was of course accused of prolonging it deliberately for his own selfish ends.
June.
June 15 26 .

The French, now menaced with an invasion and a march of the Allies to Paris, had strengthened their army enormously by withdrawing troops from all quarters to Flanders, and had set in command their only fortunate general, that very able soldier and incomparable liar, Marshal Villars. To cover Arras, the northwestern gate of France, Villars had thrown up a strong line of entrenchments from the Scarpe at Douay to the Lys, which were generally known, after the name of his headquarters, as the lines of La Bassée. There he lay, entrenched to the teeth, while Marlborough and Eugene, after long delay owing to the lateness of the spring, encamped with one hundred and ten thousand men to the south of Lille, between two villages, with which the reader will in due time make closer acquaintance, called Lincelles and Fontenoy. Thence they moved south straight upon Villars' lines with every apparent preparation for a direct attack upon them and for forcing their way into France at that point. The heavy artillery was sent to Menin on the Lys; report was everywhere rife of the coming assault, and Villars lost no time in summoning the garrison of Tournay to his assistance. On the 26th of June, at seven in the evening, Marlborough issued his orders to strike tents and march; and the whole army made up its mind for a bloody action before the lines at dawn. To the general surprise, after advancing some time in the direction of the French, the columns received orders to change direction to the left. After some hours' march eastward they crossed a river, but the men did not know that the bridge lay over the Marque and that it led them over the battlefield of Bouvines; nor was it until dawn that they saw the gray walls and the four spires of Tournay before them and discovered that they had invested the city.
June 26
July 7.
July 19 30 .
Aug. 23
Sept. 3.

Tournay had been fortified by Vauban and was one[514] of the strongest fortresses in France,[365] but its garrison had been weakened by the unsuspecting Villars, and there was little hope for it. The heavy artillery of the Allies, which had been sent to Menin, went down the Lys to Ghent and up the Scheldt to the besieged city, the trenches were opened on the 7th of July, and after three weeks, despite the demonstrations of Villars and of incessant heavy rain, Tournay was reduced to surrender.[366] Then followed the siege of the citadel, the most desperate enterprise yet undertaken by the Allied troops, inasmuch as the subterraneous works were more numerous and formidable than those above ground. The operations were, therefore, conducted by mine and countermine, with destructive explosions and confused combats in the darkness, which tried the nerves of the soldiers almost beyond endurance. The men did not object to be shot, but they dreaded to be buried alive by the hundred together through the springing of a single mine.[367] Four English regiments[368] bore their share in this work and suffered heavily in the course of it, until on the 3rd of September the citadel capitulated.

[515]
Aug. 20 31 .
Aug. 23
Sept. 3.

Before the close of the siege Marlborough and Eugene, leaving a sufficient force before Tournay, had moved back with the main army before the lines at Douay. They had long decided that the lines were far too formidable to be forced, but they saw no reason for communicating this opinion to Villars. On the 31st of August Lord Orkney, with twenty squadrons and the whole of the grenadiers of the army, marched away silently and swiftly eastward towards St. Ghislain on the Haine. Three days later, immediately after the capitulation of the citadel of Tournay, the Prince of Hessen-Cassel started at four o'clock in the afternoon in the same direction; at nine o'clock Cadogan followed him with forty squadrons more, and at midnight the whole army broke up its camp and marched after them. Twenty-six battalions alone were left before Tournay to superintend the evacuation and to level the siege works, with orders to watch Villars carefully and not to move until he did.
Aug. 26
Sept. 6.

The Prince of Hessen-Cassel soon overtook Orkney, from whom he learned that St. Ghislain was too strongly held to be carried by his small force. The Prince therefore at once pushed on. Rain was falling in torrents, and the roads were like rivers, but he continued his advance eastward behind the woods that line the Haine almost without a halt, till at length at two o'clock on the morning of the 6th of September he wheeled to the right and crossed the river at Obourg three miles to the north-east of Mons. Before him lay the river Trouille running down from the south through Mons, and in rear of it a line of entrenchments, thrown up from Mons to the Sambre during the last war to cover the province of Hainault. A short survey showed him that the lines were weakly guarded; and before noon he had passed them without opposition. His force, despite the weather and the state of the roads, had covered the fifty miles to Obourg in fifty-six hours.
Aug. 27
Sept. 7.

Too late Villars discovered that for the second time he had been duped, and that Marlborough had no[516] intention of forcing his way into France through the lines of La Bassée and the wet swampy country beyond them, when he could pass the lines of the Trouille without loss of a man. He was in a difficult position, for Mons was but slenderly garrisoned and difficult of access, while, if captured, it would be a valuable acquisition to the Allies. The approach to it from the westward was practically shut off by a kind of natural barrier of forest, running, roughly speaking, from St. Ghislain on the Haine on the north to Maubeuge on the Sambre to the south. In this barrier there were but two openings, the Trouée de Boussut between the village of that name and the Haine, and the Trouées d'Aulnois and de Louvière, which are practically the same, some miles further to the south. These will be more readily remembered, the northern entrance by the name of Jemappes, the southern by the name of Malplaquet. Villars no sooner knew what was going forward than he pushed forward a detachment with all speed upon the northern entrance, which was the nearer to him. The detachment came too late. The Prince of Hessen-Cassel was already astride of it, his right at Jemappes, his left at Ciply. The French thereupon fell back to await the approach of the main army of the Allies.
Aug. 26
Sept. 6.
Aug. 27
Sept. 7.

Meanwhile that army had toiled through the sea of mud on the northern bank of the Haine, and crossing the river had by evening invested Mons on the eastern side. On the following day Villars and his whole army also arrived on the scene and encamped a couple of miles to westward of the forest-barrier from Montreuil to Athis. Here he was joined by old Marshal Boufflers, who had volunteered his services at a time of such peril to France. The arrival of the gallant veteran caused such a tumult of rejoicing in the French camp that Marlborough and Eugene, not knowing what the clamour might portend, withdrew all but a fraction of the investing force from the town, and advancing westward into the plain of Mons caused the army to bivouac between Ciply and Quévy in order of battle.

[517]
Aug. 28
Sept. 8.
Aug. 29
Sept. 9.

Villars meanwhile had not moved, being adroit enough to threaten both passages and keep the Allies in doubt as to which he should select. While therefore the mass of the Allied army was moved towards the Trouée d'Aulnois, a strong detachment was sent up to watch the Trouée de Boussut. That night Villars sent detachments forward to occupy the southern passage, and by midday of the morrow his whole army was taking up its position across the opening. Marlborough at once moved his army forward, approaching so close that his left wing exchanged cannon shot with Villars's right. Everything pointed to an immediate attack on the French before they should have time to entrench themselves. Whether the Dutch deputies intervened to stay further movements is uncertain. All that is known is that a council of war was held, wherein, after much debate, it was resolved to await the arrival of the detachment from the Trouée de Boussut and of the troops that had been left behind at Tournay, and that in the meanwhile eighteen battalions should be sent north to the capture of St. Ghislain and the investment of Mons turned into a blockade. Evidently in some quarter there was reluctance to hazard a general action.
Aug. 30
Sept. 10.

Villars now set himself with immense energy to strengthen his position; and, when Marlborough and Eugene surveyed the defences at daybreak of the following morning, they were astonished at the formidable appearance of the entrenchments. Marlborough was once more for attacking without further delay, but he was opposed by the Dutch deputies and even by Eugene. The attack was therefore fixed for the morrow; and another day was lost which Villars did not fail to turn to excellent account.

The entrance from the westward to the Trouée d'Aulnois or southern entrance to the plain of Mons is marked by the two villages of Campe du Hamlet on the north and Malplaquet on the south. About a mile in advance of these villages the ground rises to its highest elevation, the opening being about three thousand[518] paces wide, and the ground broken and hollowed to right and left by small rivulets. This was the point selected by Villars for his position. It was bounded on his right by the forest of Laignières, the greatest length of which ran parallel to the Trouée, and on the left by a forest, known at different points by the names of Taisnières, Sart and Blaugies, the greatest length of which ran at right angles to the Trouée. Villars occupied the forest of Laignières with his extreme right, his battalions strengthening the natural obstacles of a thick and tangled covert by means of abattis. From the edge of the wood he constructed a triple line of entrenchments, which ran across the opening for full a third of its width, when they gave way to a line of nine redans. These redans in turn yielded place to a swamp backed by more entrenchments, which carried the defences across to the wood of Taisnières. Several cannon were mounted on the entrenchments and a battery of twenty guns before the redans. On Villars's left the forests of Taisnières and Sart projected before the general front, forming a salient and re-entering angle. Entrenchments and abattis were constructed in accordance with this configuration, and two more batteries were erected on this side, in addition to several guns at various points along the line, to enfilade an advancing enemy. Feeling even thus insecure Villars threw up more entrenchments at the villages of Malplaquet and Chaussée du Bois in rear of the wood of Sart, and was still hard at work on them to the last possible moment before the action. Finally in rear of all stood his cavalry, drawn up in several lines. The whole of his force amounted to ninety-five thousand men.

The position was most formidable, but it had its defects. In the first place the open space before the entrenchments was broken at about half a mile's distance by a small coppice, called the wood of Tiry, which could serve to mask the movements of the Allied centre. In the second place the forest of Sart ran out beyond the fortified angle in a long tongue, which would[519] effectually conceal any troops that might be directed against the extreme left flank. Finally the French cavalry, being massed in rear of the entrenchments, could take no part in the action until the defences were forced, and was therefore incapable of delivering any counterstroke. Marlborough and Eugene accordingly decided to make a feint attack on the French right and a true attack on their left front and flank. Villars would then be obliged to reinforce his left from his centre, which would enable the defences across the open to be carried, and the whole of the allied cavalry to charge forward and cut the French line in twain.
Aug. 31
Sept. 11.

The dawn of the 11th of September broke in dense heavy mist which completely veiled the combatants from each other. At three o'clock prayers were said in the Allied camp, and then the artillery was moved in position. Forty pieces were massed in a single battery in the open ground against the French left, and were covered with an epaulment for defence against enfilading fire; twenty-eight more were stationed against the French right, and the lighter pieces were distributed, as usual, among the different brigades. Then the columns of attack were formed. Twenty-eight battalions under Count Lottum were directed against the eastern face of the salient angle of the forest of Taisnières, and forty battalions of Eugene's army under General Schulemberg against the northern face, while a little to the right of Schulemberg two thousand men under General Gauvain were to press on the French left flank in rear of their entrenchments. In rear of Schulemberg fifteen British battalions under Lord Orkney were drawn up in a single line on the open ground, ready to advance against the centre as soon as Schulemberg and Lottum should have done their work. Far away beyond Gauvain to the French left General Withers with five British and fourteen foreign battalions and six squadrons was to turn the extreme French left at the village of La Folie.

For the feint against the French right thirty-one[520] battalions, chiefly Dutch, were massed together under the Prince of Orange. The cavalry was detailed in different divisions to support the infantry. The Prince of Orange was backed by twenty-one Dutch squadrons under the Prince of Hesse, Orkney by thirty more under Auvergne, Lottum by the British and Hanoverian cavalry, and Schulemberg by Eugene's horse. The orders given to the cavalry were to sustain the foot as closely as possible without advancing into range of grape-shot, and as soon as the central entrenchments were forced to press forward, form before the entrenchments and drive the French army from the field. The whole force of the Allies was as near as may be equal to that of the French.

At half-past seven the fog lifted and the guns of both armies opened fire. Eugene and Marlborough thereupon parted, the former taking charge of the right, the latter of the left of the army. Then the divisions of Orange and of Lottum advanced in two dense columns up the glade. Presently the Dutch halted, just beyond range of grape-shot, while Lottum's column pushed on under a terrific fire to the rear of the forty-gun battery and deployed to the right in three lines. Then the fire of the cannon slackened for a time, till about nine o'clock a salvo of the forty guns gave the signal for attack. Lottum's and Schulemberg's divisions thereupon advanced perpendicularly to each other, each in three lines, Gauvain's men crept into the wood unperceived, and Orkney extended his scarlet battalions across the glade.

Entering the wood Schulemberg's Austrians made the best of their way through marshes and streams and fallen trees, nearer and nearer to the French entrenchments. The enemy suffered them to approach within pistol-shot and delivered a volley which sent them staggering back; and though the Austrians extended their line till it joined Gauvain's detachment, yet they could make little way against the French fire. Lottum's attack was little more successful. Heedless of the[521] tempest of shot in their front and flank the Germans pressed steadily on, passed a swamp and a stream under a galling fire, and fell fiercely upon the breastwork beyond; but being disordered by the ground and thinned by heavy losses they were forced to fall back. Schulemberg then resumed the attack with his second line, but with all his exertions could not carry the face of the angle opposed to him. Picardie, the senior regiment of the French Line, held this post and would not yield it to the fiercest assault. The utmost that Schulemberg could accomplish was to sweep away the regiments in the wood, and so uncover its flank.

Lottum, too, extended his front and attacked once more, Orkney detaching three British battalions, the Buffs, Sixteenth, and Temple's, to his assistance, while Marlborough took personal command of Auvergne's cavalry in support. The Buffs on Lottum's extreme left found a swamp between them and the entrenchments, so deep as to be almost impassable. In they plunged, notwithstanding, and were struggling through it when a French officer drew out twelve battalions and moved them down straight upon their left flank. The British brigade would have been in a sorry plight had not Villars caught sight of Marlborough at the head of Auvergne's horse and instantly recalled his troops. So the red-coats scrambled on, and turning the flank of the entrenchment while Lottum's men attacked the front, at length with desperate fighting and heavy loss forced the French back into the wood. Thus exposed to the double attack of Lottum and Schulemberg Picardie at last fell back, but joined itself to Champagne, the next regiment in seniority; and the two gallant corps finding a rallying-point behind an abattis turned and stood once more. Their comrades gave way in disorder, but the wood was so dense that the troops on both sides became disjointed, and the opposing lines broke up into a succession of small parties fighting desperately from tree to tree with no further guidance than their own fury.

[522]

The entrenchments on the French left had been forced; and Villars sent urgent messages to his right for reinforcements. But Boufflers could spare him none. After Schulemberg and Lottum had been engaged for half an hour, the Prince of Orange lost patience and, without waiting for orders, opened not a false but a real attack against the French right. On the extreme left of Orange's division were two Highland regiments of the Dutch service, Tullibardine's and Hepburn's, and next to them King William's favourite Blue Guards. These were to attack the defences in the forest of Laignières, while the rest fell upon the entrenchments in the open; and it was at the head of the Highlanders and of the Blue Guards that Orange took his place. A tremendous fire of grape and musketry saluted them as they advanced, and within the first few yards most of the Prince's staff were struck dead by his side. His own horse fell dead beneath him, but he disentangled himself and continued to lead the advance on foot. A few minutes more brought his battalions under the fire of a French battery on their left flank. Whole ranks were swept away, but still the Prince was to be seen waving his hat in front of his troops; and Highlanders and Dutchmen pressing steadily on carried the first entrenchment with a rush. They then halted to deploy, but before they could advance further Boufflers had rallied his men, and charging down upon his assailants drove them back headlong. On Orange's right, success as short-lived was bought at as dear a price. The Prince still exerted himself with the utmost gallantry, but his attack was beaten back at all points. The loss of the Dutch amounted to six thousand killed and wounded; the Blue Guards had been annihilated, and the Hanoverian battalions, which had supported them, had suffered little less severely. In fact, the Prince's precipitation had brought about little less than a disaster.

The confusion in this part of the field called both Marlborough and Eugene to the Allied left to restore[523] order. Further useless sacrifice of life was checked, for enough and more than enough had been done to prevent Boufflers from detaching troops to Villars. But soon came an urgent message requiring their presence once more on the right. Schulemberg and Lottum had continued to push their attack as best they could; and red-coated English, blue-coated Prussians, and white-coated Austrians were struggling forward from tree to tree, tripping over felled trunks, bursting through tangled foliage, panting through quagmires, loading and firing and cursing, guided only by the flashes before them in the cloud of foul blinding smoke. But now on the extreme right Withers was steadily advancing; and his turning movement, though the Duke and Eugene knew it not, was gradually forcing the French out of the wood. Villars seeing the danger called the Irish Brigade and other regiments from the centre, and launched them full upon the British and Prussians. Such was the impetuosity of the Irish that they forced them back some way, until their own formation was broken by the density of the forest. Eugene hastened to the spot to rally the retreating battalions and though struck by a musket ball in the head refused to leave the field. Then up came Withers, just when he was wanted. The Eighteenth Royal Irish met the French Royal Regiment of Ireland, crushed it with two volleys by sheer superiority of fire, drove it back in disorder, and pressed on.[369] Eugene also advanced and was met by Villars, who at this critical moment was bringing forward his reinforcements in person. A musket shot struck the Marshal above the knee. Totally unmoved the gallant man called for a chair from which to continue to direct his troops, but presently fainting from pain was carried insensible from the field. The French, notwithstanding his fall, still barred the advance of the Allies, but they had been driven from their entrenchments and from the wood on the left, and only held their own by the help of the troops[524] that had been withdrawn from the centre. The moment for which Marlborough had waited was now come.

The forty-gun battery was moved forward, and Orkney leading his British battalions against the redans captured them, though not without considerable loss, at the first rush. Two Hanoverian battalions on their left turned the flank of the adjoining entrenchments, and Orange renewing his attack cleared the whole of the defences in the glade. The Allied cavalry followed close at their heels. Auvergne's Dutch were the first to pass the entrenchments, and though charged by the French while in the act of deploying succeeded in repelling the first attack. But now Boufflers came up at the head of the French Gendarmerie, and drove them back irresistibly to the edge of the entrenchments. Here, however, the French were checked, for Orkney had lined the parapet with his British, and though the Gendarmerie thrice strove gallantly to make an end of the Dutch, they were every time driven back by the fire of the infantry. Meanwhile the central battery, which had been parted right and left into two divisions, advanced and supported the infantry by a cross-fire, and Marlborough coming up with the British and Prussian horse fell upon the Gendarmerie in their turn. Boufflers, however, was again ready with fresh troops, and coming down upon Marlborough with the French Household Cavalry crashed through his two leading lines and threw even the third into disorder. Then Eugene coming up with the Imperial horse threw the last reserves into the melée and drove the French back. Simultaneously the Prince of Hesse hurled his squadrons against the infantry of the French right, and with the help of the Dutch foot isolated it still further from the centre. Then Boufflers saw that the day was lost and ordered a general retreat to Bavay, while he could yet keep his troops together. The movement was conducted in admirable order, for the French though beaten were not routed, while the Allies were too much exhausted to pursue. So Boufflers retired unmolested,[525] though it was not yet three o'clock, honoured alike by friend and foe for his bravery and his skill.

To face page 524
MALPLAQUET
Aug. 31st Sep. 11th 1709.

Thus ended the battle of Malplaquet, one of the bloodiest ever fought by mortal men. Little is known of the details of the fighting, these being swallowed up in the shade of the forest of Taisnières, where no man could see what was going forward. All that is certain is that neither side gave quarter, and that the combat was not only fierce but savage. The loss of the French was about twelve thousand men, and the trophies taken from them, against which they could show trophies of their own, were five hundred prisoners, fifty standards and colours and sixteen guns. The loss of the Allies was not less than twenty thousand men killed and wounded, due chiefly to the mad onset of the Prince of Orange. The Dutch infantry out of thirty battalions lost eight thousand men, or more than half of their number; the British out of twenty battalions lost nineteen hundred men,[370] the heaviest sufferers being the Coldstream Guards, Buffs, Orrery's and Temple's.[371]

[526]

The more closely the battle is studied the more the conviction grows that no action of Marlborough's was fought less in accordance with his own plans. We have seen that he would have preferred to fight it on either of the two preceding days, and that he deferred to Eugene against his own judgment in suffering it to be postponed. Then again there was the almost criminal folly of the Prince of Orange, which upset all preconcerted arrangements, threw away thousands of lives to no purpose, and not only permitted the French to retreat unharmed at the close of the day but seriously imperilled the success of the action at its beginning. Nevertheless there are still not wanting men to believe the slanders of the contemptible faction then rising to power in England, that Marlborough fought the battle from pure lust of slaughter.

Still, in spite of all blunders, which were none of Marlborough's, Malplaquet was a very grand action. The French were equal in number to the Allies and occupied a position which was described at the time as a fortified citadel. They were commanded by an able general, whom they liked and trusted, they were in good heart, and they looked forward confidently to victory. Yet they were driven back and obliged to leave Mons to its fate; and though Villars with his usual bluster described the victory as more disastrous than defeat, yet French officers could not help asking themselves whether resistance to Marlborough and Eugene were not hopeless. Luxemburg with seventy-five thousand men against fifty thousand had only with difficulty succeeded in forcing the faulty position of Landen; yet the French had failed to hold the far more formidable lines of Malplaquet against an army no stronger than their own. Say Villars what he might, and beyond all doubt he fought a fine fight, the inference could not be encouraging to France.
Sept. 28
Oct. 9.

It was not until the third day after the fight that the Allies returned to the investment of Mons. Eugene was wounded, and Marlborough not only worn out by[527] fatigue but deeply distressed over the enormous sacrifice of life. The siege was retarded by the marshy nature of the ground and by heavy rain; but on the 9th of October the garrison capitulated, and therewith the campaign came to an end. Tournay had given the Allies firm foothold on the Upper Scheldt, and Mons was of great value as covering the captured towns in Flanders and Brabant. The season's operations had not been without good fruit, despite the heavy losses at Malplaquet.
CHAPTER IX
Once more I return to Spain, where the armies of the Bourbons had recommenced operations in the winter of 1708. At the end of October General d'Asfeld having first captured Denia after a short siege had advanced against Alicante, which was garrisoned by eight hundred British[372] and Huguenots, under Major-General John Richards. The siege of Alicante is memorable chiefly for the manner of Richards's death. The castle was built on the solid rock, and the only possible method of destroying its defences was by means of mining. After three months of incessant work d'Asfeld hewed a gallery through the rock beneath the castle, charged it with seventy-five tons of powder, and then summoned Richards to surrender, inviting him at the same time to send two officers to inspect the mine. Two officers accordingly were sent, who returned with the report that the explosion of the mine would doubtless be destructive, but not, in their judgment, fatal to further defence. Richards therefore rejected the summons, nor, though d'Asfeld thrice repeated it, would he return any other answer.
1709.
Feb. 20
March 3.

Immediately over the gallery were two guards, each of thirty men, which could not be withdrawn without peril to the safety of the castle. Early in the morning fixed for the springing of the mine, the sentries were posted as usual, pacing up and down in the keen morning air, when General Richards and all the senior officers of the garrison who were off duty came[529] and joined them. They were come to stand by their men in the hour of trial. A little before six a thin column of blue smoke came curling up the rock, and a corporal of the guard reported that the match had been fired. Richards and his officers remained immovable, the guard stood under arms, and the sentries stuck to their posts. Presently the whole rock trembled again; the ground beneath their feet was rent into vast clefts which yawned for a moment with a hideous hollow roar and instantly closed. When the rumbling had ceased there were still eighteen men left on the rock, but Richards with eleven other officers and forty-two of their comrades had been swallowed up like the company of Korah. Yet Richards was right, for when Admiral Byng and General Stanhope arrived six weeks later the garrison still remained unconquered in the castle. But it was thought best to evacuate it, so the little force was carried away to Mahon, leaving Richards and his brave companions asleep in the womb of the rock. Among the forgotten graves of British soldiers that are sown so thickly over the world, one at least is safe from the ravages of time, the living tomb over which John Richards and his comrades stood, waiting undismayed till it should open to engulf them at Alicante.
April 26
May 7.

Shortly after the removal of the garrison from the castle Lord Galway and the Portuguese opened the campaign on the side of Portugal near Campo Mayor. Their total force consisted of about fifteen thousand men, including barely three thousand British infantry[373] and artillery; but its weakest point was that it was commanded by a Portuguese officer, the Marquis de Fronteria. Opposed to it were five thousand Spanish horse and ten thousand Spanish foot under the Marquis de Bay, who advanced with his cavalry only to the plain of Gudina on the left bank of the Caya, in order to entice Fronteria across the river. Galway entreated Fronteria not to think of attacking Bay, but the[530] Portuguese commander, disregarding his advice, sent the whole of his horse together with the Fifth, Twentieth, Thirty-ninth and Paston's regiments of British Foot across the Caya, and drew them up, rather less than five thousand men in all, on the plain beyond.

Bay at once sent for his infantry, but without waiting for them boldly attacked the Portuguese horse on Fronteria's right wing. Before the Spanish cavalry could reach them the Portuguese turned and fled, leaving the flank of the British infantry uncovered. The four regiments, however, stood firm, and having repulsed three charges formed a hollow square and made a steady and orderly retreat. Meanwhile Galway had sent forward Brigadier Sankey with the Thirteenth, Stanwix's and a Catalan regiment in support, but before they could reach their comrades Bay charged the other wing of Portuguese horse, which fled as precipitately as the former, and turning the whole of his force against Sankey's brigade isolated it completely and compelled it to surrender. The whole of the loss, as usual, fell on the British; and Galway, none too soon, vowed that they would never fight in company with the Portuguese again.
1710.

The action on the Caya practically ended the campaign in Portugal for 1709. The operations in Catalonia during the same year call for little notice; nor was it until July of the following year that Staremberg, reinforced by British[374] and Germans to a strength of twenty thousand foot and five thousand horse, was able to take the field with activity. He lay at the time at Agramont on the Segre, the Spanish army under Villadarias, the unsuccessful besieger of Gibraltar, being a couple of marches to south of him at Lerida. Staremberg resolved to take the offensive forthwith and to carry the war into Aragon.

[531]
July 16 27 .

Crossing the Segre he sent forward General Stanhope with a small force of dragoons and grenadiers to seize the pass of Alfaraz, before the Spaniards could reach it. Stanhope executed his task with his usual diligence; and the arrival of the Spanish army a few hours after him led to a brilliant little combat of cavalry at Almenara. The odds against the Allies were heavy, for they had but twenty-six squadrons against forty-two of the enemy. Both sides, each drawn up in two lines, observed each other inactive for some time, Staremberg hesitating to permit Stanhope to charge. At length, however, he let him go. The first line, wherein all the British were posted, sprang forward with Generals Stanhope and Carpenter at their head against the Spanish horse, and after a sharp engagement drove them back. The second line followed and forced them back still further upon their infantry. Panic set in among the Spaniards, and presently the whole of the Spanish army was in full retreat to Lerida. The loss of the enemy was thirteen hundred killed and wounded; that of the Allies did not exceed four hundred, half of whom were British.[375]
Aug. 7 18 .
Sept. 17 28 .

After more than a fortnight's stay at Lerida King Philip summoned Bay to supersede Villadarias, but finding it impossible to advance in face of Staremberg retreated in the direction of Saragossa. Staremberg at once started in pursuit, overtook Bay under the walls of Saragossa and totally defeated him.[376] Contrary to his own better judgment he then marched for Madrid, and led the Archduke Charles for the second time into his capital. The bulk of the army was quartered in the suburbs, but a strong detachment was sent away under Stanhope to occupy Toledo, and, this done, to follow the Tagus to the bridge of Almaraz, where it [532] should join hands with a force that was to advance from Portugal.
Sept.

The plan was hardly formed before it was broken to pieces. On receiving the news of the defeat at Saragossa Lewis the Fourteenth at once formed an army of his garrisons on the frontier and sent it southward under the command of Vend?me. By the end of September he had united his force with Bay's at Aranda on the Douro and was drawing in fresh troops from all sides. The whole population being in his favour kept him well supplied with intelligence. Before either Stanhope or the Portuguese could reach Almaraz, Vend?me had pounced upon it and destroyed the bridge. Stanhope perforce retired to Toledo, and Vend?me, having by this time collected a force superior to that of the Allies, moved up the Tagus and encamped on the historic field of Talavera.
Nov. 22
Dec. 3.
Nov. 25
Dec. 6.
Nov. 27
Dec. 8.

Staremberg now found it necessary to evacuate Madrid. The Archduke Charles had been coldly received, supplies were failing, and the army was much weakened by sickness. Recalling Stanhope, therefore, from Toledo, he retired up the left bank of the Taju?a; the army, for convenience of forage and supplies, marching in five columns of different nations—Germans, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and British. The third day's march brought the first four columns to Cifuentes, the British who formed the rearguard diverging across the river to Brihuega some fourteen miles from the rest. Stanhope had observed a large body of horse following close at his heels during the march, and had reported the fact to Staremberg, but none the less received orders to halt for another day and to collect provisions. Next morning the enemy's horse appeared on the hill in force, and was joined after a few hours, to the great astonishment of Stanhope, by its infantry. His efforts to obtain intelligence had been foiled by the hostility of the peasants, and neither he nor Staremberg had the faintest idea that there was any infantry within fifty miles of them. In truth this body of foot had,[533] under Vend?me's direction, covered one hundred and seventy miles in seven days, a march of incredible speed, which, in Stanhope's own words, was his undoing. By five o'clock in the evening Brihuega was fully invested by nine thousand men, and the escape of the British was impossible.

Stanhope's position was desperate. He had but eight battalions and eight squadrons, all so much weakened as to number together but two thousand five hundred men. The town, which was of considerable extent, had no defences but an old Moorish wall, too narrow in most places to afford a banquette for musketeers. Further, the streets were narrow and commanded on all sides by hills within range of artillery and even of musketry. Nevertheless he might hold out till Staremberg came to his relief; so rejecting the summons to surrender, he barricaded the gates, threw up entrenchments as well as he could, and at nightfall sent away his aide-de-camp, who at great risk passed through the enemy's lines, to Staremberg's camp.
Nov. 28
Dec. 9.

At midnight King Philip and Vend?me arrived with the rest of the army, horse, foot, and artillery, increasing the investing force to over twenty thousand men. Before morning two batteries had already been erected, which opened fire at nine o'clock. Two breaches were speedily made in the wall, which the British could not repair except under fire, and a mine was dug to make a third. At three o'clock in the afternoon an assault was delivered at both breaches, and was met by a vigorous resistance. While the combat was raging around them, the mine was fired and a third breach was formed, through which large bodies of the enemy effected an entrance before they were perceived. The British however turned upon them and beat them out again. Finally, the first attack was totally repulsed; and the French entrenched themselves in the breaches to await reinforcements. Again the assault was renewed and again it was driven back with heavy loss by the deadly English fire. Ammunition now began to fail, but[534] the little garrison held its own with the bayonet, contesting every inch of ground, horse and dragoons fighting dismounted by the side of the foot, and every man doing his utmost. Forced back at length from their entrenchments the British set fire to the houses which had been gained by the enemy, and after four hours of hard fighting still held the best part of the town. But their ammunition by this time was almost exhausted, and there was no sign of Staremberg's appearance; so at seven o'clock Stanhope, unwilling uselessly to sacrifice the lives of his men, capitulated, and he and his gallant little force became prisoners of war. Never did British troops fight better than at Brihuega; but even where all were so much distinguished Stanhope could not refrain from giving special praise to the Scots Guards. The total loss of the British was six hundred killed and wounded. That of the enemy was nearly three times as great.
Nov. 29
Dec. 10.
Nov. 30
Dec. 9.

It was not until the morning of the next day that Staremberg approached Brihuega, and meeting the advanced squadrons of Vend?me's, drew up his army for battle in the plains of Villa Viciosa. He had but thirteen thousand men against twenty thousand, but he made skilful dispositions, posting his left behind a deep ravine and strengthening his right, which lay on the open plain, by interlacing the battalions with his few feeble squadrons of horse. The British troops present, Lepell's dragoons, Dubourgay's and Richard's foot, were stationed on the left. The action opened with a long cannonade, after which Vend?me's horse of the right crossed the ravine, and coming down with great spirit and in overwhelming numbers on Staremberg's left swept it after a short resistance completely away. The English dragoons were very heavily punished and the two battalions were cut to pieces. The centre also was broken; and the victorious Spaniards at once fell on the baggage beyond it and began to plunder. But the right of the Allies had held its own, and Staremberg, taking advantage of the disorder among the Spaniards,[535] contrived with great coolness and skill to convert the action into a drawn battle. The whole engagement, indeed, reproduces curiously the features of the early battles of our own Civil War. On the next day, however, Staremberg was compelled to retreat, leaving his artillery to the enemy; and though Barcelona, Tarragona, and Balaguer were still kept for the Austrian side, the campaign closed with the loss to the Allies of the whole of Spain.

I shall not trouble the reader with the petty operations of the following year, for the war in the Peninsula was practically closed by the battles of Brihuega and Villa Viciosa. The spasmodic nature of the operations has made them difficult and, I fear, wearisome to the reader to follow, quite apart from the dissatisfaction that necessarily attends a long tale of failure. Disunion of purpose and the extreme inefficiency of the Portuguese were the principal infirmities of the Allies throughout the war; the long distance from their true bases at Portsmouth and at Brill their principal disadvantage. Again and again the French were able to retrieve a defeat by sending their garrisons from the frontier-towns across the Pyrenees. Too late, on the appointment of Staremberg, the Allies decided that it would be better to fight the war in the Peninsula with Germans, who could march over Italy and cross the Mediterranean to Catalonia, instead of with English and Dutch, who must make the long and dangerous passage across the Bay of Biscay and through the Straits. But the true secret of the success of the Bourbons, as Lord Macaulay long ago pointed out, lay in the fact that the general sentiment of Spain was on their side, a force which, after another century, shall be seen working to make the fame of a great English commander in another and greater Peninsular war.

Unfortunately the disasters of the year 1710 were not confined to Spain. Up to the autumn of 1709 it seemed that England was still bent on prosecuting the war till the ends of the Grand Alliance should have been[536] attained. Seven new regiments[377] at any rate had been formed during the year, which might be taken as an earnest of serious intentions. But ever since 1707 Robert Harley, who will be remembered as the proposer of the imbecile motion for disbandment which nearly drove King William from England, had been working with all the resources of a weak, crafty, and dishonest nature to undermine the Government that had so far carried the country triumphantly through the struggle. It was the misfortune of Great Britain at this time to lie at the mercy principally of three women, Queen Anne, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Mrs. Masham. Of these the Duchess alone had any ability, which ability, however, was greatly discounted by her meddlesome and imperious disposition. So long as she retained her ascendency over Anne, things went unpleasantly for the Queen but on the whole well for the country; when her ungovernable temper drove Anne into the arms of Mrs. Masham, the Queen led a quieter life, but the country suffered. Marlborough, who was aware of his wife's waning influence and foresaw the consequences, tried hard on his return from the campaign of 1709 to assure himself a permanent station of power by asking to be made commander-in-chief for life. The request was tactless as well as unprecedented. Anne, greatly offended, replied by a positive refusal, which Marlborough, for once forgetting his usual serenity, received with culpably ill grace.

So far the Queen was undoubtedly right and Marlborough undoubtedly wrong; but at the beginning of the new year the situation was reversed. The colonelcy of a regiment fell vacant and was filled up by the Queen on the nomination not of the commander-in-chief but of Mrs. Masham by the appointment of her brother, Colonel Hill. Marlborough naturally resolved to resign at once, while the wise and sagacious Somers[537] remonstrated most strongly with the Queen against this foolish step, as subversive of all discipline and injurious to the army. Unfortunately the Duke, instead of insisting that either he or Mrs. Masham must go, was persuaded to consent to a compromise, which the Queen regarded as a victory for herself and rejoiced over with all the fervour of a weak nature. In the intense personal bitterness of the struggle no one but Somers, outside the military profession, paused for a moment to reflect on its consequences to the Army.
April 11 22 .
June 15 26 .
Aug. 17 28 .

The next object of the opposing faction was to get Marlborough out of England to the Low Countries as soon as possible, which was duly effected, at Harley's instance, by ordering him to take a part in the negotiations for a peace. These negotiations coming to naught, he opened the campaign in April by a rapid movement, which brought him safely over the lines of La Bassée, and laid siege to Douay. The town made a firm defence for two months, but fell on the 26th of June; and Marlborough now proposed to himself either to invest Arras or to advance further into France and cross the Somme. Villars, however, though he had failed to relieve Douay, had made excellent dispositions for the defence of the frontier, and was lying unassailable behind a new series of lines, which he had drawn, as he said later, to be the ne plus ultra of Marlborough. The Duke therefore turned to the siege of Bethune, which surrendered on the 28th of August, and thereafter to the sieges of Aire and St. Venant on the Upper Lys, which closed the campaign. Each one of these fortresses was strong and made a spirited resistance, costing the Allies altogether some fifteen thousand men killed and wounded. The operations, though less brilliant than those of other campaigns, completed the communication with Lille, opened the whole line of the Lys, and increased the facilities for joint action with an expedition by sea, landing at Calais or Abbeville. Another such blow as Ramillies would have gone near to bring the Allies before the walls of Paris. Throughout the[538] campaign, however, Marlborough acted always with extreme caution, abandoning the plans which he had once favoured for concerted operations with the fleet. He knew that the slightest failure would lay him open to overwhelming attack from his enemies at home, whose triumph would mean not only his own fall but, what he dreaded much more, the ascendency of unscrupulous politicians who would sacrifice the whole fruits of the war to factious ends, and bring disgrace, perhaps ruin, upon England.

Meanwhile the Queen, with all the pettiness of a weak nature, kept parading her power by foolish interference with matters which she did not understand. Marlborough had submitted a list of colonels for promotion to general's rank, but as the name of Colonel Hill was not among them she insisted on promoting every colonel of this year, regardless of expense, propriety, justice, or discipline, merely for the sake of including him. In August came a heavier blow in the dismissal of Godolphin and the appointment of Harley as Lord Keeper in his place, which accomplished the long-threatened downfall of the Government. By a refinement of insult the Duke's Secretary-at-War, Adam Cardonnel, was also removed and replaced, without the slightest reference to Marlborough, by Mr. Granville. Finally, shortly after his return from the campaign the Queen, despite his entreaties, definitely dismissed the Duchess from all her posts, and even went the length of ordering the Duke to forbid the moving of any vote of thanks for his services by Parliament.

The example thus set in high places was quickly followed. A few even of the Duke's own officers, such as the Duke of Argyll, to the huge disgust and contempt of the Army, turned against him. The mouth of every libeller and slanderer was opened. Swift and St. John, the only two Englishmen whose intellect entitled them to be named in the same breath with Marlborough, vied with each other in blackening his character. Nothing was too vile nor too extravagant to be insinuated against[539] the greatest soldier, statesman, and diplomatist in Europe. He was prolonging the war for his own ends; he could make peace if he would, but he would not; he delighted in the wanton sacrifice of life; finally, he had neither personal courage nor military talent. "I suppose," wrote Marlborough bitterly, "that I must every summer venture my life in battle, and be found fault with in the winter for not bringing home peace, though I wish for it with all my heart and soul."

He would fain have resigned but for the remonstrances of Godolphin and Eugene, who entreated him to hold the Grand Alliance together for yet a little while, and gain for Europe a permanent peace. They might have spared their prayers had they known the secrets of the Cabinet, for Harley and his gang were already opening the secret negotiations with Lewis which were to dissolve the Alliance and grant to France all that Europe had fought for ten years to withhold from her. For these men, who accused Marlborough of wilful squandering of life, thought nothing of sending brave soldiers forth to lose their lives for a cause which they had made up their minds to betray. But it is idle to waste comment on such creatures, long dead albeit unhanged; though the fact must not be forgotten in the history of the relations of the House of Commons towards the Army. It will be more profitable to accompany the great Duke to his last campaign.
CHAPTER X
The French, fully aware of the political changes in England, had during the winter made extraordinary exertions to prolong the war for yet one more campaign, and to that end had covered the northern frontier with a fortified barrier on a gigantic scale. Starting from the coast of Picardy the lines followed the course of the river Canche almost to its source. From thence across to the Gy or southern fork of the Upper Scarpe ran a line of earthworks, extending from Oppy to Montenancourt. From the latter point the Gy and the Scarpe were dammed so as to form inundations as far as Biache, at which place a canal led the line of defence from the Scarpe to the Sensée. Here more inundations between the two rivers carried the barrier to Bouchain, whence it followed the Scheldt to Valenciennes. From thence more earthworks prolonged the lines to the Sambre, which carried them at last to their end at Namur.

This was a formidable obstacle to the advance of the Allies, but no lines had sufficed to stop Marlborough yet, and with Eugene by his side the Duke did not despair. Before he could start for the campaign, however, the news came that the Emperor Joseph was dead of smallpox, an event which signified the almost certain accession of the Archduke Charles to the Imperial crown and the consequent withdrawal of his candidature for the throne of Spain. Eugene was consequently detained at home; and worse than this, a fine opportunity was afforded for making a breach in the Grand Alliance. To render the Duke's difficulties still greater,[541] though his force was already weakened by the necessity of finding garrisons for the towns captured in the previous year, the English Government had withdrawn from him five battalions[378] for an useless expedition to Newfoundland under the command of Mrs. Masham's brother, General Hill; an expedition which may be dismissed for the present without further mention than that it was dogged by misfortune from first to last, suffered heavy loss through shipwreck, and accomplished literally nothing.
April 20
May 1.
June 3 14 .

Nevertheless the Imperial army was present, though without Eugene. The whole of the forces were assembled a little to the south of Lille at Orchies, and on the 1st of May Marlborough moved forward to a position parallel to that of Villars, who lay in rear of the river Sensée with his left at Oisy and his right at Bouchain. There both armies remained stationary and inactive for six weeks. Eugene came, but presently received orders to return and to bring his army with him. On the 14th of June Marlborough moved away one march westward to the plain of Lens in order to conceal this enforced diminution of his army. The position invited a battle, but Villars only moved down within his lines parallel to the Duke; and once more both armies remained inactive for five weeks. After the departure of Eugene the French commander detached a portion of his force to the Rhine, but even so he had one hundred and thirty-one battalions against ninety-four, and one hundred and eighty-seven squadrons against one hundred and forty-five of the Allies.
June 25
July 6.

We now approach what is perhaps the most remarkable and certainly the most entertaining feat of the Duke during the whole war. Villars, bound by his instructions, would not come out and fight; his lines could not be forced by an army of inferior strength,[542] and they could therefore be passed only by stratagem. The inundation on the Sensée between Arras and Bouchain could be traversed only by two causeways, the larger of which was defended by a strong fort at Arleux, the other being covered by a redoubt at Aubigny half a mile below it. Marlborough knew that he could take the fort at Arleux at any time and demolish it, but he knew also that Villars would certainly retake it and rebuild as soon as his back was turned. He therefore set himself to induce Villars to demolish it himself. With this view he detached a strong force under General Rantzau to capture the fort, which was done without difficulty. The Duke then gave orders that the captured works should be greatly strengthened, and for their further protection posted a large force under the Prussian General Hompesch on the glacis of Douay, some three miles distant from the fort.
June 28
July 9.
July 10 21 .

As fate ordained it Hompesch, thinking himself secure under the guns of Douay, neglected his outposts and even his sentries, and was surprised two days later by a sudden attack from Villars, which was only repulsed with considerable difficulty and not a little shame. Villars was in ecstasies over his success, and Marlborough displayed considerable annoyance. However, the Duke reinforced Hompesch, as if to show the value which he attached to Arleux, and pushed forward the new works with the greatest vigour. Finally, when all was completed, he threw a weak garrison into the fort and led the rest of the army away two marches westward, encamping opposite the lines between the Canche and the Scarpe. Villars likewise moved westward parallel to him; but before he started he detached a force to attack Arleux. The commander of the fort sent a message to Marlborough that he could not possibly hold it, and the Duke at once despatched Cadogan with a strong force to relieve it. It was noticed, however, that Cadogan made no such haste as the urgency of the occasion would have seemed to require;[543] and indeed before he had gone half way he returned with the intelligence that Arleux had surrendered.
July 15 26 .
July 17 28 .

Villars was elated beyond measure; and Marlborough for the first time in his life seemed to be greatly distressed and cast down. Throwing off his usual serenity he declared in public with much passion that he would be even with Villars yet, and would attack him, come what might of it, where he lay. Then came the news that Villars had razed the whole works of Arleux, over which he had spent such pains, entirely to the ground. This increased the Duke's ill-temper. He vowed that he would avenge this insult to his army, and renewed his menace of a direct attack on the entrenchments. Villars now detached a force to make a diversion in Brabant; and this step seemed to drive Marlborough distracted. Vowing that he would check its march he sent off ten thousand men under Lord Albemarle to Bethune, and the whole of his baggage and heavy artillery to Douay. Having thus weakened an army already inferior to that of the French, he repaired the roads that led towards the enemy's entrenchments, and with much display of vindictiveness, sulkiness, and general vexation advanced one march nearer to the lines. His army watched his proceedings with amazement, for it had never expected such proceedings from Corporal John.
July 22
August 2.
July 23
August 3.
July 24
August 4.

Villars meanwhile was in a transport of delight. He drew every man not only from all parts of the lines but also from the neighbouring garrisons towards the threatened point, and asked nothing better than that Marlborough should attack. In the height of exultation he actually wrote to Versailles that he had brought the Duke to his ne plus ultra. Marlborough's strange manner still remained the same. On the 2nd of August he advanced to within a league of the lines, and during that day and the next set the whole of his cavalry to work to collect fascines. At nightfall of the 3rd he sent away all his light artillery, together with every wheeled vehicle, under escort of a strong detachment,[544] and next morning rode forward with most of his generals to reconnoitre the lines. Captain Parker of the Eighteenth Royal Irish, who had obtained permission to ride with the Staff, was amazed at the Duke's behaviour. He had now thrown off all his ill-temper and was calm and cool as usual, indicating this point and that to his officers. "Your brigade, General, will attack here, such and such brigades will be on your right and left, such another in support, and you will be careful of this, that, and other." The generals listened and stared; they understood the instructions clearly enough, but they could not help regarding them as madness. So the reconnaissance proceeded, drearily enough, and was just concluding when General Cadogan turned his horse, unnoticed, out of the crowd, struck in his spurs and galloped back to camp at the top of his speed. Presently the Duke also turned, and riding back very slowly issued orders to prepare for a general attack on the morrow.

At this all ranks of the army, from the general to the drummer, fell into the deepest depression. Not a man could fail to see that direct attack on the lines was a hopeless enterprise at the best of times, and doubly hopeless now that half of the army and the whole of the artillery had been detached for other service. Again the violent and unprecedented outburst of surliness and ill-temper was difficult to explain; and the only possible explanation was that the Duke, rendered desperate by failure and misfortunes, had thrown prudence to the winds and did not care what he did. A few only clung faintly to the hope that the chief who had led them so often to victory might still have some surprise in store for them; but the most part gave themselves up for lost, and lamented loudly that they should ever have lived to see such a change come over the Old Corporal.

So passed the afternoon among the tents of the Allies; but meanwhile Cadogan with forty hussars at his heels had long started from the camp and was galloping hard across the plain of Lens to Douay, five[545] leagues away. There he found Hompesch ready with his garrison, now strengthened by detachments from Bethune and elsewhere to twelve thousand foot and two thousand horse, and told him that the time was come. Hompesch thereupon issued his orders for the troops to be ready to march that night. Still the main army under Marlborough knew nothing of this, and passed the day in dismal apprehension till the sun went down, and the drummers came forward to beat tattoo. Then a column of cavalry trotted out towards the Allied right, attracting every French eye and stirring every French brain with curiosity as to the purport of the movement. Then the drums began to roll; and the order ran quietly down the line to strike tents and make ready to march immediately.

Never was command more welcome. Within an hour all was ready and the army was formed into four columns. The cavalry having done their work of distracting French vigilance to the wrong quarter returned unseen by the enemy; and at nine o'clock the whole army faced to its left and marched off eastward in utter silence, with Marlborough himself at the head of the vanguard.
July 24-25
August 4-5.
July 25
August 5.

The night was fine, and under the radiant moonlight the men swung forward bravely hour after hour over the plain of Lens. The moon paled; the dawn crept up into the east throwing its ghastly light on the host of weary, sleepless faces; and presently the columns reached the Scarpe. So far the march had lasted eight hours, and fifteen miles had been passed. Pontoon-bridges were already laid across the river, and on the further bank, punctual to appointment, stood Brigadier Sutton with the field-artillery. The river was passed, and presently a messenger came spurring from the east with a despatch for the Duke of Marlborough. He read it; and words were passed down the columns of march which filled them with new life. "Generals Cadogan and Hompesch" (such was their purport) "crossed the causeway at Arleux[546] unopposed at three o'clock this morning, and are in possession of the enemy's lines. The Duke desires that the infantry will step out." The right wing of horse halted to form the rearguard and bring up stragglers, while a cloud of dust in the van told that the Duke and fifty squadrons with him were pushing forward at the trot. Then the infantry shook themselves up and stepped out with a will.

Villars had received intelligence of Marlborough's march only two hours after he had started, but he was so thoroughly bewildered by the Duke's intricate man?uvres that he did not awake to the true position until three hours later. Then, quite distracted, he put himself at the head of the Household Cavalry and galloped off at full speed. So furiously rode he that he wore down all but a hundred of his troopers and pushed on with these alone. But even so Marlborough was before him. At eight o'clock he crossed the lower causeway at Aubanchoeuil-au-bac and passing his cavalry over the Scarpe barred the road from the west by the village of Oisy. Presently Villars, advancing reckless of all precautions, blundered into the middle of the outposts. Before he could retire his whole escort was captured, and he himself only by miracle escaped the same fate.

The Marshal now looked anxiously for the arrival of his main body of horse; but the Allied infantry had caught sight of them on the other side of the Sensée, and weary though they were had braced themselves to race them for the goal. But now the severity of the march and the burden of their packs began to tell heavily on the foot. Hundreds dropped down unconscious and many died there and then, but they were left where they lay to await the arrival of the rearguard; for no halt was called, and each regiment pushed on as cheerfully as possible with such men as still survived. Thus they were still ahead of the French when they turned off to the causeway at Arleux, and, Marlborough having thrown additional bridges[547] over the Scarpe, they came quickly into their positions. The right wing of infantry crossed the river about four o'clock in the afternoon, having covered close on forty miles in eighteen hours; and by five o'clock the whole force was drawn up between Oisy and the Scheldt within striking distance of Arras, Cambrai, and Bouchain. So vanished the ne plus ultra of Villars, a warning to all generals who put their sole trust in fortified lines.
July 27
August 7.

Marlborough halted for the next day to give his troops rest and to allow the stragglers to come in. Fully half the men of the infantry had fallen out, and there were many who did not rejoin the army until the third day. Villars on his side moved forward and offered Marlborough battle under the walls of Cambrai; but the Duke would not accept it, though the Dutch deputies, perverse and treacherous to the last, tried hard to persuade him. Had the deputies marched in the ranks of the infantry with muskets on their shoulders and a kit of fifty pounds' weight on their backs, they would have been less eager for the fray. Marlborough's own design, long matured in his own mind, was the capture of Bouchain, and his only fear was lest Villars should cross the Scheldt before him and prevent it. Then the deputies, who had been so anxious to hurry the army into an engagement under every possible disadvantage, shrank from the peril of a siege carried on by an inferior under the eyes of a superior force. But Marlborough, even if he had not been able to adduce Lille as a precedent, was determined to have his own way, and carried his point. At noon on the 7th of August he marched down almost within cannon-shot of Cambrai, ready to fall on Villars should he attempt to cross the Scheldt, halted until his pontoon-bridges had been laid a few miles further down the stream, and then gradually withdrawing his troops passed the whole of them across the river unmolested.

It is hardly credible that a vast number of foolish civilians, Dutch, Austrian, and even English, blamed Marlborough for declining battle before Cambrai, and[548] that he was actually obliged to explain why he refused to sacrifice the fruit of his man?uvres by attacking a superior force in a strong position with an army not only smaller in numbers at its best, but much thinned by a forced march and exhausted by fatigue. "I despair of being ever able to please all men," he wrote. "Those who are capable of judging will be satisfied with my endeavours: others I leave to their own reflections, and go on with the discharge of my duty."
Sept. 2 13 .

It is possible that Villars only refrained from hindering Marlborough's passage of the Scheldt in deference to orders from Versailles, of which the Duke was as well aware as himself; but it is more than doubtful whether he ever intended him to capture Bouchain. Though inferior in numbers, however, Marlborough covered himself so skilfully with entrenchments that Villars could not hinder him, and met all attempts at diversion so readily that not one of them succeeded. Finally, the garrison surrendered as prisoners of war under the very eyes of Villars. The Duke would have followed up his success by the siege of Quesnoi, the town before which English troops first came under the fire of cannon in the year of Cre?y; but by this time Lewis, with the help of the contemptible Harley, had succeeded in detaching England from the Grand Alliance. Though, therefore, the English ministers continued to encourage Marlborough in his operations in order to conceal their own infamous conduct from the Allies, yet they took good care that those operations should proceed no further. So with the capture of Bouchain the last and not the least remarkable of Marlborough's campaigns came, always victoriously, to an end.

To face page 548
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1711.

The most brilliant manifestation of military skill was, however, powerless to help him against the virulence of faction in England. The passage of the lines was described as the crossing of the kennel, and the siege of Bouchain as a waste of lives. In May the House of Commons had addressed the Queen for[549] inquiry into abuses in the public expenditure, and when the Duke arrived at the Hague in November he found himself charged with fraud, extortion, and embezzlement. The ground of the accusation was that he had received in regular payment from the bread-contractors during his command sums amounting to ￡63,000. Marlborough proved conclusively that this was a perquisite regularly allowed to the commander-in-chief in Flanders as a fund for secret service, and he added of his own accord that he had also received a deduction of two and a half per cent from the pay of the foreign troops, which had been applied to the same object. But this defence, though absolutely valid and sound, could avail him little. His reasons were disregarded, and on the 31st of December he was dismissed from all public employment.
1712.

Three weeks later the House of Commons voted that his acceptance of these two perquisites was unwarrantable and illegal, and directed that he should be prosecuted by the Attorney-General. This done, the Ministry appointed the Duke of Ormonde to be commander-in-chief in Marlborough's place, and confirmed to him the very perquisites which the House had just declared to be unwarrantable and illegal. Effrontery and folly such as this are nothing new in representative assemblies, but it is significant of the general attitude of English civilians towards English soldiers, that not one of Harley's gang seems to have realised that this vindictive persecution of Marlborough was an insult to a brave army as well as a shameful injustice to a great man, nor to have foreseen that the insult might be resented by the means that always lie ready to the hand of armed and disciplined men.

It is not necessary to dwell on the operations, if such they may be called, of the Duke of Ormonde. He did indeed take the field with Eugene, but under instructions to engage neither in a battle nor a siege, but virtually to open communications with Villars. By July the subservience of the British Ministry to[550] Lewis the Fourteenth had been so far matured that Ormonde was directed to suspend hostilities for two months, and to withdraw his forces from Eugene. Then the troubles began. The auxiliary troops in the pay of England flatly refused to obey the order to leave Eugene, and Ormonde was compelled to march away with the British troops only. Even so the feelings of anger ran so high that a dangerous riot was only with difficulty averted. The British and the auxiliaries were not permitted to speak to each other, lest recrimination should lead either to a refusal of the British to leave their old comrades or to a free fight on both sides. The parting was one of the most remarkable scenes ever witnessed. The British fell in, silent, shamefaced, and miserable; the auxiliaries gathered in knots opposite to them, and both parties gazed at each other mournfully without saying a word. Then the drums beat the march and regiment after regiment tramped away with full hearts and downcast eyes, till at length the whole column was under way, and the mass of scarlet grew slowly less and less till it vanished out of sight.

At the end of the first day's march Ormonde announced the suspension of hostilities with France at the head of each regiment. He had expected the news to be received with cheers: to his infinite disgust it was greeted with one continuous storm of hisses and groans. Finally, when the men were dismissed they lost all self-control. They tore their hair and rent their clothes with impotent rage, cursing Ormonde with an energy only possible in an army that had learned to swear in the heat of fifty actions. The officers retired to their tents, ashamed to show themselves to their men. Many transferred themselves to foreign regiments, many more resigned their commissions; and it is said, doubtless with truth, that they fairly cried when they thought of Corporal John.

More serious consequences followed. The march was troublesome, for the Dutch would not permit[551] the retiring British to pass through their towns, and the troops were consequently obliged to cross every river that barred their way on their own pontoons. Again, all the old contracts for bread had been upset by Harley and his followers through their prosecution of Marlborough: it was nothing to them that an army should be ill-fed, so long as they gained power and place. St. John, it must be noted, was a principal accomplice in this rascality—St. John, who alone of living Englishmen had intellect sufficient to measure the gigantic genius of Marlborough; who, moreover, as Secretary-at-War during the greatest of the Duke's campaigns, had gained some insight into those prosaic details of supplies and transport which are all in all to the organisation of victory. Ormonde, a thoroughly mediocre officer, was not a man to grapple with such difficulties. Bad bread heightened the ill-feeling of the soldiers towards him. Agitators insinuated to the worst characters in the army that they would lose all the arrears of pay that were due to them; and the story found ready and reasonable credence from recollection of the scandals that had followed the Peace of Ryswick. The good soldiers, then as always a great majority, refused to have anything to do with a movement so discreditable, and reported what was going forward to their officers; but either their tale was disbelieved or, as is more likely, apathy and general disorganisation prevented the nipping of the evil in the bud. Finally, three thousand malcontents slipped away from the camp, barricaded themselves in a defensive position, and sent a threatening message to the commander-in-chief demanding good bread and payment of arrears. Then discipline speedily reasserted itself. The mutineers were surrounded and compelled to surrender. A court-martial was held; ten of the ringleaders were executed on the spot and the mutiny was quelled once for all. Fortunate it was that the outbreak took place while the troops were still abroad, or the House of Commons might[552] have learned by a second bitter experience that the patience of the British soldier, though very great, is not inexhaustible.[379]
1713.
March 31
April 11.

The negotiations so infamously begun with King Lewis shortly after found as infamous an end in the Peace of Utrecht, which not only sacrificed every object for which the war had been fought, but branded England with indelible disgrace. Five months earlier Marlborough had left England, to all intent a banished man. Before his departure he had endured incredible insults in the House of Lords, the worst and falsest of them from one of his own officers, the Duke of Argyll. The defection and ingratitude of Argyll, however, only brought out the more strongly the general loyalty of the Army towards its great chief. Marlborough's most prominent officers were of course subjected to the same degradation as himself. Cadogan, for instance, was removed from the Lieutenancy of the Tower to make room for Brigadier Hill; and even the Duke's humble secretary, Adam Cardonnel, was not too small an object for the malignant spite of the House of Commons. But honourable men, such as Lord Stair, the colonel of the Scots Greys, threw up their commissions in disgust; and plain, honest officers, such as Kane and Parker, have left on record the immense contempt wherein Argyll, brave soldier though he was, was held in the Army. The Dutch also rose, though too late, to the occasion. When Marlborough sailed into Ostend at the end of November, 1712, the whole garrison was under arms to receive him, and when he left it, it was under a salute of artillery. At Antwerp, in spite of his protests, his reception was the same; the cannon thundered in his honour, and all ranks of the people[553] turned out to meet him with joyful acclamations. He took the most secluded road to Maestricht, but go whither he would, fresh parties of horse always appeared to escort him. Above all, he was comforted by the unchanging confidence and sympathy of Eugene.

There for the present we must leave him till the time, not far distant, shall come to tell of his restoration. That the welcome given to him by the Dutch may have been a consolation to him we can hardly doubt, and yet he cannot but have felt that these same Dutch had been his undoing. For, despite the shameful perfidy of the English politicians who drove Marlborough from England and concluded the Treaty of Utrecht, the main responsibility for the catastrophe rests not with them but with those unspeakable Dutch deputies who, by wrecking the Duke's earlier campaigns, prolonged beyond the limits of the patience of the House of Commons the War of the Spanish Succession.

Authorities.—The literature of the War of the Spanish Succession is, as may be guessed, not slender. On the English side there are the lives of Marlborough by Lediard and Coxe, as well as the French life, in three volumes, which was written by Napoleon's order. There are also the journals of Archdeacon Hare for the campaign of Blenheim, and a valuable letter from him respecting Oudenarde; the narratives of General Stearne, of Kane, Parker, and Sergeant Millner, all unfortunately of one regiment, the 18th Royal Irish; and, for the campaign of 1708 only, the journal of Private John Deane of the 1st Guards (privately printed 1846). Dumont's Histoire Militaire gives admirable maps and plans. Many curious items are also to be found in Lamberti. I have not failed to study the archives of the War Office preserved at the Record Office, with results that will be seen in the next chapter, and I have been carefully through the contemporary newspapers. Minor authorities, such as Tindal's History and the like, are hardly worth mention. Marlborough's Despatches, though decried by Lord Mahon (Preface to History of England), I have found most valuable. On the French side Quincy remains the chief authority, together with the Archives Militaires in the printed collection. The Mémoires of St. Simon, Villars, Millot, and others have also been consulted, and good and pertinent comment is always to be found in Feuquières.

For the war in Spain see at the close of Chapter VI.
CHAPTER XI
Although the narrative of the War of the Spanish Succession has not infrequently been interrupted in order to give the reader an occasional glimpse of the progress and difficulties of the military administration at home, yet much has been of necessity omitted, lest the strand, enwoven of too many and too distinct threads, should snap with the burden of its own weight and unravel itself into an inextricable tangle. I propose therefore at this point to summarise the orders, regulations, and enactments of the War Office and of the House of Commons during the reign of Queen Anne to the Peace of Utrecht, so as, if possible, to convey some notion of the legacies, other than those of glory and prestige, that were bequeathed to the Army by this long and exhausting war.

The reader will, I think, have gathered at least that the extension of operations and the consequent increase of the British forces during the war was almost portentously rapid. A few figures will make this more apparent. In 1702 and 1703 Flanders was practically the only scene of active operations, the raid on Cadiz being of too short duration and too little account to be worthy of serious mention. In both of these years the British troops with Marlborough were set down at eighteen thousand men. In 1704 to 1706 they rose to twenty-two thousand, and in 1708 to 1709 to twenty-five thousand men, reverting once again to twenty-two thousand from 1711 to 1712. Concurrently with the first increase of 1704 came the first despatch of eight[555] thousand troops to the Peninsula, rising to nine thousand in 1705, ten thousand in 1706, and twenty-six thousand[380] from 1707 to 1709, relapsing between 1710 and 1712 to rather over twenty thousand. The total number of forces borne on the list of the British Army at its greatest was six troops of Household Cavalry, eleven regiments of horse, sixteen of dragoons, and seventy-five of foot, comprehending in all seventy-nine battalions.[381] The nominal war strength of a battalion in Flanders was, as a rule, in round numbers nine hundred and forty of all ranks, in the Peninsula from seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred and eighty, a diversity of establishments which gave rise to much trouble and confusion. It would not be safe to reckon the British infantry at any period during the war as exceeding fifty thousand men. The regiments of dragoons again varied from a normal strength of four hundred to four hundred and fifty, rising in occasional instances to six hundred; but they cannot reasonably be calculated at a higher figure than six thousand men. The regiments of horse were subject to similar variations, but their total strength, even including the six strong troops of Household Cavalry, cannot be counted as more than seven thousand men. There then remains the artillery, of which, from want of data as well as from vagueness of organisation, it is impossible to make any accurate calculation. Speaking generally, the highest strength actually attained by British troops at home and abroad during the war may be set down at seventy thousand men.[382]

[556]

The defect that will seem most flagrant, according to modern ideas, in the scheme above sketched is the multiplicity of distinct units that go to make up so small a force. The French had long abandoned the system of single battalions, and indeed given to their regiments the name of brigades. In the British Army the Guards and the Royal Scots alone had two battalions; and though we know by actual information that, in the case of the former, the battalions at home were used to feed those abroad, yet it is indubitable that both battalions of the Royal Scots took the field and kept it from beginning to end of the war. For this, however, the principles that then governed the conduct of a war and the maintenance of an army sufficiently account. The year was divided for military purposes into two parts—the campaigning season, which lasted roughly from the 1st of April to the 1st of October, and the recruiting season, which covered the months that remained over. Directly the campaign was ended and the troops distributed into winter quarters, a sufficient number of officers returned home to raise for each regiment the recruits that were needed. In strictness no officer enlisted a man except for his own corps; and it was only occasionally that a regiment, having enlisted more recruits than were required for its own wants, transferred its superabundance to another.

But apart from this, we find throughout the reign of Queen Anne a resolute and healthy opposition to the principle of completing one regiment by drafts from[557] another. At the beginning of the war the ranks of the Army were, thanks to the wanton imbecility of the House of Commons, so empty that it was impossible to send any appreciable number of regiments abroad without depletion of those that were left at home. As an exceptional favour therefore the first troops sent to Spain and to the West Indies were completed by drafts; but at that point the practice was checked.[383] Marlborough had early set his face against so vicious a system, and although once, under pressure of orders from the Queen herself, he directed it to be enforced, yet it is sufficiently clear from his language and from his ready deference to the protest of the officer concerned, that he fully recognised the magnitude of its evil.[384] After the disaster of Almanza the War Office appears to have been urged in many quarters to resort to drafting, but St. John told the House of Commons outright that the practice had been found ruinous to the service, prejudicial alike to the corps that furnished and that received the draft. As Marlborough's influence declined, the mischievous system seems to have been revived, and although in more than one case colonels flatly declined to part with their men,[385] yet at the close of the war we find garrisons denuded by drafts to an extent that was positively dangerous.[386] The same objectionable practice, as is well known, is still rampant among us; would that the authority of Marlborough could help to break it down.

There remains the question why, instead of raising new regiments, the authorities did not raise additional battalions to existing regiments? The reply is that they doubtless knew their own business, and adopted the best plan that lay open to them. Englishmen have [558]a passion for independent command. To this day, as the history of the volunteers shows, there are many men who, though unwilling to serve in any existing corps, would cheerfully expend ten times the care, trouble, and expense on a regiment, or even on a troop or company, of their own. It must be remembered, too, that a regiment in those days was not only a command but a property, that it afforded to officers opportunities for good and for evil such as are now undreamed of, that, lastly, it was in the vast majority of cases called by its colonel's name.

Let us now, before examining the measures taken for the supply of recruits, glance briefly at the principal centres and causes of consumption and of demand. The inquiry must not be considered superfluous, for the primary force in the maintenance of a voluntary army is attraction, and it is only after full knowledge of the elements of repulsion which work counter to it that the failure of the attractive force, and the necessity for substituting coercion in its place, can be rightly understood. The theatres of war claim first attention, and of these Flanders claims the precedence. It is well known that sickness or fatigue are more destructive in war than bullet and sword, and Marlborough's campaigns can have been no exception to the rule. Yet it is remarkable that the British were never so much thinned as after the campaign of Blenheim, wherein they bore the brunt of two severe actions. The march to the Danube was of course severe, but the men stood it well; nor do we hear of extraordinary sickness on the return march. All that we know is that when the British regiments reached the Rhine they were too weak to be fit for further work. We never hear the like in subsequent campaigns, in spite of severe marching and sieges. Yet the capture of one of Vauban's fortresses was always a long and murderous piece of work, while, if the trenches were flooded by heavy rain or the natural oozing of marshy ground, an epidemic of dysentery was sure to follow. We have no returns of the losses[559] from sickness in Flanders, but it is certain that the operations in that field were by no means the most deadly to the troops, nor the most exhausting to England. This must be ascribed almost entirely to the care and forethought of the great Duke. Marlborough knew the peculiar weaknesses as well as the peculiar value of his own countrymen, and was careful to keep them always well fed. In the second place, and this was most important, the theatre of war was but a few hours distant from England, so that a force once fairly set on foot could be maintained with comparative ease. Recruits, too, did not feel that they were going to another part of the world, and would never return home. Moreover, a bounty had been granted for Blenheim, there was some prospect of plunder,[387] and there was the glory of marching to certain victory with Corporal John.

It was far otherwise in the Peninsula. There a campaign was broken not only by winter-quarters, but also by summer-quarters in the hot months of July and August. Again, the voyage to Lisbon, and still more to Catalonia, to say nothing of the risk of storm and shipwreck, occupied days and weeks, whereas the passage to Flanders was reckoned by hours. The transport-service, too, had a bad name. Although after 1702 the official complaints of bad and insufficient food ceased, yet the mortality on board the troop-ships sent to the Peninsula shows that the sickness and misery must have been appalling. The reinforcements despatched to Lisbon in the summer of 1706 with a total strength of eight thousand men were reduced to little more than half of their numbers when they landed in Valencia in February 1707. They had suffered from bad weather and long confinement, it is true, but theirs was no exceptional case.[388] In 1710, of a detachment of three hundred men that were landed, only a hundred ever [560]reached their regiments.[389] In 1711 five weak regiments lost sixty men dead, and two hundred disabled from sickness in a voyage of ten days.[390] A private of the First Guards summed up his experience of a month in a transport as "continual destruction in the foretop, the pox above board, the plague between decks, hell in the forecastle, and the devil at the helm."[391]

This was one great discouragement to recruits; and others became quickly known to them. The Peninsula was ill-supplied, transport was difficult, the quarters of the troops were very unhealthy, and the Portuguese unfriendly even to brutality.[392] Altogether, though steel and lead played their part in the destruction of the British in the Peninsula, the havoc that they wrought was trifling compared with that of privation and disease. Prisoners of course were never lost for long, as Marlborough had always abundance of French to give in exchange for them; but in spite of this, the waste in Portugal and Spain was terrible, and the service proportionately unpopular.

So much for the two theatres of war; but the sphere of foreign service was not bounded by these. New York, Bermuda, and Newfoundland each possessed a small garrison; and the West Indies, as we have seen, claimed from four to six battalions. This colonial service was undoubtedly the most unpopular of all. When the single company that defended Newfoundland left England in 1701, their destination was carefully concealed from the men lest they should desert. The most hardened criminal could hope for pardon if he enlisted for Jamaica. Once shipped off to the West Indies, the men seem to have been totally forgotten. No proper provision was made for paying them; [561]colonels who cared for their men were compelled to borrow money to save them from starvation; colonels who did not, came home, together with many of their officers, and left the men to shift for themselves.[393] Clothing, again, was entirely overlooked. The troops in Jamaica were reduced almost to nakedness; and when finally their clothing, already two years overdue, was ready for them, it was delayed by a piece of bungling such as could only have been perpetrated by the War Office.[394] Another great difficulty was that, there being no regular system of reliefs, colonels never knew whether to clothe their men for a hot or a temperate climate. Recruits were consequently most difficult to obtain, although owing to the unhealthiness of the climate they were in great request. The result was that old men and boys were sent across the Atlantic only to be at once discharged, at great pecuniary loss, by the officers, who were ashamed to admit creatures of such miserable appearance into their companies.[395]

Again, during the course of the war, two new acquisitions demanded garrisons of three or four battalions apiece. Minorca appears to have given no very serious trouble; but Gibraltar having been reduced virtually to ruins by the siege was, owing to the lack of proper habitations, a hot-bed of sickness. The authorities seem in particular to have neglected the garrison of Gibraltar, though they took considerable pains for the fortification of the Rock. In 1706 more than half of the garrison was disabled through disease brought on by exposure,[396] yet it was not until four years later that [562]orders were given for the construction of barracks,[397] while even in 1711 the men were obliged to burn their own miserable quarters from want of fuel.[398]

These lapses in countries beyond sea might possibly find some excuse in the plea of inexperience, though this should not be admitted in a country which for nearly four centuries had continually sent expeditions across the Channel, and for more than two centuries across the Atlantic also. Yet there were similar faults at home which show almost incredible thoughtlessness and neglect. Thus in 1709 many soldiers at Portsmouth perished from want of fire and candle,[399] while the garrison of Upnor Castle was required to supply a detachment of guards in the marshes three miles from any house or shelter, where the men on duty stood up to their knees in water.[400] No one had thought that they might want a guard-room or at least tents. Again, it was not until a ship's load of men invalided from Portugal had been turned adrift in the streets of Penrhyn, penniless and reduced to beg for charity, that any provision was made for the sick and wounded. Then at last, in the fourth campaign of the war, commissioners were appointed to make them their special care. So far no one had been responsible for them, the duty having been thrust provisionally upon the commissioners of transport.[401] In a word, no forethought nor care was to be found beyond the reach of Marlborough's own hand; all administration on the side of the War Office, even under the secretaryship of so able a man as Henry St. John, was marked by blindness and incompetence.

The ground being now cleared, and the principal obstacles in the way of recruiting being indicated, it is [563]time to examine the means employed by Parliament to overcome them. We may properly confine ourselves to England, since she with her population of five and a quarter millions was necessarily the main source for the supply of men. Ireland was not yet the recruiting-ground that she became at a later day, for the simple reason that none but Protestants could be enlisted. She had, however, her five distinctly national regiments,[402] a small proportion which enabled her to provide a dozen or fifteen more in the course of the war. Protestant Ireland, in fact, still under the spell of William of Orange, played her part very fully and generously during these years. Scotland, as became a country of great military traditions, maintained a larger number of national regiments than her sister,[403] but being thinly populated, inaccessible in many districts and already engaged to furnish troops to the Dutch service, was unable to provide more than three additional battalions. The greatest stress therefore fell, and fell rightly, upon England.

Transporting ourselves therefore for a moment to the opening of the war, when the Army was still smarting under its shameful treatment by Parliament after the Peace of Ryswick, we find without surprise that the strain of providing recruits made itself felt very early. The Mutiny Act of 1703 shows this by a clause empowering the Queen to order the delivery from gaol of capital offenders who had been pardoned on condition of enlistment. This enactment was of course something like a reversion to the methods of Elizabeth; but although this class of recruit does not sound desirable, yet the competition for it was so keen that a regular roster was kept to ensure that every regiment should profit by the windfall in its turn.[404] It must be remembered that many a man was then condemned [564]to death who would now be released under the First Offenders' Act; but apart from this, criminals were welcome to the recruiting officer, first, because they cost nothing, and secondly, because they were often men of fine physique.[405] In the later years of the war the sweepings of the gaols were in particular request, and the multiplication of petitions from the condemned shows that the fact was appreciated within the walls of Newgate.

In the session of 1703-4 an Act, for which there was a precedent in the days of King William, was passed to provide for the discharge of all insolvent debtors from prison, who should serve or procure another to serve in the fleet or Army. This probably brought some useful young recruits who enlisted to procure the release of their fathers; and there is evidence that the bankrupt was as much sought after by recruiting officers as the sheep-stealer. Another most important Act of the same session was the first of a long series of annual Recruiting Acts. Under this, a bounty of one pound[406] was offered for volunteers; and justices of the peace were empowered to levy as recruits all able-bodied men who had no visible employment or means of subsistence, and to employ the officers of borough and parish for the purpose. For each such recruit a bounty of ten shillings[407] was allowed for himself as well as a fee of ten shillings to the parish officer. To remove any temptation to malpractice, no officer of the regular Army was permitted to sit as a justice under the Act; and all voters were specially exempted from its operation, the possession of the franchise being apparently considered, as it probably was, a sufficiently visible means of subsistence.

This latter measure brought with it a considerable crop of abuses. In the very next session it was found [565]necessary to give special protection to harvest-labourers, many having been already impressed, while many more had hidden themselves from fear of impressment. But this was by no means all. Voters occasionally shared the fate of their unenfranchised brethren, and required hasty deliverance with many apologies to the member for their borough.[408] The high bounty again gave a stimulus to wrongful impressment, fraudulent enlistment, and desertion. It was found necessary after a few months to restrain the zeal of parish officers, who enlisted men that were already soldiers. Again, there were recruiting-officers who would discharge the recruits brought to them for a pecuniary consideration, an occurrence which though not common was not unknown. Finally, recruits would occasionally try to break away in a body, which led to desperate fighting and to awkward complications. In one instance a large number of recruits made so determined an attempt to overpower the guard and escape that they were not quelled until two of them had been actually slain. The guard, who thought with justice that they had done no more than their duty, then found themselves threatened with an indictment for murder; and the War Office was obliged to call in the Attorney-General to advise how they should be protected.[409] Turbulent scenes with the rural population over the arrest of deserters and the impressment of idle fellows were by no means infrequent. We have, for instance, accounts of the whole town of Exminster turning out with flails and pitchforks against an officer who claimed a deserter, and of the mob of Abergavenny, mad for the rescue of an impressed recruit, driving the officers from house to house, and compelling them to fire in self-defence.[410]

After the campaign of Blenheim, the heavy losses in the field, and the resolution to send a large force [566]to the Peninsula drove the military authorities to desperate straits. Suggestions of course came in from various quarters; among them a proposal from a gentleman of Amsterdam that every one who had two or more lacqueys should send one into the Army, the writer having observed that members of Parliament "abounded in that sort of person."[411] But the stress of the situation is shown by the fact that a Bill was actually introduced to compel every parish and corporation to furnish a certain number of recruits, though it was presently dropped as being an imitation from the French and unfit for a free country.[412] The authorities therefore contented themselves by ordering stricter enforcement of the Recruiting Act, and apparently with success.[413] During the next two years there was no change in the Act, excepting the addition, in 1706, of a penalty of five pounds against parochial officers who should neglect to execute it. But in 1707 the measure showed signs of failing, and was hastily patched up by increasing the bounty to two pounds[414] for volunteers enlisting during the recruiting season, and to one pound for such as enlisted after the campaign had been opened. Some effort was also made to systematize the power granted by the Act by convening regular meetings of justices at stated times and places.

The close of the year, however, found the Commons face to face with the disaster of Almanza, and with urgent need for close upon twenty thousand recruits. The Recruiting Act now assumed a new and drastic form. The authority to impress men of no employment was transferred from the justices to the commissioners of the land-tax, with full powers [567]to employ the parochial officers. The penalty on these officers for neglect of duty was increased to ten pounds, while for diligent execution of the same a reward of one pound was promised them for every recruit, as well as sixpence a day for the expense of keeping him until he should be made over to his regiment. The parish likewise received three pounds for every man thus recruited, in order to quicken its zeal against the idle. Finally, as an entire novelty, borrowed be it noted from the French,[415] volunteers were enlisted at the same high rate of bounty for a term of three years, at the close of which they were entitled to claim their discharge. Great results were evidently expected from these provisions, for the standard of height for recruits was still maintained at five feet five inches,[416] men below that stature being accepted only for marines. So from this year until the close of the war it is possible to study the first trial of short service in England.

Unfortunately abuses seemed only to multiply under the new Act. The campaign of Oudenarde, prolonged as it was into December, drained Marlborough's army heavily, and the spring of 1709 found the forces in want of yet another fifteen thousand recruits. Moreover, from the moment when Marlborough's power began to decline the tone of the Army at home began to sink. The justices again were jealous of the commissioners of land-tax, and in some instances openly abused and reproached them.[417] In at least one case they were found conniving with officers to accept money for the discharge of impressed men.[418] Officers on their [568]side also began to misbehave, withholding the bounty from recruits and subjecting them to the gantlope if they complained, and in some instances not only withholding the bounty but demanding large bribes for their discharge.[419] As the war continued, matters grew worse and worse. Sham press-gangs established themselves with the object of levying blackmail;[420] and as a climax Army and Navy began to fight for the possession of impressed men.

At the opening of 1711 the first batch of men enlisted for three years completed their term, but found to their surprise that their discharge did not come to them automatically, as they had expected. The officers had no instructions. They were unwilling too to part with the sixty best soldiers in each regiment, for such these men of short service had proved to be, and could only promise to let them go as soon as orders should arrive from home. Harley's Secretary-at-War, with the characteristic ill faith of the politician towards the soldier, boldly proposed to pass an Act compelling them to serve for two years longer; but the Attorney-General, to whom the matter was referred, decided that the men were beyond all question entitled to their discharge.[421] Thereupon, rather late in the day, the Secretary-at-War hurriedly ordered the instant discharge of a man whose term had expired, in order to encourage others to enlist.[422] Finally, in 1711 abuses increased so rapidly under the new administration that the whole system of recruiting broke down.[423] The evils of Harley's short tenure of office were by no means bounded by the Peace of Utrecht.

[569]

There remains a further question still to be dealt with, that namely of desertion, which directly and indirectly sapped the strength of the Army as much as any campaign. Let it not be thought that this evil was confined to England, for it was rampant in every army in Europe, and nowhere a greater scourge than in France. Nor let the deserter from the army in the field be too severely judged, for his anxiety was not to serve against his own countrymen but simply to get back to his own home. Some of the English deserters in Flanders were even cunning enough to pass homeward as exchanged prisoners belonging to the fleet.[424] But it was before starting for the seat of war that deserters gave most trouble, particularly if, as was often unavoidably the case, the regiments were kept waiting long for their transports.[425] No punishment seemed to deter others from abetting them.[426] If we may judge by the records of the next reign a thousand to fifteen hundred lashes was no uncommon sentence on a deserter, while not a few were actually shot in Hyde Park.[427] The only resource, therefore, was to check the evil as far as possible by prevention. Thus we constantly find large bodies of troops under orders for foreign service quartered in the Isle of Wight, from which they could not easily escape. This remedy was at least in one case found worse than the disease, for the numbers of the men being too great to be accommodated in the public houses, very many of them perished from exposure to the weather. Thereupon the Secretary-at-War made inquiry as to barns and empty houses for them, according to the traditions of his office, fatally too late.[428]

[570]

Another practice, which from ignorance of its origin has been blindly followed till within the last few years, also took its rise from the prevalence of desertion at this period, namely that of shifting troops from quarter to quarter of England by sea. On the same principle men were frequently cooped up in the transport-vessels for weeks and even months before they sailed on foreign service, occasionally with frightful consequences. Thus in 1705 certain troops bound for Jamaica were embarked on transports on the 18th of May. They remained there for two months with fever and small-pox on board, until at last, the medical supplies being exhausted, the case was represented to the Secretary-at-War. The reply was that they were to receive such relief as was possible; but they remained in the same transports until October, when at last they were drafted off in parties of sixty on the West Indian packets to their destination. Forty-eight of them were lost through a storm in port long before October, but the number that perished from sickness is unknown, and was probably most sedulously concealed.[429]

Let us now turn to the pleasanter theme of the changes that were wrought for the benefit of the soldier. The first of these appears in the Mutiny Act of 1703, and was doubtless due in part to the scandals revealed in the office of the Paymaster-General. The rates of pay to all ranks below the status of commissioned officers are actually given in the Act, with express directions, under sufficient penalties, that the subsistence money shall be paid regularly every week, and the balance over and above it every two months. Further, all stoppages by the Paymaster-General, Secretary-at-War, commissaries, and muster-masters are definitely forbidden, and the legitimate deductions strictly limited to the clothing-money, one day's pay to Chelsea Hospital, and one shilling in the pound to the Queen. The continuance of this last tax was of course a crying[571] injustice, but the abolition of the other irregular claims was distinctly a gain to the British soldier, due, as it is satisfactory to know, to the newly appointed Controllers of Accounts. Altogether the condition of the soldier as regards his pay seems decidedly to have improved, Marlborough's attention to this most important matter having evidently borne good fruit. It is true that in Spain and the colonies, to which he had not leisure nor opportunity to give personal attention, the neglect of the Secretary-at-War caused great grievances and much suffering; it is true also that even in England, when his influence was gone, there was a recurrence of the old scandals under the miserable administration of Harley;[430] yet on the whole the improvements in this province were at once distinct and permanent.

Another valuable reform in respect of clothing was due to the direct interposition of Marlborough himself. In 1706 the abuses in this department were, at his instance, made the subject of inquiry by Secretary St. John and General Charles Churchill, with the ultimate result that the pattern and allowance of clothing and the deduction of off-reckonings were laid down by strict rule, while the whole business of clothing, though still left to the colonels, was subjected to the control of a board of six General officers, whose sanction was essential to the validity of all contracts and to the acceptance of all garments. Thus was established the Board of General Officers,[431] whose minutes are still the great authority for the uniforms of the eighteenth century.

Unfortunately these benefits could weigh but little against the disadvantages already described. It is certain that despite the standard laid down by Act of [572]Parliament, vast numbers of boys were enlisted as well as men of fifty and sixty years of age, who no sooner entered the field than they were sent back into hospital. Good regiments, however, then as now obtained good recruits, sometimes through the offer of extra bounty from the officers,[432] more often through the character of the officers themselves. The presence of thieves, pirates, and other criminals in the ranks must necessarily have introduced a certain leaven of ruffianism, yet neither in Flanders nor in the Peninsula do we find anything approaching to the outrageous bursts of indiscipline which were witnessed a century later at Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. There was, it is true, the mutiny under the Duke of Ormonde, but it was of short duration and easily suppressed; and altogether, for reasons that shall presently be given, Marlborough's army seems to have been better conducted than Wellington's. Unfortunately, although two men who served in the ranks left us journals of a whole or part of the war, we remain still without a picture of the typical soldier of Marlborough. The one figure that emerges with any distinctness from the ranks is that of Christian Ross, a woman who served as a dragoon in several actions, was twice wounded before her sex was discovered, and ended her career as virago, sutleress, and out-pensioner of Chelsea Hospital.[433] The rest, with the exception of Sergeant Littler, Sergeant John Hall,[434] and Private Deane remain buried in dark oblivion, leaving a lamentable gap that can never be filled in our military history.

From the men I pass to the officers. Our information in regard to them is curiously mixed. Certain of the abuses that dishonoured them have already been revealed, nor can these be said to exhaust the list. There [573]were grave scandals in the Guards, which had the misfortune to possess one colonel, of a distinguished Scottish family, who revived the worst traditions of Elizabeth and Charles the Second. Not only did he systematically enlist thieves and other bad characters as "faggots,"[435] but he did not scruple to accept recruits who offered themselves for the sake of defrauding their creditors, to receive money from them for doing so, and to extort more money by threatening to withhold his protection or to ship them off to fight in Spain. These men did no duty,[436] wore no uniform and drew no pay, to the great profit of the colonel and the great disgrace of the regiment; and the evil grew to such a height that when the House of Commons finally took the matter in hand, the "faggots" were found to number one-fourth of the nominal strength of the regiment.[437] Such cases, however, as this of the infamous Colonel Chartres were rare; and the decrease of this particular vice of officers in Queen Anne's time presents a pleasing contrast to its prevalence in the time of King William.

Another habit, which sounds particularly objectionable in modern ears, was the occasional unwillingness of officers to accompany their regiments, and their readiness to leave them, when employed on distasteful service. This was especially true of regiments on colonial stations, particularly in the West Indies,[438] and was by no means unknown of those actually on active service in Flanders and the Peninsula. Sometimes the offenders had received leave of absence, which the Secretary-at-War would willingly grant as a matter of jobbery in the case [574]of a friend,[439] but more often they took leave without asking for it, occasionally for as much as five years together,[440] without objection from the colonel or rebuke from the War Office. One colonel took it as a great grievance when Marlborough insisted that he should sell his commission since he was unwilling to do duty;[441] and altogether the general connivance at shirking of this kind rendered the offence so little discreditable that it must not be judged by the standard of to-day. Speaking generally, however, the officers had far more grievances that command our pity than faults which provoke our indignation.

One hardship that bore on officers with peculiar severity was the expense of obtaining recruits. They received, of course, levy-money for the purpose, but this was frequently insufficient, while no allowance was made for recruits lost through desertion, sickness, or other misfortunes over which they had no control. Marlborough was most strict in discouraging, except in extreme cases, any attempts of officers to transfer their burdens from themselves to the State, though he freely admitted, not without compassion, that officers had been ruined by sheer bad luck with their recruits. We find bitter complaints from officers in the Peninsula that owing to the heavy mortality in the transports, their recruits, by the time that they reached them, cost them eight or nine pounds a head.[442] Indeed, if one may judge from contemporary newspapers, which are quite borne out by scattered evidence, the sufferings [575]of officers on account of recruiting were almost unendurable.[443]

Remounts again were a heavy tax upon the officer. An allowance of levy-money at the rate of twelve pounds a horse[444] was granted to officers for the purpose, but was complained of as quite inadequate to the charge,[445] in consequence of heavy losses through the epidemic of horse-sickness in Flanders. Carelessness in the hiring and fitting of transports also caused much waste of life among the horses,[446] until Marlborough, as his letters repeatedly show, took the matter into his own hands. It is interesting to learn that Irish horses, being obtainable for five pounds apiece,[447] were much used in Spain, though less in Flanders, Marlborough having a prejudice in favour of English horses as of English men, as superior to all others. This cheapness, however, was of little [576]service to the officers. They were expected to pay for the transport of their horses at a fixed rate, and though at length in reply to their complaints free transport was granted for twenty-six horses to a battalion, yet this privilege was again withdrawn as soon as it was discovered that Irish animals were to be purchased at a low price.[448]

Again, the officers were always subject to extortion from civilians. Parish constables, to whom the law allowed sixpence a day for the subsistence of recruits, declined to deliver them unless they were paid eightpence a day.[449] But as usual the chief delinquents were the regimental agents. The Controllers of Accounts early made an attack on these gentry, but with little success, the fellows pleading that they were not public officials but private servants of the colonel, and therefore not bound to produce their accounts. The complaints of the officers against them were endless, and with good reason. Perhaps the most heartless instance of an agent's rascality was that of one who stole the small allowance made by a lieutenant on active service to his wife, and refused to pay it until ordered by the Queen.[450] Officers clamoured that the agents should be tried by court-martial, but this was not permitted, and perhaps wisely, for a court-martial would probably have sentenced a scoundrel to the gantlope, in which case the men would not have let him escape alive.

Yet another tax fell upon officers in the shape of contribution to pensions and regimental debts. In every regiment except those serving in Flanders a fictitious man was allowed in the roll of each troop or company, whose pay was taken to form a fund for the support of officers' widows;[451] but in Marlborough's army [577]these widows were supported by a voluntary subscription from the officers, without expense to the State. By some contrivance, which seems utterly outrageous and was presumably the work of the War Office or of the Treasury, this voluntary fund was saddled with the maintenance of widows who had lost their husbands in the previous war, so that in 1709 Marlborough was obliged to protest and to ask for the extension of "widows' men" to some at least of his own troops.[452] Again, some regiments appear to have been charged with pensions to particular individuals, though by what right or for what service it is impossible to say.[453] Yet again, by misfortune, carelessness, or roguery of a colonel, or more commonly of an agent, regiments found themselves burdened with debts amounting to several thousand pounds, as, for instance, through the loss of regimental funds by shipwreck or through mismanagement of the clothing. In such cases the only possible relief was the sale, by royal permission, of the next company or ensigncy for the liquidation of the debt.[454]

Another form of pension which, though sometimes used for worthy objects, was at least as often perverted to purposes of jobbery, was the appointment of infant officers. In many instances children received commissions in a regiment wherein their fathers had commanded and done good service, either for the relief of the widows, if those fathers had fallen in action, or for a reward if they were still living. Sometimes these children actually took the field, for there is record of one who went to active service in Flanders at the age of twelve, "behaving with more courage and conduct than could have been expected from one of his years," [578]and ruined his career at sixteen by killing his man in a duel.[455] But beyond all doubt in many instances the favour was granted without sufficient cause, while even at its best it was an abuse of public money and a wrong done to the regiment. This abuse was of course no new thing, and did not amount to an actual grievance; but it had fostered a feeling, that was already too strong, of the privileges conferred on colonels by their proprietary rights in their regiments.

The grant of commissions to children was forbidden by the Royal Regulations of 1st May 1711, a collection of orders which had at any rate for their ostensible object a considerable measure of reform, and therefore demands some notice here. Hereby the grant of brevets, which had given considerable trouble to Marlborough, and had already been forbidden in 1708, was again prohibited; and finally an attempt was made to limit the sale and purchase of commissions. To this end no sale of commissions whatever was permitted except by royal approbation under the sign manual, and then only to officers who had served for twenty years or had been disabled by active service. The announcement appears to have been treated as a joke;[456] and within six months the rule, in consequence of representations from Marlborough, was considerably modified.[457] If (so the Duke pointed out) subalterns who have been unlucky with their recruits may not sell their commissions, the debt will fall on the regiment: if, again, the successors to officers who die on service do not contribute something towards the dead man's wife and family, many widows and children must starve; lastly, colonels often wish to promote officers from other regiments to their own when they have no officer of their own fit for advancement, which is for the good of the service but must [579]become impracticable unless the superseded officer receive something in compensation.[458] His arguments were seen to be irresistible unless the State were prepared to incur large additional military expenditure, and the rules were shortly afterwards amended in the spirit of his recommendations and for the reasons that he had adduced.[459]

Thus almost the final administrative act of Marlborough as Captain-General was to uphold the system of purchase then existing against the hasty reforms of civilian counsellors. Enough has been said to show that contemporary military policy in England, with which he was chiefly identified, tended always to make the regiment more and more self-contained and less dependent on the support of the State: it will be seen before long how regiments met the charge imposed on them by the institution of regimental funds in the nature of insurance. The drawback of such a system is obvious. Excess of independence in the members can hardly but entail weakening of central control, with incoherence and consequent waste of energy in the action of the entire body. Regimental traditions, regimental pride, are priceless possessions well worthy the sacrifice of ideal unity of design and perfect assimilation to a single pattern. But regimental isolation, fostered and encouraged on principle to the utmost, must inevitably bring with it a certain division of command, a want of subordination to the supreme authority, in a word that measure of indiscipline in high places which distinguishes an aggregation of regiments from an army.

[580]

Yet who can doubt but that Marlborough acted with his usual strong good sense as a soldier and his usual sagacity as a statesman? He had risked his popularity in the Army by his avowed severity towards officers in the matter of recruits,[460] because he knew that the slightest attempt to shift this burden upon the State would mean the refusal of Parliament to carry on the war, and a wholesale disbandment of the Army. He favoured the sale of commissions on precisely the same principle; for, as his letter clearly shows, he foresaw the growth of what is now called a non-effective vote, and doubted the willingness of Parliament to endure it. That which he dreaded has now come to pass, for better or worse; the country is saddled with a vast load of pensions, and the Commons grow annually more impatient over increase of military expenditure without corresponding increase of efficiency. Marlborough's choice lay between an aggregation of regiments and no army, and of two evils he chose the less. It still remains to be proved that he was wrong.

From the regimental I pass to the general administration. Herein the first noticeable feature is the amalgamation by the Act of union of the English and Scotch establishments into a single establishment for Great Britain. Ireland of course still remained with a separate establishment of her own, and all the paraphernalia of Commander-in-Chief, Secretary-at-War, and Master-General of Ordnance. There continued always in Ireland as heretofore a different rate of pay for all ranks, which, owing to constant transfer of regiments from Ireland to England or abroad gave rise to great confusion in the accounts. The chief matter of interest in Ireland is the very reasonable jealousy of the Irish Commons for the retention within the kingdom of all regiments on the Irish establishment, or at least for the substitution of other regiments in their place if they should be withdrawn. Their intention was that Irish revenue should be spent in Ireland, and it is satisfactory[581] to note that it was rigidly and conscientiously respected by the authorities in England.[461]

Another important matter was a first attempt to settle the position of the marines, who up to the middle of the reign were subject to a curious and embarrassing division of control. St. John early disclaimed all authority over them,[462] but they were evidently subject to the regulations of the army and suffered not a little in consequence. The rigid rule that regiments must be mustered before they were paid inflicted great hardship on marines, for it could not be carried out when a regiment was split up on half a dozen different ships, and the result was that the men were not paid at all. Even when ashore they were exposed to the same inconvenience owing to the inefficiency of the commissaries,[463] so that some regiments actually received no wages for eight years.[464] The inevitable consequence was hatred of the service and mutiny, which at one moment threatened to be serious.[465] Finally, on the 17th of December 1708, the marines were definitely placed under the jurisdiction of the Lord High Admiral.[466]

I come now to the most fateful of all changes in the administration, namely the rise to supreme importance of the Secretary-at-War. Attention has already been drawn to the duties and powers which silently accumulated in the hands of this civilian official after the death of Monk, owing to the lack of [582]efficient control by the Sovereign. The reigns of King William and Queen Anne, in consequence of the constant absence of the Captain-General on active service, did nothing to restore this lost control, and the almost unperceived change which released the Secretary-at-War from personal attendance on the Commander-in-Chief in the field virtually abolished it altogether. The terms of the Secretary-at-War's commission remained the same, "to obey such orders as he should from time to time receive from the Sovereign or from the General of the forces for the time being, according to the discipline of war;"[467] but the situation was in reality reversed. Even in King William's time the Secretary-at-War had countersigned the military estimates submitted to Parliament; from the advent of St. John he assumes charge of all military matters in the Commons, often taking the chair of the committee while they are under discussion. Thus he becomes the mouthpiece of the military administration in the House, and, since the Commander-in-Chief is generally absent on service he ceases to take his orders from him, but becomes, except in the vital matter of responsibility, a Secretary-of-State, writing in the name of the Queen or of her consort, or finally in his own name and by his own authority without reference to a higher power. Lastly, his office, thus exalted to importance, becomes the spoil of political party; Secretaries-at-War follow each other in rapid succession,—St. John, Walpole, Granville, Lord Lansdowne, Windham, Gwynne; and the Army is definitely stamped as a counter in the eternal game of faction.

The power of the Secretary-at-War in Queen Anne's time is sufficiently shown by his letter-books. In the Queen's name he gives orders for recruiting, for[583] drafting, for armament, for musters, for change of quarters, relief of garrisons, hire of transports, embarkation of troops, patrolling of the coast, escort of treasure, and in a word for all matters of routine. In the Duke of Marlborough's name also he directs men to be embarked, money to be advanced, and recruits to be furnished, and even criticises the execution of the orders issued by him on behalf of the Queen.[468] On his own authority he bids colonels to send him muster-rolls and lists of recruiting staff and to provide their regiments with quarters, regrets that he cannot strengthen weak garrisons, and lays down the route for all marches within the kingdom.[469] He corresponds direct with every rank of officer without the slightest regard for discipline or dignity. We find Walpole threatening a lieutenant with forfeiture of his commission for absence without leave, bidding a captain be thankful that owing to his own clemency he is not cashiered for fraud,[470] regretting that he cannot in conscience excuse one subaltern from attending his regiment on foreign service,[471] ordering another to pay for his quarters immediately,[472] summoning a third person to the War Office to account to him for wrongful detention of a recruit. Granville promises an officer leave of absence from foreign service, but must first, in common decency, apply to the General in command.[473] Lord Lansdowne begs the Governor of Portsmouth not to be too hard on a young regiment in the matter of guard-duties, orders the discharge of a soldier when three years of his service have expired, and writes to the Irish Secretary-at-War for leave of [584]absence for a friend.[474] Finally, all ask favours of colonels on behalf of officers and men. One thing only they left for a time untouched, namely the sentences of court-martial, which St. John expressly abjured in favour of the Judge Advocate-General; but for the rest they issued orders, approbations, and reprimands with all the freedom of a Commander-in-Chief.

The Office of Ordnance remained as before independent of the War Office, though of course liable to fulfil its requisitions for arms and stores. It is remarkable that Marlborough, like Wellington a century later, no sooner became Master-General[475] than he restored the organisation of King James the Second. But the strain imposed upon the Department by the multitude of forces in the field was too severe for it. Two months before Blenheim was fought the supply of firelocks and socket-bayonets was exhausted; and in succeeding years, as disasters grew and multiplied in Spain, the Office was obliged frequently, and to the great indignation of English manufacturers, to purchase arms abroad.[476]

The subject of weapons leads us directly to the progress of the Army in the matter of armament, equipment, and training. The first point worthy of notice is the disappearance of the time-honoured pike. Pikes were issued to a battalion in the proportion of one to every five muskets as late as 1703, but were delivered back into store in the following year;[477] and in 1706 a letter from St. John announces that pikes are considered useless and that musket and bayonet must be furnished to every man.[478] The bayonet was, of [585]course, the socket-bayonet; and the musket, being of a new and improved model, was a weapon much superior to that issued in the days of King William.[479] Partly, no doubt, owing to the efficiency of this musket, which carried bullets of sixteen to the pound, as against the French weapon, which was designed for bullets of twenty-four to the pound, and still more owing to superiority of discipline and tactics, the fire of the British was incomparably more deadly than that of the French.[480] The secret, so far as concerned tactics, lay in the fact that the British fired by platoons according to the system of Gustavus Adolphus, whereas the French fired by ranks; and the perfection of drill and discipline was superbly manifested at Wynendale. For this, as well as for the better weapon, the Army had their great chief to thank, for the Duke knew better than any the value of fire-discipline, as it is called, and would put the whole army through its platoon-exercise by signal of flag and drum before his own eye.[481] Nevertheless, the cool head and accurate aim for which the British have always been famous played their part, and a leading part, in the victories of Marlborough.

Of the drill proper there is little to be said, though some few changes are significant of coming reforms. The number of ranks was left unfixed, being increased or reduced according to the frontage required, but probably seldom exceeded three and was occasionally reduced to two. The old method of doubling ranks was still preserved; but the men no longer fell in by files, and the file may be said definitely to have lost its old position as a tactical unit. A company now fell in in single rank, was sorted off into three or more divisions and formed into ranks, by the wheel of the divisions from line into column, which was a complete [586]novelty. The manual and firing exercise remained as minute and elaborate as ever; and a single word of command shows that the old exercise of the pike was soon to be adopted for the bayonet.[482] With these exceptions there was little deviation from the old drill of Gustavus Adolphus; but the real improvement, which made that drill doubly efficient, was in the matter of discipline. That the lash and the gantlope were unsparingly used in Marlborough's army there can be no doubt, and that they were employed even more savagely at home can be shown by direct evidence;[483] but the Duke, as shall presently be shown, understood how to make the best of his countrymen by other means besides cutting their backs to pieces.

For the cavalry, of which he was evidently very fond, Marlborough did very signal service by committing it definitely to action by shock. Again and again in the course of the war the French squadrons are found firing from the saddle with little or no effect, and the British crashing boldly into them and sweeping them away. There are few actions, too, in which the Duke himself is not found in personal command of the horse at one period or another of the battle—at Blenheim in the great charge which won the day, at Ramillies at the most critical moment, at Malplaquet in support of the British infantry, and most brilliantly of all at the passage of the lines at Landen. Yet he was too sensible not to imitate an enemy where he could do so with advantage. The French gendarmerie had received pistol-proof armour in 1703;[484] the British horse in Flanders, at Marlborough's suggestion, received a cuirass [587]in 1707, a reform which was copied by the Dutch and urged upon all the rest of the Allies.[485] It is characteristic of the Duke's never-failing good sense that the cuirasses consisted of breast-pieces only, so that men should find no protection unless their faces were turned towards the enemy.

As to the artillery there is little to be said except that the organisation by companies appears to have been thoroughly accepted, and the efficiency of the arm thereby greatly increased. The Duke was never greater than as an artillerist. Every gun at Blenheim was laid under his own eye; and the concentration of the great central battery at Malplaquet and its subsequent advance shows his mastership in the handling of cannon. For the rest, the artillery came out of the war with not less, perhaps with even more, brilliancy than the other corps of the army; and, though no mention is made of the fact by the historian of the regiment, it is likely that no artillery officers ever worked more strenuously and skilfully in the face of enormous difficulties than the devoted men who brought their guns first down to the south side of the Danube and then back across the river to the battlefield of Blenheim.[486]

It is impossible to quit this subject without a few words on the great man who revived for England the ancient glory of Cre?y, Poictiers, and Agincourt, the greatest, in the Duke of Wellington's words, who ever appeared at the head of a British Army. There are certain passages in his life which make it difficult sometimes to withhold from him hard names; but allowance should be made for one who was born in revolution, nurtured in a court of corruption, and matured in fresh revolution. Wellington himself admitted that he never understood the characters of that period, nor exercised due charity towards them, till he had observed the effects of the French Revolution on the minds and consciences [588]of French statesmen and marshals. Marlborough's fall was brought about by a faction, and his fame has remained ever since a prey to the tender mercies of a faction. But the prejudices of a partisan are but a sorry standard for the measure of one whose transcendent ability as a general, a statesman, a diplomatist, and an administrator, guided not only England but Europe through the War of the Spanish Succession, and delivered them safe for a whole generation from the craft and the ambition of France.

Regarding him as a general, his fame is assured as one of the great captains of all time; and it would not become a civilian to add a word to the eulogy of great soldiers who alone can comprehend the full measure of his greatness. Yet one or two small points are worthy of attention over and above the reforms, already enumerated, which were introduced by him in all three arms of the service. First, and perhaps most important, is the blow struck by Marlborough against the whole system, so much favoured by the French, of passive campaigns. It was not, thanks to Dutch deputies and German princelets, as effective as it should have been, but it still marked a step forward in the art of war. It must never be forgotten that we possess only the wreck of many of Marlborough's finest combinations, shattered, just as they were entering port, against the rocks of Dutch stupidity and German conceit. Next, there is a great deal said and written in these days about night marches and the future that lies before them. It will be well to glance also at the past that they have behind them, and to mark with what frequency, with what consummate skill, and what unvarying success they were employed under far greater than modern difficulties by Marlborough.
Next let it be observed how thoroughly he understood the British soldier. He took care to feed him well, to pay him regularly, to give him plenty of work, and to keep him under the strictest discipline; and with all this he cherished a genial feeling for the men,[589] which showed itself not only in strict injunctions to watch over their comfort but in acts of personal kindness kindly bestowed. The magic of his personality made itself felt among his men far beyond the scope of mere military duty. His soldiers, as the Recruiting Acts can testify, were for the most part the scum of the nation. Yet they not only marched and fought with a steadiness beyond all praise, but actually became reformed characters and left the army sober, self-respecting men.[487] Marlborough, despite his lapses into treachery as a politician, was a man of peculiar sensitiveness and delicacy. He had a profound distaste for licentiousness either in language or in action, and he contrived to instil a like distaste into his army. His force did not swear terribly in Flanders, as King William's had before it, and although the annual supply of recruits brought with it necessarily an annual infusion of crime, yet the moral tone of the army was singularly high. Marlborough's nature was not of the hard, unbending temper of Wellington's. The Iron Duke had a heart so steeled by strong sense, duty, and discipline that it but rarely sought relief in a burst of passionate emotion. Marlborough was cast in a very different mould. He too, like Wellington, was endowed with a strong common sense that in itself amounted to genius, and possessed in the most trying moments a serenity and calm that was almost miraculous. But there was no coldness in his serenity, nothing impassive in his calm. He was sensitive to a fault; and though his temper might remain unchangeably sweet and his speech unalterably placid and courteous, his face would betray the anxiety and worry which his tongue had power to conceal.[488] With such a temperament there was a bond of humanity between him and his men that was lacking in Wellington. Great as Wellington was, the Iron Duke's army could never have nicknamed him the Old Corporal.

The epithet Corporal suggests comparison with the Little Corporal, who performed such marvels with the French Army. Undoubtedly the name was in both cases a mark of the boundless confidence and devotion which the two men could evoke from their troops, and which they could turn to such splendid account in their operations. Marlborough could make believe that he was meant to throw away his entire army and yet be sure of its loyalty; Napoleon could throw away whole hosts, desert them, and command the unaltered trust of a new army. In both the personal fascination was an extraordinary power; but here the resemblance ends. Napoleon, for all his theatrical tricks, had no heart nor tenderness in him, and could not bear the intoxication of success. Marlborough never suffered triumph to turn his head, to diminish his generosity towards enemies, to tempt him from the path of sound military practice, or to obscure his unerring insight into the heart of things. Twice his plans were opposed as too adventurous by Eugene, first when he wished to hasten the battle of Malplaquet, and secondly when he would have masked Lille and advanced straight into France; but even assuming, as is by no means certain, that in both instances Eugene was right, there is no parallel here to the gambling spirit which pervaded the latter enterprises of Napoleon. "Marlborough," said Wellington, "was remarkable for his clear, cool, steady understanding," and this quality was one which never deserted him. Nevertheless, if there be one attribute which should be chosen as supremely characteristic of the man, it is that which William Pitt selected as the first requisite of a statesman—patience; "patience," as the Duke himself once wrote to Godolphin, "which can overcome all things";[489] patience which, as may be seen in a hundred passages during the war, was possessed by him in such measure that it appears almost godlike. These are the qualities which mark the sanity of perfect genius, that distinguish a[591] Milton from a Shelley, a Nelson from a Dundonald, and a Marlborough from a Peterborough; and it is in virtue of these, indicating as they do the perfect balance of transcendent ability, that Marlborough takes rank with the mightiest of England's sons, with Shakespeare, with Bacon, and with Newton, as "the greatest statesman and the greatest general that this country or any other country has produced."

END OF VOL. I
BOOK VII CHAPTER I
The work of disbanding the Army began some months before the final conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. By Christmas 1712 thirteen regiments of dragoons, twenty-two of foot, and several companies of invalids who had been called up to do duty owing to the depletion of the regular garrisons, had been actually broken. The Treaty was no sooner signed than several more were disbanded, making thirty-three thousand men discharged in all. More could not be reduced until the eight thousand men who were left in garrison in Flanders could be withdrawn, but even so the total force on the British Establishment, including all colonial garrisons, had sunk in 1714 to less than thirty thousand men. The soldiers received as usual a small bounty on discharge; and great inducements were offered to persuade them to take service in the colonies, or, in other words, to go into perpetual exile.

But this disbandment was by no means so commonplace and artless an affair as might at first sight appear. One of the first measures taken in hand by Bolingbroke and by his creature Ormonde was the remodelling of the Army, by which term was signified the elimination of officers and of whole corps that favoured the Protestant succession, to make way for those attached to the Jacobite interest. Prompted by such motives, and wholly careless of the feelings of the troops, they violated the old rule that the youngest regiments should always be the first to be disbanded, and laid violent hands on several veteran corps. The Seventh and[4] Eighth Dragoons, the Thirty-fourth, Thirty-third, Thirty-second, Thirtieth, Twenty-ninth, Twenty-eighth, Twenty-second, and Fourteenth Foot were ruthlessly sacrificed; nay, even the Sixth, one of the sacred six old regiments, and distinguished above all others in the Spanish War, was handed over for dissolution like a regiment of yesterday.[1] There were bitter words and stormy scenes among regimental officers over such shameless, unjust, and insulting procedure.
Aug. 1 12 .

All these designs, however, were suddenly shattered by the death of Queen Anne. The accession of the Elector of Hanover to the throne was accomplished with a tranquillity which must have amazed even those who desired it most. Before the new King could arrive the country was gladdened by the return of the greatest of living Englishmen. Landing at Dover on the very day of the Queen's death, Marlborough was received with salutes of artillery and shouts of delight from a joyful crowd. Proceeding towards London next day he was met by the news that his name was excluded from the list of Lords-Justices to whom the government of the country was committed pending the King's arrival. Deeply chagrined, but preserving always his invincible serenity, he pushed on to the capital, intending to enter it with the same privacy that he had courted during his banishment in the Low Countries. But the people had decided that his entry must be one of triumph; and a tumultuous welcome from all classes showed that the country could and would make amends for the shameful treatment meted out to him two years before.

On the 18th of September King George landed at Greenwich, and shortly afterwards the new ministry was nominated. Stanhope, the brilliant soldier of the Peninsular War, became second Secretary-of-State; William[5] Pulteney, afterwards Earl of Bath, Secretary-at-War; Robert Walpole, Paymaster of the Forces; while Marlborough with some reluctance resumed his old appointments of Captain-General, Master-General of the Ordnance, and Colonel of the First Guards. He soon found, however, that though he held the titles, he did not hold the authority of the offices, and that the true control of the Army was transferred to the Secretary-at-War.
1715.
May 24.

How weak that Army had become was presently realised at the outbreak of the Jacobite rebellion in the autumn of 1715. The estimates of 1714 had provided for a British establishment of twenty-two thousand men, of which two-thirds were stationed in Flanders and in colonial garrisons, leaving a dangerously small force for the defence of the kingdom. Even this poor remnant the Jacobite Lords had tried to weaken, by introducing a clause in the Mutiny Act to confine all regiments to the particular districts allotted to them in the British Isles. This insidious move, which was designed to prevent the transfer of troops between Ireland and England, was checked by the authority of Marlborough himself. The King, it seems, had early perceived the perils of such a situation; and accordingly, in January, the Seventh Dragoons were recreated and restored under their old officers, together with four more of the old regiments.[2] In July the prospect of a rising in Scotland made further increase imperative, and orders were issued for the raising of thirteen regiments of dragoons and eight of foot, some few of which must for a brief moment detain us.

The first of the new regiments of dragoons was Pepper's, the present Eighth Hussars, which for a time had shared the hard fate of the Seventh, and was now, like the Seventh, restored to life. The next six, Wynn's, Gore's, Honeywood's, Bowles's, Munden's, and[6] Dormer's, are now known respectively as the Ninth Lancers, the Tenth and Eleventh Hussars, the Twelfth Lancers, and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Hussars, regiments which have made their mark on many a field in the Peninsula and in India, while two of them bear on their appointments the name of Balaclava. The remaining six were disbanded in 1718.[3] Of the foot six regiments also perished after a short life in 1718;[4] the remaining two were old regiments, the Twenty-second and the Thirty-fourth, each of which was destined in due time to add to its colours the name of a victory peculiar to itself.

It may be asked whether no use was made of the hundreds of veterans who had returned from the wars of Flanders. The answer gives us a curious insight into the old conception of a reserve. On the first alarm of a rising, the whole of the officers on half-pay were called upon to hold themselves ready for service;[5] and concurrently twenty-five companies of Chelsea pensioners were formed to take over the duties of the garrisons and to release the regular troops for work in the field. For many years after as well as before this date the same system is found in force; and of this, as of so many obsolete institutions, there is fortunately a living relic still with us. In March 1719 ten of these veteran companies were incorporated into a regiment under Colonel Fielding, and having begun life with the name of Fielding's Invalids, survive to this day as the Forty-first Foot.[6]

I shall not detain the reader with any detailed [7]account of the abortive insurrection of 1715. The operations entailed by an invasion of England from the north are always the same. The occupation of Stirling cuts off the Highlands from the Lowlands, and bars any advance from the extreme north. An invasion from the Lowlands may be checked on either flank of the Cheviots, on the east coast at the lines of the Tweed or the Tyne, or, if headed back from thence, on the west coast at the line of the Ribble. If both Highlands and Lowlands are in revolt, there is the third resource of a simultaneous attack from north and south upon Stirling. This last course lay open to the insurgents on this occasion but was not accepted. The two decisive engagements were accordingly fought, one at Sheriffmuir, a little to the north of Stirling, the other at Preston, whither the insurgents of the Lowlands, checked by an insignificant force on the east coast, made a hopeless and futile march to the west, and were enveloped by English forces marching simultaneously from east, west, and south. None the less the peril to England was great. The force at Stirling was far too weak for the duty assigned to it; and Sheriffmuir was one of those doubtful actions from which each army emerges with one wing defeated and the other victorious. The English force on the Tweed was made up of raw recruits, and was so weak in numbers that General Carpenter, a veteran of Flanders and Spain, who commanded it, accomplished his work chiefly by the bold face with which he met a dangerous position. Such was the military impotence of England after a bare two years of peace.[7]

[8]
1716.
1717.

The panic caused by the insurrection swelled the military estimates of 1716 very considerably. Apart from the new regiments raised for the occasion, the strength of every existing troop and company had been augmented, while the addition of a battalion to each regiment of Guards increased the brigade to the total of seven battalions, which constituted its strength unaltered almost for the next two centuries. The full establishment voted by Parliament for Great Britain was thirty-six thousand men, exclusive of course of troops in Ireland, and of six thousand Dutchmen, who had been sent over by the States-General in fulfilment of obligations by treaty. The very next year, however, saw the establishment diminished by one-fourth, and in May the King announced that he had given orders to reduce the army by ten thousand men more. The estimates for 1718 accordingly provided for but sixteen thousand men in Great Britain, while those for 1719 diminished even that handful by one-fourth, and brought the total down to the figure of twelve thousand men.
1718.
1719.

Then as usual the numbers were found to be dangerously weak. A quarrel between Spain and the Empire, and the ambitious designs of Cardinal Alberoni brought about a breach between England and Spain, which finally culminated in the attack and defeat of the Spanish fleet by Admiral Byng off Cape Passaro. The action was fought before war had actually been declared, and Byng affected to treat it as an unfortunate accident; but Alberoni was too much incensed at the subversion of his designs to heed such empty blandishment as this. He prepared to avenge himself by making terms with the Jacobites and by fitting out an expedition from Cadiz for the support of the Pretender. The force was to be commanded by Ormonde, the same poor, misguided man who had supplanted Marlborough in Flanders; but the menace was formidable none the less. At the meeting of Parliament the King gave warning that an invasion[9] must be looked for, and received powers to augment the Army to meet it. Nevertheless, it was thought best once more to borrow six thousand foreigners from the Dutch and Austrian Netherlands; and England's contribution to her own defence consisted in no more than the transfer of four weak battalions from the Irish to the British establishment. The King's ministers took credit, when the danger was over, for the moderation with which they had exercised the powers entrusted to them, failing to see that resort to mercenary troops at such a time was a policy wanting as much in true statesmanship as in honour.
April 16.
June 10.

For the rest the peril vanished, as four generations earlier had the peril of a still greater Spanish invasion, before wind and tempest. The Spanish transports were dispersed by a gale in the Bay of Biscay, and the great armament crept back by single ships to Cadiz, crippled, shattered, barely saved by the sacrifice of guns, horses and stores from the fury of the storm. Two frigates only reached the British coast and landed three Scottish peers—Lords Tullibardine, Marischal and Seaforth—with three hundred Spanish soldiers, at Kintail in Ross-shire. Here the little party remained unmolested for several weeks, being joined by some few hundred restless Highland spirits, but supported by no general rising of the clans. At length, however, General Carpenter detached General Wightman with a thousand men from Inverness, who fell upon the insurgents in the valley of Glenshiel and, though their force was double that of his own, dispersed them utterly.[8] The campaign ended, like all mountain-campaigns, in the burning of the houses and villages of the offending clans; and thus ignominiously ended this hopeless and futile insurrection. Its most remarkable result was that it drove Lord Marischal and his brother into the[10] Prussian service, and gave to Frederick the Great one of his best officers and most faithful friends—that James Keith who fell forty years later on the field of Hochkirch.
Sept. 21.

Such aggression, failure though it was, naturally led the English to make reprisals; and in September a British squadron sailed from Spithead with four thousand troops on board for a descent on the Spanish coast. The original object of the expedition had been an attack on Corunna, but Lord Cobham,[9] who was in command, thought the enterprise too hazardous, and turned his arms against Vigo. The town being weakly held was at once surrendered, and the citadel capitulated after a few days of siege. A considerable quantity of arms and stores, which had been prepared for Ormonde's expedition, was captured, and with this small advantage to his credit, Cobham re-embarked his troops for England.[10] Shortly afterwards Alberoni opened negotiations for peace, which he purchased at the cost of his own dismissal. The treaty was signed on the 19th of January 1720, and England entered upon twenty years of unbroken peace.
1722.

But before I touch upon the history of that peace I may be allowed to advance two years to record an event which may fittingly close the first thirty years of conflict with Jacobitism and its allies. On the 16th of June 1722 died John, Duke of Marlborough. Constantly during his later campaigns he had suffered from giddiness and headache, and in May 1716 the shock caused by the death of his daughter, Lady Sunderland, brought on him a paralytic stroke. He rallied, but was struck down a second time in November of the same year; and although, contrary to the received opinion, he again rallied, preserving his speech, his memory, and his understanding little impaired, yet it was evident that his life's work was done. In the few [11]years that remained to him he still attended the House of Lords, spending the session of 1721 as usual in London, and retiring at its close to Windsor Lodge. There at the beginning of June in the following year he was smitten for the third time, and after lingering several days, helpless but conscious, he at dawn of the 16th passed peacefully away.

On the 14th of July the body was brought to Marlborough House. In those days London was empty at that season, and only in Hyde Park, where the whole of the household troops were encamped, was there sign of unusual activity. Day after day the Foot Guards were drilled in a new exercise to be used at the funeral; the weeks wore on, the day of Blenheim came and went, and at length on the 9th of August all was ready. From Marlborough House along the Mall and Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner, from thence along Piccadilly and St. James's Street to Charing Cross and the Abbey, the way was lined with the scarlet coats of the Guards. The drums were draped in black, the colours wreathed with cypress; every officer wore a black scarf, and every soldier a bunch of cypress in his bosom. Far away from down the river sounded minute after minute the dull boom of the guns at the Tower.

The procession opened with the advance of military bands, followed by a detachment of artillery. Then came Lord Cadogan, the devoted Quartermaster-General who had prepared for the Duke so many of his fields, and with him eight General Officers, veterans who had fought under their great Chief on the Danube and in Flanders. Among these was Munden, the hero who had led the forlorn hope at Marlborough's first great action of the Schellenberg, and had brought back with him but twenty out of eighty men. Then followed a vast cavalcade of heralds, officers-at-arms and mourners, with all the circumstance and ceremony of an age when pomp was lavished on the least illustrious of the dead; and in the midst, encircled by a forest[12] of banners, rolled an open car, bearing the coffin.[11] Upon the coffin lay a complete suit of gilt armour, above it was a gorgeous canopy, around it military trophies, heraldic devices, symbolic presentations of the victories that the dead man had won and of the towns which he had captured, strange contrast to the still white face, serene beyond even the invincible serenity of life, that slept within.

As the car passed by there rang out to company after company of the silent Guards a new word of command. "Reverse your arms." "Rest on your arms reversed." The officers lowered their pikes, the ensigns struck their colours, and every soldier turned the muzzle of his musket to the ground and bent his head over the butt "in a melancholy posture." The procession moved slowly on, and the troops, still with arms reversed, formed up in its rear and marched with it. Fifty-two years before, John Churchill, the unknown ensign of the First Guards, had marched in procession behind the coffin of George Monk, Duke of Albemarle; now he too was faring on to share Monk's resting-place.

At the Horse Guards the Guards wheeled into St. James's Park and formed up on the parade-ground, where the artillery with twenty guns was already formed up before them. The car crept on to the western door of the Abbey, and then rose up for the first time that music which will ever be heard so long as England shall bury her heroes with the rites of her national Church. Within the Abbey the gray old walls were draped with black, and nave and choir and transept were ablaze with tapers and flambeaux. Of England's greatest all were there, the living and the dead. The helmet of Harry the Fifth, still dinted with the blows of Agincourt, hung dim above his tomb, looking down on the stolid German who now sat upon King Harry's throne, and on his heir the Prince of Wales, who had[13] won his spurs at Oudenarde. And at the organ, humble and unnoticed, sat William Croft, little dreaming that he too had done immortal work, but content to listen to the beautiful music which he had made, and to wait till the last sound of the voices should have died away.[12]

Then the organ spoke under his hand in such sweet tones as are heard only from the organs of that old time, and the procession moved through nave and choir to King Henry the Seventh's chapel. By a strange irony the resting-place chosen for the great Duke was the vault of the family of Ormonde, but it was not unworthy, for it had held the bones of Oliver Cromwell.[13] Then the voice of Bishop Atterbury, Dean of Westminster, rose calm and clear with the words of the service; and the anthem sang sadly, "Cry ye fir-trees, for the cedar is fallen." The gorgeous coffin sank glittering into the shadow of the grave, and Garter King-at-Arms, advancing, proclaimed aloud, "Thus has it pleased Almighty God to take out of this transitory world unto his mercy the most high, mighty and noble prince, John, Duke of Marlborough." Then snapping his wand he flung the fragments into the vault.

As he spoke three rockets soared aloft from the eastern roof of the Abbey. A faint sound of distant drums broke the still hush within the walls, and then came a roar which shook the sable hangings and made the flame of the torches tremble again, as the guns on the parade-ground thundered out their salvo of salute. Thrice the salvo was repeated; the drums sounded faintly and ceased, and all again was still. And then burst out a ringing crash of musketry as the Guards, two thousand strong, discharged their answering volley. Again the volley rang out, and yet again; and then the drums sounded for the last time, and the great Duke was left to his rest.[14]

[14]

From such a scene I must turn to the further work that lies before me in the events of the next twenty years; and it will be convenient to deal first with the political aspect of the Army's history. England, it must be observed, had not yet recovered from the indiscipline and unrest of the Great Rebellion. Since the death of Elizabeth the country, except during the short years of the Protectorate, had not known a master. William of Orange, who had at any rate the capacity to rule it, was unwilling to give himself the trouble; Marlborough, while his power lasted, had been occupied chiefly with the business of war; and during the reign of both war had been a sufficient danger in the one case and a sufficient cause of exultation in the other to distract undisciplined minds. Now, however, there was peace. A foreign prince had ascended the throne, a worthy person and very far from an incapable man, but uninteresting, ignorant of England, and unable to speak a word of her language. The tie of nationality and the reaction of sentiment which had favoured the restoration of Charles the Second were wanting. The country too, after prolonged occupation with the business of pulling down one king and setting up another, had imbibed a dangerous contempt of all authority whatsoever.

Other influences contributed not less forcibly to increase the prevalent indiscipline. Many old institutions were rapidly falling obsolete. The system of police was hopelessly inefficient, and the press had not yet concentrated the force of public opinion into an ally of law and order. In all classes the same lawlessness was to be found; showing itself among the higher by a fashionable indifference to all that had once been honoured as virtue, an equally fashionable indulgence towards debauchery, and an irresistible tendency to decide every dispute by immediate and indiscriminate force. Among the lower classes, despite the most sanguinary penal code in Europe, brutal crime, not of violence only, was dangerously rife. No man who was worth robbing could consider himself safe in London,[15] whether in the streets or in his own house. Patrols of Horse and Foot Guards failed to ensure the security of the road between Piccadilly and Kensington;[15] and further afield the footpad and the highwayman reigned almost undisturbed. Nor did great criminals fail to awake lively sympathy among the populace. The names of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard enjoy some halo of heroism to this day; and frequently, when some desperate malefactor was at last brought to Tyburn, it was necessary to escort him to execution and, supposing that the gallows had not been cut down by sympathisers during the night, to surround him with soldiers lest he should be rescued by the mob. All over England the case was the same. Strikes, riots, smuggling, incendiarism and general lawlessness flourished with alarming vigour, rising finally to such a height that, by the confession of a Secretary-of-State in the House of Commons, it was unsafe for magistrates to do their duty without the help of a military force.[16]

Against this mass of disorder the only orderly force that could be opposed was the Army. It will presently be seen that the Army had grave enough faults of its own, but the outcry against it was levelled not at its faults but at its power as a disciplined body to execute the law. So far, therefore, the unpopularity of the Army was fairly universal. But its most formidable opponents were bred by faction, the Jacobites who wished to re-establish the Stuarts naturally objecting to so dangerous an obstacle to their designs. The howl against the Army was raised in the House of Commons as early as in 1714, and in 1717 a Jacobite member who, being more conspicuous for honesty than for wisdom, was known as "Downright Shippen," opened a series of annual motions for the reduction of the forces. This self-imposed duty, as he once boasted to the House, he fulfilled on twenty-one successive occasions, though on thirteen of them he had found no seconder [16]to support him.[17] If this had been all, no great harm could have resulted; but the watchword of a baffled opposition, artfully stolen from old times of discontent, was too useful not to be generally employed, and "No Standing Army" became the parrot's cry of every political adventurer, every discontented spirit, every puny aspirant to importance. Walpole himself did not disdain to avail himself of it during the four years which he spent out of office between 1717 and 1721, and the stock arguments of the malcontents were never urged more ably nor more mischievously than by Marlborough's Secretary-at-War.[18] The Lords again were little behind the Commons, and Jacobite peers who had commanded noble regiments in action were not ashamed to drag the name of their profession through the dirt.
1714-1739.

In such circumstances, where the slightest false step might have imperilled the very existence of the Army, the administration of the forces and the recommendation of their cost to the House of Commons became matters of extreme delicacy. It has already been told how the King, as the alarm of the first Jacobite rebellion subsided, voluntarily reduced the Army by ten thousand men at a stroke. Such policy, dangerous though it was from a military standpoint, was undoubtedly wise; it was the sacrifice of half the cargo to save the ship, an ingenious transformation of a necessity into a virtue. Even before the Spanish War was ended but fourteen thousand men were asked for as the British establishment, the remainder of the Army being hidden away in Ireland; and the same number was presented on the estimates up to the year 1722. In the autumn of that year, however, the administration insisted that the number should be raised to eighteen thousand. The spirits of the Jacobites had been raised by the birth of Prince Charles Edward; there had been general uneasiness in the country; troops had been [17]encamped ready for service all the summer, and six regiments had been brought over from Ireland. The augmentation was bitterly opposed in Parliament, but was carried in the Commons by a large majority, and was judiciously executed, not by the formation of new regiments but by raising the strength of existing corps to a respectable figure.[19] Until this increase was made, said Lord Townsend in the House of Lords in the following year, it was impossible to collect four thousand men without leaving the King, the capital, and the fortified places defenceless.[20]

Having secured his eighteen thousand men, Walpole resolved that in future this number should form the regular strength for the British Establishment. In 1727 the menace of a war with Spain brought about the addition of eight thousand men, but in 1730 the former establishment was resumed and regularly voted year after year until the outbreak of the Spanish War in 1739. Year after year, of course, the same factious motives for reduction were put forward and the same futile arguments repeated for the hundredth time. "Slavery under the guise of an army for protection of our liberties" was one favourite phrase, while the valour of the untrained Briton was the theme of many an orator. Men who, like Sir William Yonge and William Pulteney, had held the office of Secretary-at-War, were, when in opposition, as loud as the loudest and as foolish as the most foolish in such displays. "I hope, sir," said the former in 1732, "that we have men enough in Great Britain who have resolution enough to defend themselves against any invasion whatever, though there were not so much as one red-coat in the whole kingdom." On the side of the Government the counter arguments were drawn from an excellent source, namely, from the disastrous results of wholesale disbandment [18]after the Peace of Ryswick. The establishment was, in fact, far too small. It would have been impossible (to use Walpole's own words) even after several weeks' time to mass five thousand men at any one point to meet invasion, without stripping the capital of its defences and leaving it at the mercy of open and secret enemies.

Foiled in its attempts to reduce the numbers of the Army, the Opposition sought to weaken it by interference with its administration and discipline, for which mischief the discussion of the Mutiny Act gave annual opportunity. Here again it was Walpole who set the evil example. He it was who maintained that the Irish Establishment must be counted as part of the standing Army, who insinuated that the British regiments, with their enormous preponderance of officers as compared with men, were potentially far stronger than they seemed to be, who encouraged the Commons to dictate to the military authorities the proportion that should be observed between horse, foot, and dragoons.[21] He too it was who imperilled the passing of the Mutiny Act by advancing the old commonplace that a court-martial in time of peace was unknown to English law, and that mutiny and desertion should be punished by the civil magistrate. He it was once more who blamed the ministry for sending the fleet to the Mediterranean instead of keeping it at home to guard the coast, and gave his authority to the false idea that the function of a British fleet in war is to lie at anchor in British ports. Such were the aberrations of a conscience which fell blind directly it moved outside the circle of office.

The Opposition was not slow to take advantage of such powerful advocacy, but fortunately with no very evil results. An address to the King was carried, praying that all vacancies, except in the regiments of Guards, should be filled up by appointment of officers on the list of half-pay. The King willingly acceded,[19] for indeed he had already anticipated the request; and this rule was conscientiously adhered to, both by him and by his successor. It made for economy, no doubt, but it also weakened what then counted as the most efficient form of military reserve; and the result was that officers were forbidden to resign their commissions, being allowed to retire on half-pay only, so that their services might still be at command.[22] The Articles of War were also sent down to the Commons, and may still be read in their journals.[23] It must suffice here to say that they made careful provision for the trial of all but strictly military crimes by the civil power. Here, however, was a new precedent for allowing Parliament a voice not only in the broad principles, but in the details of discipline.

The Opposition in both Houses did not at once take advantage of this innovation, but confined itself to discourses on the inutility and danger of a Mutiny Act at large. It was not surprising that the ignominious Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, should have declaimed against the Act, but it was a sad revelation of factious feeling to find an old colonel, Lord Strafford, declaring that the country got on very well without it in King William's time. Nor must it be thought that, because the Act was ultimately passed every year, no inconvenience resulted from the obstruction in Parliament. On at least one occasion it was not renewed in sufficient time. The courts-martial held after its expiration were therefore invalid, and as prisoners could not be tried twice for the same offence, a number of them escaped scot-free.[24] It was not until 1726 that the attacks upon the measure began to subside, and even then the Government was afraid to introduce necessary [20]amendments, lest by calling attention to the Act it should blow the dull embers of hostility anew into flame.[25]

The next attempted encroachment of Parliament was of a more dangerous nature, though it was more than a little excused by extreme provocation. In the heat of resentment against the opposition to his favourite scheme of an Excise Bill, Walpole in 1733 persuaded the King not only to dismiss his opponents from their places about the court, but to deprive the Duke of Bolton and Lord Cobham, Colonels of the King's Dragoon Guards and of the Blues, and Cornet William Pitt of the King's Dragoon Guards[26] of their commissions. This was to inflict the severest of military punishments short of death for a political disobligation, and was justly seized upon by the Opposition as a monstrous abuse. Lord Morpeth accordingly brought forward a motion in the Commons to make officers of the rank of lieutenant-colonel or above it irremovable except by sentence of court-martial or upon address of either House. The issue thus raised was direct, since by the Articles of War no officer could be dismissed except by Royal Order or sentence of a general court-martial. The debate was very ingenious on both sides, but the motion was lost without a division. The most remarkable speech was that of General Wade, who opposed Lord Morpeth on the ground that he had the greatest difficulty in collecting officers for a court-martial, and that they would be still more negligent if they could be dismissed only by sentence of their fellows. "In short, sir," he said, in words of significant warning, "the discipline of our army is already in a very bad way, and, in effect, this alteration will only make it worse."

[21]

The study of the mingling of political and military influence on the Army will enlighten us as to the cause of this indiscipline. In the first place, it will be noticed that there was no Commander-in-Chief. Lord Cadogan had succeeded Marlborough as captain-general, but even Marlborough had been powerless since his restoration, and he was not in the modern sense of the word a commander-in-chief. The result was that the whole of the authority attached to the office fell into the hands of the Secretary-at-War. That functionary still received as heretofore a military commission, and was nominally a mere secretary, not a minister nor secretary-of-state; and early in the reign he took the opportunity in the person of William Pulteney to repudiate anything approaching to a minister's responsibility.[27] So far as any one was answerable for the Army, it was that secretary-of-state whose duties were later apportioned to the Home Office; and hence we find the Secretary-at-War, though really in control of the whole Army, sending daily requests to the Secretary-of-State for the preparation of commissions,[28] since he himself in theory could sign documents not as the King's adviser, but only as his clerk. As a mere matter of routine this arrangement was most inconvenient, but this would have signified little had it not also been dangerous.[29]

Peculiar circumstances, now long obsolete, gave this irresponsible secretary peculiar powers. In the first place, it must be remembered that as yet barracks were [22]almost unknown. There were, it is true, barracks at the Tower, at the Savoy, at Hull, and at Edinburgh, wherein there was accommodation for the half or even the whole of a battalion; and there was also a barrack at every garrisoned town capable of holding at least the handful of men who were supposed to keep the guns in order. But for the most part the Army was scattered all over the country in minute detachments,[30] for inns were the only quarters permitted by the Mutiny Act, and the number of those inns was necessarily limited. In Ireland the paucity of ale-houses had led comparatively early to the construction of barracks, with great comfort alike to the soldiers and to the population, but in England the very name of barrack was anathema.[31] It was in vain that military men pointed to the sister island and urged that Great Britain too might have barracks. The Government was afraid to ask for them, and the opposition combated any hint of such an innovation, "that the people might be sensible of the fetters forged for them."[32]

The apportionment of quarters fell within the province of the Secretary-at-War; and it is obvious that whether the presence of soldiery were an advantage to a town or the reverse, the power to inflict it could usefully be turned to political ends. A frequent accusation was that troops were employed to intimidate the voters at elections; and indeed the newspapers, not very trustworthy on such points, assert that at the election at Coventry in 1722 the foot-soldiers named two persons and the sheriff returned them.[33] Whether this be true [23]or false it was not until 1735 that the Mutiny Act provided for the withdrawal of the troops to a distance of at least two miles from the polling-place during an election. But it was not so much for their interference with the free and independent voter as for the burden which they laid on the innkeeper that the soldiers were disliked. Whether this burden was really so grievous or not is beside the question; it was, at any rate, believed to be intolerable.[34] As early as in 1726 the King had asked for additional powers in the Mutiny Act to check the evasion by the civil authorities of their duty of quartering the men, and it was just after this date that municipalities began to abound in complaints.[35] The question was one of extreme difficulty for the Secretary-at-War, since the outcry of the civilians was balanced by a no less forcible counter-cry of officers. Municipalities seemed to think that no military exigency could excuse the violation of their comfort. Riots, for instance, were expected at Bath which, as a watering-place, was exempt from the duty of finding quarters for soldiers. The Secretary-at-War, though he did not shrink from sending troops thither to put down the rioters, looked forward to a disturbance between the civil and military elements as inevitable.[36] Southampton, again, cried out bitterly against the arrival within her boundaries of a whole regiment of dragoons. [24]The colonel retorted that the regiment in question had been dispersed in single troops ever since its formation, and that this was actually his first opportunity of reducing it to order and discipline.[37] On some occasions the officers were certainly to blame, though they appear rarely to have misbehaved except under extreme provocation. Thus we find an officer, who had been denied a guard-room at Cirencester, solving the difficulty by the annexation of the town hall,[38] another still more arbitrary putting the Recorder of Chester under durance,[39] and a cornet of dragoons revenging himself upon an innkeeper by ordering eight men to march up and down before the inn for an hour every morning and evening, in order to disturb the guests and spoil the pavement.[40] On one occasion, indeed, we see two officers making the wealthiest clothier of Trowbridge drunk and enlisting him as a private.[41] These are specimens of the petty warfare which was waged between soldiers and civilians all over the kingdom, actions which called forth pathetic appeals from the Secretary-at-War to the offenders not to make the Army more unpopular than it already was. The warning was the more necessary, since, to use Pulteney's words, giddy insolent officers fancied they showed zeal for the Government by abusing those whom they considered to be of the contrary party. This, however, was but the natural result of making the Army a counter in the game of party politics. The only moderating influence was that of the King, who, if once convinced of any abuses committed by the soldiery was inexorably severe.[42]

Yet, on the whole, it should seem that soldiers were far less aggressive towards civilians than civilians towards soldiers. It is abundantly evident that in many places the civil population deliberately picked quarrels with [25]troops in order to swell the clamour against the Army;[43] and officials in high local and municipal station, in their rancour against the red-coats, would stoop to lawlessness as flagrant as that of the mob. Lord Denbigh falsely accused the soldiers employed against the famous Black Gang of poachers, a sufficiently dangerous duty, of leaguing themselves with them for a share in the profits.[44] The Mayor of Penzance deliberately obstructed dragoons, who had been sent down to suppress smuggling, in the execution of their duty; the inference being that his worship was the most notorious smuggler on the coast.[45] The Mayor of Bristol threw every obstacle, technical or captious, that he could devise, in the way of recruiting officers.[46] The Mayor of St. Albans, most disgraceful of all, took the Secretary-at-War's passes from certain discharged soldiers, whipped them through the streets, and gave them vagrant's passes instead, with the result that the unhappy men were stopped and shut up in gaol for deserters.[47] Redress for such injuries as these was not easily to be obtained; for of what profit could it be to these poor fellows to speak to them of their legal remedy? The soldiers were subject to a sterner and harder law than the civilians, and the civilians never hesitated to take advantage of it. They thought nothing of demanding that an officer should be cashiered unheard, solely on their accusation, and that too when redress lay open to them in the courts of law.[48] The difficulties of the Secretary-at-War in respect of these complaints are pathetically summarised by Craggs: "If I take no notice of such things I shall be petitioned against by twenty and thirty towns; if I inquire into them the officers think themselves discouraged; if I neglect them I shall be speeched every day in the House of Commons; if I give any countenance to them I shall disoblige the officers. My own opinion is that I can do no greater [26]service to the Army than when, by taking notice of such few disorders as will only affect a few, I shall make the whole body more agreeable to the country and the clamour against them less popular in the House of Commons.[49]"

With traps deliberately laid to draw the troops into quarrels, with occasional experience of such brutality as has been above described, and with members of the House of Commons incessantly branding soldiers as lewd, profligate wretches, it is hardly surprising that there should have been bitter feeling between the Army and the civil population. But even more mischievous than this was the tendency of civilians, as of the House of Commons, to interfere with military discipline. It is tolerably clear, from the immense prevalence of desertion, and from the effusive letters of thanks written to magistrates who did their duty in arresting deserters, that the great body of these functionaries were in this respect thoroughly disloyal. Men could hardly respect their officers when they saw the civil authorities deliberately conniving at the most serious of military crimes. But this was by no means all. We find Members of Parliament interceding for the ringleaders of a mutiny,[50] for deserters,[51] for the discharge of soldiers, sometimes, but not always, with the offer to pay for a substitute;[52] and finally, as a climax, we see one honourable gentleman calmly removing his son from his regiment on private business without permission either asked or received.[53] And the Secretary-at-War liberates the mutineers, warns the court-martial to sentence the deserter to flogging instead of death, since otherwise interest will procure him a pardon, and begs General Wade, one of the few officers who had the discipline of the Army at heart, to overlook the absence of the member's son without leave.

[27]

A parallel could be found to all these examples at this day, it may be said. It is quite possible, for such ill weeds once sown are not easily eradicated, but the roots of the evil lay far deeper then than now in the overpowering supremacy of the Secretary-at-War. That official throughout this period continued to correspond directly with every grade of officer from the colonel to the corporal, whether to give orders, commendation, or rebuke, wholly ignoring the existence of superior officers as channels of communication and discipline.[54] His powers in other directions are indicated by the phrase, "Secretary-at-War's leave of absence,"[55] which was granted to subalterns, without the slightest reference to their colonels, to enable them to vote for the Government's candidate at by-elections.[56] We find him filling up a vacancy in a regiment without a word to the colonel,[57] instructing individual colonels of dragoons when they shall turn their horses out to grass,[58] and actually giving the parole to the guard during the King's absence from St. James's.[59] All these orders, relating to purely military matters, were issued, of course, by the King's authority, though not always in the King's name; and, indeed, as the volume of work increased, directions, criticisms, and reproofs tended more and more to be communicated by a clerk by order of the Secretary-at-War. In fact, the absolute control of the Army was usurped by a civilian official who, while arrogating the exercise of the royal authority, abjured every tittle of constitutional responsibility.

The result of such a system in such an age as that of Walpole may be easily imagined. All sense of military subordination among officers was lost. Their road to advancement lay, not by faithful performance of their duty for the improvement of their men and the satisfaction of their superiors, but by gaining, in what fashion [28]soever, the goodwill of the Secretary-at-War,[60]—by granting this man his discharge, advancing that to the rank of corporal, pardoning a third the crime of desertion. "Our generals," said the Duke of Argyll in the House of Lords at the opening of the Spanish War, "are only colonels with a higher title, without power and without command ... restrained by an arbitrary minister.... Our armies here know no other power but that of the Secretary-at-War, who directs all their motions and fills up all vacancies without opposition and without appeal."[61] Well might General Wade be believed when he asserted that the discipline of the Army was as bad as it could be.

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.
CHAPTER III
The long reign of Walpole and of peace had endured for full seventeen years. Session after session, through difficulty after difficulty, the minister had handled his charge with consummate dexterity, as a horse-breaker handles an unbroken colt; lunging or riding the nation round and round sometimes in a larger, sometimes in a smaller circle, but except in a circle never permitting it to move at all. It was a change, and doubtless a wholesome change, from the erratic course which England had pursued for the past century, but after a time it became wearisome. Conscious of health, vigour, and strength, the nation began to pant for a wider field and for a rider that would guide it on some more adventurous career. But though there was abundance of aspirants to the saddle it was no easy matter for them to unseat Walpole; their only chance was to rouse the dumb creature, which he had so cleverly mastered, to throw him. The terrors of a standing Army, notwithstanding persistent brandishing of the old flag and howling of the old cries, had ceased to terrify, and it was necessary to discover some excitement of a more formidable kind.

The first signs of coming trouble were seen in Parliament in the spring of 1738, when there was a great debate, culminating in an address of both Houses, respecting Spanish depredations in the South American seas. The newspapers thereupon did their utmost to make matters worse by furious attacks upon Spain. Into the merits of the question it is unnecessary to[56] enter here. The grievances of the English against the Spaniards in respect of restrictions on trade and of the right of search, and of Spaniards against English for evasion of those restrictions, were at least half a century old; and it is sufficiently evident that both sides alike had good ground of complaint. The English, in fact, chafed less against the restrictions themselves than against the arbitrary and capricious fashion in which they were enforced, owing to the dishonesty and corruption of the Spanish authorities. It was a complaint, as early as in the reign of Charles the Second, that Spanish governors would encourage British vessels to violate the regulations for a time in order to make a sudden swoop on them for their own profit, when they had been enticed in sufficient numbers to make a remunerative prize. Altogether, it is only surprising that it should have needed fifty years, an unscrupulous Opposition, and a fable of Jenkins's ear to set the two nations fighting over the question of American trade.
1739.
Oct. 19 30 .

Walpole, for his part, strove his hardest to avert war, and even came to a convention with Spain as to the damages which she should pay for injuries inflicted on British ships; but this was not what the nation desired. The convention was furiously denounced in both Houses as a half-hearted measure, and by no man more vehemently than by William Pitt. The animosity against Spain was inflamed to the highest pitch; but amid all the clamour for war the Opposition did not fail to produce and to support the annual motion for the reduction of the Army.[128] The estimates provided only for a small increase of the garrisons in the West Indies, Minorca, and Gibraltar; yet this most obvious of precautions in the prospect of a rupture with Spain was opposed by the very men who were shrieking loudest for war. Walpole's unfailing dexterity, however, carried him triumphantly through the session; and though half a million was voted for the augmentation of the forces, he still hoped to prolong the years[57] of peace, and with them of his own tenure of office. But meanwhile the proud spirit of Spain had taken offence at the invectives and insults of the self-styled patriots in the English Parliament; and when the plenipotentiaries met in pursuance of the convention to adjust the regulation of commerce between the two nations, the Spaniards refused to proceed with the business unless the right of search, the very point which had been denied in Parliament, were first admitted. Walpole had now to choose between resignation and war, and to his shame he chose war. The open declaration of hostilities was proclaimed in London on the 19th of October, amid the pealing of joy-bells from every steeple in the city. "They may ring their bells now," muttered Walpole, doubtless with memories of the War Office in Marlborough's day strong upon him, "they will be wringing their hands before long."
Nov. 15 26 .

Already, in the course of the summer, an augmentation of some five thousand men had been made to certain regiments of horse and foot both at home and in colonial garrisons.[129] Recruits offered themselves in such abundance that officers could pick their men, and the enthusiasm for the war spread to all parts of the kingdom.[130] Seven hundred men were enlisted in Edinburgh alone; and the Irish, attracted by the offer of a bounty, came over in numbers to take service, though only to be met by an order that, as papists, they should not be admitted.[131] The people were, in fact, intoxicated at the prospect of plundering New Spain. Not a man called to mind the expedition of Venables and Penn, nor thought of the thousands who started with them, big with expectation of gold told up in bags, and had never returned. In November the King opened Parliament, and, having announced the increase already made to the forces, declared his [58]intention of raising several corps of marines, and left the Commons to debate upon the same. Then the old instinct of faction at once recovered strength. Though war had actually been declared, the proposal was severely criticised as an insidious augmentation of the standing Army. Pulteney declined to distinguish between marines and land-forces, as if the point could at the moment have been of the slightest importance; several members expressed their hope that the marines would at least be drafted from the standing Army, and an address to the King to that effect actually found ninety-five supporters. Finally, old Shippen, for the twenty-third time, brought forward his annual motion for the reduction of the Army. These were the men who had brought on the war, and this was the way in which they prepared to support it.[132] When it is remembered that these creatures claimed the name of patriots, it is hardly surprising that patriotism should have found a definition as the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Nov. 21 Dec. 2.
1740.
March 3 14 .

However, orders were issued for the formation of six regiments of marines,[133] under Colonels Wolfe, Robinson, Lowther, Wynyard, Douglas, and Moreton, with a strength of eleven hundred men apiece; and either in deference to the House of Commons, or possibly for greater despatch, these corps were actually filled mainly by drafts from existing regiments, as the event was to prove, with disastrous results.[134] Meanwhile Admiral Vernon's squadron in the West Indies attacked Porto Bello, and having blown up the defences returned triumphant to Jamaica. This piece of work was undoubtedly well done, but the exploit was magnified in England as though Vernon had captured [59]the whole of Spanish America. When a nation goes to war with a light heart it must needs exaggerate the most trifling success; and Vernon became the hero not only of the hour but of the whole war, once again with disastrous results. Elated by his good fortune, the Admiral three months later made an attempt on Carthagena, but found that the capture of the port was a task beyond the strength of his squadron, or indeed of any squadron without the assistance of seven or eight thousand troops. His report, however, indicated the spot where a blow might be struck in earnest at Spain, and to his influence must be ascribed the choice of the field of operations.

The Government now girded itself for a serious effort against New Spain, and decided, like Cromwell, that New as well as Old England should take a share in the conflict. Directions were accordingly issued for the raising of four battalions of Americans under the colonelcy of Deputy-Governor Spotswood of Virginia; the recruiting sergeant was set to work on both sides of the Atlantic; and all through the summer preparations went forward for a secret expedition. It was hoped that it would sail for its destination at the end of June or the beginning of July, that being declared by experts to be the latest possible date at which operations could be conducted with any hope of success.[135] In April the regiments appointed for the service began to assemble in the Isle of Wight, and all was bustle and activity. There was not a little difficulty with these troops, for the new regiments of marines were remarkable neither for drill nor discipline; but by the energy of Brigadier-General Wentworth they were licked into shape with creditable rapidity. Lord Cathcart, who had been selected for the chief command, was indefatigably vigilant, and indeed he had good cause, for the ignorance and stupidity of the authorities with whom he had to deal was almost incredible. Thus, for instance, the War Office, having depleted regiments of the Line to[60] make up the new corps of marines, did not hesitate to order one of the regiments so depleted upon active service; and Cathcart, bound as he knew to a deadly climate in the heart of the tropics, found that part of the force allotted to him consisted of boys who had not strength to handle their arms.[136] Such were the first-fruits of the cry of "No Standing Army."
Aug. 3 14 .

By intense labour the military officers sifted out this unpromising material and turned the residue to the best account, struggling manfully and not unsuccessfully to have all ready for the expedition to start in July. Moreover, on the death of Colonel Spotswood, the intended second in command, Lord Cathcart begged that his place might be filled by Brigadier Wentworth, as a reward for the diligence and the capacity which he had shown in the camp.[137] The request was duly granted, with very tragical consequences. At the same time, however, the General discovered that, although it was now late in July, the Admiral who was to escort his transports had no orders to sail, while his fleet was not even so much as manned.[138] None the less he pushed his preparations strenuously forward, and, choosing the anniversary of Blenheim as a day of good omen for the embarkation, put eight regiments of six thousand men on board ship.[139] Then came vexatious delays, due partly to foul winds, partly to official blundering. Three times the ships got under way, the men cheering loudly at the prospect of sailing at last, and three times the wind failed them or turned foul. Cathcart grew more and [61]more anxious. The favourable season was slipping away fast. The men had been cooped up in the transports for six weeks and had consumed most of the victuals intended for the voyage. Scorbutic sickness was seriously prevalent, and there had already been sixty deaths. "Surely," wrote the General, "some fresh meat might be given to the troops"; but the authorities had given no thought to such matters. August passed away and September came, bringing with it the news that a Spanish fleet had put to sea, and that a French fleet also was about to sail from Brest. France had already manifested sympathy with Spain, as was natural from one Bourbon king to another, and the intentions of the ships from Brest might well be hostile. Such a contingency might have been foreseen, but it was not; so there was further delay while the British fleet was reinforced. Then, when the ships were ready, men could not be found to man them. Two old regiments of the Line, the Thirty-fourth and Thirty-sixth, were turned over to the fleet to make up its complement; but these were insufficient, and Cathcart was ordered to send six hundred of his marines also to the men-of-war. He obeyed, not without warning the Government that an infectious fever, which had already proved terribly fatal, was raging in the fleet; but his warning was not heeded, possibly in the pressure of business could not be heeded. So the days dragged on; the transports waited, and the men died. Cathcart's patience was strained almost beyond endurance. Apart from the trouble with army and fleet, an endless shower of vexations poured on him from Whitehall. His instructions were constantly altered, and no effort was made to keep his destination unknown. One statement which was communicated to him as an important secret had been the talk of all the coffee-houses in Portsmouth long before it reached him. The newspapers published details of every ship-load of arms and stores that was sent to the West Indies, and as a climax printed in full a proclamation which had been prepared for Cathcart to[62] issue on his arrival in South America.[140] Such were the English ideas of organising victory.
Oct. 24 Nov. 4.
1740, Dec. 23. 1741, Jan. 3.

At length, on the 4th of November, the fleet sailed, just four months too late, and after a very stormy passage, which scattered the ships in all directions, the bulk of the transports arrived at St. Rupert's Bay, Dominica, on the 3rd of January 1741. Already the force had suffered heavy losses. The fleet was very sickly, over one hundred soldiers had died, and worst of all, Lord Cathcart himself had been seized with dysentery and was also dead.[141] Wentworth assumed the command in his stead; and the fleet after a day or two proceeded to St. Kitts, where all the missing ships were found at anchor safe and sound. But among them too sickness had made sad havoc, and of the six hundred marines transferred despite Cathcart's warnings to the men-of-war, many were dead and few fit for duty. From thence the fleet sailed, as had been appointed, for Jamaica, where it found Vernon's squadron awaiting it in the harbour, and the American battalions, now regimented under the command of Colonel Gooch, in camp on the island. The Americans were in a very bad state. Their ranks had been filled without difficulty, but with bad material: they were guiltless of drill or discipline, and on arrival at Jamaica had at once become disorderly and mutinous. There was good excuse for their discontent, for the English Government, though it had made arrangements for the payment and victualling of the British troops, had made none whatever for the Americans, who were thus compelled to fall back on such meagre resources as Jamaica could provide.[142] Moreover, the Americans were even more sickly than the British, and had buried scores of men since their disembarkation. By the first returns sent home from [63]Jamaica it appears that of the nine thousand soldiers who had started from England and America in October, seventeen officers and six hundred men had died before the end of the year, while fifteen hundred more were actually on the sick-list.[143]
Feb. 24 March 7.

Still the survivors remained in good spirits. There was for the present all possible harmony between army and navy,[144] and the losses could to some extent be made good by embarking the four independent companies which lay in garrison in Jamaica. But meanwhile the French fleet was concentrated off the coast of Hispaniola, and until it should be dispersed the commanders dared not undertake any operations against the Spanish Main. It is true that France and England were not at open war; but this, as shall presently be seen, was no reason why the fleets and armies of the two nations should not fight each other. When, therefore, the fleet at last sailed from Jamaica on the 7th of March, Vernon was fully resolved to attack the French if he should fall in with them.[145] He was, however, relieved of any such responsibility. Sickness had driven the French fleet back from the Caribbean Sea to Brest, and the British were free to go whither they would. It was thereupon decided to attack Carthagena without delay, for though Cathcart's instructions gave Wentworth the option of first attempting Havana, yet the Cuban port was considered to be too well defended, whereas Carthagena would, it was hoped, fall an easy prey. The fact was that Vernon had set his heart on Carthagena, and he found little difficulty in carrying his point.
March 4 15 .

On the 15th of March, accordingly, the fleet anchored at Playa Grande, two leagues to windward of Carthagena, and the English commanders could judge of the work before them. The city of Carthagena lies at the head of an inland lake, which extends at its greatest length for some seven miles north and south. To this lake [64]there are two entrances, of which the eastern, known from its narrowness as the Boca Chica or Little Mouth, alone was practicable for line-of-battle ships. The western side of the Boca Chica was defended by three forts—St. Jago and San Felipe at the entrance from the sea, and Fort Boca Chica, a far more formidable work, half way up the passage. On the eastern side a fascine-battery had been thrown up at the entrance, while another stronghold, Fort St. Joseph, sealed up the inner end. To force the Boca Chica so as to admit the fleet to the harbour was the first task to be accomplished by Wentworth and Vernon.
March 9 20 .
March 11 22 .

On the 20th of March a portion of the squadron, under Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle, battered down the forts of St. Jago and San Felipe; three hundred grenadiers were successfully landed on the western shore of the Boca Chica; and on the 22nd the whole of the land-forces were disembarked excepting the Thirty-fourth, the Thirty-sixth, and the Americans, of which last, owing to their indiscipline, but three hundred were trusted ashore. From the moment of disembarkation Wentworth seems to have lost his head. He knew his profession by book, but he was wholly without experience. Though encamped on an island surrounded everywhere by at least a league of water, he lived in mortal terror of a surprise, and posted guards so numerous and so strong that he could hardly find men to relieve them. Vernon and Ogle watched him with amazement for two days, and then losing all patience sent him a letter, the first of a very remarkable series that was to pass between Admirals and General before Carthagena. "Push forward part of your force to Fort Boca Chica," they said in effect, "put the rest of your men under canvas, hasten your engineers to the siege of the fort, and choose a few picked men for your guards instead of harassing your whole army."[146] It was excellent if elementary advice, though hardly such as a General looks for from an Admiral.

[65]
March 12 23 .
March 22 April 2.

Wentworth, to do him justice, seems to have taken this counsel in good part, but the delay in opening the siege of Fort Boca Chica was not altogether his fault. There was but one engineer in the whole army who was the least competent to carry on a siege, and there seems to have been considerable difficulty, first in getting him to the scene of action at all, and secondly in making him work when he reached it.[147] Ground was broken at last on 23rd March, but when the batteries had been built, there were so few efficient artillerymen with the army that Vernon's seamen were perforce borrowed to work the guns. Finally, on the 2nd of April Wentworth opened fire; and then it was discovered that by some mistake the camp had been pitched directly in the same straight line with the battery, so that every shot from Fort Boca Chica that flew over the British guns fell among the tents, killing and wounding over a hundred men on the first day. Nevertheless, with the help of a furious cannonade from some of the men-of-war, the guns of Fort Boca Chica were silenced, and then Vernon and Ogle began again to stir up Wentworth to action. "We hope," they wrote on the 3rd of April, "that you will order your troops to make a lodgment under Boca Chica to-night ... the longer you delay, the harder your work will be." Wentworth hesitated, and nothing was done. "You ought to storm the fort to-night before the moon rises," they wrote again on the 4th. Wentworth still hesitated, and another day was lost. Then the naval officers became more peremptory. "Diffidence of your troops," they wrote, "can only discourage them. In our opinion you have quite men enough for the attack of so paltry a fort. You should have built another battery, for your men would be all the healthier for more work. Knowing the climate, we advise you to pursue more vigorous measures in order to keep your men from sickness."

The tone of the two sailors towards the soldier was rather that of a contemptuous nurse towards a timid[66] child, but the last letter had the desired effect, for Wentworth ordered the fort to be stormed on the very same day. The English no sooner mounted the breach than the Spaniards fled almost without firing a shot, and the dreaded fort of Boca Chica fell into Wentworth's hands at the cost of two men wounded. Moreover, the Spaniards in the forts on the other side of the channel also partook in the panic and abandoned them, leaving the entrance to the harbour open to the British. The operations so far had cost one hundred and thirty men killed and wounded, but two hundred and fifty had perished from sickness, and over six hundred were in hospital. The rest of the work needed to be done quickly if it were to be done at all.
April 5 16 .
April.

It was, however, first necessary to re-embark all the troops in order to carry them to the head of the harbour for the attack on the city of Carthagena. This process occupied more than a week, and did not improve relations between army and navy. Vernon had already complained loudly, and probably with some justice, of the laziness of the soldiers: the blue-jackets had done all the hard work at the first landing of the regiments, and they were now called upon to do it again. At length, however, the transports got under way and proceeded towards the inner harbour, the entrance to which, like that of the outer port, lay through a narrow channel with a large fort, called the Castillo Grande, on one side, and a small redoubt on the other. The passage was more effectually blocked by a number of sunken ships which the Spaniards had scuttled after the forcing of Boca Chica. The fleet, however, quickly disposed of all these obstacles. The Spaniards abandoned Castillo Grande, and the naval officers, with their usual deftness, contrived to find a channel through the sunken ships. A few broadsides cleared the beach for the disembarkation, and on the 16th of April Wentworth landed. He had begged hard for five thousand men, but had been answered curtly, though not unjustly, by the naval commanders that, while they were ready to[67] land them if required, they thought fifteen hundred men quite sufficient, since time above all things was precious.[148] So with fifteen hundred men Wentworth proceeded to the further task before him. There was now but one outwork between him and Carthagena, a fort standing on an eminence about seventy feet above the plain, and called Fort St. Lazar. The approach to it from the head of the harbour lay through a narrow defile, at the mouth of which the Spaniards offered some slight resistance. They soon gave way on the advance of the British, but poor Wentworth, always a General by book, with his head full of ambuscades and other traps for the unwary, halted his men instead of pushing on boldly, or he would almost certainly have carried Fort St. Lazar then and there, and broken into Carthagena itself on the backs of the fugitives. Vernon had urged upon him on the day before that he had only to act vigorously to ensure success, but Wentworth was far too much oppressed by the responsibilities of command to avail himself of such sound advice. He advanced no further than to within a league of St. Lazar, encamped, and pressed the Admiral to send him the remainder of his men.

Vernon acceded to the request, but with no very good grace. "I send the men," he wrote, "but I still think such a number unnecessary. Delay is your worst enemy; their engineers are better than yours, and a vigorous push is your best chance. No time should be lost in cutting off the communication between the town and the surrounding country. We hope that you will be master of St. Lazar to-morrow." The advice was sounder than ever, but Wentworth could not nerve himself to act on it. Shielding himself behind the vote of a council of war, he replied that the escalade of St. Lazar was impossible; the walls were too high and the ditch too deep. Would it not be possible, he asked, for the ships to batter the fort and sweep the isthmus that divided the town from the surrounding country[68] for him. This was too much. The fleet had borne the brunt of the work so far, but it could not do everything. Vernon's tone, always overbearing, now became almost violent. "Pointis,[149] who knew the climate, tried the escalade and succeeded," he retorted, "the ships can do no more. If you had advanced at once when the Spaniards fled from you, we believe that you would have taken St. Lazar on the spot."

After digesting this unpalatable document for a day Wentworth decided after all for an escalade. Though he lacked Vernon's experience of the tropics he had a sufficient dread of the rainy season, which had already sent sickness into his camp to herald its approach. By some mischance, for which he disclaimed responsibility, neither tents nor tools were landed with the men;[150] and for three nights the troops, young, raw and shiftless, were compelled to bivouac. On the third day they began to fall down fast. A council of war was held, and although General Blakeney, an excellent officer, opposed the project to the last, it was decided to carry St. Lazar by assault. The fort indeed was nothing very formidable in itself, and could have been knocked to pieces without difficulty from another eminence called La Popa, about three hundred yards from it. The only engineer, however, had been killed before Boca Chica was taken, the artillerymen were wholly ignorant of their duty, and the tools had not been landed; so that although a battery on La Popa would have served the double purpose of destroying St. Lazar and battering the walls of the city, no attempt was made to erect it. And meanwhile the Spaniards had made use of their respite to strengthen St. Lazar by new entrenchments which were far from despicable, and had reinforced the garrison from the town. There, however, the matter was; and the problem, though it might be difficult in itself, was so far simple in that it admitted of but one solution. St. Lazar was practically inaccessible except [69]on the side of the town, where it was commanded by the guns of Carthagena. The fort must, therefore, be carried from that side before daylight, and carried as quickly as possible.
April 9 20 .

Early in the morning of the 20th of April the columns of attack were formed. First came an advanced party of fifty men backed by four hundred and fifty grenadiers under Colonel Wynyard, then the two old regiments, the Fifteenth and Twenty-fourth, jointly one thousand strong; after them a mixed company of the Thirty-fourth and Thirty-sixth; then the Americans with woolpacks and scaling-ladders, and finally a reserve of five hundred of Wolfe's marines. The design was to assault the north and south sides of St. Lazar simultaneously, Wynyard taking the southern or weaker face, while Colonel Grant with the old regiments, on which Wentworth principally relied, assaulted the northern. A couple of Spanish deserters were at hand to guide the columns to their respective positions.

At four o'clock the march began, the fireflies still flickering overhead against the darkness, the air close and still, and alive with the chirping, whistling, and croaking of the noisy tropic night. Within the camp men were lying in scores under the scourge of yellow fever, some tossing and raving in delirium, some gasping in the agonies of the last fatal symptom, some prostrate in helpless and ghastly collapse, waiting only for the dead hour before the dawn when they should die. These were left behind, and the red columns disappeared silently into the darkness. Before long Wynyard's men reached the foot of the hill and began the ascent. The ground before them was so steep that they were forced to climb upon their hands and knees, and the officers began to doubt whether their guides might not have played them false. Still the grenadiers scrambled on almost to the top of the hill, and then suddenly, at a range of thirty yards, the Spaniards opened a deadly fire. Now was the time for a rush, which would have swept the Spaniards pell-mell from their[70] entrenchments. One man with the traditions of Cutts the Salamander would have carried the fort in two minutes; a few score of undisciplined Highlanders with naked broadswords would have mastered it even without a leader; but the officers had no experience except of the parade ground. They were conscious of a heavy fire in front and flanks, so they wheeled their platoons outwards to right and left for "street-firing," as it was called, and advanced slowly in perfect order, the men firing steadily at the flashes of cannon and musketry that blazed before them over the parapet. Raked through and through by grape and round shot, the soldiers stood without flinching for a moment, and loaded and fired as they had been taught, while the grenadiers lit their fuses coolly and hurled their hand-grenades into the belt of flame before them. They did not know, poor fellows, that the grenades provided for them were so thick, owing to the negligence of the authorities of the Ordnance, that not one in three of them would burst. So Wynyard's column fired dutifully on, though the men that composed it were mown down like grass.

On the northern face of the hill, where Grant's column was engaged, a like tragedy was enacted. Grant himself was shot down early, and after his fall no man seemed to know what should be done. The men faced the fire gallantly enough and returned it with perfect order and steadiness, but without effect. There were calls for the woolpacks and scaling-ladders, but the undisciplined Americans had long since thrown them down and fled; and even had the ladders been forthcoming they were too short by ten feet to be of use. There were appeals for guns to silence the Spanish artillery, but these had been placed in the rear of the columns and were not to be brought forward. So for more than an hour this tragical fight went on. Day dawned at length; the light grew strong, and the guns of Carthagena opened fire on Grant's column with terrible effect. Still the English stood firm and fired[71] away their ammunition. It was all that they had been bidden to do, and they did it. Wynyard, his grenadiers once thrown into action, seemed incapable of bringing up other troops to support them. General Guise, who was in charge of the combined attack, showed magnificent courage and set a superb example, but it was something more than courage that was wanted. It was now broad daylight, and the Spaniards began with unerring aim to pick off the English officers. Finally, a column of Spanish infantry issued from the gates of Carthagena to cut off the English from their ships, and at last at eight o'clock Wentworth gave the order to retire, Wolfe's marines coming forward to cover the retreat. The troops had been suffering massacre for close on three hours, but until that moment not a man turned his back. There was no pursuit and the retreat was conducted in good order; but the troops, who had borne up hitherto against hardship and sickness, were thoroughly and hopelessly disheartened.
April 10 21 .
April 14 25 .

The losses in the assault were very heavy. Of the fifteen hundred English engaged, forty-three officers and over six hundred men were killed and wounded, and the Fifteenth and Twenty-fourth both lost over a fourth of their numbers. The treachery of the guides was answerable for much, but the mismanagement of the officers was responsible for more. Colonel Grant was picked up alive, indeed, but desperately wounded. "The General ought to hang the guides and the King ought to hang the General," he gasped out in his agony; and a few hours later he was dead. Wentworth, striving hard to put a good face on the disaster, ordered a battery to be erected against Fort St. Lazar on that same evening; but by this time yellow fever had seized hold of the army in good earnest, and it was a question not of building batteries but of digging graves. On the 21st the General called a council of war and announced to the Admiral its decision that the number of men was insufficient for the work, and that the enterprise must be abandoned. "Since the engineers or[72] pretended engineers of the army declare that they do not know how to raise a battery, we agree," answered Vernon and Ogle, "though if our advice had been taken we believe that the town might have fallen." Then with studied insolence of tone they proceeded to offer a few obvious suggestions for the withdrawal of the troops. The military officers, not a little hurt, remonstrated in mild terms against the taunt, and after a short wrangle Wentworth requested a general council of war, by which it was finally determined that the attack on Carthagena must be given up as impracticable.
April 17 28 .

It was indeed high time. Between the morning of Tuesday the 18th and the night of Friday the 21st of April the troops had dwindled from sixty-six hundred to thirty-two hundred effective men. The two old regiments had been much shattered in the attack of St. Lazar, and the residue of the British force consisted chiefly of young soldiers, while the twelve hundred Americans who still survived were distrusted by the whole army, and were in fact little better than an encumbrance. On the 28th the troops were re-embarked, poor Wentworth being careful to carry away every scrap of material lest the Spaniards should boast of trophies. The naval officers grudgingly consented to blow up the defences of Boca Chica, and then for ten terrible days the transports lay idle in the harbour of Carthagena.
April 24 May 5.

The horrors of that time are quite indescribable. By the care of Cathcart hospital-ships had indeed been provided for the expedition, but these had neither nurses, surgeons, cooks, nor provisions. "The men," wrote Smollett, himself a surgeon on board a man-of-war, "were pent up between decks in small vessels where they had not room to sit upright; they wallowed in filth; myriads of maggots were hatched in the putrefaction of their sores, which had no other dressing than that of being washed by themselves in their own allowance of brandy; and nothing was heard but groans and lamentations and the language of despair invoking death[73] to deliver them from their miseries." So these poor fellows lay in this sickly, stifling atmosphere, with the raging thirst of fever upon them, while the tropical sun burnt fiercely overhead or the tropical rain poured down in a dense, gray stream, filling the air with that close clammy heat which even by a healthy man is grievous to be borne. The sailors also suffered much, though less heavily, being many of them acclimatised; and surgeons could have been spared from the men-of-war for the transports could Wentworth have been brought to ask them of Vernon, or Vernon to offer them to Wentworth. So while the commanders quarrelled the soldiers perished. Officers died as fast as the men, all discipline on the transports came to an end, and the men gave themselves up to that abandoned listlessness which was seen in Schomberg's camp in Ireland, when the bodies of dead comrades were used to stop the draughts in the tents. Day after day the sailors rowed ashore to bury their boats' loads of corpses, for there was always order and discipline in the ships of war; but the raw soldiers simply dragged their dead comrades up on deck and dropped them overboard, without so much as a shroud to their bodies or a shot to their heels. Vernon railed furiously at this nastiness, as he called it,[151] not reflecting that men untrained to the sea might know no better. So after a few hours the bodies that had sunk beneath the water came up again to the surface and floated, hideous and ghastly beyond description, about the transports, while schools of sharks jostled each other in the scramble to tear them limb from limb, and foul birds with ugly, ragged wings flapped heavily above them croaking for their share. Thus the air was still further poisoned, sickness increased, and the harbour became as a charnel-house. At length, on the 5th of May, it was resolved to return to Jamaica; and two days later the fleet sailed away from the horrors of Carthagena. By that time the men nominally fit for service were reduced to seventeen hundred, of whom[74] not above a thousand were in a condition to be landed against an enemy.[152]
August 12 23 .
August 18 29 .

Arrived at Jamaica the commanders deliberated as to what should next be done. There were still men enough, it was thought, for a successful descent upon Cuba, though the British regiments were terribly short of officers, having lost over one hundred since they had left England. But the plague was not stayed by the removal to Jamaica. Within the month that elapsed after the abandonment of Carthagena eleven hundred men died; the strength of the British was reduced to fourteen hundred, and of the Americans to thirteen hundred, men.[153] For the next three weeks the troops continued to die at the rate of one hundred a week, the Americans, as always throughout this expedition, perishing even more rapidly than the British. At last, after long disputes, it was decided to make an attempt upon Santiago de Cuba. The fleet sailed on the 23rd of August, and on the 29th anchored on the north coast of the island, in a bay which Vernon, in honour of Prince William, named Cumberland Haven.

Then the Admiral again came forward with the same advice as he had offered at Carthagena. He urged Wentworth to take a picked force of a thousand men only, together with a thousand bearers, and with this column to make a forced march and take Santiago by surprise, the fleet meanwhile co-operating by sea. In the hands of an enterprising commander it is possible that such a plan might have succeeded; it was in fact just such a stroke as had been beloved of Drake and of the greatest of the buccaneers, but it was beyond the spirit of Wentworth. The risk indeed was great. The town lay ninety miles distant from Cumberland Haven, the only road was a path cut through the jungle, and there were rivers on the way which a few hours of rain might render impassable whether for advance or retreat. In a word Wentworth would have none of such [75]ventures. The ill-feeling between army and navy was embittered; the troops lay idle in their camp, and, worst of all, sickness increased rather than abated at the close of the rainy season. By the middle of November there were hardly sufficient men to supply reliefs for the ordinary guards, and at the beginning of December there were less than three hundred privates fit for duty. A council of war was called, and it was decided to re-embark the troops for Jamaica, whither Wentworth, despite violent protests from Vernon, decided to accompany them.
1742.
March 9 20 .
May.

Still the curtain was not yet to fall on this awful drama. The military force was now so much reduced that four of the eight regiments were drafted into the other four, and only the Fifteenth, Twenty-fourth, Wolfe's, and Fraser's were left. The yellow fever continued to rage unchecked. Two hundred and fifty of the men left in hospital by Wentworth on his departure for Cuba died in a single fortnight.[154] Then in February 1742 there came a reinforcement of three thousand men, namely, one battalion of the Royal Scots, the Sixth, and the Twenty-seventh Foot. They arrived healthy, but began to sicken at once.[155] All kinds of new projects were now debated, an attack on Guatemala, on Yucatan, on Panama; but the troops continued to die at the rate of fifteen men a day, and it was of little profit to discuss plans in the presence of such a general as yellow fever. At length, after much delay, the expedition put to sea for the third time, and sailed against Porto Bello. The voyage was protracted by inclement weather to nineteen days, and at the end of those nineteen days, although none but healthy and selected men had been embarked, the Sixth regiment alone had thrown ninety-eight corpses overboard, and of the whole force nearly a thousand were [76]sick or dead.[156] In such circumstances the enterprise was abandoned, and the expedition, once more delayed by unfavourable weather, returned again to Jamaica. There the hospitals were emptier and the graveyards fuller than at Wentworth's departure, for five hundred of the sick which he had left behind him had succumbed. The survivors who returned from Porto Bello soon filled up the hospital again, and by the end of July it was crowded with eight hundred men. One hundred and fifty of these died in August, and three hundred more were dead by the middle of October. By this time such few men as remained of the four thousand Americans had been discharged, the survivors numbering little more than three hundred, and all hope of further operations had been abandoned. The commanders indeed still met and discussed their plans with each other and with Governor Trelawny, the contention growing so hot between them that Trelawny and Sir Chaloner Ogle drew their swords upon each other, and were with difficulty prevented by Wentworth from adding to the death-roll. But when yellow fever is killing men before they can arrive within range to kill each other, councils of war are even less than ordinarily profitable. Of the regiments that had sailed from St. Helen's under Cathcart in all the pride and confidence of strength, nine men in every ten had perished.[157]

A great historian has asked, When did this Spanish war end?[158] and the answer is that it ended imperceptibly in the gradual annihilation of the contending armies by yellow fever. The French fleet was driven back to France by it, the Spaniards were left defenceless by it, the English were palsied for attack by it. There was indeed desultory fighting, not without incidents of signal gallantry, between the colonists of Carolina and [77]Georgia and their Spanish neighbours in Florida, but the operations were too trifling to merit record in this place. The one gleam of light in the whole dark history is the heroic voyage of Anson, who had been sent round Cape Horn, with some vague idea that his fleet and Vernon's should co-operate in attacks on Central America. In Anson's fame the Army also has some faint though melancholy share, for about three hundred Chelsea pensioners, weak, aged, and infirm, were barbarously driven on board his ships, nominally to man them, but in reality only to find at sea the grave which past service should have ensured them on English soil. Whether with Anson or with Vernon, whether on the Atlantic or the Pacific, the war had nothing but failure and death for the red-coats.

It remains to say something of the human share in the catastrophe of the expedition to Carthagena. Wentworth has hitherto been made the scapegoat for every misfortune, and it is probable that he must remain so; yet the blame of the avoidable disasters must not be laid wholly to his charge. So far as he had been tried up to the time of his command he had proved himself a diligent and painstaking officer; he had been installed as Cathcart's second by Cathcart's own request, and could he have remained a subordinate would probably have done well enough. Though lacking experience of active service, in or out of the tropics, he did his best to make good the deficiency by consulting those officers who knew more than himself. He tried his hardest to work in concert with the naval officers, and never wrote home a word of complaint against Vernon until he had endured his arrogant and overbearing tone for more than a year. But his own training, like that of his men, had been mechanical only, and he could neither rise above the stiff formalities of his profession himself, nor raise his men above them. It will be seen that this same mechanical training could produce astonishing results on the familiar battlegrounds[78] of Flanders, but it was out of place on the Spanish Main, as it was soon to prove itself out of place on the Ohio. Again, poor workman though Wentworth was, the tools to his hand were not good. He himself had only with great difficulty taught six of his regiments the rudiments of discipline in the Isle of Wight. His regimental officers were, without exception, young and inexperienced, while some few of them, who had obtained commissions through political jobbery, are described as the most abandoned wretches of the town. The American troops, which formed a third of the whole force, were incomparably worse than the worst of the English, and being made up to some extent of Irish papists were more than a little untrustworthy. Again, although the least foresight must have shown that the brunt of the work would fall upon the artillery, the gunners furnished to Wentworth were raw yokels, just caught up from the plough and wholly ignorant of their duty, while their commander was incapable, and his second a drunkard. Of the engineers it is sufficient to repeat that after the chief was killed not one could be found with the slightest knowledge of his duty. Moreover, of the eight battering cannon furnished to him one was found to be unserviceable and the rest were all of different patterns, while the shells, like the hand-grenades, were of bad quality. Again, the stores of all kinds were so unspeakably bad as to call forth the bitterest complaints from Wentworth; and beyond all doubt bad food contributed to increase the sickliness of the Army and to weaken the men against the attacks of yellow fever. In fact, the trail of the incompetent Newcastle is over the whole expedition; but these blunders and deficiencies only the less excuse Wentworth for failing to adopt a swifter and more dashing system of operations.

Walker & Boutall del.

To face page 78.
CARTHAGENA 1741.
From a contemporary plan by
Capt. Ph. Durrell.

Vernon, on his side, boasted loudly that had he been invested with the sole command he would have accomplished every object at a far lower sacrifice of life; and it is probable that he spoke truth. Certainly he[79] never ceased to impress upon Wentworth the necessity for bold and active measures. Nevertheless it was Vernon who was mainly responsible for the fatal friction between army and navy. He seems to have been by nature a bully; imperious, conceited, insolent, and without an idea of tact. The ill-feeling between the two services had shown itself before the expedition joined Vernon's fleet at Jamaica; and the Thirty-fourth regiment, which had been detailed for service on the men-of-war, lost half of its numbers through ill-usage on board ship before a shot was fired. It would have been a sufficiently difficult task for Vernon to have composed these differences, but far from attempting it he set himself deliberately to aggravate them. Still, when the whole history of the expedition is examined the blame for its failure must rest not with the General, not with the Admiral, not even with the Government, but with those benighted and unscrupulous politicians who gambled away the efficiency of the Army and of the military administration for the petty triumphs of party and the petty emoluments of place and power.

Authorities.—The most familiar account of the expedition to Carthagena is of course that of Smollett, a great part of which is repeated in Roderick Random. Other sources are the State Papers, Colonial Series, "North America and West Indies," No. 61, and Admiralty Papers, "Jamaica," No. 1. There is indeed more to be gleaned from the enclosures sent home by Vernon than from Wentworth's despatches. All the returns, however, are in the Colonial Series, as well as a criticism of the conduct of the expedition, and an excellent narrative by Lord Elibank.
CHAPTER IV
Oct. 9 20 .
April 1 12 .

Long before the enterprise against the Spanish Main had worn itself out to its tragical end, all Europe had been kindled into a blaze of war. On the 20th of October 1740, while Cathcart was still impatiently awaiting the fair wind which should carry him from Spithead, the Emperor Charles the Sixth died, leaving his daughter Maria Theresa sole heiress of his dominions. Her succession had already been recognised by the powers of Europe through their guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction, but on such guarantees little trust was to be reposed. The principal rival to the Queen of Hungary was the Elector of Bavaria, and France, mindful of her old friendship with Bavaria, was ready enough to wreak her old hostility upon the House of Austria by upholding him. England and Holland alone, commercial nations to whom a contract was a thing not lightly to be broken, felt strongly as to their duty in supporting the young Queen. The various states of Germany were as usual self-seeking and disunited, watching greedily to make what profit they could out of the helpless House of Hapsburg. Frederick of Prussia, not yet named the Great, was the first to move. He had but recently come to the throne, inheriting together with it the most efficient army in Europe, and a large stock of ready money. Moving, as ever, promptly, swiftly, and silently, he invaded Silesia, and by a signal victory over the Austrians at Mollwitz called the whole of Europe to arms.

France, with visions not only of acquiring new[81] territory in Germany, but of paying off old scores against England through Hanover, had begun to weave great schemes even before the fight of Mollwitz. The most remarkable of living French statesmen, Marshal Belleisle, having thought out his plans and obtained the royal sanction for them, started off in March 1741 on a tour of visits to the courts of Europe; his object being to persuade them, first to renounce the Pragmatic Sanction, and secondly to support the candidature of the Elector Charles Albert of Bavaria against that of Maria Theresa's husband, the Grand Duke Francis of Lorraine, for the imperial crown. This done, he seems to have hoped to partition Austria proper between Saxony and Prussia, and to divide all Germany and the Empire into four weak kingdoms, Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, and Hungary, which by careful fostering of jealousies and quarrels should be kept dependent on France.
Dec. 4 15 .
February.

Charles Albert of Bavaria, Augustus of Saxony, Frederick of Prussia and the Queen of Spain were gained over by Belleisle with little difficulty; but Hanover, with England at its back, stood out for the Pragmatic Sanction. In England the sympathy with Maria Theresa was strong, and Walpole in the session of 1741 obtained from Parliament a pledge to maintain her succession, a subsidy of three hundred thousand pounds to tide her over financial difficulties, and an acknowledgment of England's obligation to assist her with a force of twelve thousand men. He also attempted to detach Frederick from Belleisle's confederacy, but with conspicuous ill-success. Meanwhile King George went over to Hanover to assemble troops for the support of Maria Theresa; and then France, always ready to strike the first blow, sent two armies across the Rhine, one to join hands with the forces of Bavaria and carry the war to the gates of Vienna, the other straight upon Hanover itself. Thus surprised, the King could do nothing but stipulate for one year's neutrality for Hanover, promising also that during the same period he would neither give help to the Queen of Hungary[82] nor cast his vote as an Elector of the Empire in her husband's favour. Bound by this humiliating agreement, which had excited no less scorn in England than in Austria, the King returned home to meet a new parliament, which had been elected amid no ordinary excitement owing to the disasters on the Spanish Main. Furious attacks were made upon Walpole, who was held responsible for a war which he had always deprecated, and for which he knew the nation to be unprepared; and in less than two months he was driven from office. Lord Wilmington succeeded him as nominal head of the Treasury, and Lord Carteret, one of the few living Englishmen who could speak German, took charge of foreign affairs. Parliament showed itself more zealous than ever in the cause of Maria Theresa, and voted her a subsidy of half a million, while Carteret prevailed with his colleagues to send sixteen thousand British troops to Flanders to act as her auxiliaries in arms. Finally, five millions were granted for the prosecution of the war.

Notwithstanding that all these preparations could be aimed at no power but France, the two nations were not supposed to be at war with each other. The French had invented the phrase auxiliaries, and had marched their armies into Germany under the shelter of that innocent designation; and the English were foolish enough for a time to follow their example. The movements of the French fleet at the outset of Wentworth's expedition had, however, left little doubt as to the hostility of France towards England, and the fact had been settled beyond all dispute by some French despatches intercepted by Vernon. The past year therefore had not passed without additional military preparations on the part of England. In January 1741 four more regiments of marines were raised over and above those sent out with Wentworth; and simultaneously orders were issued for the formation of seven new regiments of foot under Colonels Fowke, Long, Houghton, Price, Cholmondeley, and De Grangue. Of these the first six still remain with us, numbered the[83] Forty-third to the Forty-eighth. Throughout the summer also a force of some five thousand men had been kept in camp near Colchester under General Wade, in readiness to take the field. Finally, the estimates for 1742 provided for a force on the British establishment of sixty-two thousand men. Sufficient troops being therefore presumably to hand, the next thing was to appoint a commander, and the choice fell on John, Earl of Stair.

Stair was now close on seventy years of age, but despite a very early beginning of a soldier's life, was still active and efficient enough. At the age of nineteen he had fought at Steenkirk, already with the rank of colonel; in Marlborough's first campaign he had been the foremost in the breach in Cutts's mad assault upon Venloo; he had served as a regimental officer at Blenheim, as a brigadier at Ramillies, on Marlborough's staff at Oudenarde, and had been present also at Malplaquet. He had been distinguished by particular kindness and attention both from the great Duke and from Prince Eugene, and had not failed to take to heart their teaching in the art of war. Altogether he was not ill-qualified to command a British army in its first active service on the continent since the death of Marlborough.
May 6 17 .

His first duties, however, were diplomatic, namely to induce the States-General to permit the occupation of Nieuport and Ostend by the British, as their bases of operations against the French in the Austrian Netherlands. He was further instructed to allay any feeling of distrust that might have been roused by Hanover's declaration of neutrality, and if possible to engage the Dutch to take an active part as auxiliaries of Queen Maria Theresa. It was no easy task, for endless faction joined to an impossible form of government had reduced the Dutch to the lethargy, inefficiency, and helplessness which was their ruin; while, moreover, recollections of the Peace of Utrecht were still strong enough to make them diffident and cold towards any[84] overtures from England. The proposal to quarter a British garrison in the Netherlands was therefore ill-received, until, in the nick of time, there came the news that the Austrians, having made a desperate push to expel Frederick of Prussia from Silesia, had been totally defeated by him at the battle of Chotusitz. Such a blow to the Austrian cause might bring about great results. Marshal Maillebois, with a French army of forty thousand men, lay in Westphalia, blocking the march of the Hanoverian troops if they should try to join the British, and at the same time ready to pierce into Holland at any moment. In such circumstances a contingent of British troops could not but be valuable to the States, so leave was granted for the disembarkation of the first British battalions at Ostend; and arrangements were made, though with no very good grace, to find them quarters in Bruges and Ghent. But as to throwing in their lot with the British for the defence of the Pragmatic Sanction, the machinery of the Dutch Government was too complicated, the minds of men too cautious, and the spirit of those in authority too corrupt, to permit the settlement of a matter of such importance without delay of months or even years.

The British troops continued to arrive in driblets from England, and Stair meanwhile, knowing that his movements must depend upon those of the French, watched the situation with the keenest interest. The French army of Bavaria, after a few trifling successes on the Danube, had been rapidly swept back by the energy of the Austrian General Khevenhüller. A portion of it, which had penetrated into Bohemia and captured Prague, was still lying in that kingdom under an incompetent commander, Marshal Broglie, with Prague for its base. Little was to be feared from Broglie: the really formidable enemy was Frederick of Prussia, whom Stair was for detaching from Belleisle's confederacy at any cost. The Prussian army once out of the way, the whole armed force of Austria could be turned upon the French in Bohemia, who, owing to[85] Khevenhüller's successes on the Danube, must either be sacrificed altogether, or rescued with great difficulty at the price of denuding the whole French frontier of troops. It would then be open to the Austrians to advance through the Palatinate and up the Moselle into France, while the Dutch and English might either join them or break straight in from the north upon Paris and put an end to the war and to the mischief of French ambition for ever.
May 31 June 11.

So counselled Stair, with a clearness of judgment, alike as soldier and statesman, that was not unworthy of his great master; but unfortunately Maria Theresa would not come to terms with Frederick without striking a last blow for Silesia, which ended, as has been told, in the disaster of Chotusitz. Then at last she gave in; and the Treaty of Breslau purchased the friendship of Frederick at the cost of Silesia. Stair was instantly on the alert, for the game seemed now to be in his hand. The French frontier towards the Netherlands was but weakly defended; a feint of invasion in that direction must certainly bring back Maillebois from Westphalia to guard it, and then the road would be open for the junction of the Hanoverians with the British. The Austrians had already fourteen thousand troops in the country, which, added to the British and their Allies, would make up a force superior to any that Maillebois could bring together.[159] Carteret entered warmly into the plan; and meanwhile events elsewhere had fallen out exactly according to Stair's prevision. The Austrians, relieved from the pressure of Frederick and his Prussians, turned all their strength against the French in Bohemia, and swept them out of all their posts except Prague, wherein they held the wreck of the French force closely besieged. Maillebois was called away to Bohemia to save the beleaguered army if he could, and the whole of the French frontier towards Flanders lay open, with little more than twenty thousand[86] men to protect it. This was the moment for which Stair had waited, hardly daring to hope that it would ever come, and he urged that the whole of the forces present, alike of England, Hanover, and Austria, should be concentrated for an immediate attack on Dunkirk, where the best of the French troops were known to be gathered together. These troops once beaten, the road would be clear for a march to Paris.[160]

But just at this moment King George suddenly turned lukewarm. He was not at war with France, he said, and his troops were acting simply as auxiliaries to the Queen of Hungary. France could take no offence at their presence, as her troops were likewise employed only as auxiliaries to the Elector of Bavaria.[161] Again, there were sundry arrangements to be adjusted before the troops of the Allies could be concentrated. It was, therefore, not until the 24th of August that orders were despatched to the Hanoverians to march; and even then King George was inclined rather to bar the return march of Maillebois from Bohemia at the Meuse than to strike at the heart of his enemy at Dunkirk. Then, again, the men of skill in England, as Stair contemptuously called the council of war at Whitehall, thought the attack on Dunkirk too venturesome; and the plan was disapproved, chiefly, it should seem, because the King had some idea of taking command of the Army in person.[162] Stair meanwhile was chafing with impatience, concerting new plans with the Austrian commanders, and promising himself that his winter quarters should be in Normandy. His design now was to march straight for the head of the Oise, which would give him a navigable river for his transport, and to move from thence direct upon Paris. The French troops on the spot were few in number and would not dare to leave [87]Dunkirk. The road for two-thirds of the journey to the Oise was paved, and the short distance that remained, therefore, constituted the only difficulty, by no means insuperable, in the way. Arrived at Paris the army could take artillery from the arsenal there, and move down the Seine to the siege of Havre. Finally, Stair promised that, if the King would give him a free hand, he would enable him before the 12th of October to dictate his own terms.[163]

The plan was daring enough, but Stair was neither a visionary nor an idle boaster, and there appears no reason to doubt that it was perfectly feasible. The French had recently fortified Dunkirk anew, and, as was not uncommon with them, had elaborated the works to such excess that forty thousand men were required to defend them. Unless, therefore, they chose to abandon Dunkirk, which they could hardly afford to do, there remained no troops to check an advance on Paris. But the design did not commend itself to the King. He submitted it to General Wade, slowest and most cautious of generals, who criticised it adversely; and meanwhile, whether through jealousy or treachery or sheer mismanagement, the orders for the Hanoverians to march were on one pretext or another delayed until all hopes of a campaign of 1742 were banished by the coming of the winter.[164]

February.

Stair was deeply chagrined; and the discipline of his troops, who had been long kept idle in quarters which they detested, suffered so much that it was only restored by the strongest measures.[165] The winter set in with unusual severity, making the ground easy for purposes of transport and neutralising the value of the inundations on which the fortresses of the north-west frontier of France depended chiefly for their defence. Stair was eager to pounce upon some of them while the [88]frost lasted, but the Austrian generals would not hear of it. He then proposed to attack one or other of the fortresses in Lorraine, Metz, Longwy, or Thionville, preparatory to an invasion of France by the Moselle; but again the Austrians dissented.[166] Their great object was to move King George's army into Germany, in order to frighten some of the minor German princes into alliance with Austria; and Stair, as he bitterly complained, was so much hampered by his instructions that he felt absolutely helpless.[167] The Hanoverians again, though supposed to be under his command, received independent orders from the King which were not communicated to Stair, and they declined to obey any other.[168] At last, after many struggles with Austrian generals and English ministers, the British army in February 1743 began its march eastward, as the Austrians had desired. The regiments were sadly distressed by the absence of multitudes of officers, who had gone home on leave for their duties in Parliament or for more private and trivial objects. "I thought it hard to refuse them leave," wrote Stair with biting sarcasm, "when they said that their preferment depended on the interest of their friends at Court. They had no notion that it depended on their exertions here."[169] To such a pass had twenty years of peace under Walpole brought the discipline of the Army.

Nevertheless Stair's recent severity had borne good fruit, and the conduct both of officers and men in a winter's march of extreme hardship and discomfort was such as to call forth his warmest praise.[170] As the spring drew near, the question as to the plan of [89]the coming campaign became urgent. Fifty thousand French troops had been moved to the Moselle to bar any invasion through Lorraine, while all their forces in Flanders had been stationed on the Meuse ready either to join their comrades on the Moselle, or to advance to the Neckar in case the Allies should cross the Rhine to the south of Cologne. Stair, with the spirit of his master strong upon him, hinted at the desirability of a march to the Danube. The Austrians, as he guessed, would certainly resume their advance from the east against the French on that river as soon as the weather permitted, and his plan was to close in upon them from the west and fall upon their rear while the Austrians attacked them in front. Such a project, however, was too bold for the caution of King George, and, moreover, as he was always reminding Stair, though the French were to be treated as enemies he was not at war with France.[171] His final orders, given after immense delay, were that Stair should occupy the heights of Mainz and command the junction of the Rhine and Main.[172] Such a disposition was from a military point of view sufficiently obscure; and indeed it had no military object whatever, being designed simply to secure the choice of King George's nominee for the vacant electorate of Mainz.
May.
May 23 June 3.

Very slowly, owing to the extreme difficulty of obtaining forage, the forces, both native and mercenary, of England, Hanover, and Austria were assembled on the north bank of the Main. Their position extended from the Rhine to Aschaffenburg, and faced to the south, while a bridge of boats was kept ready at Frankfort for the passage of the river.[173] Meanwhile, a French army of seventy thousand men, under Marshal Noailles, had quietly taken up its station on the Upper Rhine near Spires, and was seeking to establish communication with Bavaria and the Neckar, in order to save what [90]was left of Broglie's army while still it might; though, at the same time, not without apprehensions as to the danger of leaving the Palatinate and Lorraine open behind it. Stair took in the situation at a glance. He was for crossing the Main, following the left bank downward and taking up a position between Oppenheim and Mainz. There he could threaten Noailles so closely that he would not dare to detach any part of his army to Bavaria. He would, moreover, have it in his power to attack the French on the Neckar whenever he pleased; and finally, he could in due time cross the Rhine westward, and force the French to retire on Landau and Alsace, leaving Lorraine and the Netherlands open to invasion. After some trouble Count d'Arenberg, a general neither very enterprising nor very capable, who commanded the Austrians, appears to have been converted to his views; and though the entire army was even now not yet arrived at the rendezvous, the Allies on the 3rd of June began the passage of the Main. A day or two later Stair received intelligence that Noailles had left the Neckar and was advancing along the high road from Darmstadt to Frankfort to attack him. This road passed for a considerable distance through a forest, and it was at its outlet from this forest that Stair took up his position to await the French. D'Arenberg so strongly disapproved of the whole proceeding that he withdrew the whole of the Austrian dragoons to the right bank of the Main, in order to rescue the shattered remnants that should be left of Stair's army after the battle. Marshal Neipperg, his second, however, led the Austrian infantry to the position of Stair's choice: and when Noailles arrived on the following morning he withdrew without venturing to attack.
May 30 June 10.

Meanwhile King George, who had arrived at Hanover a fortnight before, was perfectly frantic. On Stair's first proposal to cross to the south bank of the Main he had sent positive orders, which reached Stair too late, that he was not to stir. The King was[91] surrounded by nervous Austrians who, having information of Noailles's intended advance, were, or professed to be, in terror lest the Allies should be beaten in detail, and did not fail to represent how dreadful it would be if the army should be defeated before His Majesty could take command. Letter after letter therefore was despatched to Stair, bidding him above all things to be careful, and finally ordering him to repass the Main. Stair at first had prepared to obey orders, though not without speaking his mind. "I am too careful of the King's interest," he wrote, "to be rash, but I am sure of two things, that the French are far more occupied with Bavaria than with us, and that we are superior to them even in numbers. The importance of giving an army to a person who is trusted is now evident. Had my plan been followed, we should now be in a position to fall on the head of the French army which, after sending away a detachment to Bavaria, is now taking post along the Rhine." In truth, during the months of May and June, the Austrians on the Danube had swept Broglie right out of Germany; and Noailles's detachment no sooner reached him than it was ordered forthwith to retreat. But when Stair heard of Noailles's advance to attack him he quietly suppressed the King's orders to repass the Main until he had offered battle to the French. When Noailles refused it, Stair recrossed the river as he had been bidden, unwillingly indeed, yet not a little satisfied that after all the King's orders and all the Austrian predictions of disaster, he had successfully proved the soundness of his views. "But," he added significantly on arriving on the northern bank, "it will be impossible for us now to find forage. The French being masters of one side of the river, forage cannot be brought down to us by water, so we must move upward." It was just this question of supplies which had made him so anxious for a general action; and the event proved that he was right.[174]

June 8 19 .
June 15 26 .

On the 19th of June King George at last arrived from Hanover and took over the command of the army, which was encamped, as he had ordered, on the right bank of the Main, the English and Hanoverians lying about Aschaffenburg. In the hope of securing forage on the other bank, a battery had been erected on the bridge of Aschaffenburg, but Noailles, moving up to the river, erected a redoubt at his own end of the bridge and put an end to all such hopes. Meanwhile he seized a post further up the river to intercept all supplies from Franconia, and threw two bridges over it below Aschaffenburg at Seligenstadt, by which his troops could cross and cut off the Allies from their magazines at Hanau. For a week the King remained helpless in this camp, unwilling to retreat though his peril increased every day. The result was that he found himself in command of a starving army. It was impossible to keep the soldiers from plunder, and discipline became seriously relaxed. At last, on the 26th of June, it was perforce resolved that the army must retreat to Hanau that very night.
June 16 27 .

Meanwhile Noailles had not been idle. The ground on which the Allies were encamped is a narrow plain pent in between the Spessart Hills and the Main. These hills are densely wooded, and the forest appears at that time to have descended lower into the plain than at present. When therefore the Allies retired to Hanau, as Noailles knew that inevitably they must, it would be impossible for them to keep out of range of cannon posted on the opposite bank of the Main, and accordingly the marshal had erected five different batteries to play upon them during their march. At one o'clock on the morning of the 27th intelligence was brought to[93] him that the Allies were in motion. This was the moment for which he had been waiting. Instantly galloping to Seligenstadt, he ordered Count Grammont to cross the Main with twenty-eight thousand men by the two bridges which he had laid for the purpose, and to take up a position about a mile up the river by the village of Dettingen. At that point a rivulet runs down across the plain from the Spessart Hills to the Main, through a little boggy dale which was uncrossed by any bridge except by that of the high road to Hanau. There Grammont was bidden to wait and to make an end of the Allies as they defiled over the bridge. He took up his position accordingly, and Noailles returned to the opposite bank of the Main to direct his operations against King George's flank and rear.

It was four o'clock in the morning before the Allied army was fairly in motion. The British cavalry led the way, followed by the Austrian, then came the British infantry and the Austrian infantry after them; and last of all came a strong rear-guard composed of the British Guards, the choicest of the German infantry, and the Hanoverian cavalry; for it was in the rear that an attack of the French was most looked for and most to be dreaded. The apprehensions of a French advance on Aschaffenburg were soon seen to be well founded. The march of the Allies from that town lay across a bend of the Main to the village of Klein Ostheim, and as they approached the river they could see the French on the opposite bank in full march to cross the river behind them and cut off their retreat up the stream. Thus Noailles's dispositions were complete. These troops were to block the Allies to the south, impenetrable woods shut them off from the east, the Main barred their way on the west, and Grammont stood before them at Dettingen on the north. Noailles had caught them, as he said, in a mouse-trap, and might reasonably feel certain that they could not escape.

On arriving about seven o'clock at Klein Ostheim, the whole army of the Allies was obliged to file through[94] it by a single road. The cavalry, therefore, when it had passed through the village was halted and wheeled round with its face to the river to wait till the infantry should come up. This again Noailles had foreseen, and he had planted his cannon in exactly the right place to play upon the Allies when they should advance beyond the village. For an hour the cavalry stood halted before the march could be resumed; and now came intelligence from an advanced party in Dettingen that Grammont was in order of battle in front and that an immediate engagement was inevitable. King George hastened to set his army likewise in order of battle; but all the baggage had been massed between the first and second divisions of the column of route, and the confusion for a time was very great. Meanwhile the French troops bound for Aschaffenburg had by this time cleared the front of the first of Noailles's batteries and left the guns free to open fire. The shot soon came humming thick and fast into the heavy mass of waggons and baggage-animals, and the confusion increased. Guns were sent for in frantic haste to silence the French cannon, but the artillery being far in the rear was long in making its appearance: and meanwhile the King capered about on horseback in great excitement, staff-officers galloped to and fro, and the troops marched and counter-marched into their positions, always under the deadly fire of the French battery. Gradually, though with infinite difficulty, the troops were shuffled into their places, for the stereotyped order of battle was useless in a plain that permitted a frontage only of twenty-three battalions and a few squadrons at most. So passed a terrible hour and more, until at last the British guns came into action and replied effectively to the French batteries; and then a push was made to shift the baggage into a place of safety. In the middle of the plain between Klein Ostheim and Dettingen stood a wood flanked on each hand by a morass. Two lines of cavalry were moved forward towards this wood, the baggage followed them, the infantry followed the baggage, and the[95] troublesome waggons were at last stowed away securely under cover of the trees, while the cavalry and the Austrian infantry made haste to form the right of the Allies' line of battle.

It was high time, for it was now almost noon, and Grammont, tired of remaining where he had been bidden to wait on the north side of Dettingen, or believing (as he himself said) that the Allies had already passed him and that only their rear-guard was left, had advanced beyond the ravine to take up a fresh position. So far as the Allies could see, he was man?uvring to move troops down under cover of the forest upon their right flank. By this time, however, King George's line was formed, and on its extreme left were seen the scarlet coats of the British battalions. To the left of all, and within a furlong of the river, stood the Thirty-third Foot, and to its right in succession the Twenty-first Fusiliers, Twenty-third Fusiliers, Twelfth, Eleventh, Eighth and Thirteenth Foot. On the right of the Thirteenth stood an Austrian brigade, and then in succession the Blues, Life Guards, Sixth Dragoons, and Royal Dragoons. All of these were in the first line. In the second line, in rear of their comrades on the left, were posted the Twentieth, Thirty-second, Thirty-seventh, Thirty-first, and the Buffs; and in rear of the cavalry on the right, the Seventh Dragoon Guards, King's Dragoon Guards, Fourth and Seventh Dragoons, and the Scots Greys. Opposite to them the French were ranged in two lines with a reserve in third line, the infantry being in the centre and the cavalry on the flanks, so that the famous French Household Cavalry,[175] in its place of honour on the extreme right, stood opposed to the British battalions on the Allied left. General Clayton, who commanded on the left, observing the mass of cavalry that confronted him, sent hastily for the Third Dragoons to fill up the gap between the Thirty-third and the river, and therewith the British dispositions were complete.

The whole of the first line then advanced, the King,[96] who had with difficulty been prevented from stationing himself on the extreme left, waving his sword and shouting words of encouragement with a broad German accent. Fortunately the French were themselves in great disorder and confusion. The corrupt dealing in the appointment and promotion of officers, which fifty years later was to set the French army on the side of the Revolution, was already undermining efficiency and discipline. Grammont on advancing beyond the ravine had thought out no new order of a battle. Not a brigadier was competent to draw up his brigade, and the Household Cavalry kept man?uvring about in front of the infantry without a thought except for the fine figure that it was cutting in the sight of both armies. The advance of the Allies was necessarily slow, for some of the English regiments, whose way lay through the morasses, were knee-deep in mire. The whole line was presently halted to take breath, and the British, evidently a little shaken by the previous hurry and confusion and by the gesticulations of the King, broke into a feeble and irregular cheer, a sound which Lord Stair heard with great displeasure. The line was dressed and the advance was resumed in better order, though the French batteries on the other bank of the Main never ceased to rain destruction on the Third Dragoons and on the unfortunate battalions on the left. The men were not yet quite steady, for some undisciplined spirits, fretting at the incessant parade of the French Household Cavalry, opened an irregular fire all along the line. Then, as it seems, came the most comical incident of the day. King George's horse, frightened by the crackle of the musketry, took the bit in his teeth and bolted away to the rear, His Majesty, with purple face and eyes starting out of his head, pulling desperately at him with both hands but unable to stop him. Ultimately the animal's career was checked, and the King returning to the right of the line dismounted and resumed his gestures on foot, utterly fearless, as are all of his race, and confident that his own legs, at least, would carry him[97] in the right direction. The line was again halted to load, there being fortunately still time to repair previous faults, and the advance was again resumed with greater steadiness.

Then the French infantry of the Guard on Grammont's right centre advanced likewise, cheering loudly, and opened a fitful and disorderly fire. The British, now thoroughly in hand, answered with a regular, swift, and continuous fire of platoons, the ranks standing firm like a wall of brass and pouring in volley after volley, deadly and unceasing—such a fire as no French officer had ever seen before.[176] The French Guards staggered under it and the British again raised an irregular cheer. "Silence," shouted Stair imperiously, galloping up. "Now one and all together when I give the signal." And as he raised his hat the British broke into the stern and appalling shout which was to become so famous on the fields of the Peninsula. The French Guards waited for no more when they heard it, but shrank back in disorder in rear of their horse, which now advanced in earnest against the extreme British left.

Clayton saw the danger. His left flank in the general confusion had never been properly secured, and though the fire of the French batteries by the river had ceased lest it should destroy their own troops, yet the Third Dragoons and the Thirty-third had been much weakened by it during their advance. Despatching urgent messages for reinforcements of cavalry, he put a bold face on the matter, ordered the Dragoons, Thirty-third, Twenty-first, and Twenty-third forward to meet the French attack, and prepared to stand the shock. Down came the flower of the French cavalry upon them, sword in hand, at high speed. The Third Dragoons were the first to close with them. They were but two weak squadrons against nine squadrons of the enemy, their depth was but of three ranks against eight ranks of the French; but they went straight at them, burst into the heart of them and cut their way[98] through, though with heavy loss. The Thirty-third faced the attack as boldly, never gave way for an inch and brought men and horses crashing down by their eternal rolling fire. Next to them the two regiments of Fusiliers were even more hardly pressed. The Gendarmerie came down upon them at full trot with pistols in both hands and swords dangling by the wrist. Arrived within range they fired the pistols, dashed the empty weapons in the faces of the British, and then fell in with the sword; but the Fusiliers, as it was said, fought like devils, their platoon-fire thundering out as regularly as on parade, and the French horse fell back repulsed.

Still, gallantly as this first attack had been met, the numerical superiority of the French cavalry was formidable, and there was imminent danger lest the British left flank should be turned. The Third Dragoons had suffered heavily, after their first charge, from the bullets of a battalion posted in support of the French horse, but they rallied, and twice more, weak and weary as they were, they charged ten times their numbers and cut their way through them. But after the third charge they were well-nigh annihilated. All the officers except two, and three-fourths of the men and horses had been killed or wounded; two of the three standards had been cut to atoms, both silk and staves, by shot and shell, and in the last charge the third had dropped from a cornet's wounded hand and lay abandoned on the ground. A trooper of the regiment, Thomas Brown by name, was just dismounting to recover it when a French sabre came down on his bridle-hand and shore away two of his fingers. His horse, missing the familiar pressure of the bit, at once bolted, and before he could be pulled up had carried his rider into the rear of the French lines. There Dragoon Brown saw the standard of his regiment borne away in triumph by a French gendarme. Disabled as he was he rode straight at the Frenchman, attacked and killed him; and then gripping the standard between his leg and the saddle he turned[99] and fought his way single-handed through the ranks of the enemy, emerging at last with three bullet-holes through his hat and seven wounds in his face and body, but with the standard safe.

But now the First and Seventh Dragoons, which had been summoned from the right, came galloping up and fell in gallantly enough upon the French Household Cavalry. These were, however, repulsed, partly, it should seem, because they attacked with more impetuosity than order, partly because the French were armed with helmets and breastplates heavy enough to turn a pistol shot. The Blues followed close after them, but sacrificing order to speed were, like their comrades, driven back in confusion; and the French Gendarmes, flushed with success, bore down for the second time upon the Twenty-first and Twenty-third and succeeded in breaking into them. But the two battalions were broken only for a moment. Quickly recovering themselves they faced inwards, and closing in upon the French in their midst shot them down by scores. The Fourth and Sixth British Dragoons, together with two regiments of Austrian dragoons, now came up and renewed the combat against the French Household Cavalry, but it was not until after they had been twice repulsed that at last they succeeded, with the help of their rallied comrades, in forcing back the intrepid squadrons of the French horse.

Meanwhile the battle elsewhere had flagged. A feeble attack of the French against the right of the Allies had been easily repelled, and in the centre the second line of the French infantry had cared little more than the first to face the terrible English fire. But while the Gendarmerie were still pressing the British hard on the left, the French Black Musketeers suddenly broke away from their place by their side, and wheeling to their left galloped madly between the fire of friendly and hostile infantry to make a dash upon the British Royal Dragoons at the extreme right of the Allied line. The Austrian Marshal Neipperg no sooner saw them[100] than he exclaimed: "Now is the time. The British horse will attack in front, and our horse in flank, and the thing is done." British and Austrians at once closed in upon the Black Musketeers, cut them to pieces, and then bore down upon the flank of the French infantry. The French foot, which had behaved very unworthily of itself all day, now took to its heels and fled in confusion towards the Main. The British horse on the left, one regiment in particular burning to wipe out the humiliation of its first failure, pressed the French Household Cavalry harder than ever in front, and the Scots Greys plunging in upon their flank threw them into utter rout. The whole French army now made headlong for the fords and bridges of the Main, the infantry in their panic plunging madly into the stream and perishing by scores if not by hundreds in the water. Now was the moment for a vigorous pursuit, and had Stair been left to work his own will the French would have suffered very heavily; but the King was too thankful to have escaped from Noailles's mousetrap to think of turning his good fortune to account. The Marshal was allowed to retreat in peace, and thus, after four hours of sharp work, ended the battle of Dettingen.

Seldom has a commander found more fortunate issue from a series of blunders than King George. Had Grammont obeyed his orders it is difficult to see how a man of the Allied Army could have escaped; but even allowing for Grammont's ill-timed impatience it is strange that Noailles should have allowed the day to go as it went. It is true that he had sent the best of his troops across the Main with Grammont, but he had still from twenty to thirty thousand men on his own side of the river whom he left standing idle, without an attempt to employ them. He seems, in fact, to have been paralysed with dismay over the wreck of his very skilful combinations. The action itself deserves the name of a combat rather than a battle, for on neither side was more than half of the force really engaged; yet Dettingen was decidedly a victory, for the French[101] were badly beaten and lost little, if any, less than five thousand men, killed, wounded, and prisoners. The loss of the Allies was about half of that number, of which the British share was two hundred and sixty-five killed and five hundred and sixty-one wounded, the most valuable life taken being that of General Clayton. As the brunt of the action fell wholly on the first line, the greatest sufferers among the infantry were the regiments chiefly exposed to the flanking fire of the French batteries. These were the Thirty-third, Twenty-first, Twenty-third, and Twelfth of the Line, but in not one of them did the casualties exceed one hundred men, or about an eighth of their strength. The cavalry suffered far more heavily in comparison, though here again the losses of the heroes of the day, the Third Dragoons, were more than twice as great as those of any other regiment: one hundred and fifty men and as many horses forming a terrible proportion of casualties in two squadrons. The most noticeable points in the engagement were the disgraceful behaviour of the French infantry, by no one more severely censured than by Noailles himself, and the deadly accuracy of the British fire. A smaller but curious fact is that both the King and the Duke of Cumberland were run away with by their horses, the former, as has been told, to the rear, the latter to the front, and indeed into the midst of the French infantry, from which, however, he emerged with no greater hurt than a bullet in the leg. At the close of the day the King was so much elated by his success as to revive the creation of knights banneret in the field, a proceeding which ceases to seem ridiculous when we learn that Lord Stair was the first and Dragoon Thomas Brown the last of the new knights. Such a scene was never to be seen again, for Dettingen was the last action in which a king of England actually commanded his army in person.
December.

March 21 April 1.

The ceremony of knighthood completed, the King left his wounded on the ground to the care of Noailles, and hastened away as quickly as possible with the army[102] to his magazine at Hanau. The battle virtually closed the campaign, so far as the British were concerned, and King George returned home with his laurels fresh upon him, to be hailed with acclamation as a victor, and hear his praises sung in endless stanzas of most execrable verse. A few months later Lord Stair also returned home, without recrimination and without complaint, but with resolute and scornful determination to resign the command, since he was not trusted with the conduct of operations. General Wade was appointed field-marshal, to command in his stead. Finally, some weeks later the ridiculous fiction, that the principal combatants were acting only as auxiliaries to rival claimants to the Empire, was abandoned, and open war was declared against France. Had this straightforward course been adopted two years before, Stair would probably have turned the date of the declaration of war into that of the conclusion of an honourable peace. As matters stood the war was prolonged, and the time of its avowed inception was chosen as the moment for discarding the ablest of living British Generals.

Authorities.—The best accounts of the battle of Dettingen will be found in a collection of letters entitled British Glory Revived, in the British Museum, and in a great number of letters printed in the Gentleman's Magazine. There are accounts also in the Life of the Duke of Cumberland, and in the anonymous Memorial of the E[arl] of S[tair]. The best known of the French accounts is that of Voltaire in Siècle de Louis Quinze, which should be read with Noailles's report to the King in Correspondance de Louis XV. et du Maréchal Noailles. The exploits of Thomas Brown are to be found in the newspapers, and in Cannon's History of the Third Dragoons. The best plan of the battle that I have seen is in the Memorial of the E. of S. As a specimen of the doggerel effusions, I transcribe one stanza from a broadsheet in the British Museum:—

Our noble generals played their parts,

Our soldiers fought like thunder,

Prince William too, that valiant heart

In fight performed wonders.

Though through the leg with bullet shot

The Prince his wound regarded not,

But still maintained his post and fought

For glorious George of England.
CHAPTER V
However fortunate might be the issue of Dettingen, it served at least its purpose in preventing the despatch of French reinforcements to the Danube and to Bohemia; and the campaign of 1743 closed with the utter collapse of Belleisle's great schemes and with the expulsion of the French from Germany. It was now clear that the war would be carried on in the familiar cockpit of the Austrian Netherlands. Such a theatre was convenient for France, since it lay close to her own borders, and convenient for the Allies, because the Dutch had at last been persuaded to join them, and because the British would be brought nearer to their base at Ostend. Marshal Saxe, whose fine talent had hitherto been wasted under incompetent French Generals in Bohemia, was appointed to the chief command of the French in Flanders; and every effort was made to give him a numerous and well-equipped army, and to enable him to open his campaign in good time.
1744.

In England the preparations by no means corresponded with the necessities of the position. The estimates indeed provided for a force of twenty-one thousand British in Flanders in 1744 as against sixteen thousand in the previous year, but only at the cost of depleting the weak garrison left in England; for the actual number of men voted for the two years was the same. All British officers of experience strongly urged upon the Government the importance of being first in the field,[177][104] but when an army was to be made up in different proportions of English, Dutch, Germans, and Austrians it needed a Marlborough to bring the discordant Courts into harmony as well as to make ready the troops for an early campaign. By the beginning of April eighty thousand French soldiers had marched from their winter quarters, and were concentrated on the frontier between the Scheldt and the Sambre, while the Allies were still scattered about in cantonments, not exceeding even then a total strength of fifty-five thousand men. Wade, the English commander, delayed first by confusion at home and next by contrary winds, was still in England while the French were concentrating, and not a single English recruit to repair the losses of the past campaign had arrived in Flanders. Then arose disputes as to the disposition of the Allied forces, both Austrians and Dutch being nervously apprehensive of leaving their towns on the frontier without garrisons. When in the second week in May the Allied Army was at last collected close to Brussels, it was still weaker by twenty thousand men than it should have been, and found itself confronted with the task of holding Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, and the Sambre against a superior force of French.[178] May passed away and June came, but the Allies remained helpless and motionless in their camp, while Saxe, after a short march westward, turned north and advanced steadily between the Scheldt and the Lys. His principal object was not very difficult to divine. By the middle of June his detachments had seized Ypres and Fort Knock, which commanded the canal from Nieuport to Ypres, thus cutting off the British from one of their bases on the coast. It remained to be seen whether he would aim next at Ostend, where the whole of the British stores of ordnance were accumulated, or whether he would attempt Bruges and Ghent in order to secure the navigation of the Bruges Canal as well as of the Scheldt and Lys. Again, it was[105] always open to him, if he pleased, to besiege Tournay, a fortress which the Allies would not willingly lose. Thus the problem set to the Allies was not easy of solution; but of all solutions they chose the worst. The Dutch and Austrians could not bear the notion of forsaking any one of their darling strongholds, and insisted that the strength of the army should be frittered away in providing weak garrisons for the defence of all.[179] Wade, to do him justice, was for keeping all the troops together, crossing the Scheldt, and taking up a strong position to cover Ghent; but the Austrians would not consent lest they should expose Brussels.[180] Wade was certainly not a strong man, but he must not be too hardly judged. Marlborough had spent the most anxious days of all his campaigns in distraction between the safety of Ghent and of Brussels, and had only extricated himself by the march that preceded the battle of Oudenarde.
July.

Meanwhile King George had been exerting himself with great energy, but two months too late, to provide Wade with additional troops, both British and Dutch, and had begged that Prince Charles of Lorraine might cross the Rhine with his whole army, and direct the operations in Flanders as Commander-in-Chief of all the Allies. It was a wise step in every way, since the Prince's relationship to Queen Maria Theresa assured to him the seniority in rank which was needed to hold so heterogeneous a host in coherence. Prince Charles did his share of the work admirably, forcing his passage across the Rhine with great skill in the face of the French, and taking up a strong position on the frontier of Alsace. A few days later the British reinforcements reached Wade, and King George issued positive orders to [106]him to take the offensive and "commence hostilities of all kinds."[181]
July 20 31 .

It seemed, indeed, as if the time were come for pressing home upon the French; but just at this critical moment Frederick of Prussia intervened in favour of France, and by a threat to invade Bohemia brought Prince Charles back quickly over the Rhine. None the less Wade and his fellows held a council of war and resolved to bring Saxe to action if possible. King George gave his gracious approval to their plan, and on the 31st of July the Allies turned westward and crossed the Scheldt. It still remained to be seen, however, whether Saxe would allow an action to be forced on him; for he lay now, entrenched to the teeth, on the Lys between Menin and Courtrai, which was a pretty clear indication that he would not. At this moment Lord Stair, who had followed the course of operations carefully from England, came forward, like a true pupil of Marlborough, with a new plan of campaign. His advice was that the Allies should turn Saxe's tactics against himself. They should march south to Orchies, between Lille and Tournay, and there encamp, where they would be within reach of half a dozen French fortified towns. The French would not dare to leave the fortresses defenceless; and the garrisons necessary to render them secure would absorb the whole of their force in the field. Then the Allies could send detachments into France and lay Picardy under contribution, or possibly carry out the plan, rejected two years before, of a march to the Seine. The King of Prussia's action only made some bold stroke of the kind the more imperative.[182]

Stair had gained over the Austrian general D'Arenberg to this project in 1742; but it was hardly likely [107]to be accepted by him now. Carteret, in forwarding Stair's memorandum to Wade, gave him no positive orders except at least to do something; but poor Wade found it impossible to make the Austrians do anything. The Allies having crossed the Scheldt halted inactive for weeks, and no persuasion could induce D'Arenberg to move. At last the army did march down to the plains of Lille, but without its artillery, so that it could not be said seriously to threaten the French fortresses. The Dutch and Austrians had undertaken to furnish a siege-train, but had taken no step to procure one of the ten thousand horses that were required to transport it. After a short sojourn in the south the Allies marched helplessly northward once more. August passed away and September came, but even in the fourth month of the campaign the Dutch and Austrians were still without their artillery.[183] Wade boldly proposed to force Saxe's lines on the Lys: the Austrians refused. He proposed to pounce on a detachment of fourteen thousand men which Saxe had imprudently isolated from his main army: D'Arenberg carefully sent a weak body of cavalry to reveal to the detachment the danger of its position. Finally, in the first week of October, the Allies retired into winter-quarters, which was precisely the object for which D'Arenberg had been working from the first. Despite the English subsidies, he had no money with which to pay his troops, and he wished to spare the Austrian Netherlands the burden of furnishing forage and contributions. Wade, sick in body and distressed in mind, at once resigned his command. He had had enough of the Austrian alliance, and King George before long was to have enough of it also.[184]
1745.

Once again, despite the endless length to which the [108]war was dragging on, the establishment of the British forces remained virtually unaugmented for the year 1745. The troops allotted for service in Flanders were indeed raised to a strength of twenty-five thousand men, but this was effected only by reducing the garrison of Great Britain to fifteen thousand, which, as events were to prove before the year's end, created a situation of perilous weakness. Moreover, the past campaign had revealed a failing in one of the confederated powers which was hardly less serious than the impecuniosity and selfishness of Austria. The Dutch army, which under Marlborough had done such brilliant service, was become hopelessly inefficient. The competition of rival demagogues for popular favour had reduced it to such weakness in numbers that it hardly sufficed to find efficient garrisons for the fortified towns. Concurrently its discipline had suffered, and General Ligonier had already complained that the Dutch troops which served with the Allies in 1744 were intolerably insubordinate and disorderly, setting a bad example to the whole army.[185] In February 1745 Ligonier again brought the matter to the notice of the English Government. The Dutch, he said, would probably keep all their men in garrison, and if the Allies were so weak that they could only find garrisons for the fortresses on the frontier, the French would be free to go where they pleased. It would be far better, therefore, to make a great effort, collect a hundred thousand men, take the offensive, and end the war in a single campaign. Ten thousand men would be required to guard the line of the Bruges Canal, and the remainder should besiege Maubeuge and Landre?y and enter France by the line of the Sambre, making the Meuse the main line of communication, as open alike to the passage of reinforcements from England, from Holland,[109] and from Germany.[186] Such counsel was not likely to find acceptance with the men who had mismanaged the war so far. One important change, however, was made by the appointment of the Duke of Cumberland to be Commander-in-Chief in Flanders, and also in Great Britain.[187] The Duke at the time of this promotion still wanted a month to complete his twenty-fifth year, but he had from his boyhood been an enthusiastic soldier, he had studied his profession, he had shown bravery at Dettingen, and, young though he might be, he was older than Condé had been when he first gained military fame. Finally, it was an immense advantage that a prince of a reigning family should preside over so motley an army as that of the Allies, since there would be the less disposition to cavil at his authority.
April 22 May 3.
April 19 30 .
April 28 May 9.

Cumberland entered upon his work energetically enough, crossed over to Flanders early in April, made all his arrangements for concentration at Brussels on the 2nd of May, and actually began his march southward on the following day.[188] Even so, however, Marshal Saxe had taken the field before him, assembling his troops in Hainault, as in the previous year, so that it was impossible to divine which of the fortresses of the barrier he might intend to attack. After a feint which pointed to the siege of Mons, he marched rapidly upon Tournay and invested it on the 30th of April, screening his movements so skilfully with his cavalry that not a word of his operations reached Cumberland until nearly a week later. Cumberland, after leaving Soignies on the 3rd of May, moved slowly south-westward by Cambron, Maulbay, and Leuse, and arrived on the evening of the 9th at Brissoel, within sight of Saxe's army. The ground immediately in front of the Allies [110]was broken by little copses, woods, and enclosures, all of them crammed with mercenary irregular troops—Pandours, Grassins, and the like—which, imitated first from the Austrians, had by this time become a necessary part of the French as of every army. Beyond this broken ground a wide plain swept in a gentle, almost unbroken slope to the village of Fontenoy, which formed the centre of Saxe's position. The advanced parties of irregulars, together with twelve squadrons drawn up on the slope before Fontenoy, forbade Cumberland's further advance for that day, and the Allies encamped for the night. Headquarters were fixed at Maubray, a village in full sight of Fontenoy, and a bare mile and a half to the south-eastward of the French camp.
April 29 May 10.

On the next day the French advanced posts were pushed out of the copses, and Cumberland, together with the Prince of Waldeck and the Count of K?nigseck, who commanded the Dutch and the Austrians respectively, went forward to reconnoitre the position. Saxe's army occupied the crest of the slope, lying astride of the two roads that lead from Condé and from Leuse to Tournay. His right rested on the village of Anthoin and on the Scheldt, the tower of Anthoin Castle marking the western boundary of his position with clearness enough. From thence his line extended due east along the crest of the height for nearly two miles to the village of Fontenoy. A few hundred yards before Fontenoy stands the hamlet of Bourgeon, but this was now veiled in smoke and flame, having been fired by the Pandours as they retired. From Anthoin to Fontenoy Saxe's front faced due south, but eastward from Fontenoy it turned back almost at right angles to the forest of Barry and the village of Ramecroix, fronting considerably to eastward of south. The village of Vezon, however, which lies in the same straight line with Fontenoy due east of Anthoin, was also occupied by the French as an advanced post. This was quickly cleared by Cumberland's troops, and the Allied Generals completed their[111] reconnaissance. The position was undoubtedly strong by nature and had been strengthened still further by art. Beyond Anthoin the French right flank was secured by a battery erected on the western bank of the Scheldt, while the village itself was entrenched, and held by two brigades. Between Anthoin and Fontenoy three redoubts had been constructed, and the space was defended by three brigades of infantry backed by eight squadrons of horse. Fontenoy itself had been fortified with works and cannon, and made as strong as possible; and from Fontenoy to the forest of Barry ran a double line of entrenchments, the first line held by nine and the second by eleven battalions of infantry. At the edge of the forest of Barry were two more redoubts, the foremost of them called the Redoubt d'Eu, both armed with cannon to sweep the open space between the forest and Fontenoy; in rear of the forest were posted nine more battalions, and in rear of all two strong lines of cavalry. The flower of the French army, both horse and foot, was stationed in this space on Saxe's left, for the English had the right of the line in the Allied Army, and Saxe knew the reputation of the red-coats.

The Allied Generals decided to attack on the following day. K?nigseck, it is said, was for harassing Saxe's communications and compelling him to raise the siege of Tournay; but finding himself overruled by Cumberland and by Waldeck he gave way. Cumberland's force was decidedly inferior in numbers, being less than fifty thousand against fifty-six thousand men, but he was young and impetuous, and had been strongly impressed by the disastrous inaction of the preceding campaign. It was agreed that the Dutch and Austrians should assail the French centre and right, the Dutch in particular being responsible for Fontenoy, while the British attacked the French left between that village and the forest of Barry.
April 30 May 11.

At two o'clock on the following morning the British began to move out of their camp upon Vezon,[112] the cavalry leading. The advance took much time, for there were many narrow lanes to be traversed before the force could debouch upon the slope, and when the slope was passed it was still necessary to defile through the village of Vezon. Cumberland's order of attack was simple. Brigadier Ingoldsby, with the Twelfth and Thirteenth Foot, the Forty-second Highlanders, a Hanoverian battalion, and three six-pounder cannon, was to assault the Redoubt d'Eu on the right flank of the line of the British advance, and to carry it with the bayonet. The remainder of the infantry was simply to march up across the thousand yards of open ground between it and Fontenoy and sweep the enemy out of their entrenchments.

Before five o'clock the advanced squadrons of the British horse, fifteen in all, under General Campbell, had passed through Vezon and deployed in the plain beyond, to cover the formation of the infantry for the attack. The French batteries in Fontenoy and the redoubt at once opened fire on them, but the cavalry endured the fire for an hour unmoved, until at length a shot carried away General Campbell's leg. The gallant veteran, who had fought at Malplaquet, and was now seventy-eight years of age, was carried dying from the field, full of lamentation that he could take no further part in the action. No one but himself seems to have known for what purpose his squadrons had been brought forward, and accordingly after his fall they were withdrawn. The infantry then moved up to the front, where General Ligonier proceeded to form them in two lines, without further interruption, to use his own simple words, than a lively and murderous cannonade from the French. Cumberland meanwhile ordered up seven six-pounders to the right of the British front, which quickly came into action. Conspicuous before the French front rode an officer on a white horse, and the English gunners at once began to lay wagers who should kill him. The second or third shot brought the white charger to the ground, and his rider was[113] carried, shattered and dying, to the rear. He was Count Grammont, the gallant but thoughtless officer who had spoiled the combinations of Noailles at Dettingen. Then, turning to their more legitimate work, the gunners quickly made their presence felt among the French field-batteries; but the round shot never ceased to plough into the scarlet ranks of the British from Fontenoy and from the Redoubt d'Eu. Ligonier's two lines of infantry were soon formed, with the cavalry in two more lines in their rear, and the General presently sent word to Cumberland that he was ready to advance as soon as Waldeck should lead his Dutch against Fontenoy. The name of the aide-de-camp who carried this message should not be omitted, for he was Captain Jeffery Amherst of the First Guards.

Thereupon the Dutch and Austrians, in the centre and left, advanced against Fontenoy and Anthoin, but flinching from the fire in front, and above all from that in their flank from the battery on the other side of the Scheldt, soon shrank back under cover and could not be induced to move forward again.[189] Worst of all, the Dutch cavalry was smitten with panic, galloped back on to the top of some of the British squadrons, and fled away wildly to Hal crying out that all was lost. Things therefore went ill on the Allied left; and meanwhile on the right there was enacted a blunder still more fatal. For Ingoldsby, misconceiving his instructions, hesitated to make his attack on the Redoubt d'Eu, and despite repeated orders from Cumberland never delivered it at all. Cumberland, however, was impatient. Without further delay he placed himself at the head of the British, who were standing as Ligonier had arrayed them, in most beautiful order. In the first line, counting from right to left, stood a battalion of the First Guards,[114] another of the Coldstreams, and another of the Scots Guards, the First, Twenty-first, Thirty-first, Eighth, Twenty-fifth, Thirty-third, and Nineteenth; in the second line the Buffs occupied the post of honour on the right, and next to them came in succession the Twenty-third, Thirty-second, Eleventh, Twenty-eighth, Thirty-fourth, and Twentieth. Certain Hanoverian battalions joined them on the extreme left. The drums beat, the men shouldered arms, and the detachments harnessed themselves to the two light field-guns that accompanied each battalion. Ingoldsby saw what was going forward and aligned his battalions with them on the right. Then the word was given to advance, and the two lines moved off with the slow and measured step for which they were famous in Europe.

Forward tramped the ranks of scarlet, silent and stately as if on parade. Full half a mile of ground was to be traversed before they could close with the invisible enemy that awaited them in the entrenchments over the crest of the slope, and the way was marked clearly by the red flashes and puffs of white smoke that leaped from Fontenoy and the Redoubt d'Eu on either flank. The shot plunged fiercely and more fiercely into the serried lines as they advanced into that murderous cross-fire, but the gaping ranks were quietly closed, the perfect order was never lost, the stately step was never hurried. Only the Hanoverians in the second line, finding that they were cramped for space, dropped back quietly and decorously, and marched on in third line behind the British. Silent and inexorable the scarlet lines strode on. They came abreast of village and redoubt, and the shot which had hitherto swept away files now swept away ranks. Then the first line passed beyond redoubt and village, and the French cannon took it in reverse. The gaps grew wider and more frequent, the front grew narrower as the men closed up, but still the proud battalions advanced, strewing the sward behind them with scarlet, like some mass of red[115] blossoms that floats down a lazy stream and sheds its petals as it goes.

At last the crest of the ridge was gained and the ranks of the French battalions came suddenly into view little more than a hundred yards distant, their coats alone visible behind the breastwork. Next to the forest of Barry, and exposed to the extreme right of the British, a line of red showed the presence of the Swiss Guards; next to them stood a line of blue, the four battalions of the French Guards, and next to the Guards a line of white, the regiments of Courtin, Aubeterre, and of the King, the choicest battalions of the French army. Closer and closer came the British, still with arms shouldered, always silent, always with the same slow, measured tread, till they had advanced to within fifty yards of the French. Then at length Lord Charles Hay of the First Guards stepped forward with flask in hand, and doffing his hat drank politely to his enemies. "I hope, gentlemen," he shouted, "that you are going to wait for us to-day and not swim the Scheldt as you swam the Main at Dettingen. Men of the King's company," he continued, turning round to his own people, "these are the French Guards, and I hope you are going to beat them to-day"; and the English Guards answered with a cheer. The French officers hurried to the front, for the appearance of the British was a surprise to them, and called for a cheer in reply, but only a half-hearted murmur came from the French ranks, which quickly died away and gave place to a few sharp words of command; for the British were now within thirty yards. "For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful," murmured an English Guardsman as he looked down the barrels of the French muskets, but before his comrades round him had done laughing the French Guards had fired; and the turn of the British had come at last.[190]

[116]

For despite that deadly march through the cross-fire of the French batteries to the muzzles of the French muskets, the scarlet ranks still glared unbroken through the smoke; and now the British muskets, so long shouldered, were levelled, and with crash upon crash the volleys rang out from end to end of the line, first the First Guards, then the Scots, then the Coldstreams, and so through brigade after brigade, two battalions loading while the third fired, a ceaseless, rolling, infernal fire. Down dropped the whole of the French front rank, blue coats, red coats and white, before the storm. Nineteen officers and six hundred men of the French and Swiss Guards fell at the first discharge; regiment Courtin was crushed out of existence; regiment Aubeterre, striving hard to stem the tide, was swept aside by a single imperious volley which laid half of its men on the ground. The British infantry were perfectly in hand; their officers could be seen coolly tapping the muskets of the men with their canes so that every discharge might be low and deadly, and nothing could withstand their fire; while the battalion guns also poured in round after round of grape with terrible effect. The first French line was utterly shattered and broken. Even while the British were advancing Saxe had brought up additional troops to meet them and had posted regiments Couronne and Soissonois in rear of the King's regiment, and the Brigade Royal in rear of the French Guards; but all alike went down before the irresistible volleys. The red-coats continued their triumphant advance for full three hundred yards into the heart of the French camp, and old Ligonier's heart leaped within him, for he thought that the battle was won.

Saxe for his part thought little differently from Ligonier; but though half dead with dropsy, reduced to suck a bullet to assuage his intolerable thirst, so[117] weak that he could not ride but was carried about the field in a wicker litter, the gallant German never for a moment lost his head. Sending a message to the French King, who with the Dauphin was watching the action from a windmill in the rear, to retire across the Scheldt without delay, he strove to gain time to rally his infantry. On the first repulse of the French Guards Cumberland had detached two battalions to help the Dutch by a flanking attack on Fontenoy. Seeing that this movement must be checked at all hazards, Saxe headed these troops back by a charge of cavalry; whereupon one of the battalions extended itself along the left flank of the British. Partly in this way, partly owing to the incessant play of the French artillery on both flanks, the two British lines assumed the form of two huge oblong columns which gradually became welded into one. The change was not untimely, for now the first line of the French cavalry, which had been posted in rear of the forest of Barry, came down upon the British at full gallop, but only to reel back shivered to fragments by the same terrible fire. Then the second line tried its fortune, but met with no better fate. Finally, the Household Cavalry, the famous Maison du Roi, burning with all the ardour of Dettingen unavenged, was launched against the scarlet columns, and like its predecessors, came flying back, a mob of riderless horses and uncontrollable men, decimated, shattered and repulsed by the never-ending fire. "It was like charging two flaming fortresses rather than two columns of infantry."[191]

Nevertheless some time was hereby gained for the broken French infantry to reform. The British, once arrived within the French camp, came to a halt, and looked at last to see how the Dutch were faring on their left. As has already been told, Waldeck's attack had been a total failure, and the British, unsupported and always under a cross-fire of artillery, fell back to the crest of the ridge and were reformed for a second[118] attack. Waldeck undertook to make another attempt on Fontenoy, and Cumberland in reliance upon his help again advanced at the head of the British. But meanwhile Saxe had brought forward his reserves from Ramecroix, and among them the Irish brigade, to meet him, while artillery had also been brought up from the French right to play upon the British front. The French Guards and the rest of the troops of the French first line had also been rallied, and the task of the British was well-nigh desperate. The Irish brigade, which consisted of six battalions, was made up not of Irish only but of Scots and English also, desperate characters who went into action with a rope round their necks, and would fight like devils. Yet, even in this second attack the British carried their advance as far as in the first, the perfection of their fire-discipline enabling them to beat back even the Irish brigade for a time. But their losses had been frightfully heavy; the Dutch would not move one foot to the attack of Fontenoy, and the cannonade in front added to that in the flanks became unendurable. The French infantry likewise closed round on them in superior numbers on both flanks, and it became apparent that there was nothing for it but a retreat.

Ligonier sent back two battalions to secure the roads leading through Vezon, and the retreat then began in perfectly good order. The French Household Cavalry made a furious charge upon the rear of the column as it faced about, but found to its cost that the infernal fire was not yet quenched. The three battalions of Guards and a battalion of Hanoverians turned sternly about to meet them, and gave them a few parting volleys, which wholly extinguished one regiment and brought down every officer of another. A few British squadrons, the Blues conspicuous among them, pushed forward, in spite of heavy losses, through the cross-fire to lend what help they could, and the remnant of the heroic battalions retired, facing about[119] in succession at every hundred yards, as steadily and proudly as they had advanced.

Their losses in the action were terribly severe. Of the fifteen thousand infantry, English and Hanoverian, for the Hanoverians bore themselves not less nobly than their Allies, nearly six thousand were killed or wounded, the casualties of the twenty English battalions just exceeding four thousand men. The heaviest sufferers were the Twelfth and Twenty-third regiments, both of which lost over three hundred men, the Twenty-first and Thirty-first, which lost rather less than three hundred men apiece, and the three battalions of Guards, which lost each of them about two hundred and fifty. Of the Generals of Foot, Cumberland, Ligonier, and Brigadier Skelton, though in the hottest of the fire, alone came off unhurt; all of the rest were either killed or wounded. Many regiments of cavalry also suffered not a little, in particular the Blues and Royal Dragoons; and the total loss of the British cavalry exceeded three hundred men and six hundred horses. The loss of the French was never made public, but was certainly at least equal to that of the Allies. Contemporary accounts set it down, with no great improbability, at fully ten thousand men. As an example of the prowess of British infantry, Fontenoy stands almost without a parallel in its history. The battalions formed under a cross-fire of artillery, remained halted under the same fire, advanced slowly for half a mile in perfect order under the same fire, and marched up to within pistol-shot of the French infantry to receive their volley before they discharged a shot. They shattered the French battalions to pieces, repulsed three separate attacks of cavalry, halted under a heavy cannonade, retired for some distance and reformed under a cross-fire, advanced again with both artillery and musketry playing on front and flanks, made the bravest brigade in the French service recoil, repelled another desperate attack of cavalry, and retired slowly and orderly under a cross-fire almost to the end. By consent of all the British[120] commanders it was Ingoldsby's misunderstanding of his orders and his failure to capture the Redoubt d'Eu that lost the battle; and Ingoldsby was duly tried by court-martial for his behaviour. He was, however, acquitted of all but an error in judgment; and indeed there was no question of cowardice, for he accompanied the remainder of the infantry in its advance with his own detachment and was severely wounded. It is customary to blame Cumberland for dashing his head against a wall in attempting such an attack, but he could hardly have been expected to count on such bad luck as the failure of Ingoldsby on one flank and of the Dutch on the other. The sheer audacity of his advance went near to give him the victory. Saxe owned that he never dreamed that any General would attempt such a stroke, or that any troops would execute it. Cumberland is blamed also for not attacking either the Redoubt d'Eu or Fontenoy after he had penetrated into the French camp. This charge is less easy to rebut, for the French always know when they are beaten, and seeing their left rolled up and troops advancing on Fontenoy in flank and rear would probably have given up the game for lost, and that the more readily since their ammunition in Fontenoy was for the moment nearly exhausted. Even so, however, Saxe's reserves were always at hand at Ramecroix, and would have required to be held in check. Another puzzling question, namely, why Cumberland did not make greater use of his artillery in the action, is answered by the fact that the contractors for the horsing of the guns ran off with the horses early in the day. Such an occurrence was by no means unusual, and yet it never happened to Marlborough, not even at Malplaquet. Altogether, the conclusion seems to be that Cumberland stumbled on to a brilliant feat of arms by mistake, and, though seconded by his troops with bravery equal to his own, was not a General of sufficient capacity to turn his success to account.

At the close of the action Cumberland retreated to[121] Ath and encamped under the guns of that fortress, leaving his wounded to the mercy of the French, who, by a strange perversion of their usual chivalry, treated them with shameful barbarity. Among the wounded, strangely enough, were a few of the new sect of Methodists founded by John Wesley, who faced death and wounds with the stern exultation that had once inspired the troopers of Cromwell. One of them wrote to Wesley, that even after a bullet in each arm had forced him to retire from the field, he hardly knew whether he was on earth or heaven, such was the sweetness of the day. This man and a few more of his kind probably helped their fellow-sufferers through the misery of the days following the battle, until Cumberland's furious remonstrances with Saxe procured for them better treatment.
June 30 July 11.
August.

From Ath Cumberland fell back to Lessines and drew out such British corps as were in garrison in Flanders to replace those which had suffered most heavily in the action. Meanwhile Tournay, very shortly after the battle, fell by treachery into the hands of the French; and Saxe's field-army being thus raised to a force nearly double that of the Allies, Cumberland was reduced to utter helplessness. The mischief of Fontenoy lay not in the repulse and the loss of men, for the British did not consider themselves to have been beaten, but in the destruction of all confidence in the Dutch troops. The troubles which had harassed Wade to despair now reappeared. Cumberland, despite his inferiority in strength, was expected somehow to defend Flanders, Brabant, and above all Brussels, and yet simultaneously to keep an active army in the field. Worse than this, he attempted to fulfil the expectation. Against his better judgment he weakened his force still further by detaching a force for the garrison of Mons,[192][122] and then, instead of taking up a strong position on the Scheldt to cover Ghent at all hazards, he yielded to the pressure of the Austrians and crossed the Dender to cover Brussels.[193] Halting too long between two opinions he at last sent off a detachment for the defence of Ghent, half of which was cut off and turned back with heavy loss, while the other half, after enduring much rough usage on the march, entered Ghent only to see the town surprised by the French on the following day. Four British regiments took part in this unlucky enterprise and suffered heavy loss, while the Royal Scots and the Twenty-third, which had been despatched to Ghent after Fontenoy, of course became prisoners.[194] Moreover, a vast quantity of British military stores were captured in Ghent, although Cumberland had a week before ordered that they should be removed.[195] After this blow Cumberland retired to Vilvorde, a little to the north of Brussels, still hoping to cover both that city and Antwerp, and so to preserve his communications both with Germany and with the sea. Here again he sacrificed his better judgment to the clamour of the Austrians, for he would much have preferred to secure Antwerp only. His position was in fact most critical, and he was keenly alive to it.[196] Just when his anxiety was greatest there came a letter from the Secretary of State, announcing that invasion of England was imminent, and hoping that troops could be spared from Flanders without prejudice to his operations. "What!" answered Ligonier indignantly, "Are you aware that the enemy has seventy thousand men against our thirty thousand, and that they can place a superior force on the canal before us and send another army round [123]between us and Antwerp to cut off our supplies and force us to fight at a disadvantage? This is our position, and this is the result of providing His Royal Highness with insufficient troops; and yet you speak of our having a corps to spare to defend England!"[197]

Walker & Boutall del.

To face page 122.
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1743.
DETTINGEN, June 16th 27th 1743.
FONTENOY, April 30th May 11th 1745.
Aug. 13 24 .
Sept.
Oct.

Saxe's plan for reducing the Allies was in fact uniformly the same throughout the whole of the war, namely to cut off their communications with the sea on one side and with Germany on the other. Even before he began to press Cumberland northward toward Antwerp he had detached a force to lay siege to Ostend, which was the English base. Cumberland, on his side, had advised that the dykes should be broken down and the country inundated in order to preserve it, and both Dutch and Austrians had promised that this should be done; but as usual it was not done, and before the end of August Ostend had surrendered to the French. The English base was then perforce shifted to Antwerp. But by this time the requests for the return of troops to England had become urgent and imperative orders. First ten battalions were recalled, then the rest of the foot, and at last practically the whole of the army, including Cumberland himself.[198] It is now time to explain the causes for the alarm in England.

Authorities.—The official account of Fontenoy was drawn up by Ligonier in French and translated into English, with some omissions, for publication. The French version is far the better and will be found in the State Papers. The account in the Life of the Duke of Cumberland is poor, though valuable as having been drawn up from the reports of the English Generals. Of the French accounts Voltaire's is the best known, and, as might be expected from such a hand, admirably spirited. More valuable are the accounts in the Conquête des Pays Bas, in the Mémoires du Maréchal de Saxe, where Saxe's own report may be read, in the Campagnes des Pays Bas, and in Espagnac. The newspapers furnish a few picturesque incidents of some value.

CHAPTER VI
Ever since the death of Cardinal Fleury, in January 1743, the hopes of the Jacobites for French help in an attempt to re-establish the Stuarts by force of arms had been steadily reviving. Cardinal Tencin, Fleury's successor, was warmly attached to the cause of the exiled house; the feeling between France and England was greatly embittered; the beginning of overt hostilities could be only a matter of time; and an invasion of Britain was the most powerful diversion that could be made to divide the forces of the partisans of the Pragmatic Sanction. In the autumn of 1743 preparations for a descent upon England from Dunkirk under Marshal Saxe were matured, and a French fleet, with Saxe and Prince Charles Stuart on board, actually sailed as far as Dungeness. There, however, it was dispersed by a storm, which wrecked many of the transports, and for the present put an effectual end to the enterprise.
July 25 August 5.

Prince Charles returned to Paris not a little disappointed, but receiving no further encouragement from France nourished the hope of landing in Scotland and making his attempt with the aid of his British adherents only. Those adherents for their part had warned him that success was hopeless unless he should bring with him at least six thousand men and ten thousand stand of arms; but Charles was none the less determined to try his fortune. The defeat of the British at Fontenoy doubtless strengthened his resolution: in June 1745 he came to a definite decision, and on the 25th of July he landed at Loch-nan-Uamh, between Moidart and Arisaig,[125] with seven companions, of whom one only besides himself, Sir John Macdonald, had any experience of the military profession. Three weeks before his actual arrival a rumour of his landing had reached Sir John Cope, the General commanding in Scotland, who recommended that all officers should be recalled to their posts, and that every precaution should be taken.[199] Even so, however, Charles had been on Scottish soil a full week before Cope could believe the rumour to be true.
August 19 30 .

The three persons on whom the Government chiefly relied for the safety of Scotland were Cope himself, Andrew Fletcher, the Lord Justice-Clerk, and Duncan Forbes, the Lord President: but the only man in authority who at once betrayed serious apprehension was the Lord Advocate Craigie, who had been dreading some such complication ever since Fontenoy. Cope also was uneasy, owing to the extreme weakness of the force at his disposal. He had not, in all, more than three thousand men, for the most part new and raw regiments upon which he could repose little trust, and which in spite of his representations in the previous year were not even properly armed.[200] He resolved, however, to march northward at once in order to overawe any waverers by a display of force: and on receiving at last, after long delay, absolute confirmation of the news of the Pretender's disembarkation, he threw his most trustworthy regiment, the Sixth Foot, with two companies of the Royal Scots, into the forts which protected the line of Loch Lochy and Loch Ness.[201] It was, however, impossible for him to move without first making provision for the subsistence of his little army, and this was a work of much time and difficulty. It was not until the 19th of August that he finally marched from Edinburgh for Fort Augustus with fifteen hundred men of the Forty-fourth, Forty-sixth, and Forty-seventh [126]Foot, and a convoy of stores so large as greatly to impede his movements.

Meanwhile affairs had assumed a far more dangerous complexion. Charles had been active in summoning the leaders of the clans on which he counted; and though less favourably received than he had hoped he had secured Cameron of Lochiel, Macdonald of Keppoch, Macdonald of Glengarry, and others. On the 16th of August a party of Keppoch's and Lochiel's men succeeded in cutting off two companies of the Royal Scots which were on their way to Fort Augustus, killed a dozen of them, and took the rest prisoners: and on the 19th, the very day of Cope's departure from Edinburgh, Charles raised his standard at Glenfinnan, to find himself on the next day at the head of sixteen hundred men.

Cope had not yet received full intelligence of these transactions, but it was pretty evident to him that his advance to the north was likely to be something more than a mere military promenade, and he became extremely unwilling to execute it. Yielding, however, to positive orders from the Lords-Justices[202] he continued his march upon Fort Augustus, not a little disgusted to find that, though he had encumbered his train with several hundred stand of arms for distribution to loyal volunteers, no such volunteers were forthcoming to receive them. Charles, for his part, on receiving information of Cope's approach, with great promptitude made a forced march to Corry Arrack, the worst pass on the road, and having disposed his troops with great skill, waited exultingly for the coming of the red-coats that he might overwhelm them during their passage of the defile.[203] To his surprise not a man appeared. Cope had been made aware of his dispositions and had turned aside from Dalwhinnie to [127]Inverness, leaving the road to the south open to the rebels. From Inverness he despatched urgent messages to Edinburgh for transports to convey his troops southward by sea.

Cope has always been greatly blamed for this movement, the contention being that he should either have maintained his ground in front of Charles or have fallen back on Stirling. All critics, however, overlook the crucial points, that not only was his force inferior to that of the rebels but that he could not trust a man of them. Charles's Highlanders could march two miles to Cope's one, and would have made short work of a large convoy in charge of undisciplined troops. Again, if Cope had halted, the rebels would have been on him in a few hours before he had had time to entrench himself, even supposing that he could have found entrenching tools. The fact that he sent for transports shows that he would not rely upon his troops in a retreat; the advance northward was undertaken contrary to his advice, and the misfortune that followed was simply the usual result of civilians' interference with military operations.
Aug. 30 Sept. 10.
Sept. 4 15 .
Sept. 11 22 .

Charles, on his side, lost no time in following up his advantage, and at once pushed rapidly southward. One of his parties was, indeed, repelled by the minute English garrison which held the post at Ruthin,[204] but his men indemnified themselves by bringing in Macpherson of Cluny a prisoner, and thereby gaining Lord Lovat and the Frasers to the cause. By the 30th of August Charles had reached Blair Athol, and on the 4th of September he entered Perth, where he was joined by James Drummond, titular Duke of Perth, and Lord George Murray, both of them valuable acquisitions for the following that they brought with them, while Murray was, in addition, a very skilful officer.[128] Resuming his march on the 11th, he avoided the guns of Stirling Castle by fording the Forth eight miles above the fortress, and took up his quarters in the town of Stirling, which had opened its gates to him. By the 15th he was within eight miles of Edinburgh.
Sept. 16 27 .
Sept. 17 28 .

The city was in consternation over his approach. The Castle of Edinburgh was, indeed, provided with an adequate garrison, but the town was absolutely defenceless; nor were there any regular troops at hand excepting the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dragoons, both of them young regiments, raw and untrained. On the morning of the 16th these two corps, together with a party of the town-guard, were drawn up at Coltbridge, when their picquets were suddenly driven in by the pistol-shots of a few mounted gentlemen of the rebel army. The picquets were seized with inexplicable panic, which presently communicated itself to the main body; and in a few minutes both regiments, despite the entreaties of their officers, were off at full gallop to the south, never stopping until they reached Preston. They had not been there long before the panic was rekindled. One of the dragoons, while in search of forage after dark, fell into a disused coal-pit full of water and shouted lustily for help. Instantly the cry was raised that the Highlanders were on them, and the men, rushing to their horses, galloped away once more through the night, and could not be halted till they reached Dunbar. The "Canter of Coltbrigg," as this ludicrous but shameful flight was dubbed, was the source of all the subsequent success of the Pretender. So petty are the causes that will go near to overset a throne. Probably, if the truth of the matter could be known, it would be found that a few raw horses, unbroken to fire-arms, among the picquets were the cause of the whole disaster.[205] For the[129] moment, however, the panic was decisive in its results. Charles entered Edinburgh without resistance on the following day and took up his quarters at Holyrood; but halting for no more than twenty-four hours in the capital he pursued his march to the south. His troops by this time had swelled to twenty-five hundred men, though many of these were indifferently armed, and the force was absolutely destitute of artillery. Still happy chance had sent panic in advance of him, and he wisely followed it with all possible speed.
Sept. 19 30 .
Sept. 20 October 1.

Cope, meanwhile, on hearing of the march of the rebels southward had moved from Inverness to Aberdeen, where, on the arrival of transports from Edinburgh, he embarked his men and arrived safely on the 16th of September at Dunbar. On the two following days the troops were disembarked, and the army, being reinforced by two hundred Highland levies under Lord Loudoun, and by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dragoons, was raised to a total of twenty-three hundred men, with six guns. On the 19th Cope marched northward along the coast road, and on the following day caught sight of the rebels, not, as he had expected, to westward, but to southward of him, quietly halted on the brow of Carberry Hill. He at once took up a strong position, with his rear resting on the sea, his left being covered by a marsh and his right by two enclosures with walls seven feet high, between which ran the road to the village of Prestonpans. In his front lay another enclosure surrounded by a ditch from ten to twelve feet broad; and thus naturally entrenched, Cope's force might well have seemed unassailable. The rebels, however, moved down from the hill and took up their position opposite to the marsh on Cope's right. Cope therefore changed front to the left so as to rest his right on the ditch and his left on the sea, thus presenting his front to the marsh, an alteration which appeared to offer the rebels little[130] advantage. In the course of the evening, however, a man well acquainted with the marsh pointed out to the rebel commanders a passage by which it might safely be traversed; and in the course of the night Charles threw his army safely across and formed it for attack in two lines—twelve hundred men in the first, and the remainder, who were but ill-armed, in the second line. His new position was not more than two hundred yards from the English camp, for Cope, deeming the marsh impassable, had omitted to post a single guard or sentry on that side.
Sept. 21 October 2.

A little before daybreak the alarm was given in Cope's camp, and the General hastened to form his line of battle, with his infantry, as usual, in the centre, the Thirteenth Dragoons on his right wing, and the Fourteenth Dragoons on his left. The Highlanders were no sooner formed than Charles gave the signal for attack. They rushed forward with a yell upon the artillery before Cope's front, and drove the gunners, who were seamen from the fleet, away from their guns. Then, firing a volley at the dragoons, they rushed straight upon them with the broadsword and slashed furiously at the noses of the horses. The dragoons, already too well inured to panic, at once wheeled about in confusion. The infantry, though uncovered on both flanks, remained steady and poured in a destructive fire, but the Highlanders immediately closed with them, and the bayonet was no match for broadsword and target. In a few minutes the English were broken and flying for their lives. Four hundred were cut down on the spot and over a thousand more were taken prisoners, one hundred and seventy only succeeding in making their escape. The loss of the rebels was no more than thirty killed and seventy wounded. The whole action did not last ten minutes, and yet never was victory more complete. The dragoons were so thoroughly scared that, after galloping first to Edinburgh, where the Governor indignantly refused to admit them to the Castle, they turned round[131] and hurried south to Berwick, where Cope had already arrived before them.

The moral effect of Prestonpans was prodigious. Twice the English troops had faced the Highlanders, and each time they had fled in panic. On the first occasion no blood had been shed, but Prestonpans brought with it a memory and a tradition of horror, for all of the slain English had perished by the sword, and the field presented a frightful spectacle of severed limbs and mutilated bodies. Charles was for taking advantage of the moment and marching immediately upon London; and if he had done so it is probable that he would at least have reached the capital. There was little or no enthusiasm among the English for the cause of the Guelphs, and there were few or no troops to stand in Charles's way; there was only one fortified place, Newcastle, to trouble him to the south of the Tweed, and the whole district was profoundly scared. But the Highlanders were already hurrying homeward with the plunder gained by the action, diminishing the strength of his force by one-half; so that it was deemed more prudent to return to Edinburgh.

Charles's great object now was the reduction of Edinburgh Castle, which with Stirling Castle and the forts in the Highlands was practically all of Scotland that remained to the Guelphs. A blockade of a few weeks would have forced it to submission by famine, but General Guest, the Governor, threatened to lay the town in ashes if his supplies were cut off. A few shots from his cannon showed that he was in earnest, and, in deference to the entreaties of the townsfolk, Charles was fain to let him have his way. The circumstance might in itself have sufficed to show the futility of military operations on such terms, but the gain of certain prominent Scottish nobles to the cause, and the addition of several hundred volunteers to the rebel army, seemed to afford some compensation for this enforced inactivity. By the end of October Charles's force was augmented to six thousand men, five-sixths[132] of them excellent material, while its efficiency was further heightened by the arrival of several French and Irish officers, who brought with them money, five thousand stand of arms, and six pieces of field artillery.

Meanwhile military preparations went forward in England with feverish activity. Cumberland, as has already been told, received orders to send back first a part, and then the whole of his army: and now the full peril of the situation in Flanders can be realised. It is plain from Ligonier's letters that Saxe had it in his power to destroy the British force encamped at Vilvorde, and that one good soldier at least lived in daily dread of the catastrophe. Had Ligonier's apprehension been fulfilled the throne of the Guelphs must have fallen: and the fault would have been King George's own, for his folly in trifling with the war for two campaigns instead of pursuing it vigorously as Stair had advised. As things were, however, the British passed the North Sea in safety, together with certain Dutch and Hessians who had been summoned, as in 1715, the help of England in pursuance of the Treaty. The Dutch indeed arrived before the British could be despatched, and thus of ten battalions placed under the command of Marshal Wade for the defence of the kingdom no fewer than seven were foreign.[206] Pending the arrival of the troops from over sea frantic efforts were made to fill the ranks, as usual much depleted by drafts, of the regiments at home. On the 6th of September a bounty of no less than six pounds was offered to every recruit who would join the Guards before the 24th, and of four pounds to any enlisting between the 24th and the 1st of October.[207] The spirit of the country also began slowly to kindle: and the newspapers fanned the rising flame by an incessant blast of "No popery, no arbitrary power, no wooden shoes."[208] Fifteen leading noblemen offered to [133]raise and equip two regiments of horse and thirteen of foot at their own expense. The gentlemen of Yorkshire raised a Royal Regiment of Hunters, first germ of our present Yeomanry, which served without pay. Companies of volunteers were formed in London. The peaceful Quakers combined to present every soldier with a flannel waistcoat for the coming winter campaign: and a subscription was started in the City to provide a blanket and two paillasses to each tent, thirty watch-coats to each battalion, and a pair of worsted gloves to every man.[209] The militia also was called out in several counties: and finally Cope was removed from the command in Scotland and replaced by General Handasyde.[210]
Oct. 31 Nov. 11.

Charles in the meantime was anxious to move southward with the least possible delay, and fight the motley force which was gathered together under Wade at Newcastle;[211] but his Scottish adherents were most unwilling to move, and it was only when he declared his determination to enter England alone, if no one would follow him, that they grudgingly consented to march for a little distance over the border. Lord George Murray with great wisdom advised that the advance should be through Cumberland rather than Northumberland, which would compel Wade to harass his troops by marches along bad roads through a difficult country. If Wade should remain inactive, which his previous behaviour in command suggested to be more than likely, the rebels would be at liberty to move whither they pleased. The better to conceal the true direction of the advance the army was divided into two columns, the one under Charles himself to march by way of Kelso and the other by way of Moffat, both to converge ultimately on [134]Carlisle. Thus at length, on the 31st of October, the rebels began their advance southward, but still in no very good heart. The letters of the chiefs show that they looked upon the whole enterprise as desperate, and that they longed to be at their homes reaping their harvest, and looking to the wintering of their herds.[212] The rank and file of the Highlanders did not write letters, but simply betook themselves in scores to their homes.
Nov. 8 19 .
Nov. 17 28 .
Nov. 20 Dec. 1.

Murray's plan of invasion succeeded admirably. On his arrival at Kelso Charles sent forward an advanced party to order quarters at Wooler, and having thus alarmed Wade for Newcastle turned sharply to the westward and entered Cumberland by Liddesdale. On the following day he was joined by the other column, and the united army, some five thousand strong, proceeded to the investment of Carlisle. The town was held only by a[135] garrison of militia, but the commander and the mayor refused to surrender, and the siege was delayed by a false alarm that Wade was marching to rescue. On the 13th of November, however, batteries were raised by the rebels, whereupon the mayor's courage evaporated and his worship requested a capitulation for the town. Charles refused to grant it unless the Castle also was included, and the result was that he gained both Castle and town with the loss of hardly a man. Wade, when it was too late, started to relieve Carlisle, but, being stopped by a fall of snow, returned again to Newcastle, and sent General Handasyde with two battalions of foot and a regiment of dragoons to re-occupy Edinburgh. This movement increased the anxiety of the Highlanders to return home: but after some debate it was decided to continue the advance. Two hundred men were left to garrison Carlisle, and with a force greatly reduced by desertion Charles, on the 20th, renewed his march to the south without the least molestation from Wade. On the 27th he passed the Ribble, that barrier so often fatal to Scottish invasion, at Preston, where he was well received, and a few recruits were added to his army. Acclamations, too, greeted him on his way to Wigan and Manchester, but the people refused to accept the arms that were offered to them or to enlist themselves for his cause. Only at Manchester the exertions of Mr. Francis Townley, a Roman Catholic of a very old family in the county, availed to raise a couple of hundred men. It was but a trifling addition compared with that expected by the Highland chiefs, and served to confirm their misgivings as to the desperate character of the enterprise.
Dec. 4.

English troops now began to close in upon the little rebel army from every side. Wade was moving down upon it from the north; Cumberland lay before it with eight thousand men at Lichfield, while a still larger force of militia, stiffened by battalions of the Guards, was in process of concentration at Finchley Common for the defence of London. Still the rebels pursued their march southward, the people staring at them as they[136] passed, amused but indifferent, and apparently hardly able to take the matter seriously. At Cambridge sensible middle-aged men talked of taking a chaise to go and see them on the road;[213] and Hogarth, to the great good fortune of posterity, could see nothing in the march of the Guards to Finchley but an admirable subject for the exercise of his pencil and the indulgence of his satire. Yet there was still a panic in store for London. From Macclesfield Lord George Murray sent forward a small force to Congleton, which pushed away a party of horse that lay there and pursued it for some way along the road to Newcastle-under-Lyme. Cumberland, thinking that the rebels were about to advance by that line or turn westward into Wales, turned also westward to Stone to intercept them, and Murray, making a forced march eastward, reached Ashbourne and on the following day entered Derby. By this man?uvre the rebel army had gained two marches on Cumberland and successfully passed by the most formidable force interposed between it and London. The capital was in consternation. Business was suspended, all shops were shut, and the Bank of England only escaped disaster by making its payments in sixpences in order to gain time. Cumberland on discovering his mistake hurried his cavalry by desperate marches to Northampton in order to regain, if possible, the ground that he had lost, but the only result was utter exhaustion of the horses; and the Duke of Richmond, who was in command of this cavalry, frankly confessed that he did not see how the enemy could be stopped. The rapidity of the rebels' movements, the difficulty of moving regular troops during the winter along execrable roads, and above all the want of an efficient head at Whitehall to replace the timid and incompetent Newcastle, served to paralyse the whole strength of England.
Dec. 6 17 .
Dec. 18 29 .
Dec. 26.
1746.
Jan. 3 14 .

On the night of his arrival at Derby Charles discussed at length the question of the dress which he should wear on his entry into London; but on the following day[137] his officers represented to him the danger of further advance, with Wade and Cumberland closing in upon his rear. News had arrived of the landing of French troops at Montrose; it would be better, they urged, to retreat while there was yet time and to join them. Charles combated the proposition hotly for the whole day, but yielded at last; and on the morrow the retreat was begun. Cumberland, who had fallen back to Coventry, at once caught up four thousand men and followed the rebels by forced marches, but did not overtake them until the 18th, when his advanced parties made an attack on Murray's rear-guard at Clifton Moor, a few miles to the south of Penrith. The English, however, were repulsed with the loss of a hundred men, a misadventure easily explained by the fact that the action was fought after dark, when the musket was a poor match for the claymore. Still the repulse was not creditable to the royal troops nor encouraging for further attempts upon the rebel rear-guard. Wade meanwhile made no attempt to intercept the northward march of Charles, who crossed the Esk into Scotland unmolested on the 20th of December, and six days later occupied Glasgow. His force, despite many days of halt, had covered the distance from Edinburgh to Derby and from Derby back to Glasgow in exactly eight weeks. A few days later he resumed his march to Stirling, where he was joined by the French, who had landed at Montrose, and by other levies which, notwithstanding General Handasyde's entreaties that they might be attacked from Edinburgh and Inverness, had been allowed to assemble in the north. These reinforcements augmented his strength to nine thousand men: and since the French had brought with them battering guns Charles resolved to besiege the Castle of Stirling and so to secure for himself, if possible, all Scotland north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde.

Meanwhile Cumberland after recovering Carlisle had been recalled to the south of England with most of his infantry to guard the southern coast in case of a French invasion. Wade, who was quite worn out with age and[138] infirmity, was also removed from his command, and at Cumberland's nomination General Hawley was appointed to be Commander-in-Chief in Scotland. Hawley was a man of obscure origin, rough and brutal in manners, but a strict disciplinarian of the ruder school which was beloved of Cumberland, and very far from an incapable soldier. On his arrival at Edinburgh he found himself entrusted with twelve battalions and four regiments of dragoons, and with absolute liberty to do with them as he thought best. Still his difficulties were considerable. Artillery had been given to him but no gunners, his instructions being that he should draw the latter from the garrisons of Berwick and of Edinburgh. On being summoned, however, these gunners proved to be civilians who had been foisted on to the establishment for the sake of their votes, and were not intended to be of any other service.[214] The same principle could be traced in every other detail relating to these two garrisons, for the trail of corruption was over all.[215] Many of the battalions again were no better than militia, and the infantry generally was in so bad a state that it was hard to raise above three or four thousand men fit for service from the whole of it. "I hope we shan't be blamed," wrote Hawley, in explaining his inaction, "but it is not the name of twelve battalions that will do the business. No diligence in me shall be wanting, but a man cannot work without tools. The heavy artillery is still at Newcastle for want of horses, which were sent to Carlisle for no use. The major of artillery is absent through sickness. I suspect his sickness to be a young wife: I know him. I have been obliged to hire a conductor of artillery, and seventy odd men to act as his assistants for the field-artillery. I was three days getting them from the Castle to the Palace-yard and now they are not fit to march."[216] At length by great exertion the whole [139]force of twelve battalions and three regiments of dragoons, with its artillery, was made ready for the field. Hawley then moved up to Falkirk on the way to relieve the beleaguered Castle of Stirling, and encamped on the western side of the town.
Jan. 17 28 .

The rebels so far had made little progress with the siege. The French engineer with them, who was a coxcomb of little skill, had chosen wrong sites for his batteries, and General Blakeney, who was in command of the garrison, had made him sensible of the fact by a most destructive fire. On the 16th of January Charles, hearing of Hawley's march upon Falkirk, left a few hundred men to maintain the blockade of the Castle, and advanced with the remainder to Bannockburn, where he drew them up, as on a field of good omen, in order of battle. Hawley, however, declined to move, his artillery being but just come up: so on the following day Charles determined to attack him. While he was moving forward Hawley was enjoying the hospitality of Callendar House from Lady Kilmarnock, wife to one of the rebel leaders, having left General Huske, an excellent officer, in command. Man?uvring with a small detachment to distract Huske's attention to the northward along the road that leads to Stirling, Charles led his army to the south of the English camp, and then advanced upon it towards a ridge of rugged upland known as Falkirk Muir. The English drums promptly beat to arms, and urgent messages were despatched to Callendar House for Hawley, who presently galloped up at speed without his hat. Hastily placing himself at the head of the three regiments of dragoons he hurried with them in the teeth of a storm of rain and wind to the top of Falkirk Muir, ordering the foot to follow with bayonets fixed. The rebels however reached the summit of the ridge before him; and Hawley then formed his army on the lower ground, drawing up the infantry in two lines, with the cavalry before them on the left of the first line. His left was covered by an impassable morass, and thus it came about that the left[140] of the rebels, who were also formed in two lines, stood opposite to his centre. The numbers of each army were about nine thousand men. The formation of the British being complete, Hawley, who had great faith in the power of cavalry against the Highlanders, ordered the dragoons to attack. They advanced accordingly. The Highlanders waited with perfect coolness until they were within ten yards of them, and then poured in an effective volley. Therewith the evil tradition of panic seized at once upon the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dragoons, which turned about and galloped off in disorder. The Ninth Dragoons showed more firmness, but the Highlanders throwing themselves on the ground thrust at the bellies of the horses with their dirks, and they also were beaten back. Then the Highlanders advanced, and the foot, shaken by the defeat of the horse and blinded by wind and rain, fired an irregular volley. One-fourth of the muskets missed fire owing to the rain, and every regiment excepting two at once turned and fled. No efforts of their officers, who behaved with the greatest gallantry, had the least effect in stopping them, though many were regiments of famous reputation; and the Highlanders pursuing with the claymore made not a little havoc among the fugitives. On the right of the first line, however, the Fourth and Forty-eighth stood firm, their front ranks kneeling with bayonets fixed while the middle and rear ranks fired, and repulsed the left wing of the rebels: the Fourteenth soon rallied and joined them, the Royal Scots and Buffs rallied also, and these troops keeping up a steady fire made, with the Ninth Dragoons, an orderly retreat. The losses did not exceed two hundred and eighty of all ranks, killed, wounded or missing, the two regiments that stood firm coming off with little hurt, the Forty-eighth indeed without injury to a man.

The action cannot be called a great defeat if a defeat at all, but it was a disgrace, and Hawley felt it to be so. "My heart is broke," he wrote to Cumberland, "I can't say we are quite beat, but our left is beat and their left[141] is beat.... Such scandalous cowardice I never saw before. The whole second line of foot ran away without firing a shot." It may well be that Hawley's absence during the preliminary man?uvres of the rebel army and his hurried arrival immediately before the action contributed to make the troops unsteady, but in reality there was nothing to excuse their precipitate flight except that, as Hawley had himself written from Edinburgh, they were little better than militia. The truth was, that by constant talk of the desperate prowess of the Highlanders and by endless gloating, such as the ignorant delight in, over the horrors of the field of Prestonpans, the men had worked themselves into a state of almost superstitious terror.[217] Such a thing is not rare in military history and has, unless I am mistaken, been seen again in our own army within our own time.[218]

Hawley was soon able to report that the whole of his force had recovered itself with the exception of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dragoons, which appear to have been hopelessly demoralised. Nor can it be denied that the General's remedies were stern enough. "There are fourteen deserters taken," he wrote, a fortnight after the action, "shall they be hanged? Thirty-one of Hamilton's dragoons are to be hanged for deserting to the rebels, and thirty-two of the foot to be shot for cowardice."[219] Still it was felt that there was but one way thoroughly to restore the spirit of the troops, namely that the Duke of Cumberland should take command of them in person. The Duke no sooner received his orders than he hurried to Edinburgh, travelling night and day with such speed that he accomplished the journey from London in less than six days. Neither he nor the King blamed Hawley. Indiscipline was in his [142]opinion the reason for the failure, and he came up to Scotland fully resolved to put an end to it. He seems in fact to have joined the army, asking in scornful and indignant surprise what was the meaning of this foolish flight of English infantry before wild Highlanders: and this attitude was almost sufficient in itself to put the soldiers upon their mettle.
Feb. 1 12 .

Hawley had made all preparations for an advance against the Duke's arrival, and on the 31st of January Cumberland moved forward to Falkirk with twelve battalions of foot, two regiments of dragoons, in which neither the Thirteenth nor the Fourteenth was included, and several companies of loyal Highlanders. The rebels thereupon raised the siege of Stirling and retired, much against the will of Charles, to Inverness, leaving their battering guns in the trenches behind them. Cumberland at once sent forward his dragoons in pursuit, and pushed on as rapidly as possible to Perth. He was in no amiable mood, and gave an indication of his feelings towards the rebels by granting his troops licence to plunder the estates of rebel leaders on the march.[220] Arriving at Perth he was detained for several days by the difficulty of collecting supplies and transport. Nevertheless the campaign was at last to be conducted with common sense. Cumberland was careful to give his troops special training against their enemy, prescribing for the infantry the formation so successfully adopted by the Fourth and Forty-eighth at Falkirk, and directing that when at close quarters with Highlanders each soldier should turn his bayonet not against the enemy immediately before him, but against the man on his own right front, where the target could not parry the thrust. But this, though creditable to Cumberland, was of small importance compared to the[143] change in the general situation. The rebels were in full retreat from the fertile lowlands into the barren mountains, and their supplies from France were cut off by British ships of war, while Cumberland's force was fed from the sea. When one army is full and another starving, lead and steel are hardly needed to decide the victory.
Feb. 18 March 1.

Nevertheless, even after his retreat from Stirling Charles met with some trifling successes. Inverness, when he reached it, was held by Lord Loudoun with some raw Highland levies. Loudoun made a night march in the hope of seizing Charles's person at Moy Castle, some ten miles distant; but half a dozen of the rebel Highlanders, firing a few shots and raising the war-cry of their clans, kindled the inevitable panic, and Loudoun's men ran away to Inverness in such disorder that he decided to evacuate the town, and retired across the Moray Firth. In the course of the evacuation panic again overtook his men, and fully a third of them deserted.[221] Charles occupied the town on the following day, and thus obtained a port into which such French ships as might elude the British cruisers could bring him supplies. Another of his parties, again, contrived to capture Fort Augustus, together with three companies of the Sixth Foot which formed its garrison. But his attempts against Fort William and Blair Castle were fruitless, for both posts though besieged, and the latter indeed hard pressed, held out with the greatest firmness and determination. Thus the barrier of Loch Lochy and Loch Ness was never wholly broken through.

During all this time Cumberland's temper was steadily rising. For all his impatience, his operations were delayed by bad weather and difficulties of transport; though his troops scoured the country overawing and disarming the inhabitants he could obtain no intelligence of the rebels whatever; and the petty defeat of Loudoun, though of no very great importance, was from its moral effect extremely irritating. Throughout the month of[144] March he remained at Aberdeen unable to move; and meanwhile a further revival of the spirit of panic exasperated him beyond measure. Five thousand Hessians under Prince Frederick of Hesse-Cassel had been taken into British pay, landed in Scotland, and posted at Perth to check any attempt of the rebels to return to southward. On the intelligence of a petty inroad of rebel parties upon Blair and Rannoch Prince Frederick actually decided to evacuate Perth and fall back to Stirling. Cumberland was no sooner apprised of this decision than he ordered the Hessians forward to relieve Blair Castle, but the Prince from sheer timidity shrank from any attempt to execute the command. Fortunately Blair was able to defend itself: but Cumberland did not fail to let the Prince know what he thought of his conduct.
April 15 26 .

At length on the 8th of April the Duke was able to advance from Aberdeen, and having crossed the Spey successfully on the 12th, pushed forward by forced marches upon Nairn. On the evening of the 14th his advanced parties had a brush with the rebels' rear-guard, and he knew that his enemy lay at last within his reach. Charles lodged for that night at Culloden House, some twelve miles from Nairn, while his troops, now reduced to five thousand starving, dispirited men, bivouacked on Culloden Moor. On the following day he drew up his army in order of battle; but the Duke had granted his troops a halt at Nairn after their exertions, and the more readily since the 15th was his birthday. Charles therefore formed the bold design of surprising him in his camp on that same night; but though his troops were actually set in motion for the purpose, the men were too weak from privation to traverse the distance within the appointed time; and they fell back weary and despondent, having fatigued themselves to no purpose. Charles's officers were now for moving to some stronger position, but the young Prince's head seems to have been turned by his previous successes, and he resolved to accept battle where he stood.
April 16 27 .

Between four and five in the morning of the next day[145] the Duke broke up from Nairn, and after a march of eight miles received intelligence from his advanced parties that the rebels were in his front. He at once formed in order of battle, but finding that the enemy did not come forward, continued his march. The rebels were formed in two lines, their right resting on some straggling park walls and huts, their left extending towards Culloden House. The Duke's army was disposed in three lines, the two first consisting each of six battalions of infantry and two regiments of dragoons, while the Highland irregulars formed the third line. The entire force numbered about ten thousand men with ten guns, which were stationed in pairs between the battalions of the first line. "Now," said the Duke, turning to his men when all was in order, "I don't suppose that there are any men here who are disinclined to fight, but if there be, I beg them in God's name to go, for I would rather face the Highlanders with a thousand resolute men at my back than with ten thousand half-hearted." The men answered with cheers, and there could be little doubt as to the issue of the battle. Hawley and the dragoons were then sent forward to break down the enclosures on the enemy's right, and at ten o'clock the rebels opened the action with a discharge from their artillery.

The Duke's cannon instantly took up the challenge; but the duel could not last long, for Charles's guns were ill-aimed and ill-served, whereas the British fire was most accurate and destructive. The right and centre of the Highlanders, unable to endure the grape, presently rushed forward, swept round the left of the British line upon the flank and rear of the Fourth and Twenty-seventh Regiments, and for a short time threw them into some confusion. At every other point, however, they were speedily driven back by a crushing fire, and the Fourth and Twenty-seventh, recovering themselves, turned bayonet against claymore and target for the first time with success. In utter rage at this repulse the rebels for a few minutes flung stones at the hated red-coats; but by this time Hawley had broken through the enclosures[146] and turned four guns upon Charles's second line. On the left of the rebels the Macdonalds, sulking because they had not the place of honour, refused to move, and now the English dragoons burst in upon the Highlanders from both flanks, and, charging through them till they met in the middle, shivered them to fragments. The rout of the enemy was complete and the dragoons galloped on to the pursuit. One thousand of Charles's troops were killed on the spot, and five hundred prisoners, of whom two hundred were French, were taken. The remainder fled in all directions. The loss of the Duke's army was slight, barely reaching three hundred men killed and wounded, of whom two-thirds were of the Fourth and Twenty-seventh. The victory was decisive: the rebellion was crushed at a blow, and all hopes of a restoration of the Stuarts were at last and for ever extinguished.

The campaign ended, as a victorious campaign against mountaineers must always end, in the hunting of fugitives, the burning of villages, and the destruction of crops. To this work the troops were now let loose, as they had already been in the march to Perth, though now with encouragement rather than restraint, and with no attention to "proper precautions." But enough and too much has been written of the inhumanity which earned for Cumberland the name of the butcher; his services were far too valuable to be overlooked, and himself of far too remarkable character to be tossed aside with the brand of a single hateful epithet. Charles Edward, and Murray, the ablest of his officers, had turned the gifts which fortune gave them, and the peculiar powers of their little force in rapidity of movement and vigour of attack, to an account which entitles them to very high praise as commanders. It was by such bold actions as Falkirk and Prestonpans, and by such skilful man?uvres as left Wade astern at Newcastle and Cumberland at Stone, that our Indian Empire was won. Thus it was against no unskilful leaders that Cumberland was matched; and on taking the command[147] he found the British regular troops in a state of demoralisation, through repeated panic, which is almost incredible. Whole regiments were running away on the slightest alarm, in spite of the heroism of their officers; and even a General, a foreigner and a royal prince, Frederick of Hesse-Cassel, prepared to retreat at the mere rumour of the approach of a few score of Highlanders. To all this, Cumberland, by the prestige of his position and rugged force of character, put an end. He was called up, young as he was, to a duty from which almost every General in Europe, of what experience soever, would have shrunk—a winter campaign in a mountainous country. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have waited for the summer, and indeed such delay was expected of Cumberland, but he pressed on to his task at once. He restored the confidence of his troops partly by the dignity of his station, partly by his own ascendency as a man, partly by his skill as a soldier, encouraging them not by mere words only, but also by training them to meet the peculiar tactics of a peculiar enemy by a new formation and a scientific, if simple, method of using the bayonet. He pursued his work persistently, despite endless difficulties, disappointments, and vexations, and did not rest until he had achieved it completely. Jacobitism, which had been the curse of the kingdom for three quarters of a century, was finally slain, and the Highlanders, who had been a plague for as long and longer, were finally subjugated, for no one's advantage more than for their own. The methods employed were doubtless harsh, sometimes even to barbarity, being those generally used by barbarians towards each other and therefore held inexcusable among civilised men; but it is not common for half-savage mountaineers—and the Highlanders were little else—to be brought to reason without some such harsh lesson. Military execution, as it was called, was not yet an obsolete practice in war, whether for injury to the enemy or indulgence of the troops, while Tolpatches, Pandours, and other irregular bands, whose barbarities were unspeakable,[148] were esteemed a valuable if not indispensable adjunct to the armies of the civilised nations of Europe. Moreover, French regular troops behaved quite as ill in Germany during the Seven Years' War as any of the irregulars. Still wanton brutality and outrage, however excused by the custom of war, must remain unpardoned and unpardonable, on the score not only of humanity but of discipline. But though the blot upon Cumberland's name must remain indelible, it should not obscure the fact that, at a time of extreme national peril, the Duke lifted the army in a few weeks, from the lowest depth which it has ever touched of demoralisation and disgrace, to its old height of confidence and self-respect.

Authorities.—The literature of the rebellion of 1745 is of course boundless, but the military operations and the state of the Army can hardly be better studied than in the S.P., Dom., Scotland, vols. xxvi.-xxxi., in the Record Office. On the other side, the Narrative of the Chevalier Johnstone, though frequently inaccurate, throws useful light on divers points.
CHAPTER VII
May 20 31 .

The virtual evacuation of the Low Countries by the British in consequence of the Jacobite Rebellion was an advantage too obvious to be overlooked by the French. At the end of January, though winter-quarters were not yet broken up, they severed the communication between Antwerp and Brussels, and a week later took the town of Brussels itself by escalade. The citadel, after defending itself for a fortnight, went the way of the town, and the capital of the Spanish Netherlands was turned into a French place of arms.[222] The consternation in Holland was great, and it was increased when the French presently besieged and captured Antwerp. Meanwhile the British Commander, Lord Dunmore, who had been left in the Netherlands with a few squadrons of cavalry, could only look on in utter helplessness. It was not until June that the Hessian troops in British pay and a few British battalions could be embarked, together with General Ligonier to command them, from England; and it was not until July, owing to foul winds, that they were finally landed at Williamstadt. The change of base was significant in itself, for since the capture of Ostend and Antwerp there was no haven for British ships except in the United Provinces. Even after the disembarkation these forces were found to be still unready to take the field. The Hessians had not a grain of powder among them, and there were neither horses for the artillery nor waggons for the baggage. Again,[150] to add small difficulties to great, the Austrian General, Batthyany, having no British officer as his peer in command, denied to the British troops the place of honour at the right of the line. It was a trifling matter, but yet sufficient to embarrass counsel, destroy harmony, and delay operations.
June 30 July 11.
July 13 24 .

While the Allies were thus painfully drawing their forces together, the activity of the French never ceased. The Prince of Conti was detached with a considerable force to the Haine, where he quickly reduced Mons and St. Ghislain, thus throwing down almost the last relics of the Austrian barrier in the south. Thence moving to the Sambre, Conti laid siege to Charleroi. It was now sufficiently clear that the plan of the French campaign was to operate on the line of the Meuse for the invasion of Holland. Maestricht once taken, the rest would be easy, for most of the Dutch army were prisoners in the hands of the French; and with the possession of the line of the Meuse communication between the Allied forces of England and of Austria would be cut off. But before Maestricht could be touched Namur must first be captured; and the campaign of 1746 accordingly centred about Namur.
July 6 17 .
July 16 27 .
July 21 Aug. 1.

For the first fortnight of July the Allies remained at Terheyden, a little to the north of Breda, Saxe's army lying some thirty miles south-westward of them about Antwerp. On the 17th of July the Allies at last got on march, still with some faint hopes of saving Charleroi, and proceeded south-eastward, a movement which Saxe at once parried by marching parallel with them to the Dyle between Arschot and Louvain. Pushing forward, despite endless difficulties of transport and forage, through a wretched barren country, the Allies, now under command of Prince Charles of Lorraine, reached Peer, turned southward across the Demer at Hasselt, and by the 27th of July were at Borchloen. They were thus actually on the eastern side of the French[151] main army, within reach of the Mehaigne and not without good hope of saving Namur if not Charleroi. On the 1st of August they crossed the Mehaigne, only to learn to their bitter disappointment that Charleroi had surrendered that very morning. Saxe meanwhile, with the principal part of his army, still lay entrenched at Louvain with detachments pushed forward to Tirlemont and Gembloux. The Allies continued their march before the eyes of these detachments to Masy on the Orneau, and there took up a position between that river and the head-waters of the Mehaigne, fronting to the north-east. This was the line approved through many generations of war as the best for the protection of Namur.[224]
Aug. 18 29 .
Sept. 2 13 .

Saxe now drew nearer to them, and the two armies lay opposite to each other, in many places not more than a musket-shot apart, both entrenched to the teeth. The Allies so far had decidedly scored a success, but they were outnumbered by the French by three to two, and they were confined within a narrow space wherein subsistence was extremely difficult; while if they moved, Namur was lost. Ligonier, who was most uneasy over the situation, longed for five thousand cavalry with which to make a dash at Malines and so call the enemy back in haste to defend Brussels and Antwerp.[225] Prince Charles, however, was averse to operations of such a nature. His hope was that Saxe would offer him battle on the historic plain of Ramillies where, notwithstanding the disparity of numbers, he trusted that the quality of his troops and the traditions of the field would enable him to prevail. But Saxe had no intention of doing anything of the kind. He did indeed shift his position further to the north and east, with the field of Ramillies in his rear, but it was not to offer battle. Pushing out detachments to eastward he captured Huy, and cutting off the Allies' communications with Liége and Maestricht [152]forced them to cross the Meuse and fall back on Maestricht from the other side of the river. Cross the Meuse the Allies accordingly did, unmolested, to Ligonier's great relief, by twenty thousand French who were stationed on the eastern bank of the stream. They then opened communication with Maestricht, five leagues away, while Saxe extended his army comfortably with its face to the eastward along the line of the Jaar from Warem to Tongres, waiting till want of forage should compel the Allies to recross the Meuse. Back they came over the river within a fortnight, as he had expected, and the Marshal, without attempting to dispute the passage, retreated quietly for a few miles, knowing full well that his enemy could not follow him from lack of bread. Ligonier never in his life longed so intensely for the end of a campaign.[226]
Sept. 6 17 .
Aug. 30 Sept. 10.
Sept. 27 Oct. 7.

On the 17th of September the Allies advanced upon the French and offered battle. Saxe answered by retiring to an impregnable position between Tongres and the Demer. There was no occasion for him to fight, when his enemies were short of provisions and their cavalry was going to ruin from want of forage. So there the two armies remained once more, within sight of each other but unwilling to fight, since an attack on the entrenchments of either host would have entailed the certain destruction of the attacking force. But meanwhile the trenches had been opened before Namur by a French corps under the Prince of Clermont, and within nine days the town had fallen. Ligonier again urged his design, for which he had prepared the necessary magazines, to upset Saxe's plans by a dash upon Antwerp, but he could find no support in the council of war; so there was nothing for the Allies to do but to wait until some further French success should compel them to move. Such a success was not long in coming. The castle of Namur surrendered after a miserable defence of but eleven days; Clermont's corps[153] was released for operations in the field, and the Allies were forced to fall back for the protection of Liége. Accordingly, on the 7th of October they crossed the Jaar, not without annoyance from the enemy, and took up a new position, which gave them indeed possession of Liége, but placed them between the Meuse in their rear, and an enemy of nearly twice their strength on the Jaar before their front.[227]
Sept. 29 Oct. 10.

Now at last Saxe resolved to strike a blow. On the 10th of October he crossed the Jaar with evident intention of an attack, and the Allied army received orders to be ready for action before the following dawn. The Allies' position faced very nearly due west, the army being drawn up astride of the two paved roads leading into Liége from Tongres and St. Trond. Their extreme right rested on the Jaar and was covered by the villages of Slins, Fexhe, and Enick, all of which were strongly entrenched and occupied by the Austrians. South of Enick extended an open plain from that village to the village of Liers, and in this plain was posted the Hanoverian infantry and four British battalions, the Eighth, Nineteenth, Thirty-third, and Forty-third Foot, with the Hessian infantry on their left in rear of Liers. The Hanoverian cavalry prolonged the line southward to the village of Varoux, and the Sixth and Seventh Dragoons and Scots Greys continued it to the village of Roucoux, from which point Dutch troops carried it on to the village of Ance, which formed the extreme left of the position. Ligonier did not like the situation, for he did not see how the turning of the left flank could be prevented if, as would certainly be the case, the French should seriously attempt it. Prince Charles, knowing that if his right were turned his retreat to Maestricht would be cut off, had taken care to hold the right flank in real strength and dared not weaken it; but the position, with the Meuse in its rear, was perilously shallow, while the convergence of two ravines from[154] the Jaar and Melaigne into its centre allowed of but one narrow way of communication between the right and left of the army. The defects of the Allies' dispositions were in fact not unlike those which had proved fatal to King William at Landen, and Ligonier's anxiety was proved to rest on all too good foundation.
Sept. 30 Oct. 11.

The morning of the 11th of October opened with bad news for the Allies. The French had been admitted into Liége by the inhabitants behind the backs of the Dutch, so that the Prince of Waldeck, who, commanded on the left, was obliged to withdraw eight battalions from Roucoux and post them en potence on his left flank, with his cavalry in support. Thus the defence of Roucoux, as well as of Liers and Varoux, was left to eight battalions of British, Hanoverians, and Hessians only. This made the outlook for the Allied left the worse, since it was evident that the brunt of the French attack would fall upon it. Saxe gave Prince Charles little time for reflection. He had one hundred and twenty thousand men against eighty thousand, and he knew that of the eighty thousand at least one-third were tied to the Austrian entrenchments about the Jaar. He opened the action by a furious assault upon the Dutch on the left flank, his infantry being formed in dense columns, so that the attack could be renewed continually by fresh troops. Simultaneously fifty-five battalions in three similar columns were launched upon Liers, Varoux, and Roucoux. Outmatched though they were, Dutch, Germans, and British all fought splendidly and repelled more than one attack. But, to use Ligonier's words, as soon as two French brigades had been repulsed in each village, a third brigade ran in; and the eight battalions, though they still held Liers, were forced to withdraw both from Roucoux and Varoux. Being rallied, however, by Ligonier, they advanced again and recaptured both villages; and the Nineteenth and Forty-third took up a position in a hollow road which they held to the last. The Dutch now began to retire across the rear of the position from the left, in good[155] order despite heavy losses, while Ligonier checked the enemy in the plain with the British cavalry. When the Dutch had passed he ordered his own men to retreat in the same direction, still covering the movement with the cavalry and with the Thirteenth and Twenty-sixth Foot, which had been sent to the field from the garrison of Maestricht. The Austrians formed a rear-guard in turn when the British and their German comrades had passed, and thus the whole army filed off, unpursued and in perfect order, and crossed the Meuse in safety on the following morning.

The action may be looked upon as a fortunate escape for the Allies, since it was impossible, humanly speaking, that it could have issued favourably for them. Prince Charles, in seeking to cover both Liége and Maestricht, had attempted too much. His army thus occupied too wide a front, the villages in the centre were too weakly held, there was hardly anywhere a second line of infantry, and the left flank could not be sustained against so superior an enemy. The total loss of the Allies was about five thousand men, which was sufficiently severe considering that but a third of the army was engaged. The casualties of the British were three hundred and fifty killed and wounded, of whom no fewer than two hundred belonged to the Forty-third. The French lost as many men as the Allies, or more, and gained little by the action except eight guns captured from the British, Hanoverians, and Hessians. Had not the Allied troops been far better in quality and discipline than the French, they must have been lost during their retreat with superior numbers both in flank and rear. Both armies presently retired into winter-quarters, and the campaign ended far less disastrously than might have been feared for the Allies.[228]
Sept. 20 Oct. 1.
Oct. 1 12 .

Unfortunately, however, it was not in Flanders only that discredit fell upon the British arms. At the end[156] of September a force of six battalions[229] was sent, under command of General St. Clair, to the coast of Brittany to attack Port L'Orient and destroy the stores of the French East India Company there. The enterprise was conducted with amazing feebleness. The troops landed at Quimperle Bay practically unopposed, but, being fired at on their march on the following day, were turned loose to the plunder of a small town as a punishment to the inhabitants for their resistance. On the following day they reached L'Orient, which the Deputy Governor of the East India Company offered to surrender on good terms. His overtures, however, were rejected and a siege was begun in form; but after a few days of firing and the loss of about a hundred men killed and wounded, St. Clair thought it prudent to retreat; and on the 12th of October the troops re-embarked and returned to England. Anything more pointless than the design or more contemptible than the execution of this project can hardly be conceived, for it simply employed regiments, which were badly needed in Flanders and America, in useless operations which did not amount to a diversion.
1747.

If the cause of Queen Maria Theresa was to be saved, it was evident that great efforts were imperative in the coming campaign of 1747. To meet the vast numbers brought into the field by the French the Austrians promised to have sixty thousand men at Maseyck on the Meuse by April; the British contributed four regiments of cavalry and fourteen battalions of infantry; and it was hoped that the Allies would take the field with a total strength of one hundred and ten battalions, one hundred and sixty squadrons, and two hundred and twenty guns, besides irregular troops, the whole to be under command of the Duke of Cumberland.[230] Unfortunately the weather was adverse to an early opening of the campaign; and the French, by the seizure of [157]Cadsand and Sluys, which were shamefully surrendered by the Dutch, closed the southern mouth of the Scheldt below Antwerp. This was a sad blow to the arrangements for the transport of the Allies, since it brought about the necessity of hauling all the forage for the British overland from Breda. Had Cumberland been in a position to open the campaign before the French, he meant to have laid siege to Antwerp; as things were, he was compelled, thanks chiefly to the apathy of the Dutch, to attempt to bring Saxe to a general action. His last letter before beginning operations has, however, an interest of another kind. It contains a recommendation that Major James Wolfe may be permitted to purchase a vacant lieutenant-colonelcy in the Eighth Foot, that officer having served constantly and well during the past two years as a major of brigade and proved himself capable and desirous to do his duty.[231]
May 15 26 .
June 15 26 .
June 18 29 .
June 19 30 .
June 20 July 1.

The French being encamped between Malines and Louvain, Cumberland collected his troops at Tilburg and advanced straight upon them, encamping on the 26th of May on the Great Nethe, a little to the east of Antwerp, between Lierre and Herenthout. Saxe, entrenched as usual to the teeth, remained immovable for three weeks, and Cumberland despaired of bringing him to action. At length the news that a detached corps of thirty thousand French, under the Prince of Clermont, was on the old ground about Tongres, moved Cumberland to march to the Demer, in the hope of overwhelming Clermont before Saxe could join him. Saxe, however, was on his guard, and on the 29th of June prepared to concentrate the whole of his army at Tongres. Cumberland thereupon decided to take up Saxe's camp of the previous year, from Bilsen, on the head-waters of the Demer, to Tongres. So sending forward Count Daun, afterwards well known as an antagonist of Frederick the Great, with a corps of Austrians to occupy Bilsen, he ordered the rest of the[158] army to follow as quickly as possible on the next day. Riding forward at daybreak of the morrow, Cumberland was dismayed to see the French advancing in two columns from Tongres, as if to fall upon the head of his own army. This was a surprise. Cumberland knew that Saxe was in motion but had not expected him so soon; and indeed Saxe had made a notable march, for his army had not left Louvain until the 29th of June and had traversed little less than fifty miles in two days. The Duke lost no time in setting such troops as were on the spot in order of battle, and hurried away to see if those on the march could be brought up in time to force back the French, and to secure the position of his choice. But the French cavalry was too quick for him, and, before Ligonier could bring up the English horse, had occupied the centre of the ground which Cumberland had intended for himself. Ligonier drew up his squadrons before them to bar their further advance, and the Allied infantry, as it came up, was formed in order of battle, fronting, however, not to eastward, as had been originally designed, but almost due south. In fact, owing to Saxe's unexpected arrival and to deficient arrangements by the staff of the Allies, there seems to have been considerable delay in putting the Allied army into any formation at all, or the French might certainly have been forced back to Tongres. Saxe's rear had not yet come up and the men were fatigued by a long and harassing march; but Cumberland was not the man to fight an action of the type of Oudenarde, and the opportunity was lost. [232]

The position now occupied by the Allies extended from some rising ground known as the Commanderie, a little to the south-east of Bilsen, along a chain of villages and low heights to the Jaar, a little to the south of Maestricht. The Commanderie being the right of[159] the line was held by the Austrians, with a strong corps thrown back en potence to Bilsen to protect the right flank; for it was as important on this field as on that of Roucoux that the retreat into Holland should not be cut off. The ground possessed natural features of strength which were turned to good account, so good account indeed that the Allied right, like the French left at Ramillies, could neither attack nor be attacked. Eastward from the Commanderie the Austrians occupied the heights of Spaeven, together with the villages of Gross and Klein Spaeven; next to them the Dutch formed the centre of the line, while the Hanoverians and British held the villages of Val, or Vlytingen, and Lauffeld, and prolonged the line to its extreme left at the village of Kesselt.
June 21 July 2.

There the Allies lay on their arms until nightfall, while Saxe's weary battalions tramped on till far into the night up to their bivouacs. At daybreak the French were seen to be in motion, marching and countermarching in a way that Cumberland did not quite understand; the fact being that Saxe, as at Roucoux, was doubling the left wing of his army in rear of the right, for the formation of those dense columns of attack which he could handle with such consummate skill. After observing them until nine o'clock Cumberland came to the conclusion that the Marshal meditated no immediate movement and retired to the Commanderie for breakfast; but he had hardly sat down when an urgent message arrived from Ligonier that the enemy was on the point of attacking. Cumberland at once returned and moved the left of his line somewhat forward, setting fire to the village of Vlytingen and occupying Lauffeld with three British and two Hessian battalions. Lauffeld was a straggling village a quarter of a mile long, covered by a multitude of small enclosures with mud walls about six feet high, topped by growing hedges. It was thus easily turned into a strong post for infantry, and cannon were posted both in its front and flanks. The remainder of the British were drawn[160] up for the most part in rear of Lauffeld in order to feed and relieve its garrison, the brigade of Guards being posted in the hedges before Vlytingen. The British cavalry stood on the right of the infantry and joined their line to that of the Dutch.

Meanwhile Saxe, sending forward a cloud of irregular troops to mask his movements, had despatched Count d'Estrées and the Count of Segur with a strong force of infantry and cavalry to seize the villages of Montenaken and Wilre on the left flank of the Allies. This service was performed with little loss. At the same time he directed the Marquis of Salières, with six brigades of foot and twenty guns, to attack Vlytingen, and launched five brigades, with as many guns, backed by a large force of cavalry, against Lauffeld. The assault of the French infantry upon Lauffeld was met by a furious resistance. It was just such another struggle as that of Neerwinden, from hedge to hedge and from wall to wall; and the French, for all their superiority of numbers, were driven back headlong from the village with terrible loss. Salières met with little better success against the brigade of Guards in the hedges of Vlytingen; but with great readiness he turned half of his guns to his right against Lauffeld and the remainder against a ravine on his left, with most destructive effect. Cumberland, observing the fury with which Saxe had concentrated his attack against these two villages, asked the Austrians to relieve him by a diversion upon his right; but the Austrian troops could not face the fire of Salières' guns, and it became clear that Vlytingen and Lauffeld must be held by the British and Hanoverians alone.

Saxe's first attack had been brilliantly repulsed. He at once replaced the beaten troops by two fresh brigades of infantry, with cavalry to support them, and renewed the assault, but with no better success. The British were driven back from the outer defences only to stand more fiercely by those within, and Lauffeld remained unconquered. But Saxe was not to be[161] deterred from his purpose. Two more brigades, including the six Irish battalions that had saved the day at Fontenoy, were added to those already on the spot, and the whole of them launched for a third attack against Lauffeld. They were met by the same stubborn resistance and the same deadly fire; and the Irish brigade lost no fewer than sixty officers in the struggle. Nevertheless Irish impetuosity carried the rest of the troops forward; the British were borne back to the rearmost edge of the village and the French began to swarm up the slope beyond it. Cumberland promptly ordered the whole of his line of infantry to advance; and the French at once gave way before them. The French cavalry was obliged to drive the foot forward at the sword's point, but Cumberland continued steadily to gain ground despite their efforts. Then at an unlucky moment, some Dutch squadrons in the centre were seized with panic and came galloping straight into the British line, carried away the Hessians and one squadron of the Greys and fell pell-mell upon the Twenty-first and Twenty-third Fusiliers. The Twenty-first, anticipating the treatment of the Belgians at Waterloo, gave the Dutchmen a volley and partly saved themselves, but the Twenty-third suffered terribly and the whole line was thrown into confusion. Before order could be restored Salières had thrown three more brigades upon Lauffeld, which closed in round it, blocking up a hollow road which formed the entrance into it from the rear, and barring the way for all further reinforcements of the Allies. The few troops that were left in the village were speedily overpowered, and Lauffeld was lost.

Some of Daun's Austrians now advanced to Cumberland's help from the right; but three French brigades of cavalry that were waiting before Vlytingen at once moved forward to check them, and charging boldly into them succeeded in turning them back, though themselves roughly handled when retiring from the charge. Meanwhile Saxe had brought up ten guns to right and left of Lauffeld, and reinforcing the cavalry[162] of D'Estrées and Segur extended it in one long line from Lauffeld to Wilre, for a final crushing attack on the Allied left. Order had been restored among the British infantry, who were now retreating with great steadiness, but they were wholly unsupported. Ligonier, determined to save them at any cost, caught up the Greys, Inniskillings, and Cumberland's dragoons, and led them straight against the masses of the French cavalry. The gallant brigade charged home, crashed headlong through the horse, and fell upon the infantry beyond, but being galled by their fire and attacked in all quarters by other French squadrons, was broken past all rallying and very heavily punished. Ligonier himself was overthrown and taken prisoner. Cumberland, who had plunged into the broken ranks to try to rally them, was cut off by the French dragoons, and only with difficulty contrived to join the remainder of his cavalry on the left. With these he covered the retreat of the army, which was successfully effected in good order and with little further loss.

So ended the battle of Lauffeld, in which the British bore the brunt with a firmness that extorted the praise even of Frenchmen, but of which few Englishmen have ever heard. The troops, in Cumberland's words, behaved one and all so well that he could not commend any one regiment without doing injustice to the rest. The total loss of the five regiments of horse and fourteen battalions of foot was close upon two thousand men.[233] The three devoted regiments which charged with Ligonier were the worst sufferers, the Greys losing one hundred and sixty men, the Inniskillings one hundred and twenty, and Cumberland's dragoons nearly one hundred. The loss of the whole of the Allies was about six thousand men, that of the[163] French decidedly greater, amounting indeed, according to Saxe's account, to not less than ten thousand men. The British, moreover, had nine French colours and five French standards as trophies for their consolation. Finally, the French failed to accomplish the object of the action, which was to cut off the Allies from Maestricht.

After the battle the Allies crossed the Meuse and encamped at Heer, a little to the east of Maestricht, while Saxe returned to his quarters at Tongres. The French then detached a corps for the capture of Bergen op Zoom; but the most important transactions of the war still went forward on the Meuse, where constant negotiations were carried on between Saxe and Cumberland. The campaign closed with the fall of Bergen op Zoom and the capture of most of the strong places in Dutch Brabant.
1748.
April 19 30 .
October.

By this time King George and his people in England were thoroughly sick of the war. The British had suffered severely in every action, but had reaped no success except in the fortunate victory of Dettingen. The Dutch had proved themselves useless and contemptible as Allies, their Government feeble and corrupt in council, their troops unstable if not dangerous in action. The Austrians, in spite of lavish subsidies, had never furnished the troops that they had promised, and had invariably obstructed operations through the obstinacy of their Generals and the selfishness of their ends. The opening of the campaign of 1748 was even more unpromising for the Allies. Saxe, strong in the possession of a superior force, kept Cumberland in suspense between apprehensions for Breda and for Maestricht, and when finally he laid siege to Maestricht could match one hundred and fifteen thousand men against Cumberland's five-and-thirty thousand. War on such terms against such a master as Saxe was ridiculous. Moreover, the Dutch, despite a recent revolution, were more supine than ever; the Prince of Orange, who was the new ruler, actually keeping two thousand of his troops[164] from the field that they might adorn the baptism of one of his babies. In the face of such facts Cumberland pressed earnestly for peace;[234] and on the 30th of April preliminaries were signed, which six months later were expanded into the definite treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.

The peace left matters practically as they had stood before the war, with the significant exception that Frederick the Great retained Silesia. Not a word was said as to the regulation of trade between England and Spain, which had been the original ground of quarrel; and as between England and France it was agreed that there should be mutual restitution of all captures. Yet this could not set the two countries in the same position as before the war. The French were utterly exhausted; but the British, though not a little harassed by the cost of maintaining armies and producing subsidies, had received a military training which was to stand them in good stead for the great struggle that lay before them. To understand this struggle aright it must first be seen what was implied by the mutual restitution of all captures, for among the possessions that had changed hands during the war were Cape Breton and Madras. The time is now come to watch the building up of empire in distant lands to east and west. Let us turn first to the great Peninsula of the East.

Authorities.—The official correspondence in the Record Office. F. O. Military Auxiliary Expeditions. Campagnes de Louis XV. Espagnac. Life of the Duke of Cumberland. Some useful details as to Lauffeld are to be found in the Gentleman's Magazine.

Walker & Boutall del.

To face page 164.
ROUCOUX. Sept. 30th Oct. 11th 1746.
LAUFFELD. June 21st July 2nd 1747.
BOOK VIII  CHAPTER I

April 20.

As English history to the vast majority of Englishmen begins with the Norman, so does also the modern history of India begin with the Mohammedan, conquest. As early as in the eighth century Arab conquerors made incursions into Scinde as far as Hyderabad, only to be driven back by a revolt of Hindoos; but it was not until the eleventh century that Sultan Mahmoud, the second of the House of Ghuznee, established a Mohammedan garrison to the south of the Indus at Lahore, nor until the end of the twelfth century that Shahab-ud-din penetrated as far as Benares and fixed the seat of government at Delhi. It was at his death that India assumed the form of an independent kingdom distinct from the governments to the north of the Indus; and it was only a few years later that the invasion of the Moguls under Zinghis Khan heralded the approach of the race that was first to gather the greatest portion of the peninsula into a single empire, and to found a dynasty which should rule it. The battle of Delhi placed Baber, the first of this dynasty, in possession of the capital, and set up therein the throne of the Great Mogul. Baber's grandson, Akbar, after fifty years of conquest, wise policy and incessant labour, reduced the whole of Hindostan and great part of the Deccan under the Mogul Empire, dividing it for administrative purposes into eighteen provinces, each under the rule of a governor or subahdar. But the Deccan had never been firmly secured; and even after the Hindoos had submitted there were Mohammedan[168] chieftains who refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the Moguls. Too jealous, however, to unite in resistance, these chieftains allowed themselves to be crushed in detail; and in 1656 the Emperor Shah Jehan seemed to have established his authority over all the Mohammedan kingdoms of the Deccan. But even so the work of Shah Jehan did not endure. In the reign of his son Aurungzebe a new power appeared to dispute the rule of the Moguls in the Deccan. A race of Hindoo mountaineers, the Mahrattas, came down from their fastnesses in the Western Ghauts and hired themselves out as mercenary soldiers to the Mohammedan chiefs. Led by a man of genius, the famous Sevajee, the Mahrattas grew continually in strength, and at length fairly defeated the army of the Moguls in the open field. It was not until after the death of Sevajee that Aurungzebe was able to drive his followers back to the hills, and push his Empire to its farthest limits to southward, so far indeed as to include in it even a portion of Mysore. Never before, it should seem, had so much of the peninsula been united under the dominion of one man; but the Mahrattas none the less had laid the axe to the root of the Mogul Empire, and from the death of Aurungzebe the tree, though destined to totter for yet another fifty years, was already doomed. It must now be told how the foundation of a new Indian Empire fell not to the Mahrattas but to invaders from Europe.
1498.
1600,
Dec. 31.

The first of the European nations to gain a footing in the peninsula was of course the Portuguese. In 1493 Bartholemew Diaz doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and five years later Vasco da Gama arrived on the Western or Malabar coast, and after a second voyage obtained permission to establish a factory at Calicut. His work was continued by Albuquerque, under whose care the Portuguese power in India was more widely extended than at any time before or since. To him it was due that Goa was made the chief centre of Portuguese influence, and that Ceylon became tributary to[169] Portugal's king. It was not, however, conceivable that Portugal should long be allowed to enjoy the monopoly of this lucrative traffic; and competitors soon presented themselves from the maritime powers of Europe. Moreover, in 1580, Portugal passed under the crown of Spain, so that any encroachment on her East Indian trade inflicted also some damage on the detested Spaniard. In 1582 an Englishman, Edward Fenton, led the way by attempting a voyage direct to the east. The venture, however, was a failure, as was also a second attempt made by James Lancaster in 1589. Finally, a Dutchman, James Houtmann, sailed from the Texel in 1595, and presented himself as the first rival of the Portuguese by the establishment of a factory at Bantam in Java. But though thus distanced for a moment in the race for a new market the English speedily resolved to make up the lost ground; and in 1599 an association of Merchants Adventurers was formed in London with the object of prosecuting a voyage to the East Indies. In the following year they received a charter from Queen Elizabeth, and thus came into being the famous East India Company.
1607.
1611.
1612.
1628.
1651.

The two first voyages of the new Company followed the track of the Dutch to Sumatra and Java, but in the third the ships were driven by stormy weather into Sierra Leone, whence one of them under Captain Hawkins sailed direct to Surat, and found there good promise of opening trade. In 1609 Hawkins visited Agra in person and obtained privileges from the reigning Mogul, eldest son of the great Akbar; but his influence was soon undermined by Portuguese Jesuits, and he was fain to return with little profit. Two years later, however, an English vessel touched at Point de Galle, sailed up the Coromandel, or eastern, coast of India as far as Masulipatam and founded the nucleus of a factory at Petapolee, the germ from which was to spring the trade of England in the Bay of Bengal. The jealousy of Dutch and Portuguese had by this time risen so high that the Company was obliged to employ[170] force against them. In 1612 Captain Best boldly attacked a superior Portuguese fleet in the Bay of Surat, and defeated it so thoroughly that the reigning Mogul disallowed the Portuguese claim to a monopoly of the trade, agreed to a treaty granting important privileges to the English, and consented to receive an ambassador from them at his Court. One formidable rival was thus crippled, but the Dutch were not so easily to be dealt with, more particularly since the troubles which followed on the accession of Charles the First in England left them little to fear from an armed force. The affairs of the Company began to languish, but fresh outlets for trade were none the less sought for. One factory was definitely established at Masulipatam, a second on the coast further northward, and finally, in 1640, a third was settled at Madras under the name of Fort St. George. This was the one gleam of sunshine at that period amid all the troubles of England at home and abroad. Then at last the cloud of the Civil War passed away; the power of England began to revive, and the Company addressed a petition to Parliament for redress of injuries received from the Dutch. Thereupon followed the Dutch war and the seven furious actions of Blake and Monk, which dealt Dutch maritime ascendency a blow from which it never recovered. A piece of unexpected good fortune, namely the recovery of Shah Jehan's daughter from dangerous sickness under the care of an English surgeon at Surat, procured for the Company free trade with Bengal. At the close of the Protectorate the Company had organised its markets into three divisions. A supreme presidency was established at Surat with special charge of the Persian trade, a subordinate presidency at Madras with control of the factories on the eastern coast and in Bengal, and a third presidency at Bantam for direction of the traffic with the Eastern Islands.
1660.
1661.

Then came the Restoration, and with it a new charter empowering the Company to send ships of war, men, and arms to their factories for defence of the same,[171] and to make peace or war with any people not Christians. Authority was also granted for the fortification of St. Helena, which since 1651 had become the port of call on the voyage to India, and stringent provision was made for the maintenance of the Company's monopoly. The following year brought Bombay by dowry to the British Crown, and in 1662 Sir Abraham Shipman was sent out with four hundred soldiers to take possession and to remain as governor. These were the first British troops to land in India, but as there was a dispute with the Portuguese as to whether the word Bombay, as inscribed in the treaty of marriage, signified the island only or included its dependencies also, the poor fellows were landed on the island of Anjediva, near Goa, where they at once began to sicken. In 1664 they were transferred to Madras, in view of the war with Holland; but by the end of the year Shipman and a vast number of the men were dead, and when at last they landed in Bombay, in March 1665, the four hundred had dwindled to one officer and one hundred and thirteen men. Such was the first experience of the British Army in India.[235]
1668.

In 1668 Bombay, together with the whole of its military stores, was made over to the Company for a rent of ten pounds a year; and authority was also given for the Company to enlist officers and men for their own service, as well as to call in certain garrisons of the King's troops at Bombay and Madras to fill up vacancies. Further, in order to form a local militia, half-pay was granted to all soldiers who would settle on the island, new settlers were promised from England, and a rule was made that not more than twenty soldiers should return to Europe in any one year. The men and officers of the King's troops at once took service with the Company under its own military code and articles of war, and thus was founded the first military establishment in Bombay. The men agreed, it seems,[172] to serve for three years only, which gives them an additional interest as the first English soldiers ever enlisted for short service. Having thus provided itself with men the Company proceeded next to the improvement and fortification of Bombay itself, and with such vigour that by 1674 no fewer than one hundred cannon were mounted for its defence. Finally, in 1683-84 the garrison was increased from four hundred to six hundred men, two companies of Rajpoots were embodied as an auxiliary force, and Bombay was made the headquarters of the Company in India.
1685.

The Company thus strengthened forthwith became ambitious. Hitherto it had addressed the native princes in terms of humble submission: it now assumed the tone of an equal and independent power, able to command respect by force of arms. It also equipped a fleet of twelve powerful men-of-war, which was first to capture Chittagong and then to proceed up the eastern branch of the Ganges to seize Dacca. Hostilities were precipitated by a quarrel between English and native soldiers in the bazaar at Hooghly, wherein the forces of the nabob of the province were defeated. The nabob, however, avenged himself by pouncing upon the British factory at Patna; and the approach of Aurungzebe caused the British to withdraw from Hooghly to Chuttamuttee, the site of the present Calcutta. Thus the war against the Moguls ended in the utter humiliation of the Company. The period of conquest was not yet come.
1642.
1668.
1669.
1697.
1701.

Meanwhile a new rival had sprung up in the East Indies. In 1609 a French East India Company had been formed, which after thirty years of ineffectual life at last gave definite evidence of vitality by the formation of a settlement at Madagascar. The venture was not a success; but the great minister Colbert, quickly awake to the advantages of an Indian trade, granted the help of the Government to form a new Company, which, after wasting some time and money on a second experiment in Madagascar, sent an expedition[173] to Surat. There in 1668 was established the first French factory in India, which was quickly followed by the erection of a second at Masulipatam. But, if the Company were to prosper, something more than a factory with a rival factory alongside it was needed; and this want was made good by the foundation of Pondicherry by Fran?ois Martin in 1674. Two or three years later a French fleet entered the Hooghly and disembarked a body of settlers at Chandernagore, which was finally granted to them by Aurungzebe in 1688. Meanwhile the foolish quarrel of the English Company with the Moguls had given the French an opportunity to take a share of the Indian trade, of which they did not fail to make good use. Their further progress was, however, checked for the moment through the capture of Pondicherry by the Dutch in 1693; but the settlement was restored at the Peace of Ryswick, and no time was lost in improving and fortifying it. Shortly afterwards the French abandoned their factory at Surat and transferred their headquarters to Pondicherry. On the whole they had made good use of their time. The settlements of the British Company after one hundred years of existence were set down, in contemporary spelling, as follows: Bombay, with factories at Surat, Swally, Broach, Amadavad, Agra, and Lucknow; on the Malabar coast the forts of Carwar, Tellicherry, and Anjengo, with the factory of Calicut; on the Coromandel coast Chinghee, Orixa, Fort St. George or Madras, Fort St. David (which had been purchased in 1692 as a counterpoise to Pondicherry), and the factories of Cuddalore, Porto Novo, Petapolee, Masulipatam, Madapollam, and Vizagapatam; in Bengal, Fort William (Calcutta), with factories at Balasore, Cossimbazar, Dacca, Hooghly, Moulda, Rajahmaul, and Patna. The French could show Pondicherry, with a factory at Masulipatam on the eastern coast, and Chandernagore and Cossimbazar on the Hooghly as the result of barely five-and-thirty years of work.

Such competition as this might not at first appear[174] formidable to the English, but the comparative strength of the rival nations in India was not to be measured by mere counting of forts and factories. Fran?ois Martin had shown considerable dexterity in handling the native authorities during the negotiations by which he acquired Pondicherry, and had established good traditions for the management of similar business in future. All Frenchmen had and still have a passion for interference with the internal politics of any barbarous or semi-civilised races with which they may be brought into contact, and will spare no pains to gratify it. The emissaries of the most insolent nation in Europe approached the Indian princes with flattery of their self-esteem, deference for their authority, respect for their prejudices, conformity with their customs and imitation of their habits; while the French love of dramatic action and of display brought them at once into touch with the oriental character. They gave sympathy, sometimes in reality, always in appearance; and they obtained in return not only toleration but friendship and influence. Mere trading was sufficient for the English; it was not so for the French. Their ambition rose above the mere bartering of goods to the governing of men and the swaying of them by subtle policy to the glory of France. It was no ignoble aim, and might well lead to the making, if not to the keeping, of an Empire.
1707.
1719.

Aurungzebe at his death divided his dominions among his three sons, who at once fell to fighting for the succession to the entire realm. The contest was decided after a year in favour of the eldest of them, Bahadur Shah, who hastened to make terms with the Mahrattas in the south, but secured a precarious peace in that quarter only to find himself confronted with an insurrection of Rajpoots and with the sudden and alarming rise of the Sikhs in the Punjaub. He died in 1712, when the succession after the inevitable dispute passed to his grandson Farokshir, who succeeded in crushing the Sikhs but made little head against the Mahrattas, whose territory continued to increase in the[175] south. Finally, on Farokshir's death in 1719 Nizam-ul-Mulk, the Governor of Malwa, rose in revolt against his successor, made terms with the Mahrattas, and was soon virtually master of the Deccan; to which, after a short-lived reconciliation with the Court of Delhi, he returned in 1724, openly and avowedly as an independent monarch.
1725.
1735.

During this period the English Company acquired from Farokshir an extension of territory on the Hooghly, amounting to a tract of nearly ten miles on both sides of the river. The French, on the other hand, were declining owing to the virtual insolvency of the Company; nor was it until 1723, five years after the reconstruction of a new Company, that their prospects in India began to revive. But already, in 1720, a man had been appointed to high station in Pondicherry who was destined to raise French influence in India to a height undreamed of by friend or foe. This was Joseph Fran?ois Dupleix, son of a director of the French East India Company, who, though in boyhood averse to a mercantile life, had been converted by travel at sea to a passion for commercial enterprise and to a longing for a field wherein to indulge it. Such a field was now opened to him, when no more than twenty-three years of age, in India. His idea was to extend the operations of the Company beyond the mere trade between Europe and Pondicherry, and, by opening up traffic with the cities both inland and on the coast, to make Pondicherry the centre of the commerce of Southern India. To show, by example, that such a scheme was feasible, he embarked his own fortune in the trade and made a handsome profit. In 1731 he was sent to Chandernagore, then fast sinking into stagnation and decay, and by his energy soon raised it to the most important European centre in Bengal. Concurrently a second great Frenchman, who was also to leave his mark on India, had made his appearance in 1725. The occasion was the capture of Mahé, a little town on the western coast, where the French desired a[176] port to compensate them for the abandonment of Surat. The feat was accomplished by a captain in the French navy named Bertrand de la Bourdonnais. His next duty, though not performed in India, was none the less of high importance to it, namely the improvement of the island of Mauritius. The French attempts at colonisation in Madagascar had been foiled alike by the climate and by the hostility of the natives; and the settlers had perforce betaken themselves to the adjacent island of Bourbon. La Bourdonnais found Mauritius a mere forest, yet within two years he converted it into a flourishing settlement, well cultivated and well administered, with arsenals, magazines, barracks, fortifications, dockyards, and all that was necessary to make it not only a commercial station but a base for military operations in India.

Meanwhile the confusion that accompanied the gradual dissolution of the Mogul Empire was turned to useful account by yet another Frenchman, Dumas, the Governor of Pondicherry. In 1732 the Nabob of the Carnatic died and was succeeded by his nephew Dost Ali, who however was on such ill terms with his superior, the viceroy Nizam-ul-Mulk of the Deccan, that he could not obtain from him authentic confirmation of his succession. He therefore courted the support of the Governor of Pondicherry, conceding to him substantial privileges in return, and soon formed intimate relations with him. Dost Ali, moreover, had a son, Sufder Ali, and two sons-in-law, Mortiz Ali and Chunda Sahib, of whom the last named was imbued with a particular admiration for the French. The extension of French influence through these new friendships advanced rapidly. In 1735 the death of the Hindoo Rajah of Trichinopoly was followed, as usual, by a quarrel over the succession. The widow of the Rajah, who was one of the claimants, took the fatal step of invoking the help of Dost Ali, who sent Chunda Sahib with an army to her assistance. Chunda Sahib, however, once admitted to the city refused to leave it,[177] but assumed the government in the name of Dost Ali; and thus Trichinopoly passed into the hands of a friend to the French. Adjoining Trichinopoly and between it and the eastern coast lay the Hindoo kingdom of Tanjore; the Coleroon river, which formed its northern boundary, running within thirty miles of Pondicherry. Here again the death of the Rajah in 1738 led to a dispute over the succession, and one of the competitors, named Sauhojee, offered Governor Dumas the town of Carical in the delta of the Cauvery and Coleroon, as the price of French assistance. Dumas promptly supplied money, arms, and ammunition; and when Sauhojee, having thus gained his kingdom, declined to fulfil his agreement, Chunda Sahib stepped in unasked to compel him. Thus Carical also was added to the French settlements in India.
1739.
1740.
1741,
March.

But now the Mahrattas, jealous of the advance of the Mohammedans in the south, gathered themselves together for the conquest of the Carnatic, defeated and killed Dost Ali, and spread panic from end to end of the province. Sufder Ali, thus become Nabob, and Chunda Sahib fell back on their French allies and sent their families and goods for security to Pondicherry. Dumas gave them asylum without hesitation, nor could all the threats of the Mahrattas shake his loyalty to his friends. He answered their menaces by strengthening the defences of the town, formed a body of European infantry, and by a happy inspiration armed four or five thousand Mohammedan natives and trained and drilled them after the European model. Thus was conceived in danger and emergency the embryo, now grown to such mighty manhood, of a Sepoy Army. Meanwhile Sufder Ali, after the Oriental manner, succeeded in purchasing immunity from the Mahrattas by secretly betraying Chunda Sahib into their hands; but none the less his gratitude to the French was extreme. He declared that from henceforth they should be as much masters of the Carnatic as himself, and granted to them additional territory on the southern bounds of Pondicherry.[178] The Mahrattas, pursuant to their agreement with Sufder Ali, then beleaguered Chunda Sahib in Trichinopoly, captured the city after a siege of three months, and carried him off as their prisoner. This done they turned again upon Dumas, and required of him, among other demands, the surrender of Chunda Sahib's property. Dumas received the Mahratta envoy with courtesy but refused inflexibly to comply; and having shown him the preparations which he had made for the defence of Pondicherry he dismissed him with the assurance that he would stand by the city so long as a man was left with him. This resolute bearing had its effect. The further wrath of the Mahratta chief was allayed by a present of French liqueurs; and the danger passed away. Dumas, as the man who had defied the dreaded Mahrattas, became the hero of Southern India. Presents and eulogies were showered on him by Sufder Ali and Nizam-ul-Mulk; and even the effete Mogul Emperor at Delhi conferred on him the title of Nabob, adding thereto the favour, conferred at Dumas's own request, that the rank should descend to his successor.
Oct.

Dumas then resigned and returned to France, leaving Dupleix to reign in his stead. The latter, after ten years' administration of Chandernagore, had raised it to the head of the European settlements in Bengal, and had concurrently amassed for himself an enormous fortune by private trading. He at once assumed all the pomp and circumstance of his rank of Nabob, caused himself to be installed with great ceremony at Chandernagore, and took pains to impress upon the neighbouring princes that he was one of themselves and armed with like authority from the court of Delhi. He could wear the dignity of his position the more naturally since he had an innate passion for display, and could turn the outward glitter to the better account for that he loved it for its own sake. But his was no spirit to be content with the mere robes of royalty. The weakness of the court of Delhi and his own[179] remoteness from it left him free from all restraint. He had the power, and he knew how to use it; and it had come to him in the nick of time, when hostilities between France and England were hastening to their development into avowed and open war.
1742,
Sept.
1744.

But meanwhile native affairs had undergone their usual swift changes in the Carnatic. Sufder Ali, once established as Nabob, refused to pay the revenue due from him to the viceroy Nizam-ul-Mulk, and, having little hope of French support in such defiance of authority, transferred his treasures from Pondicherry to the custody of the English at Madras. Shortly afterwards he was assassinated by his brother-in-law, Mortiz Ali, who thereupon proclaimed himself Nabob. His principal officers then appealed to the Mahratta chief, Morari Rao, to drive him out, and Mortiz Ali fled, leaving Sufder Ali's infant son to reign in his place. The whole province fell into anarchy, and in 1743 the viceroy Nizam-ul-Mulk appeared with a large army to restore order. The Mahrattas therefore retired from Trichinopoly; and, the infant ruler having been made away with, Anwarudeen, one of the viceroy's officers, was installed as Nabob. By this time Dupleix had received intelligence that war had been declared between France and England, and that a British squadron was on its way to destroy Pondicherry. The French squadron in East Indian waters had been recalled to France; the fortifications of the city were open to destruction by the cannon of men-of-war; and there were less than five hundred Europeans in garrison to defend it against a joint attack by sea and land. At this crisis Dupleix appealed to Anwarudeen for protection, pleading the friendship of the French with the Nabobs of the Carnatic in the past. The Nabob responded by sending a message to Madras that he intended to enforce strict neutrality within his province, and would permit no attack to be made on the French possessions on the coast of Coromandel.
1745.
1746,
June 25 July 6.

At the close of 1745 the British squadron duly[180] arrived, but found itself, through Anwarudeen's action, limited exclusively to operations by sea. Meanwhile, also La Bourdonnais, aided partly by the arrival of a few weak ships from France, but chiefly by his own amazing energy and resource, had fitted out a squadron at Mauritius, with which he appeared in July 1746 off the southern coast of Ceylon. An indecisive engagement followed, at the close of which the British commander, Commodore Peyton, with strange pusillanimity sailed to Trincomalee to repair the trifling damage sustained in the action, leaving Pondicherry untouched and Madras unprotected from French attack. The French therefore had won a first and most important point in the game: if the Nabob could be persuaded to let that game proceed without interference, the ultimate victory must lie with France.
Aug. 18 29 .
Sept. 3 14 .
Sept. 10 21 .

The town of Madras at that time consisted of three divisions; that on the south side, which was known as the White Town or Fort St. George, being inhabited by Europeans, that next to northward of it being given up to the wealthier class of Indian and Armenian merchants, while a suburb to the north of all was filled with all other classes of natives. Of these divisions the White Town, which was about four hundred yards long by one hundred broad, alone possessed defences worthy the name, being surrounded by a slender wall with four bastions and as many batteries. The total number of English did not exceed three hundred, two-thirds of which was made up of the soldiers of the garrison. The Directors of the East India Company had too often been neglectful of defences in the past, and had improved little in this respect during the past half century. They relied upon the British fleet and upon that alone. The Governor, Mr. Morse, was simply a merchant, a man of invoices and ledgers, with little knowledge of affairs beyond the scope of his business, and ignorant of the very alphabet of intercourse with native princes. There was, it is true, a clerk in his office named Robert Clive, who had arrived in India two years before; but[181] this clerk was known only as a quiet, friendless lad, not without spirit when provoked, but lonely and out of harmony with his environment, and grateful to be able to escape from it to the refuge of the Governor's library. On receiving intelligence of hostile preparations by the French at Pondicherry, Governor Morse appealed to the Nabob Anwarudeen to fulfil his determination of enforcing neutrality within the Carnatic; but his envoy, being unprovided with the indispensable credentials of a present, met with little success in his mission. On the 29th of August the French squadron appeared before Madras, cannonaded it for a time with little effect and sailed away again; but a fortnight later it reappeared with eleven hundred European soldiers and four hundred drilled natives, under the command of La Bourdonnais in person. The troops were at once landed, batteries were erected, and after a short bombardment Madras was forced to capitulate. The terms agreed on were, that all the English inhabitants should be prisoners on parole, and that negotiations might be reopened later for ransom of the town.
Oct. 3 14 .
Oct. 10 21 .

The Nabob Anwarudeen no sooner heard that the French were actually besieging Madras than he sent a message to Dupleix that unless further operations were suspended he would put an end to them by force. Dupleix answered astutely that he was conquering the town not for France but for the Nabob himself, and would deliver it to him immediately on its surrender. Fortunately for England La Bourdonnais's views as to the future treatment of Madras differed materially from those of Dupleix. As conqueror of the settlement he claimed that the ultimate disposal of it lay with himself: Dupleix, intent above all things on conciliating the Nabob, as vehemently contended that his authority as Governor-General was supreme in such matters. The two masterful men fell bitterly at variance over the question, and lost sight of all greater interests in the acrimony of their quarrel. La Bourdonnais, fully aware of the danger of waiting on the coast when the[182] northern monsoon was due, but bent none the less on having his own way, lingered on and on before Madras, until on the 14th of October the monsoon suddenly burst upon him with the force of a hurricane, destroyed four of his eight ships utterly, and disabled the remainder. A week later he signed a treaty for the ransom of Madras and for its subsequent evacuation by the French; and this done he returned, as soon as his ships could be made seaworthy, to Pondicherry. There the quarrel with Dupleix was resumed face to face; and after only ten days' stay La Bourdonnais sailed from India never to return.
Oct. 22 Nov. 2.
Oct. 24 Nov. 4.

Dupleix was now left in sole and unhampered command, with moreover a force of three thousand trained Europeans ready to his hand, some of them left behind by La Bourdonnais, some taken from the French squadron. Such an accession of strength was all important to him, for he had now to reckon with the Nabob, who growing suspicious over the long delay in the delivery of Madras had sent ten thousand men under his son Maphuze Khan to invest the town. Dupleix, who, if he had ever meant to give it up, had determined first to dismantle the fortifications, sent orders to D'Espréménil, the officer in command, to hold the town at all hazards. D'Espréménil finding himself hard pressed made a sortie with four hundred of his garrison, and boldly facing the masses of the enemy's cavalry opened on them so effective a fire from his field-guns that they fled with precipitation, abandoning their camp to the victor. With their own clumsy artillery, not yet advanced beyond the stage attained by European nations in the sixteenth century, the natives thought it good practice if a gun were discharged four times in an hour; and they were utterly confounded and dismayed by the rapidity with which the French pieces were served. This was one great lesson for Europeans in Indian warfare, but a second and a greater was to follow. After lingering for another day in the vicinity of Madras Maphuze marched to St.[183] Thomé, some four miles to southward of it, to intercept a French force which was on its way to relieve D'Espréménil's garrison. On the morning of the 4th of November the expected detachment appeared, a mere handful of two hundred and thirty Europeans and seven hundred Sepoys, which had been sent up from Pondicherry under a Swiss officer named Paradis. The situation of Paradis was sufficiently perilous to have alarmed him. His orders were to open communications with Madras; and here was an army of ten thousand men, with artillery, drawn up on the bank of a river before him to bar his advance. Now, after a century and a half of fighting in India, no British officer would be for a moment at a loss as to the course to be pursued, but Paradis had neither tradition nor experience to guide him. However, whether by inspiration or from despair, he did exactly what he ought. Knowing the river to be fordable, he led his men without hesitation across it and straight upon the enemy, scrambled up the bank, gave them one volley, and charged with the bayonet. The effect of this bold attack was instantaneous. The Nabob's army was at once transformed into a disorganised mob, which fled headlong into the town of St. Thomé, only to be crowded and jammed in hopeless confusion in the streets. Paradis, following up his success, poured volley after volley into the struggling mass; while, to perfect the victory, a party which had been detached from Madras to join hands with him came up in rear of the fugitives and cut off their retreat. This attack in rear, always dreaded by Oriental nations, completed the rout. Maphuze Khan, who was mounted on an elephant, was one of the first to fly; and his army streamed away to westward, a helpless, terrified rabble, never pausing in its flight until it reached Arcot.

With this action it may be said that the dominance of an European nation in India was assured. Hitherto the native armies had been treated with respect. Their numbers had given the impression of overwhelming[184] strength; and it had not occurred to Europeans that they could be encountered except with a force of man for man. Consequently all dealings of Europeans with native princes had been conducted in a spirit of humility and awe. Even Dupleix, while flaunting his dignity among his brother Nabobs, had courted the ruler of the Carnatic with deference and submission. Now the spell was broken, and Dupleix from the courtier had become the master; so momentous was the change wrought by a single Swiss officer, whose very name is hardly known to the nation which now rules India. Of all the fruits of the long friendship which French and Swiss sealed with each other's blood in the furious struggle of Marignano, none is more remarkable than this. The memory of Paradis should be honoured in England since he taught us the secret of the conquest of India.
Nov.
Dec. 6 17 .

The victory swept away Dupleix's principal difficulties at a blow. He at once appointed Paradis to the chief command at Madras and bade him issue a manifesto repudiating La Bourdonnais's treaty as null and void, and declaring Madras to belong to the French by right of conquest. The English protested, but in vain. Morse and the rest of the officials were conducted to Pondicherry. A few only contrived to make their escape to Fort St. David, among them the man who was soon to make Dupleix smart for his ill-faith, the young writer Robert Clive. Fort St. David, situate about twelve miles south of Pondicherry, now became the rallying-point of the English. Since the fall of Madras the authorities there had taken over the general administration of British affairs on the coast of Coromandel; the fort, though small, was the strongest for its size that the British possessed in India; and they were determined to defend it to the last extremity. Dupleix on his side was equally resolved to strike at it without delay, and with this object he instructed Paradis to return to Pondicherry as soon as he should have settled the affairs of Madras. This duty, however, detained Paradis until December; and meanwhile the British[185] officials had invoked the aid of the Nabob Anwarudeen, who, smarting under the defeat of St. Thomé, agreed to send a force under Maphuze Khan and his brother Mohammed Ali to Fort St. David. Maphuze Khan, eager to wipe out his disgrace, attacked Paradis on his march down from Madras; but the French, though they were but three hundred strong and encumbered with the plunder of Madras, beat off his attack with little difficulty, and made their way, with trifling loss, to their destination of Ariancopang, a mile and a half from Pondicherry.
Dec. 8 19 .
1747.
Feb.

The total force now gathered together by Dupleix at Ariancopang for the attack on Fort St. David consisted of about sixteen hundred men, nine hundred of them Europeans, with six field-pieces and as many mortars. Against these the British garrison could muster but two hundred Europeans and half as many natives. Unluckily, however, for the success of Dupleix's schemes, there were several French officers senior to Paradis, the chief of whom, General de Bury, took the command. On the 19th of December De Bury crossed the river Pennar and encamped in a walled garden about a mile and a half from Fort St. David. Though the Nabob's army was not five miles distant, neither picquets nor sentries were posted; and the French were dispersed and cooking their dinners when they were suddenly alarmed by the approach of the enemy. Panic-stricken the whole force rushed out of the garden to the river, each man anxious only to place the water between himself and the foe; and had not the artillery stood firm De Bury's troops would have fared badly indeed. As things fell out they escaped with the loss of a dozen Europeans killed and one hundred and twenty wounded, and made good their retreat to Ariancopang. For three weeks after this reverse the French remained inactive in their camp, but in January 1747 a squadron of French ships arrived on the coast, and Dupleix seized the opportunity offered by this display of force to reopen negotiations with the Nabob Anwarudeen. With[186] his usual dexterity he pointed out that the condition of the British was hopeless; and his arguments were not the less cogent for an accompaniment of gifts to the value of fifteen thousand pounds. The Nabob, already weary of the war, concluded a peace with the French and withdrew his army from Fort St. David.
Feb. 19 Mar. 2.
Mar. 2 13 .

Dupleix seemed now to hold his rivals in his hand; and undoubtedly for the moment the outlook for the British was dark. One or two isolated ships despatched by the Company had arrived on the coast, but had either been captured or frightened away; and it was not until March that one of them succeeded in landing twenty men and sixty thousand pounds in silver at Fort St. David. Ten days later the French began a second attempt against the fort, but were compelled to beat a hasty retreat by the arrival of Admiral Griffin with a British squadron in the roadstead. Griffin landed a company of one hundred soldiers, and lent also marines and sailors from the fleet, as a temporary measure, to strengthen the garrison while he sailed with the fleet to blockade Pondicherry. Fresh reinforcements arrived at Fort St. David both from Europe and from some of the Company's settlements during May and June; and by July the garrison, including the naval brigade, had risen to twelve hundred Europeans and eight hundred natives.
June 11 22 .
1748.

The restoration of British supremacy at sea turned the tables against Dupleix, but he contrived none the less to despatch a message to Mauritius for reinforcements. The letter did not reach the island until December, nor was it possible until May 1748 to send off a squadron, which even then was inferior in strength to the blockading fleet under Griffin. By great dexterity, however, the French Admiral contrived to entice Griffin to sea and to slip past him in the night to Madras, where having landed three hundred European soldiers and a large sum of money he put to sea again, leaving Griffin to hunt for him where he would. Dupleix thereupon snatched the opportunity afforded[187] by Griffin's absence to make an attack on Cuddalore, an English fortified station about two miles south of Fort St. David, which he had already attempted once without success. The force that he had collected for this enterprise was large judged by the minute scale of the armies employed in these early Indian wars, consisting of eight hundred Europeans and one thousand Sepoys. But by this time the British had been strengthened not only by the reinforcements of the previous year but by the arrival in January of a competent commander. This officer, whose fame is far below his deserts, was Major Stringer Lawrence.
June 17 28 .

Dupleix's idea was to surprise Cuddalore by night, and with this view he sent his army by a circuitous route to some hills within three miles of the station, with orders to halt and remain concealed until the time should come for the attack. Lawrence, who had full intelligence of the design, ostentatiously removed the garrison and the guns from Cuddalore to Fort St. David during the day; but at nightfall sent them back again, with due precautions to conceal the fact from the French, together with a reinforcement of four hundred Europeans. At midnight the French advanced to the walls without thought of meeting with resistance, but had no sooner planted their scaling-ladders than they were saluted by a withering fire of musketry and grape. The whole body was instantly smitten with panic. Most of them flung down their arms without firing a shot, and one and all took to their heels and fled, not halting until they reached Pondicherry. So ended the first brush between French and English troops in India.
June 23 July 4.
July 31 Aug. 11.

The result was a sad blow to Dupleix, for news had reached them that a powerful armament was on its way from England. In effect the British Government had determined to help the East India Company both with ships and men, and in November 1747 Admiral Boscawen had sailed with eight men-of-war and a convoy of fourteen hundred regular troops. By a novel arrangement, due doubtless to the sad experience of Carthagena, the[188] Admiral held sole command both of army and navy. The first object prescribed to the expedition was the capture of Mauritius and Bourbon, which islands, being within a month's sail of the coast of Coromandel, were of unspeakable value to the French as a base for their operations in India. The British possessed no such station. St. Helena was too remote, even supposing that a harbour comparable to Port Louis could have been found in it, and the Cape of Good Hope was in the hands of the Dutch. Boscawen arrived before Port Louis on the 4th of July, but found Mauritius strongly defended by forts and batteries at every spot which was suitable for a landing. After three days spent in vain endeavour to discover a weak point, the Admiral decided to push on without further loss of time to the ulterior goal appointed him by his instructions, Pondicherry. He set sail, therefore, for Fort St. David, and early in August effected his junction with Griffin. The combined squadrons formed the most powerful armament yet seen in East Indian waters.
Aug. 8 19 .

A fleet of thirty ships set Boscawen at ease as to his communications by sea; and as every preparation had been made at Fort St. David against his arrival, he was able within a week to march to the siege of Pondicherry. The King's regular troops consisted of twelve independent companies each one hundred strong, eight hundred marines, and eighty of the Royal Artillery, which, added to the Company's soldiers and a naval brigade, brought up the total to a strength of thirty-seven hundred Europeans. Two thousand Sepoys also accompanied the expedition, though as yet neither trained nor disciplined. But meanwhile Dupleix had not been idle. Desperate though his situation might appear, he had resolved to make the best of it, and had not only strengthened the defences of Pondicherry itself, but had added a strong fort at Ariancopang, which was constructed under the care of the indefatigable Paradis. This latter work was the first obstacle that presented itself to Boscawen's advance. No one in his camp knew[189] anything about it, because no one had been at any pains to find out. A deserter reported that it was held by a hundred natives only, and Boscawen without further ado resolved to carry it by storm. Seven hundred men were therefore launched against it, only to find that the defences were decidedly formidable and the garrison four times as strong as had been supposed. Moreover, owing to a neglect which, after the failure before St. Lazaro, seems perfectly unpardonable, no scaling-ladders had been prepared for the storming party. The troops, therefore, as at St. Lazaro, tried stubbornly to do impossibilities until nearly a fourth of their number had been killed or wounded, and then fell back not less mortified than dispirited by their repulse.
Aug. 26 Sept. 6.

It was then resolved to besiege Ariancopang in form; but here as at Carthagena the engineers proved to be utterly ignorant of their business, and blunder succeeded blunder. Paradis, who had a troop of sixty horse in addition to the infantry of his garrison, judged astutely of the moral effect which cavalry might produce on seafaring men, and sent his handful of troopers, with infantry in support, straight at the trenches of the naval brigade. The sailors were seized with panic; the panic spread to the regular troops, and the whole rushed headlong back to the camp, leaving their best officer, Stringer Lawrence, to be taken prisoner. Accident, however, came to the help of the British. A magazine at Ariancopang caught fire and exploded, disabling over one hundred men; and the garrison having dismantled the fortifications withdrew into Pondicherry. Boscawen accordingly moved forward from Ariancopang and opened his trenches against the north-western corner of the town. Then once more the ignorance of the engineers led to blunders and waste of time, for they opened their first parallel at a distance of fifteen hundred yards, or twice the distance prescribed by rule and common sense, from the covered way. Still fortune for the present favoured the British. A sortie made by the French was brilliantly repulsed, and Paradis, the[190] ablest of the French both as officer and engineer, was wounded to the death. The Englishman most distinguished in this affair was to prove himself Paradis's most brilliant pupil, an ensign in the Company's service, taken only twelve months before as a clerk from the Company's desks, Robert Clive.
Sept. 26 Oct. 7.
Sept. 30 Oct. 11.

The success of the British now appeared so certain that the Nabob Anwarudeen, yielding to the repeated gifts and appeals of Boscawen, decided to throw in his lot with them and promised to furnish a body of two thousand horse. Still Dupleix was not discouraged. By the death of Paradis the chief burden of military as well as of civil command was thrown upon his shoulders, but he did not shrink from it. After all, if he were no soldier, neither was Boscawen. By immense labour the British trenches were carried forward to the position from which they should have been opened, eight hundred yards from the wall, and early in October two batteries at last opened on the town. They were answered by twice as formidable a fire from the guns of the besieged. Boscawen then ordered the fleet to open fire from the sea, but the ships being prevented by shoal water from approaching nearer than a thousand yards from the works, the cannonade was wholly ineffective. The fire of the British batteries ashore continued for three days with little result, while that of the besieged increased rather than languished. The rainy season then set in earlier than usual; the trenches were flooded, and disease began to rage in the British camp. Finally, on the 11th of October, Boscawen decided to raise the siege and the British retreated, leaving over one thousand Europeans dead behind them, while Dupleix remained proud and unconquered in Pondicherry.

The failure of this enterprise was due to the same causes that had wrecked the expedition to Carthagena. In the first place, Boscawen arrived on the coast too late. In the second, he wasted nearly three weeks over the capture of Ariancopang, which was not[191] essential to the capture of Pondicherry. In the third, the unskilfulness of the engineers prolonged the operations, and occupied the troops with duties which kept them from active service in the trenches and harassed them to death for no purpose. The experiment of setting a naval officer in charge of highly technical military operations was probably due to the influence of Vernon; to which also may be traced Boscawen's readiness to attempt the storm of Ariancopang after Vernon's rough-and-ready manner. Against Spaniards in South America such methods might have succeeded; against Frenchmen they could not, least of all when commanded by a Dupleix with a Paradis for his military adviser. If the failure before Pondicherry had ended with the raising of the siege, the reverse would have been comparatively a trifling matter; but it told far and wide over India as a blow to British influence and prestige, and Dupleix was not the man to neglect to magnify the success and the greatness of his nation.

The news of the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle some months later brought about a cessation of overt hostilities and the re-delivery of Madras to Boscawen; but still the war did not end. As in Europe French and English could fight fiercely as auxiliaries of an Elector of Bavaria and a Queen of Hungary, so in Asia they could carry on, as allies of native princes, the contest which was to determine the fate of India.
CHAPTER II
The first of the native states in which the British initiated their new policy of intervention was one with which the French had busied themselves ten years earlier, the kingdom of Tanjore. There the ruler favoured by Governor Dumas, Sauhojee, had, after some years of misrule, been deposed; he now came to the British Company for assistance, offering to pay the expenses of the war and to give the fort and territory of Devicotah as the price of his re-establishment on the throne. The Company accordingly detailed a force of five hundred Europeans and fifteen hundred Sepoys, which started at the end of March 1749 for Trichinopoly. Sauhojee had engaged that its operations could be seconded by a general rising in his favour, but this promise was found to be illusory, and the expedition returned without effecting anything. Undismayed, however, by this first failure, the Company equipped a second force, and resolved this time to push straight for the prize offered by Sauhojee, the fort of Devicotah. Eight hundred Europeans and fifteen hundred Sepoys under command of Major Stringer Lawrence embarked for the mouth of the Coleroon, and landing on the south side of the river succeeded after a few days' cannonade in battering a breach in the wall of the fort. A ship's carpenter then contrived a raft on which troops could be conveyed across the river, and Lawrence resolved to storm the fort forthwith. Clive led the storming party, which consisted of thirty-four Europeans and seven hundred[193] Sepoys, but, the Sepoys failing to support him, his little party of British was cut to pieces by the cavalry of the Tanjorines, and he himself narrowly escaped with his life. Lawrence thereupon resolved to throw the whole of his Europeans into the breach. The Tanjorine horse again attacked them as they advanced, but were crushed by their fire; and the British on entering the breach found the fort deserted. Lawrence accordingly took possession of the fort and territory, and the Company, having obtained all that it desired, promised Sauhojee a pension if he would undertake to give no more trouble in Tanjore. It was destined to pay dearly for this evil precedent, and for the paltry acquisition so ignobly gained.
July 23 Aug. 3.

Meanwhile momentous events elsewhere had led to fresh complications. In 1748 Nizam-ul-Mulk, the Viceroy of the Deccan, died, and his death was followed as usual by a quarrel over the succession to his throne. The successor nominated by the dead ruler was his grandson, Murzapha Jung; the rival was his second son, Nasir Jung; and, as was natural, both claimants cast about them for allies. It has already been related how Chunda Sahib, the devoted admirer of the French, had been captured by the Mahrattas in Trichinopoly in 1741. Ever since that time he had been kept in close confinement at Satara; the Mahrattas, who knew him by reputation as the ablest soldier that had been seen for years in the Carnatic, refusing to release him except for an impossible ransom. He had, however, a friend in Dupleix, who throughout his imprisonment had protected his wife and family in Pondicherry, and had contrived further to maintain with him a friendly correspondence. Murzapha Jung while travelling in search of help from the Mahrattas encountered Chunda Sahib at Satara, and at once perceived the value of such a man for an ally. Dupleix was called in, and took in the whole situation at a glance. If the force of the French arms could enthrone Murzapha Jung as viceroy, there would be little or nothing to hinder French[194] influence from becoming predominant in the Deccan, or, in other words, to prevent Dupleix from becoming practically if not nominally viceroy himself. He at once pledged himself to discharge Chunda Sahib's ransom, and immediately after his release allowed him to take into his pay two thousand Sepoys from the garrison of Pondicherry; agreeing also, on receipt of a further cession of territory near the town, to give him the assistance of four hundred European soldiers. With these and with the troops that he had collected, in all some six thousand men, Chunda Sahib joined himself to Murzapha Jung's army of thirty thousand men, and advanced with them against Arcot. The capture of this, the capital town of the Carnatic, would place the resources of that province at their disposal and win for them the first step to the throne of the Deccan. The old Nabob Anwarudeen had collected a force to oppose them, but he could bring forward no troops to match the disciplined infantry of the French. After a sharp action at Amoor he was defeated and slain: the victorious army entered Arcot on the following day, and the Carnatic was won.

Murzapha Jung having proclaimed himself Viceroy of the Deccan, and taken steps to assert his sovereignty, proceeded next with Chunda Sahib to Pondicherry, where they were received in great state by Dupleix, and in return rewarded him with yet another grant of the neighbouring territory. Meanwhile the English looked on, indignant but helpless, having barred their right to protest by their own foolish action at Tanjore. Boscawen did indeed take advantage of Anwarudeen's death to hoist the British flag over St. Thomé, as a masterless town which might be of profit to the Company; but for the rest the arm of the British seemed paralysed. Mohammed Ali, son of the dead Nabob Anwarudeen, who had fled from the field of Amoor to Trichinopoly, invoked the aid of the East India Company; but though profoundly distrustful of the friendship between Chunda Sahib and Dupleix, the[195] authorities sent but one hundred and twenty men to help him. This done, they actually permitted Boscawen to return to England with his fleet and transports, retaining but three hundred of his men in India to strengthen the British garrison. This was the moment for which Dupleix had longed. The one force which he dreaded was removed. It remained only for Murzapha Jung and Chunda Sahib to march to Trichinopoly and crush Mohammed Ali; and Southern India was gained once for all.
Dec. 20 31 .

Dupleix did not fail to urge this step upon his two allies; but they had spent so much money over their own enjoyment at Pondicherry that they had exhausted the treasure necessary for the decisive campaign. Judging that the easiest and speediest method of replenishing their empty purse would be to extort funds from the Rajah of Tanjore, they led their armies against that city and summoned it to surrender. The Rajah, Partab Singh, gained time by astute negotiation to summon the English and Murzapha Jung's rival, Nasir Jung, to his assistance; but the English hardly responded, and the Rajah, cowed by an attack of the French infantry on the defences of the city, agreed to pay the sum required of him. None the less, by continual haggling he continued to keep his enemies inactive before the walls until the news of Nasir Jung's approach, with a force of overwhelming strength, caused them to fall back in panic upon Pondicherry.
1750.
April 1 12 .

The favourable moment in fact had been lost, despite Dupleix's pressing entreaties that it might be seized. Nasir Jung had not only invaded the Carnatic with his own forces but had called Mohammed Ali and the British to his standard; and the East India Company, roused by the imposing numbers of his army, had sent him six hundred European soldiers under command of Stringer Lawrence in person. At the end of March the hostile armies stood within striking distance of each other midway between Pondicherry and Arcot, near the fortress of Gingee; but no blow was struck. A[196] mutiny of the French troops practically broke up Murzapha Jung's army; Murzapha himself surrendered to Nasir Jung; and the whole of Dupleix's grand combinations seemed to be shattered beyond repair. With inexhaustible energy, however, the French Governor set himself to restore the discipline of the troops, and meanwhile opened negotiations with Nasir Jung. Finding his overtures rejected he boldly surprised his camp by night with a handful of men, and with such effect that Nasir Jung retreated hurriedly to Arcot. The British, thus abandoned, retired likewise to Fort St. David, and the field was left open once more to the ambition of Dupleix.
Aug. 31 Sept. 11.
Dec. 5 16 .

Thoroughly understanding the Oriental character, he hastened to follow up this first blow with another. First he turned upon Mohammed Ali, who had been left in isolation near Pondicherry, dispersed his army, though vastly superior to his own, almost without loss of a man, and sent him flying northward. He then detached one of his best officers, M. de Bussy, with a handful of troops against the fugitives of Mohammed Ali's force which had rallied under the walls of Gingee; and Bussy not only routed them in the field but actually carried the fort of Gingee itself, for generations deemed an impregnable stronghold, by escalade. This feat, one of the most brilliant and marvellous ever achieved by Europeans in India, provoked Nasir Jung anew to try his fortune in the field and lured him on to his destruction. Notwithstanding the lateness of the season he collected a vast unwieldy host of a hundred thousand men and moved down to Gingee, only to find military operations absolutely impossible owing to the breaking of the monsoon. For three months he remained perforce inactive, while Dupleix sedulously fostered sedition and conspiracy in his camp. At last, in December, the French attacked and utterly defeated his army, while the conspirators made an end of Nasir Jung himself. Murzapha Jung was at once saluted as Viceroy of the Deccan, and a few days later was solemnly installed as[197] such at Pondicherry; Dupleix, in all the splendour of Oriental robes, sitting by his side as one of equal rank, to receive with him the homage of the subordinate princes. The French Governor was declared Nabob of the whole of the country south of the Kistnah to Cape Comorin, and Chunda Sahib was appointed Nabob of Arcot and of its dependencies under him; his former rival, Mohammed Ali, being only too glad to gain Dupleix's favour by renouncing all pretensions of his own. Finally, new privileges and concessions were showered on the French East India Company. To such a height indeed had French ascendency risen that Dupleix gave orders for the erection of a city with the pompous title of the Place of the Victory of Dupleix.
1751.
Jan. 4 15 .
June 18 29 .

Nothing now remained but to escort the new Viceroy of the Deccan to his capital at Aurungabad, a duty which was entrusted to Bussy. At one point in the march some opposition was encountered, which, though easily swept aside by the French artillery, proved fatal to Murzapha Jung. His vindictive temper led him forward to a personal contest of man to man, and while actually within reach of the goal of his ambition he was struck dead. The incident, untoward though it might appear at such a time, proved to be of little moment. One puppet would serve as well as another for Viceroy of the Deccan, so the actual sovereignty rested with Dupleix. Salabat Jung, a younger brother of Nasir Jung, was accordingly released by Bussy from the prison in which he was confined, and was elevated with general approval to the place of the potentate whose career had been so unfortunately cut short. Needless to say, he at once confirmed all former privileges to the French and added yet others to them. Finally, in June, the poor creature entered Aurungabad in state, attended by Bussy and his troops, who did not omit to take up their quarters permanently in the capital. Thus from the Vindhya mountains to the Kistnah the country was practically under the control of Bussy, while from the Kistnah to Cape Comorin Dupleix ruled[198] as actual vicegerent of the Mohammedan sovereign of the Deccan. The moment marks the zenith of French power in India.
March.
May.

Throughout these transactions the British had remained open-mouthed and inactive, so inactive that in October 1750 they had permitted their ablest soldier, Stringer Lawrence, to return to England. Thoroughly alarmed at the rapid progress of Dupleix's influence, and irritated by the ostentatious display of his sovereignty on its boundaries, the Company at last resolved to initiate a steady policy of opposition to the French in all quarters. There was but one pretext for intervention. Mohammed Ali, the son of the late Nabob Anwarudeen, while negotiating with Dupleix for the surrender of Trichinopoly, had never ceased to make piteous appeals for British assistance. Rather, therefore, than allow this last excuse for interference to be taken from them, the British authorities consented to give him help, and as a first instalment despatched three hundred British and as many Sepoys to Trichinopoly in February 1751. The main issue now turned on the possession of Trichinopoly, and Dupleix was not slow to recognise the fact. Chunda Sahib was already preparing to march upon the city with a native army of about eight thousand men, and to these Dupleix added four hundred French under an able officer. The British replied by equipping a further force of five hundred Europeans, one hundred Africans, and a thousand Sepoys, under the command of Captain Gingen, with Lieutenant Robert Clive for his commissariat-officer. Not daring to act as principal, for French and English were still nominally at peace, Gingen waited at Fort St. David until the middle of May, when he was joined by sixteen hundred of Mohammed Ali's troops. Vested by the advent of this rabble with the character of a legitimate auxiliary, he then marched southward to seize the pagoda of Verdachelum, which commanded the communications between Fort St. David and Trichinopoly. This was successfully accomplished; and having[199] received further reinforcements he moved south-westward to Volconda, on the road between Arcot and Trichinopoly, to intercept the advancing army of Chunda Sahib.
July 17 28 .

The result was disastrous for Gingen. After the exchange of a few cannon-shots the British troops were seized with panic, flung down their arms, and could not be rallied even by Clive himself. Gingen, finding them much shaken, thereupon fell back upon Trichinopoly. Chunda Sahib immediately followed them; and after three days of skirmishing the British crossed the river Coleroon and finally took refuge under the walls of the city. The enemy lost no time in closing in around them, and now the French could look upon their success as well-nigh assured. Almost the whole of the British force in India was cooped up in the city before them; there seemed to be no prospect of relief for them from any other quarter, and it was therefore necessary only to keep them strictly blockaded to make them prisoners in a body.

The British authorities in Fort St. David saw the danger, but could not divine how to avert it. A small force of Europeans had lately arrived from England, but every military officer was shut up in Trichinopoly, and there was not one at hand to take charge of a relieving force. None the less a convoy was equipped at the end of July and sent off with an escort of eighty Europeans and three hundred Sepoys under command of a civilian, Mr. Pigot, with Robert Clive, who had returned from the army after the retreat from Volconda, as second in command. Pigot conducted his convoy safely as far as Verdachelum and passed his reinforcement successfully into Trichinopoly, but both he and Clive were cut off while returning to Fort St. David, and only with the greatest difficulty evaded capture. Clive, now raised to the rank of captain, was presently sent into Tanjore with a second reinforcement, which, like its predecessor, contrived to make its way into Trichinopoly, and raised the strength of the British[200] battalion therein to six hundred men. But the French on their side could bring nine hundred Europeans to meet them; and the salvation of Trichinopoly, and of British power in India which lay bound up in it, seemed to be hopeless.
August.
Aug. 26 Sept. 6.

Clive grasped at once the significance of the situation, and without wasting further time over the blockaded city returned with all haste to Madras. The only hope for Trichinopoly, as he pointed out, lay in a vigorous diversion which should carry the war into the enemy's country. Though the bulk of the British forces might be shut up in Trichinopoly, the bulk of Chunda Sahib's army was equally tied down before it, and therefore the capital of the Carnatic must be left unguarded. Let a bold stroke be aimed at Arcot, and Chunda Sahib must either raise the siege of Trichinopoly to save it, or suffer a loss for which the gain of Trichinopoly would be poor compensation. The plan was audacious beyond measure, but the Governor, Mr. Saunders, a resolute and far-seeing man, perceived its merit; so reducing the garrisons of Madras and Fort St. David to the lowest point he equipped a force of two hundred Europeans and three hundred Sepoys, together with three field-guns, and placed Clive in command with unlimited powers. With this handful of men and eight officers, of whom four had like himself been taken from desk and ledger, Clive marched on the 6th of September from Madras.
Aug. 31 Sept. 11.

Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, and then the seat of Chunda Sahib's government, lies sixty-four miles to south and west of Madras. It was then an open town of about one hundred thousand inhabitants, with no defences but a ruined fort, which was held by a garrison of a thousand natives. Five days, including a halt of one day at Conjeveram, sufficed to bring Clive within ten miles of the city. At this point he again made a short halt, but resuming his march through a terrific thunderstorm pushed forward to the gates on the same evening. Rumour of his approach had gone before[201] him. Spies had reported that the British were striding on unconcerned through lightning, rain, and tempest; and the garrison, afraid to oppose a man who set the very elements at defiance, evacuated the fort without firing a shot.
Sept. 4 15 - 6 17 .
Sept. 23 Oct. 4.

Clive at once occupied the deserted fort, repaired the defences, mounted the guns that he found there, and made every preparation to resist a siege. The native garrison having encamped about six miles from the city, Clive made two successful sorties against them, in order to keep them in a becoming state of alarm; and hearing a week later that they had been reinforced to a strength of three thousand men, he burst suddenly upon their camp by night, killed several, sent the rest flying away in panic terror, and returned to the fort without the loss of a man. But by this time Chunda Sahib had heard of the misfortune to his capital, and had detached four thousand men from before Trichinopoly to recapture the fort. Dupleix, though greatly averse to any diminution of the blockading army, added one hundred French soldiers to this detachment, while other levies raised it to a total of ten thousand men. With this force Raju Sahib, Chunda Sahib's son, entered Arcot on the 4th of October and began the investment of the fort.
Sept. 24 Oct. 5.
Sept. 25 Oct. 6.
Oct. 30 Nov. 10.
Nov. 13 24 .
Nov. 14 25 .

On the very next day Clive made a bold sally with the object of driving the enemy from the town, but was driven back with the loss, very serious in view of his numbers, of two officers and thirty-one European soldiers killed and wounded. On the morrow the besiegers received further reinforcement, which raised their numbers to eleven thousand natives and one hundred and fifty Europeans; whereas Clive's garrison was by this time reduced to six score Europeans and two hundred Sepoys only. A fortnight later the enemy's battering train arrived, and on the 10th of November, a practicable breach having been made in the walls, Raju Sahib summoned Clive to surrender. He was answered by a message of contemptuous defiance; but knowing that[202] the supplies of the fort were running low, he hesitated to storm, in the hope of reducing the garrison by starvation. Meanwhile, however, Governor Saunders was pushing forward reinforcements, and had induced the Mahrattas, under the redoubtable Morari Rao, to throw in their lot with the British. Intelligence of this last put an end to Raju Sahib's inaction, and on the 24th of November he laid his plans for an assault. The day chosen was the festival of the brothers Hassan and Hussein, an anniversary on which Mohammedan fanaticism is inflamed always to its fiercest heat. Fortunately Clive had been warned by a spy of the intended attack, and had made such preparations as he could by training cannon on to the breach, and keeping relays of muskets loaded for the maintenance of a continuous fire. At dawn the enemy's troops swarmed up to the breach, while elephants, with their heads armoured by plates of iron, were brought forward to batter down the gates. But the fire of the British was too hot and deadly to be endured, and the elephants, galled by wounds, swerved back and trampled all around them under foot. Once only the storming-party seemed likely to gain ground, and then Clive, taking personal charge of one of the field-guns, dispersed them effectively with three or four rounds. After maintaining the attack for an hour the enemy fell back defeated. The French for some reason held aloof, and the bravest of the native leaders were killed. How hot the affair was while it lasted may be judged from the fact that Clive's garrison, though reduced to eighty Europeans and one hundred and twenty Sepoys, expended twelve thousand cartridges during the assault. The loss of the defenders was but six killed and wounded; that of the enemy was reckoned at not less than four hundred. On the following day Raju Sahib raised the siege and marched away, abandoning several guns and a great quantity of ammunition; and Clive was left in Arcot triumphant. The siege had lasted fifty days and had cost the little garrison one-fourth of its number in killed alone, besides a still[203] greater number wounded; but this was no heavy price to pay for the re-establishment of British prestige. The feast of Hassan and Hussein may justly be accounted the birthday of our empire in India.

On the evening of the day of the assault Clive was joined by a reinforcement of men and of four guns, which enabled him, after leaving a garrison in the fort, to take the field with two hundred Europeans and seven hundred Sepoys. Raju Sahib's army had in great measure disbanded itself during his retreat, none remaining with him except his small party of French and the men which he had brought with him from Trichinopoly. With these he retired westward to Vellore. There a reinforcement from Pondicherry increased the number of his French to three hundred, while the successful repulse of a rash attack of Mahrattas had served to raise the spirits of his troops. But Clive, though inferior in numbers, was not the man to let them escape scot free. Picking up six hundred Mahratta horsemen he made a forced march in pursuit of them and caught them as they were about to cross the river Arnee. The enemy could show three hundred Europeans against two hundred, fifteen hundred Sepoys against seven hundred, and three thousand native levies against the Mahratta horse; but they were out-man?uvred and defeated, with the loss of fifty Europeans, thrice as many natives, and the whole of their artillery, while Clive's loss did not exceed eight Sepoys and fifty Mahrattas. After this action Clive marched on Conjeveram, captured it after a siege of three days and dismantled the fort. Then, having thrown a strong garrison into Arcot, he returned at the end of December to Fort St. David to concert measures for the relief of Trichinopoly.
1752.
Feb. 2 13 .
Feb. 3 14 .

No sooner was his back turned than the scattered levies of Raju Sahib reassembled; and having first restored the defences of Conjeveram and thrown a garrison into it to cut off communication between Madras and Arcot, ravaged the country to within a few miles of Madras itself. This diversion, which was[204] brought about at the instigation of Dupleix, had the effect which he desired. The preparations for the relief of Trichinopoly were suspended, and on the 13th of February Clive marched from Madras with three hundred and eighty Europeans and thirteen hundred Sepoys, together with six guns; the troops being drawn in great part from the garrison at Arcot. The enemy, though superior in strength of Europeans and very far superior in native troops and artillery, would not await his coming, but retired to an entrenched camp at Vendalore, about five-and-twenty miles south-westward of Madras. Clive hurried after them, but arriving at Vendalore at three o'clock in the afternoon found that they had disappeared, no one knew whither. A few hours later he received certain information that they were gone to Conjeveram. It was now nine o'clock in the evening, and the men had already marched twenty-five miles on that day, but Clive without a moment's hesitation called them out for another forced march, and by four o'clock next morning had reached Conjeveram. The garrison of the fort surrendered at the first summons, but gave the bad news that the enemy had marched on Arcot. Clive's troops were too much exhausted to follow them at once, but at noon the march was resumed. At sunset Clive had reached Covrepauk, sixteen miles on his road, when his advanced guard was surprised by a sudden fire of nine field-guns upon its right flank. The enemy, failing in their design against the fort of Arcot, had retraced their steps by a forced march and laid an ambush for Clive; and Clive, quite unsuspectingly, had marched straight into it.

The position taken up by the enemy was well fitted for their purpose. About a furlong to the north of the road, or on the right of Clive as he advanced, was a dense grove of mango-trees covered in front by a ditch and a bank; and here were stationed the nine field-guns of the French with a body of infantry in support. On Clive's left, or to the south of the road,[205] and about one hundred and fifty yards from it ran a dry water-course, in the bed of which troops were well sheltered from fire; and here was massed the remainder of the enemy's infantry. Between the road and the water-course and beyond the water-course to the southward was drawn up the enemy's cavalry, some two thousand in all, ready to bar the British advance to the front or to sweep round upon their rear. The peril of Clive's position, already formidable enough, was enhanced by his inferiority in numbers, for the French could match four hundred Europeans against his three hundred and eighty, and two thousand Sepoys against his eighteen hundred; while against their two thousand horsemen Clive could not produce a man. Without losing his presence of mind for an instant Clive at once brought up three of his field-guns to reply to the French artillery, ordered the main body of his infantry to take shelter in the water-course, directed the baggage to be drawn back for half a mile with one gun and a small guard to defend it, and posted his two remaining guns, with forty Europeans and two hundred Sepoys, to the south of the water-course to check the enemy's cavalry. The rapidity with which he grasped the situation, surprised as he was in the waning light, and the readiness with which he made his dispositions to meet the danger, suffice in themselves to distinguish Clive as a man almost unmatched for steadfastness and resource.

Meanwhile the sun went down, and the moon shone cold and white to light the combatants to battle. In the water-course the French infantry, six abreast, encountered the English, and exchanged a savage fire at close range; but both sides, worn out with long marching, recoiled from a fight with the bayonet. On the other flank the British gunners, though outnumbered by three to one, stood to their guns and fell by them under the ceaseless rain of fire from the French pieces. And all the time the enemy's cavalry careered restlessly backward and forward, now pressing on the[206] guns to the south of the water-course, now swooping on the infantry that guarded them, now making a dash upon the baggage, but never charging home, for they dared not face the white man. So the combat went fitfully on for three full hours under the silver moon, but the red flashes never ceased to leap from the shadow of the grove, and the British artillerymen were at last so much thinned that there were scarce enough of them to work the guns. It was plain that unless the French battery could be silenced the battle was lost. Clive bethought him that the mango-grove, though protected by the ditch in front, might be open in the rear, and sent a native sergeant round to reconnoitre. The sergeant returned to report that the rear of the battery was unguarded; and Clive, withdrawing two hundred of the British from the water-course, marched off stealthily at their head, with the sergeant for his guide. Like Cromwell at Dunbar he wished to direct the turning movement that was to decide the day; but no sooner was he gone than the troops in the water-course began to waver. The whole of them ceased firing and prepared for flight: some of them, indeed, did actually make off. Perforce Clive returned to rally them and appointed Lieutenant Keene to command the turning movement in his place.

Making a wide circuit to avoid discovery, Keene stole round to the rear of the mango-grove, halted within three hundred yards of it and sent Ensign Symmonds forward to examine the French dispositions. Symmonds was not gone far when he came upon a deep trench, in which a detachment of infantry was taking shelter until its time for action should come. He was challenged as he drew nearer, and could see muskets pointed at him, but answering calmly in French he was allowed to pass and to enter the grove in rear of the French guns. Behind the battery stood a detachment of one hundred French soldiers, all gazing eagerly towards the failing fire of the British cannon in their front, and without any precaution against attack from[207] the rear. Symmonds stole back to his men, avoiding the trench; and the two hundred British advanced silently and noiselessly, by the track of his return, into the grove, halted under the deep shadow of the mangos within thirty yards of the French detachment and fired a volley. The effect was instantaneous. Many of the French fell, the rest of them broke, the artillerymen abandoned their guns, and the whole fled away in confusion, they knew not whither, through the trees, with the British in pursuit. A building in the grove presented a refuge, and there the fugitives crowded in, not knowing what they did, one on the top of another until they were packed so tightly that they could not use their arms. The British presently came up with them and offered quarter, whereupon the whole of them surrendered as prisoners of war. Meanwhile the silence of the French battery told Clive of Keene's success, and his troops in the water-course regained their confidence. Presently a few of the fugitive French who had escaped capture came running up to their comrades with news of the disaster in the grove, and therewith the whole of the enemy's infantry in the water-course incontinently took to flight. The native cavalry was not slow to follow the example, and very soon all sign of an enemy had vanished and the victory was won. Clive gathered his men together, and the exhausted army lay under arms until the moon paled and the sun rose up to show what manner of victory it had won. On the field fifty French soldiers and three hundred Sepoys lay dead; sixty more French had been captured in the grove, and the whole of the French artillery was abandoned to the British. Of Clive's force forty Europeans and thirty Sepoys were killed and a still greater number wounded, no extravagant price to pay for so far-reaching a success.

For by Covrepauk not only was the work begun at Arcot completed but Trichinopoly was saved; not only was British military reputation established but supremacy in the south of India was wrenched from the French.[208] It was essentially a general's action, Clive's action; and when we reflect on the hours that preceded it, hours of continuous marching, doubtful information, and incessant anxiety, we can only marvel at the moral and physical strength which enabled him to present instantly a bold front, to keep his weary soldiers together during those four hours of fighting by moonlight, and to devise and execute the counterstroke which won the day.

From Covrepauk Clive marched on to Arcot, and was proceeding southward from thence when he was recalled to Fort St. David, to command an expedition which was preparing for the relief of Trichinopoly. On his way he passed the growing city which was to commemorate the victories of Dupleix and razed it to the ground;[236] but he met with no trace of an enemy. Raju Sahib's army had dispersed; the French and their Sepoys had been recalled to Pondicherry; and Raju Sahib himself, on returning thither from the scene of his defeat, was received by Dupleix with a displeasure and contempt which showed how deeply the dart of Clive's victory was rankling in the breast of the ambitious Frenchman.

Meanwhile, through all these months the French had maintained the siege of Trichinopoly, feebly indeed but persistently. In September 1751 their battering train had arrived and batteries had been erected before the town, but, like Boscawen's before Pondicherry, at too great a distance to do effectual damage. In fact the French commander, Law, a nephew of the famous Scottish financier, had proved himself both unenterprising[209] and incompetent. The force under his orders comprised the unparalleled number of nine hundred French troops and two thousand Sepoys, over and above the thirty thousand native levies of Chunda Sahib; yet he had effected little or nothing. He was now to be put to a sterner test than the mere blockading of an inferior force under an inactive leader. The supreme command of the expedition for the relief of Trichinopoly was indeed taken from Clive at the last moment, but only to be transferred to Stringer Lawrence, who had just returned from England. Moreover Clive was to accompany Lawrence as a trusted subordinate, so that the change signified only the presence of two officers of conspicuous ability instead of one. Dupleix's instructions to Law were explicit: to leave the least possible number of his troops to continue the blockade of Trichinopoly, and to march out with the rest to intercept the relieving army.
March 17 28 .

On the 28th of March Lawrence started from Fort St. David at the head of four hundred Europeans and eleven hundred Sepoys, together with eight guns and a large convoy of stores. The distance to be traversed was about one hundred and fifty miles, and the way was barred by several rivers. The most important of these was the Coleroon, which a few miles above Trichinopoly parts itself into two branches, the northern branch retaining the name of Coleroon while the southern becomes the Cauvery. It is on the south bank of the Cauvery, and about three miles below the parting of the streams, that Trichinopoly stands. The long narrow strip of land between the two branches is called the island of Seringham, on which, about fifteen miles below and to eastward of Trichinopoly, stood the fort of Coilady, barring the advance of any enemy from that side. About six miles up the river from Coilady the Cauvery splits again into two branches, and it was along the narrow delta between these two branches that the advance of Lawrence must necessarily be made. The ordinary road passed within range of the guns of Coilady[210] across the Cauvery; and Law, assuming that the British would certainly follow it, threw the whole of his intercepting army into the fort. Lawrence, on learning of this disposition, naturally looked for another road, and although, by an error of his guides, the British did come under the fire of Coilady and suffer some loss, yet Law took no advantage of the favourable moment. Lawrence therefore was able to cross the river and to advance on the same evening to within ten miles of Trichinopoly.

On the following day Law took up a position astride of the direct road to Trichinopoly, extending obliquely from the village of Chukleypollam on the south bank of the Cauvery past a rocky eminence known as French Rock, whereon he had mounted cannon, and thence to another almost inaccessible rock called Elimiseram. Lawrence, apprised of these dispositions, made a circuit to southward which carried him outside Elimiseram, and a mile beyond it effected a junction with a detachment of the garrison which had been sent forward to meet him under Captain Dalton. Law now made a feeble and half-hearted attempt at an attack; but the action soon resolved itself into a duel of artillery, from which the French retired with heavy loss, leaving Lawrence to enter Trichinopoly unmolested.
April 1 12 .
April 6 17 .

A few days later Law, taking fright at a threatening movement of the British against some of his native levies, resolved forthwith to withdraw from the south of the Cauvery to the island of Seringham. In such haste did he execute this pusillanimous decision that he abandoned most of his baggage, destroyed vast quantities of stores, and left a small garrison isolated at Elimiseram, which was promptly captured by the British. Clive then proposed to cut matters short by dividing the British forces into two bodies, one to remain to the south of the Cauvery, the other to cross without delay to the north bank of the Coleroon, in order to cut off the supplies of the French and sever their communications with Pondicherry. Lawrence assented, and on the[211] night of the 17th of April four hundred British, seven hundred Sepoys and four thousand Mahratta and Tanjorine horse, together with six field-guns, crossed the Cauvery and Coleroon under Clive himself, and took up a position at Samiaveram, about nine miles north of Seringham, on the road to Pondicherry.
March 30 April 10.
April 15 26 - 16 27 .

Meanwhile Dupleix with unconquerable energy had, on the news of Law's retreat, despatched one hundred and twenty Europeans and four hundred Sepoys to him under M. d'Auteuil. Leaving Pondicherry on the 10th of April, D'Auteuil marched to within fifteen miles of Clive's position at Samiaveram, and resolved to advance from thence by a circuitous route to the Coleroon in order to avoid him. Clive, however, having intercepted one of the messengers sent by D'Auteuil to apprise Law of his intentions, moved out to meet him; whereupon D'Auteuil, learning in turn of Clive's advance, retreated to Uttatoor, while Clive on his side hastened back to Samiaveram. Meanwhile Law, hearing of Clive's departure from Samiaveram but not of his return, sent a force of eighty Europeans, forty of whom were British deserters, and seven hundred Sepoys to attack his camp, as he supposed, during his absence. At midnight of the 26th of April Law's party approached the English encampment. Clive, never dreaming of such enterprise on the part of the French commander, was in bed and asleep. As the French drew nearer they were challenged by a sentry of the British Sepoys; but the officer of the deserters, an Irishman, stepped forward and explained that he was come with a reinforcement from Major Lawrence, and the sentry, hearing the deserters speak English, allowed them, after some hesitation, to pass. The British troops at Samiaveram occupied two pagodas a quarter of a mile apart, and the native troops were encamped around them. The French marched through the heart of the natives' camp and came to the smaller of the two pagodas, near which Clive was sleeping under an open shed in his palanquin. Here they were again challenged. They answered by firing a volley into both[212] pagoda and shed, and then, pressing into the pagoda, put all within it to the sword.
April 16 27 .

Clive, startled out of his sleep, and never doubting but that the fire was the result of a false alarm, ran to the greater pagoda, turned out two hundred of his Europeans and hurried back with them to the shed. Here he found a large body of French Sepoys drawn up before it and firing incessantly at they knew not what, but in the direction of Seringham. Confirmed by this circumstance in the idea that these were his own men, for the darkness obliterated all distinctions of dress, he drew up his Europeans in their rear and ran in among them, rebuking and even striking them for what he supposed to be their panic. For some minutes this absurd position remained unchanged, until one of the Sepoys discovering at last that Clive was a Englishman, attacked him and wounded him in two places with his sword. Clive turned upon him instantly, and the Sepoy finding himself overpowered fled into the pagoda pursued by Clive, who was now in the highest pitch of exasperation over what he conceived to be the mutinous behaviour of one of his own men. To his amazement Clive was accosted at the gate by six Frenchmen; and then at last he was undeceived. With astonishing composure he told them that he was come to offer them terms, and invited them to see his whole army drawn up ready to attack them. Completely deceived by his confidence the French surrendered; and Clive then prepared to attack the Sepoys, but found that they were already withdrawn out of reach of his Europeans. There still remained, however, the larger force of the enemy's Europeans, including the British deserters, which had occupied the greater pagoda. These last refused to surrender, and made so desperate a resistance that at daybreak Clive approached them to open a parley. Owing to weakness from loss of blood he was obliged to lean on the shoulders of two sergeants; but the officer of the deserters, whether through desperation or sheer brutality, at once presented a musket at him and fired.[213] The bullet missed Clive but wounded both of the sergeants to death; whereupon the French soldiers, fearing that their apparent connivance with such an act might debar them from any claim to quarter, immediately laid down their arms. All the Europeans of the enemy's force being now secured, the Mahratta horse was despatched in pursuit of the retreating Sepoys, whom they overtook before they had reached the Coleroon and cut down to a man. Thus for the second time did Clive's marvellous presence of mind not only pluck himself and his troops out of deadly peril, but turn his enemies' devices with terrible retribution upon their own head.
April 26 May 7.
April 28 May 9.
June 2 13 .

After this repulse the toils closed rapidly round the French in Seringham. On the 7th of May Lawrence captured the fort of Coilady together with all the stores therein and cut off Law from communication with the east; and after this little remained to be done except to dispose of D'Auteuil, who still lingered at Uttatoor waiting for an opportunity to effect a junction with Law. On the 9th of May Lawrence detached Captain Dalton with five hundred Europeans and Sepoys and as many Mahratta horse to oust him; a task which Dalton accomplished by making such a display of his force that D'Auteuil, conceiving Clive's whole army to be upon him, retreated after a faint resistance to Volconda. In the course of the next few days Clive captured an important post which severed Law's communications with the north and commanded the camp of Seringham. Thereupon the greater part of Chunda Sahib's army deserted, some of the men even taking service with Clive. Shortly afterwards the British crossed the Cauvery and established themselves on the island of Seringham itself, hemming the French in closer and closer. Then D'Auteuil, roused by the desperate state of his comrade, took courage and again moved southward from Volconda. Clive was at once despatched with a force to Uttatoor to meet him; but D'Auteuil's heart again failed him when he arrived within seven miles of that[214] position, and he retreated hastily towards Volconda. He was not, however, to escape thus easily. Clive at once pushed forward the Mahrattas to harass him on the march; his Sepoys, veterans of Arcot, marched their swiftest after the Mahrattas and opened the attack by themselves; and last of all the British, who had been unable to keep pace with the Sepoys, arrived at the scene of action, when D'Auteuil, seeing resistance to be hopeless, surrendered. His force consisted of but one hundred Europeans and less than eight hundred Sepoys and natives, of whom the latter were at once disarmed and released. Thus vanished Law's last hope of relief. Chunda Sahib in vain urged him to make a sally against the divided forces of the British, and to cut his way out to Carical. Law would not move. On the 13th of June he surrendered; and eight hundred French troops and two thousand Sepoys became prisoners of war, while forty-one pieces of artillery passed into the hands of the victors. A few days later Chunda Sahib, who had made terms of surrender for himself, was treacherously assassinated by order of the Tanjorine General, and his head was sent to his successful rival, Mohammed Ali. Thus for the present ended the long agony of the contest for Trichinopoly. To all appearance Dupleix was really beaten at last; but his resources were not yet exhausted, and the last battle had not yet been fought before the city on the Cauvery.
CHAPTER III
June 7 18 .

No sooner was the victory gained at Trichinopoly than the Nabob Mohammed Ali and his allies the Mysoreans and Mahrattas fell at variance over the division of the spoil. This complication, which was due in great measure to the intrigues of Dupleix, thoroughly answered his purpose; for the British, who had marched northward as far as Uttatoor to prosecute the campaign in the Carnatic, found themselves obliged to return to Trichinopoly. Finally two hundred Englishmen and two thousand Sepoys under Captain Dalton were left in the city to keep the peace; the Mahrattas and Mysoreans still keeping their former position to westward of the city, and occupying, by leave of Mohammed Ali, the pagoda which formed the strongest post on the island of Seringham. The remainder of the British army then resumed its march to northward, but with all hope of future operations frustrated by this untoward diminution of its strength. Advancing by Volconda and Verdachelum Lawrence on the 17th of July took Trivady, which was held by a small party of French Sepoys, and there left the army, to return to Fort St. David on sick-leave. Clive had already proceeded thither for the same reason, and the British force was left under the command of Major Gingen, an officer of tried incapacity.

Meanwhile Dupleix's activity had never ceased. While the native confederates were quarrelling over the success at Trichinopoly the annual reinforcement of troops arrived from France, and these, by dint of taking sailors from the ships, he increased to a strength of five[216] hundred European soldiers. This done he waited only for an opportunity for retrieving the reputation of the French arms. Such an opportunity soon came. Yielding to the fanciful representations of Mohammed Ali, but contrary to the wishes of Lawrence, Governor Saunders ordered Gingen to detach a portion of his force against the fortress of Gingee. Gingen accordingly told off two hundred Europeans, fifteen hundred Sepoys and six hundred native cavalry for the task, the command being entrusted to Major Kinnear, an officer only recently arrived from Europe and wholly without experience of India. What the object of such an enterprise can have been it is difficult to divine. Gingee, it is true, was above all fortresses in India bound up with the glory of France, and its capture would therefore have dealt a blow at French military reputation; but Gingee, held by trained troops under an European commander, was not to be taken again as Bussy had taken it, when defended by undisciplined natives only. Kinnear on approaching the fortress perceived his task to be hopeless, and while still hesitating as to his movements found that Dupleix had moved a French force, under command of his nephew, M. Kerjean, in his rear, to cut off his communications with Trivady. Nothing daunted Kinnear faced about and attacked Kerjean, but was repulsed with heavy loss; and the native princes, finding their faith in the invincibility of the British thus disappointed, began again to veer round to the side of the French. Most opportunely also for himself Dupleix received at this time the confirmation from Delhi of his appointment of Nabob of the country south of the Kistnah. With his usual cleverness he selected Raju Sahib, the son of Chunda Sahib, to hold the post subject to himself, thus reasserting himself as Dupleix the king-maker. Strengthened by this accession of dignity he renewed his intrigues with the Mysoreans and Mahrattas, who engaged themselves to embrace the side of the French if Dupleix would find means to distract the principal[217] British army from Trichinopoly and leave them free to do what they would with the city. Dupleix accordingly as a first step reinforced Kerjean to a strength of two thousand trained men, one-fourth of them Europeans, and five hundred native horse, and sent him to blockade Fort St. David and cut its communications with Trichinopoly.
Aug. 17 28 .
Aug. 26 Sept. 6.

Lawrence on learning of this movement at once embarked from Fort St. David for Madras, and marched from thence with a force nearly equal to Kerjean's to attack him. Kerjean, however, fell back, closely followed by Lawrence, until he was within a league of Pondicherry and on French soil, where Lawrence's instructions forbade him to take aggressive action. Lawrence thereupon, as though in dread of a regular engagement, retreated with precipitation to Bahoor, two miles from Fort St. David, in the hope that Kerjean would pursue him. Kerjean and his master Dupleix with him both fell into the snare; and the French force advancing in pursuit of the British encamped within two miles of Bahoor. At three o'clock on the following morning the British force marched off to attack him, the Sepoys seventeen hundred strong in the first line, the English four hundred strong in the second, while four hundred native horse advanced parallel to them on the farther side of a high bank which ran from the right of Lawrence's position to the French camp. A little before dawn the British Sepoys struck against the French outposts and skirmished with them until daylight, when the battalion of French soldiers, stronger by fifty men than that of the British, was discovered drawn up between the bank and a large pond. The British halted to extend their front to equal that of the French, a French battery of eight guns playing upon them vigorously as they executed the movement, and then advanced firing, platoon after platoon. Closer and closer they came, still firing; but the French never shrank for a moment until, rarest of rare incidents, the bayonets crossed and the two battalions engaged each[218] other fiercely hand to hand. At length, however, a company of British grenadiers, the choicest troops in India, forced its way though the French centre; upon which the whole of the French gave way, flung down their arms and fled. Had the native cavalry then charged as they were bidden they would utterly have annihilated Kerjean's troops, but according to their custom they preferred to plunder the French camp. The loss of the French in killed and wounded is unknown, but Kerjean himself with fifteen other officers and one hundred men were taken prisoners. The British battalion lost four officers and seventy-eight men killed and wounded, a sufficient proof of the stubbornness of the fight.

Signal though this victory might be, Lawrence did not think it prudent to venture on further operations until he could ascertain whether the Mahrattas, always wavering since the dispute after the expulsion of the French from Trichinopoly, would finally attach themselves to the British or to their enemies. He therefore moved to Trivady, designing to reduce the country northward between Pondicherry and the river Paliar. Meanwhile the Nabob Mohammed Ali requested that the forts of Chinglapet and Covelong, which commanded a considerable tract of country north of the Paliar, might be captured. The only troops that could be furnished from Madras for the purpose were two hundred English recruits, the sweepings of the streets of London, and five hundred newly raised Sepoys as untrained as the English. It was unpromising material, but Clive volunteered to take the command, and to Clive the task was entrusted. The force accordingly marched, taking four siege-guns with it, from Madras on the 10th of September; its first destination being Covelong, a walled fort on the coast, which was held by fifty Europeans and three hundred Sepoys. On arriving before it Clive sent forward a detachment to a garden within a short distance of the fort, where it was attacked by the French. Unfortunately the officer[219] commanding the British was killed, whereupon the men at once took to their heels. By good luck they ran against Clive and the main body in their flight, and by dint of blows and curses they were with some difficulty rallied and brought back to the garden, which was evacuated by the French on their approach. On the following day Clive began the erection of a battery, but it was only with the greatest trouble and by constant exposure of himself to the enemy's fire that he could induce his men to stand. On the third day of the siege intelligence reached Clive that a French force, little inferior in numbers to his own, was advancing from Chinglapet to the relief of Covelong. With his usual audacity he at once led half of his miserable troops forth to meet it; but the terror of his name sufficed to awe the French commander into a precipitate retreat. Thereupon the garrison of Covelong surrendered, and Clive on taking possession of the fort found therein fifty guns which had been taken from Madras by La Bourdonnais.
Oct. 31 Nov. 11.

At daybreak of the following morning Ensign Joseph Smith discovered a considerable force moving forward upon Covelong, and concluding that it must be the French again advancing from Chinglapet, posted such troops as were with him in ambuscade and hastened to inform Clive. The conjecture proved to be correct. The French marched straight into the ambuscade, where the troops, which Clive had taken over less than a week before as a spiritless, undisciplined rabble, poured in so deadly a fire that within a few minutes they struck down a hundred men. The attack was so unexpected that half of the French force stood rooted to the ground with fear. The commanding officer, with a score more of Europeans, two hundred and fifty Sepoys and two guns were captured, and the remainder, throwing down their arms, rushed away in terror to Chinglapet. Clive resolved to follow them while the panic was still alive. The fort of Chinglapet, though of native construction, was designed with more than ordinary native skill; it[220] mounted fifteen guns and was held by forty Europeans and five hundred Sepoys. Clive hastened to traverse the thirty miles that separated it from Covelong, and after four days' cannonade succeeded in making indeed a breach, though not such a breach as in the least to endanger the safety of the fort. But the terror of his name was again potent, and the garrison surrendered the place on condition that it should march out with the honours of war, terms which Clive was very well content to grant. Thus the country to the north of the Paliar, from the mouth of the river to Arcot, was subjected to the allies of the British, all by a handful of men who, starting as raw and villainous recruits, returned, under the magic of Clive's leadership, as heroes. This instance of his power is the more remarkable inasmuch as throughout the expedition he was in bad health, which indeed forced him to sail for England as soon as he had completed the work. His departure from India was more valuable than a victory to Dupleix.
1753.
Jan. 3.

Meanwhile, despite these successes and Lawrence's brilliant action at Bahoor French influence was, on the whole, decidedly on the gaining hand. Within six weeks of Bahoor, thanks to the indefatigable intrigues of Dupleix, both Mysoreans and Mahrattas had alienated themselves from the English and openly attached themselves to the French cause. Dalton had from the first been troubled by conspiracies and other mischievous designs of the Mysoreans in Seringham, which compelled him to take precautions in Trichinopoly as elaborate as though he were in presence of an enemy. Dupleix, seeing that affairs were going as he wished, promised to send some Europeans to help the Mysoreans in Seringham; and the Mysoreans, thus encouraged, moved a step further forward and suborned the Mahrattas to cut off supplies from the city. It was now useless for the authorities at Madras longer to pretend to treat the Mysoreans otherwise than as enemies. Accordingly, early in January 1753 Dalton attempted a surprise of their camp in Seringham, which though at first successful[221] was eventually repulsed with the serious loss of seventy Europeans and three hundred of the best Sepoys. Thus the struggle for Trichinopoly, the darling object of Dupleix's ambition, was reopened, and reopened by a reverse to the British. Dalton, undismayed though fully alive to the significance of his failure, now turned all his attention to the defence of the city.
March.

His situation indeed was most critical. Even before his sortie he had discovered that but three weeks' supplies were left to him, and had urged Lawrence to march to his relief; and now not only were his communications with the north severed by the hostile occupation of Seringham, but a force of eight thousand men had entrenched itself at a place called Fakir's Tope, four miles to south-west of the city, to intercept all supplies from the south. Meanwhile, to divert the British from Trichinopoly, Dupleix had skilfully engaged Lawrence in a campaign of petty, harassing operations on the river Pennar; while the Mahrattas scoured every part of the Carnatic from the Paliar to the Coleroon, insulting even the fortifications of Fort St. David. Lawrence in vain strove to bring the French to action. They were following the tactics of Saxe in the Low Countries, always present and therefore always a danger, but always entrenched to the teeth against attack. Finally, after an unsuccessful attempt to storm their entrenchments, Lawrence resolved to adopt the course so often urged by Ligonier in Flanders, to carry the war into some other quarter. So far his operations had proved a failure, and the reputation of the British had accordingly waned paler than ever in the eyes of the native princes. He was still hesitating as to the choice of a new theatre of operations when his mind was made up for him by the receipt of Dalton's letters from Trichinopoly.
April 21 May 2.
May 6 17 .

Throwing a garrison of one hundred and fifty British and five hundred Sepoys as a garrison into Trivady, he marched with the remainder by Chillumbrum, Condoor, and Tanjore for Trichinopoly, and entered the city unmolested on the 17th of May. Dalton had not been[222] inactive during the interval, and had done his best to clear the way for his coming by scaring the enemy from their position at Fakir's Tope. Nevertheless Lawrence's men had suffered greatly on the march. Several died from the effects of the heat, others were sent back to Fort St. David, and no less than a hundred were carried straight into hospital at Trichinopoly. Finally, there was much desertion, in particular from a company of Swiss which had been sent down from Bengal. Thus, even including such men of the garrison as could be spared from duty in the city, he could muster no more than five hundred Europeans, two thousand Sepoys, and three thousand native horse for service in the field. To add to his difficulties Dupleix, on hearing of his march, had with his usual promptitude despatched M. Astruc with two hundred Europeans, five hundred Sepoys and four guns to join the Mahrattas and Mysoreans at Seringham, which force arrived at its destination only one day later than Lawrence himself. None the less, after granting his troops three days' rest Lawrence took the initiative with his wonted energy, crossed the river to Seringham with his infantry only, and made a daring attempt to drive the enemy from the island. Success was almost within his grasp, and the French were actually about to retreat when, by an unfortunate misadventure, the British troops were recalled just at the critical moment, and the enemy recovering themselves forced him to fall back. His loss was but slight, but he had seen sufficient to convince him that for the present he must confine himself to the defensive.

Meanwhile matters went ill with the British farther north. The French attacked Trivady and though twice repulsed succeeded, thanks to a mutiny among the garrison, in capturing it. A British detachment was also obliged to evacuate Chillumbrum through the treachery of the native governor. Thus the control of these districts was lost, and communication between Trichinopoly and Fort St. David was hampered, while swarms of banditti, pretending commissions from[223] Dupleix, levied contributions and spread lawlessness through the country. Finally Mortiz Ali, called from obscurity by Dupleix to replace Raju Sahib as Nabob of the Carnatic, commenced hostilities in the neighbourhood of Arcot and even destroyed a small British force. He was only restrained from further operations in that quarter by Dupleix who, always with his eye on Trichinopoly, persuaded him to detach three thousand of his Mahrattas to Seringham and added to them three hundred Europeans and a thousand Sepoys. The total force on the island after the arrival of this reinforcement amounted to four hundred and fifty Europeans, fifteen hundred well-trained and over a thousand imperfectly trained Sepoys, eight thousand Mysorean and over three thousand Mahratta horse, and a rabble of fifteen thousand native infantry. After many failures it seemed that Dupleix at last held the coveted Trichinopoly within his grasp.

As soon as these troops had joined them the French quitted Seringham, and crossing to the south side of the Cauvery encamped in the plain three miles to the north of Fakir's Tope. A mile to the south of Lawrence's position some mountains known as the Five Rocks rise out of the plain, on which he had always maintained a guard to secure the passage of his supplies from the south. Unfortunately Lawrence was obliged by sickness to withdraw from the camp to the city, and during his absence this guard was withdrawn. The French thereupon at once seized the Five Rocks and encamped there with their entire force, thus cutting Lawrence off not only from his supplies but from seven hundred of his Sepoys, who were on their way to him from the south with a convoy. The British commander's position was now almost desperate. His troops lost heart in the presence of overwhelming numbers, and desertion became frequent; Dupleix seemed to be nearer than ever to the capture of Trichinopoly.
June 26 July 7.

Lawrence had now but one post by which to communicate with the south, a rocky eminence known as[224] the Golden Rock, about half a mile to south-west of his camp, which he had occupied with two hundred Sepoys. On the 7th of July Astruc sallied forth from the French camp with his grenadiers and a large force of Sepoys to attack it, knowing that, if he could capture it, his artillery would force Lawrence to take refuge under the walls of Trichinopoly, where his surrender or retreat would be only a question of days. The Sepoys on the Golden Rock made a stout resistance, and Astruc presently ordered out the whole of his army to support the attack. Lawrence observing this detached a hundred Europeans to guard the camp, and marched with the rest of his force, a bare three hundred European infantry, eighty British artillerymen and five hundred Sepoys, to gain the position before the French army; but ere he could reach it Astruc by a desperate effort carried the Golden Rock and killed or captured every Sepoy of the guard. Lawrence saw the white flag of France flutter from the summit, and halted. Before the rock itself stood the French Sepoys with the grenadiers in support; on either flank of them the French artillery was playing on his own troops, in rear of the rock was the battalion of French, with the entire Mysorean army drawn up a cannon-shot behind him, while the Mahratta horse scoured the plain in small parties, continually menacing Lawrence's flanks and rear. The courage of the British rose to the occasion. After the tedious disappointing work with the French entrenchments on the Pennar they asked for nothing better than a brush with their old enemy in the open field. Lawrence saw with joy the spirit that was in them. A few words from him served to heighten it; and then he gave the order to his grenadiers to fix bayonets and storm the Golden Rock, while he himself with the rest of the troops should engage the entire army of the enemy. The men replied with three cheers: the bayonets sprang flashing from their scabbards, and the word was given to advance.

Forward strode the grenadiers, at great speed but in perfect order, with the best of the Sepoys after them,[225] forward to the base of the Rock, heedless of the spattering fire from above them, forward to the ascent of it, forward without dwelling or firing a shot to the summit; while the enemy, not daring to await the shock of their onset, scrambled headlong down in terror to the plain. Meanwhile Lawrence, with his men in beautiful order, was moving in column round the western side of the Rock, with the design of falling on the left flank of the French battalion. Astruc thereupon changed front to the left to meet him, resting his right flank upon the Rock; but the movement was hardly completed when the British column with admirable precision wheeled into line to its left and halted squarely before him, not more than twenty yards away. Astruc called to his men to reserve their fire till the rest of his troops should deploy and encompass Lawrence's handful of infantry; when to his amazement, for he had not seen the advance of the British grenadiers, a heavy fire from the Rock struck full and true against his right flank and flung it staggering back. The French line wavered. Lawrence's men poured in one crushing volley, and before the French ranks could be closed the British bayonets came gleaming through the smoke, and Astruc's battalion was broken up in hopeless confusion. A few rounds of grape from a British field-gun completed the disorder, and the whole of the French infantry fled for refuge to the rear of the Mysoreans, leaving their guns in the hands of their victors. The Mahratta cavalry dashed forward to cover their retreat, and cut down a few of the British grenadiers who had run forward to secure the captured guns; but they strove in vain to pierce the phalanx of bayonets about the main body and were repulsed with heavy loss. Lawrence halted at the foot of the Rock for three hours, anxious only to renew the fight, and then prepared to retire to his camp, leaving the French to occupy the Golden Rock again if they dared.

Then came the critical operation of a retreat across the plain among the swarms of the enemy's horse. The three captured guns were placed in the centre,[226] the infantry was formed in platoons on each flank, the British field-guns distributed in the front, rear and intervals of the column. Against these two parallel lines of eight hundred resolute men not even the rush of ten thousand cavalry could prevail. The infantry halted at the word with ordered arms as coolly as on parade, and the gunners waited calmly, linstock in hand, while the wild horsemen whirled up to them, till the signal was given and a shower of grape laid men and horses in scores upon the plain. The havoc wrought by the British artillery and the sight of the infantry steady and immovable, reserving their fire, was too much for the native cavalry. They broke and fled in all directions, and Lawrence marched proudly back to his camp, having fought an action as skilful, as gallant, and as daring as ever was won by British officer on the blood-stained plains of India.

The victory not only ensured the safe arrival of Lawrence's convoy from the south, but set the French and their allies at variance, Mysoreans and French mutually reproaching each other, and the Mahrattas impartially blaming both. Astruc resigned his command and was succeeded by M. Brennier, who continued the blockade of Trichinopoly. Lawrence being weak in numbers resolved not to hazard another general action, but marched with his army into Tanjore, with the double object of meeting a reinforcement that was on its way from Madras, and of persuading the wavering king to take his side and to furnish him with some native horse. He was successful in both matters, and after a month's absence turned back towards Trichinopoly, having obtained three thousand horse and two thousand foot from Tanjore, and one hundred and seventy Europeans and three hundred Sepoys from Fort St. David.
August 9 20 .

On entering the plain with a large convoy Lawrence was warned by signals from Trichinopoly that the French were awaiting him. Their cavalry was drawn up between the Golden Rock and another eminence, called the Sugar-loaf Rock, about a mile to the east of[227] it. The Golden Rock itself was occupied by a detachment, but the main body of the enemy's infantry and the whole of their artillery was formed up by the Sugar-loaf Rock, that being the point where Lawrence, whose advance was from the south-east, would first come within their reach. Lawrence on perceiving their dispositions resolved to hold on his course straight westward, keeping his convoy wide on his left or unexposed flank, and so to move round the Golden Rock and wheel northward upon the city. It was, however, imperative that he should capture the Golden Rock at whatever cost, since that position commanded the entire space between it and Trichinopoly. To conceal his intention he halted the army a mile to south-east of the Sugar-loaf and bade the convoy march on alone, at the same time detaching his grenadiers and eight hundred Sepoys with orders to defile westward under cover of the convoy, and at the right moment to move as swiftly as possible to the attack of the Golden Rock.

Brennier, with no eyes for anything but Lawrence's menacing attitude before the Sugar-loaf Rock, hastily recalled most of the detachment from the Golden Rock to his main position. Then, perceiving too late the advance of the British grenadiers, he despatched a thousand native horse at full gallop to check them, and sent three hundred infantry to reinforce the party on the Rock. But the cavalry dared not charge home upon the grenadiers, who without slackening their pace for an instant swarmed up the Rock, drove out the enemy, and planted their flag on the summit. The French reinforcement lost heart at the sight and halted, and Brennier, who was advancing with the main army, halted likewise, giving time to Lawrence to bring the whole of his force up to the Golden Rock. Brennier then opened a destructive fire of artillery upon the British, but for some reason left the reinforcement, which had failed to reach the Golden Rock, still standing alone and unsupported. Lawrence therefore detached the grenadiers and five hundred more[228] Europeans and Sepoys to cut off this isolated party before Brennier's main body could reach it, giving orders that it should be broken up with the bayonet. These troops suffered much from the fire of the French cannon during their advance, and the officer in command hesitated to attack; whereupon Lawrence himself galloped to their head, and the French not caring to await the shock turned and fled. Dalton, who had been watching the fight from Trichinopoly, now came up in their rear with a couple of field-guns and completed their discomfiture. Then too late Brennier set the main body in motion; but these seeing the defeat of their comrades ran off in confusion to the Five Rocks, with the British guns from the Golden Rock playing on them all the way. This little combat cost the French about one hundred and the British about forty killed and wounded; but its moral effect was great, since it showed Brennier to be as helpless as a child in presence of such a commander as Lawrence.
Aug. 24 Sept. 4.
Aug. 26 Sept. 6.

After the action the French retreated to Weycondah, a strongly fortified post some two miles west of the city, where they entrenched themselves; but quitted this stronghold in confusion at the mere menace of an attack by Lawrence, and retired to the south bank of the Cauvery. A few weeks more under Brennier would probably have brought the French to a pitch of demoralisation which would have simplified Lawrence's task not a little; but just at this moment the energy of Dupleix again turned the tables against the British. Four hundred Europeans, two thousand Sepoys, and several thousand native troops arrived to reinforce the French, and, more important still, Astruc arrived with them to take the command out of Brennier's hands. Once more, therefore, Lawrence was thrown on the defensive, and forced back to his old position at Fakir's Tope. The French likewise moved round to southward of him, resuming their old position between the Golden and Sugar-loaf Rocks; and in this posture the two armies remained, looking at each other across two[229] miles of open plain without firing a shot. At last on the 30th of September Lawrence moved round to the French Rock, off the south-east side of the town, to meet a reinforcement which was on its way to him from the eastward, and brought it in successfully on the same evening. The reinforcement consisted of three hundred Sepoys and of two hundred and thirty-seven Europeans, which latter had just arrived from England, together with an officer who was soon to become famous, Captain Caillaud. Small though it was, and very far from sufficient to equalise the disparity of numbers between the British and the enemy, its arrival raised the army's spirits not a little; and Lawrence, straitened for supplies and fuel, resolved to bring the enemy to a general action and, if necessary, to attack them in their camp.
Sept. 20 Oct. 1.

Sending his baggage under cover of night to Trichinopoly, he withdrew from the garrison every European that could be spared, a bare hundred men, appeared at daybreak at his old position of Fakir's Tope, and offered battle. The enemy declining to meet him, he determined to attack them on the morrow. The French camp fronted towards the north, extending both east and west of the Sugar-loaf Rock. The Mahrattas were encamped to the east, and the French close to the west of the Sugar-loaf, while beyond the French the Mysoreans prolonged the line westward almost to the Golden Rock. The rear of the camp was covered by jungle and rocky ground; the front of the French quarters was protected by an entrenchment, as was also that of the Mahratta camp; but along the rest of the line the field-works, though marked out, were still unfinished. The Golden Rock itself was held by one hundred Europeans, six hundred Sepoys, and two companies of native infantry, with two guns. The total strength of the French forces would seem to have been about six hundred Europeans, three thousand Sepoys, and from twenty to thirty thousand Mahrattas and Mysoreans, both horse and foot. Against them Lawrence[230] could pit an equal number of Europeans, two thousand Sepoys and three thousand Tanjorine horse. The battle therefore, if won, must be won by the General.
Sept. 21 Oct. 2.

The moon was shining brightly over the plain when Lawrence's army fell into its ranks before the camp and marched away in profound silence towards the Golden Rock. The British battalion, five hundred strong, led the van in column of three divisions, the grenadiers in the front; while six field-guns, with a hundred British artillerymen, were distributed equally on the flanks of each division. In rear of the British followed the Sepoys in two lines, and echeloned to the left rear of the Sepoys rode the Tanjorine horse. The troops had not proceeded far on the march when a heavy cloud floated across the moon and shrouded the plain in darkness. Still silently the columns pushed on through the gloom, and the grenadiers drew closer and closer to the familiar Rock which they had so often stormed; but no sign came from the enemy, until at last, when they were arrived within pistol shot, a challenge and a flash told them that they were discovered. Firing one volley they swarmed up the Rock on three sides at once, while the French, having barely time to snatch up their arms, emptied their muskets in a feeble, irregular fire, and fled hurriedly down to the plain. Such was their haste that they left their two field-guns undischarged, though these were ready and loaded with grape. The left of the French position being thus overpowered, Lawrence ordered the Tanjorine horse to move up before the French entrenchments; then wheeling his three divisions into line to the left, he formed the Sepoys in echelon in rear of each flank and ordered the whole to advance through the Mysorean camp upon the left flank of the French battalion. The men received the order with loud cheers, and the troops stepped off, the drums of the British beating the Grenadiers' March, the gunners advancing with lighted port-fires on the flanks of the divisions, and the Sepoys making wild music on their native instruments in rear.

[231]

The Mysoreans fled in all directions before the din, and the Sepoys kept up a constant fire on the swarms of fugitives before them; but the British, disdaining such ignoble game, marched proudly on with recovered arms and bayonets fixed. But the formation of the British was soon broken by the obstacles that confronted them in that dark march through the Mysorean camp; and presently the grenadiers, who kept the right of the line, were striding away in their old place in the front, having out-marched the second division, while the second division in its turn out-marched the third. The Sepoys having clear ground before them also came forward from their places in rear, and the artillery being unable to keep up was left to toil along as it might. Then broad spurts of flame flashed out from the darkness in the front, and the round shot from the French guns flew humming overhead far away to the west, where wild yells told that they had fallen among the hapless Mysoreans, their own allies. Onward marched the British, and soon the gleam of port-fires showed them more clearly where their enemy stood.

Meanwhile Astruc, perceiving by the flight of the fugitives from what quarter the attack was coming, was busy changing front to his left. His French battalion had already been drawn up with its face to the west, and two divisions, each of two thousand Sepoys, were hastening into their positions to support it on either flank; but in the darkness and confusion the division designed for his right flank mistook its direction and took post on the Sugar-loaf Rock. And now the dawn flushed up in the east and showed the white coats of the French battalion conspicuous in their line of battle, and the scarlet of the British, not, as they should have been, in line, but broken into echelon. The rear divisions quickened their pace to align themselves with their comrades in front, but before the formation could be completed the Sepoys on their right came into action and swept the Sepoys opposed to them off the ground with their very first volley. Then at last, when within twenty yards of the[232] enemy, the British battalion got into line, while Astruc, galloping backward and forward, repeated again and again the order that not a French musket must be discharged until the red-coats had fired. In the volleys that followed, Captain Kilpatrick, who commanded the grenadiers on the right, was desperately wounded; but Caillaud, instantly taking his place, wheeled the grenadiers round and fell upon the left flank of the French, which had been uncovered by the flight of their Sepoys. A crushing volley on this flank, followed by a charge with the bayonet, drove the French left crowding upon its centre, and a second deadly volley from the British centre and left completed the discomfiture of the whole line. Astruc strove in vain to rally his men; the grenadiers pressing on with the bayonet gave them no respite. Meanwhile also the British Sepoys on the left had pushed on against the Sugar-loaf Rock and dispersed the French Sepoys there, and the whole of the French army fled scattered and in disorder towards Seringham. Had the Tanjorine horse done its duty, the enemy would have suffered past recovery, but as usual it was far too busy with plunder to give a thought to pursuit. None the less the losses of the French were heavy. Of their Europeans a hundred were killed and wounded, and two hundred more, together with Astruc and ten of his officers, were taken prisoners; while the whole of their tents, baggage and ammunition, and eleven guns remained in Lawrence's hands. The loss of the British amounted to no more than forty killed and wounded, Lawrence himself being slightly hurt in the arm. So ended his third and most important victory before Trichinopoly.
Sept. 22 Oct. 3.
Oct., end.

On the very same evening Lawrence moved westward to besiege the fortified post of Weycondah, which was assaulted next day without orders by the Sepoys and carried by the resolution of an English sergeant belonging to one of their companies. Such was the spirit which Lawrence had infused into them that they emulated the exploits of King Harry's army after Agincourt.[233] Being assured of abundance of supplies by his victory, Lawrence now put his troops into cantonments at Coilady for the rainy season, detaching four hundred Sepoys and one hundred and fifty Europeans to strengthen the garrison of Trichinopoly. At about the same time Captain Dalton returned to Europe, resigning the command of the city to Lieutenant Harrison.
Nov., beginning.
Nov. 28 Dec. 9.

The French at Seringham being thoroughly cowed, Dupleix resorted as usual to intrigue to regain his lost ground, and by threats and promises contrived to detach the Tanjorines from the British alliance. The next step was to gain their active assistance for the French, and to this end he strengthened the troops at Seringham by a reinforcement of three hundred Europeans and matured preparations for a blow, great and daring in conception, which should neutralise all the successes of Lawrence; namely to surprise and storm Trichinopoly by night. On the morning of the 9th of December the attempt was made, and was within an ace of success. Six hundred Frenchmen escaladed the walls and surprised and bayonetted the Sepoys on guard; and had they obeyed their orders not to fire a shot, they must infallibly have taken the city. But in the elation of their first success they fired a volley which aroused the garrison. Lieutenant Harrison, with perfect presence of mind, made effective dispositions, and the attack was beaten back with a loss to the French of forty Europeans killed and nearly four hundred taken prisoners.
1754.

This reverse was a fatal blow to Dupleix, for, apart from the loss of so large a body of Europeans, the King of Tanjore determined to reject his overtures and reverted to his original predilection for the British. At the opening of 1754 therefore Dupleix approached Governor Saunders with proposals for peace in the Carnatic; for despite his misfortunes in the south he had, thanks to the skill of Bussy, good compensation in the spread of French influence in the northern provinces of the Deccan. The negotiations, however, soon broke down and the war was renewed.

[234]

Meanwhile the position of Lawrence before Trichinopoly was still, for all his victories, both anxious and critical. Owing to the numbers of French prisoners in the city he could muster but six hundred Europeans and eighteen hundred Sepoys for service in the field; whereas the enemy's European battalion was as strong as his own, their Sepoys thrice as numerous, and the Mahrattas and Mysoreans still with them in undiminished strength. Moreover, in February a stroke of good fortune revived the drooping spirits of the French. A British convoy destined for Trichinopoly was attacked by them and by their allies in overwhelming force and captured, the whole of its escort being either killed or wounded. This was by far the most serious reverse suffered by the British during the whole course of the war, for among the troops that were lost was the entire company of grenadiers which had done such magnificent service before Trichinopoly. This defeat greatly increased Lawrence's difficulty in obtaining supplies. He applied to the King of Tanjore for assistance in vain; and having lost one-third of his Europeans and five hundred Sepoys, his situation became perilous in the extreme.
May 12 23 .

A still greater misfortune followed. Lawrence himself fell dangerously ill, and it was not until after weeks of anxiety, by which time the army could hardly hold its ground for want of supplies, that there came at last a gleam of hope for the British. A convoy of stores being expected, Captain Caillaud was sent southward on the night of the 23rd of May with one hundred and twenty Europeans, five hundred Sepoys, and two guns to escort it into camp. The French having gained intelligence beforehand of this movement, despatched double that number of trained troops and guns, together with four thousand picked Mysorean horse, to occupy the position which Caillaud had designed for himself and to lie there in wait for him. Fortunately Caillaud made timely discovery of their whereabouts and decided to attack them forthwith, which he did with success, driving[235] them from a tank in which they were posted and occupying it himself. Not until the day broke did he realise the odds against which he had fought in the darkness and the numbers by which he was still menaced; but fortunately the sound of the firing had been heard in Trichinopoly, and Captain Polier, who commanded during Lawrence's illness, at once started with every man that could be spared to Caillaud's assistance. A French force started at the same time with him to intercept him; but Polier out-marching it, effected his junction with Caillaud without mishap. The British force thus united amounted to but three hundred and sixty Europeans and fifteen hundred Sepoys, with five guns: the task that lay before it was to fight its way back over the plain against seven hundred Europeans, five thousand Sepoys, and ten thousand horse, of which last fortunately none were Mahrattas. Forming two sides of a square the little force marched, not without loss but without serious molestation, over a mile of the plain to a second tank; and here the enemy closed round it, the Sepoys and cavalry on three sides and the French battalion on the fourth. But when the French advanced to the attack they were met by a fire of grape which in a few minutes laid a hundred of them on the ground and so staggered the rest that they wavered and halted. "Never, I believe," says Lawrence, "were two field-pieces better served than these." Caillaud, who was again in command owing to the disabling of Polier by two wounds, seized the moment to make a counter-attack, and the British poured in so deadly a volley of musketry that the French gave way and fled. Their officers exerted themselves to the utmost to rally them, but they would not stop until they were beyond range of cannon, nor even then would they return to the attack. After this there was little impediment to Caillaud's retreat. The loss of the French amounted to five hundred killed and wounded, of whom two hundred were Europeans; that of the British slightly exceeded two hundred, of whom rather more than a third were Europeans. Thus the much-needed[236] convoy was brought safely into camp; and the French were not a little disheartened by their repulse.

Lawrence accordingly took the opportunity to march into Tanjore, at once to confirm the vacillating king in his allegiance and to pick up a slender reinforcement which was waiting for him at Devicotah. Thereupon the French as usual moved round to the south side of Trichinopoly to cut off its supplies. Fortunately the garrison had now provisions for three months, for the Tanjorines, though quickly gained over to the British side, showed no eagerness to give active assistance; nor was it until the 17th of August that Lawrence re-entered the plain of Trichinopoly with twelve hundred Europeans, three thousand Sepoys, and five thousand of his hardly won allies. For the fourth time the French prepared to fight him, but would not carry the action beyond a duel of artillery, wherein they suffered much from the superiority of the British fire. In a few days they were again shut up in Seringham; and Lawrence went into cantonments for the rainy season.
Oct. 11.
1755.

At this time a squadron arrived on the coast from England under Admiral Watson, having on board the Thirty-ninth Foot, a small party of the Royal Artillery, and recruits for the Company's forces. The French likewise received reinforcements from Europe; but meanwhile they had lost the life and soul of their enterprise in India. At the beginning of August Dupleix was recalled to France, and three months later, in accordance with orders received from London and Paris, Governor Saunders and M. Godeheu, Dupleix's successor, agreed to a suspension of arms, which in the following January was expanded into a conditional treaty. The revenue of the territory gained by France during the war was computed at over eight hundred thousand pounds; the gains of the English were set down at less than a tenth of that sum. There could be no question as to the side which had reaped the greater advantage, thanks to the energy of Bussy and of Dupleix.

Yet Dupleix was now recalled; himself, the most[237] indefatigable of intriguers, falling a victim to obscure intrigues and jealousies at Versailles. This is no place wherein to treat of the grandeur of his ambition, the vast range of his designs, the incomparable adroitness with which he handled native princes, the insight with which he foresaw every danger, the constancy with which he faced every reverse, the resource whereby he repaired every misfortune, and the unfailing tenacity with which he clung to his purpose. Excepting Napoleon England has known no such dangerous and uncompromising enemy, nor can it be said that he was beaten even at the last. Yet after reading the story of the long struggle for Trichinopoly, it is difficult to believe that he would not have been beaten even had he remained in India. His panegyrists complain, not unjustly, that he was hampered by a dearth of able subordinates. It would be nearer to the truth to say that he was checked by an extraordinary abundance of able British officers, not one of them bearing high rank; by clerks such as Clive, by majors such as Lawrence, by captains such as Dalton, Kilpatrick, and Caillaud, lieutenants such as Harrison, ensigns such as Joseph Smith. These were the men who thrust the cup of success from his lips as often as he raised it to drink, until his own countrymen finally dashed it from his hand. And this is the true significance of our early wars in India to the student of British military history—the vast wealth of ability that lay, and doubtless still lies, latent among the junior officers of the British Army.

Authorities.—Orme's Military Transactions is the principal authority for the history of the war on the English side, next to which the Memoirs of Stringer Lawrence and Wilks's History of Mysore are the most valuable works in elucidation. Colonel Malleson has treated the subject from the French side in The French in India, to which may be added his two short lives of Clive and Dupleix, and his Decisive Battles of India. Malleson's work, however, requires to be carefully checked, since it contains more than a few inaccuracies of detail, and betrays marks of haste if not of carelessness. The French sources of information are enumerated by him.

BOOK IX CHAPTER I
From the East the course of our history leads us by rapid transition to the great continent of the West. The English claim to the sovereignty of North America dated from the reign of Henry the Seventh, under whose patronage Sebastian Cabot had made his great discoveries; but it was the Spaniards who first approached the unknown land and gave it the name of Florida, and it was a Frenchman, Denis of Honfleur, who first explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So also it was a Frenchman, Jacques Cartier, who gave its name to that noble river, and the name of Mount Royal or Montreal to the hill on which the city now stands. Full sixty years passed away before further attempt was made to found European settlements on the North American continent, and then English and French took the work in hand well-nigh simultaneously. In 1603 De Monts obtained permission from the French king to colonise Acadia,[237] discovered and planted the harbour called by him Port Royal and by the English at a later date Annapolis Royal, and explored the coast southward as far as that Plymouth where the Pilgrim Fathers were to land in 1621. The attempt of De Monts was a failure, and it was left to Samuel Champlain to begin the work anew by the founding of Quebec and by the establishment of Montreal at once as a gateway for Indian trade and a bulwark against Indian invasion.[242] To him was due the exploration of the river Richelieu and of the lake which bears his name, as far as the two headlands which were afterwards to become famous under the names of Ticonderoga and Crown Point. In Champlain's wake followed the Jesuit missionaries, whose history presents so curious a mixture of that which is highest and lowest in human nature. Lastly, to Champlain must be ascribed not only the final settlement of the French in Canada but the initiation of the French policy of meddling with the internal politics of the Indian tribes.
1613.

Meanwhile an English Company of Adventurers for Virginia had established a first settlement on the James river, just three-and-twenty years after Raleigh's abortive attempt to accomplish the same feat. The rival nations had not been settled in North America five years before they came into collision. The English claimed the whole continent in virtue of Cabot's discoveries, and the English Governor of Virginia enforced the claim by sending a ship to Acadia, which demolished the Jesuit settlement at Port Royal and carried the settlers prisoners to Jamestown.
1621.

A few years later a Scottish nobleman, Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Stirling, obtained a grant from James the First of the territory which, in compliment to his native land, he christened Nova Scotia, and planted a colony there. Finally, in 1627, during the war with France, a company of London merchants, inspired chiefly by two brothers named Kirke, sent an expedition up the St. Lawrence, which captured Quebec, established settlements in Cape Breton, and in a word made the conquest of Canada. Unfortunately, however, Charles the First, then as always impecunious, allowed these important acquisitions to be restored to France at the Peace of 1632 for the paltry sum of fifty thousand pounds. The conquering merchants protested but in vain, pleading passionately for the retention at any rate of Quebec. "If the King keep it," they wrote, "we do not care what the French or any other can do, though[243] they have an hundred sail of ships and ten thousand men."[238] So truly was appreciated, even in the seventeenth century, the strategic value of that famous and romantic fortress.
1654.
1667.

Still even so Acadia[239] was not yet permanently lost, for in 1654 Major Sedgwicke, who had been sent by Cromwell to attack the Dutch settlements on the Hudson, took the opportunity to capture the French ports at St. Johns, Port Royal and Penobscot, and restored Acadia to England once more. With England it remained until 1667, when it was finally made over to France by the Treaty of Breda. Thus was established the French dominion in what is now called Canada.
1621.

Meanwhile, in the same year as had seen the first British settlement in Nova Scotia, English emigrants had landed at New Plymouth and founded the New England which was destined to swallow up New France. King James granted the infant settlement a charter of incorporation, encouraged it, and in 1625 declared by proclamation that the territories of Virginia and New England should form part of his empire.[240] The next step was the foundation of a distinct colony at Massachusetts Bay in 1628, which was erected into a corporation two years later and soon increased to a thousand persons. In 1635 yet another settlement was formed at Connecticut by emigrants from Massachusetts; and in the same year the intolerance of his fellow-settlers in Massachusetts drove Roger Williams afield to found the colony of Rhode Island. Finally, in 1638, another secession brought about the establishment of New Haven. The settlers had left England, as they pleaded, to find liberty of conscience; but as the majority understood by this phrase no more than licence to coerce the consciences of others, the few that really sought religious liberty wandered far before they found it.

[244]
1644.

A very few years sufficed to assure the preponderance of Massachusetts in the Northern Colonies. It widened its borders, absorbed the scattered settlements of New Hampshire and Maine, and in 1644 took its place at the head of the four federated colonies of New England.[241] The distraction caused by the Civil War in Britain left the colonies practically free from all control by the mother country, and Massachusetts seized the opportunity to erect a theocracy, which was utterly at variance with the terms of her charter, and to assume, together with the confederacy of New England, the airs and privileges of an independent State. The ambitious little community coined her own money, negotiated with the French in Acadia without reference to England, refused to trade with other colonies that were loyal to the King's cause, resented the appointment by the Long Parliament of Commissioners for the administration of the colonies, and hinted to Cromwell that the side which she might take in the Dutch war of 1653 would depend entirely on the treatment which she might receive from him. As her reward she received the privilege of exemption from the restrictions of the Navigation Acts.
1660.
1684.

Then came the Restoration; and the confederacy of New England quickly fell to pieces. Connecticut received a separate charter, under which she absorbed New Haven; and Rhode Island obtained a separate charter likewise. Massachusetts being thus left isolated, Charles the Second determined to inquire into the many complaints made against her of violation of her charter. The colonists replied by setting their militia in order as if for armed resistance; but on reconsideration decided to fall back on smooth words, false promises, false statements, and skilful procrastination. Such methods might seem at first sight to be misplaced in a community of saints, such as Massachusetts boasted herself to be, but at least they were never employed without previous invocation of the Divine guidance. For twenty years[245] the colonists contrived to keep the Royal authority at arm's length, till at last, after long forbearance on the side of Whitehall, the charter was cancelled by legal process, and Massachusetts was restored to her dependence on the mother country.

In the course of these years the English settlements in North America had multiplied rapidly. Maryland had been granted to Lord Baltimore in 1632; Carolina was planted by a company in 1663; Delaware with New Jersey was assigned by patent to the Duke of York, afterwards James the Second, in 1664, and Pennsylvania to William Penn in 1680. In fact, by the close of Charles the Second's reign the British seaboard in North America extended from the river St. Croix[242] in the north to the river Savannah in the south. But of all England's acquisitions during this period the most momentous was that of the Dutch settlements on the Hudson, captured in 1664 by Colonel Nicolls, who gave to the town of New Amsterdam its now famous name of New York.[243] One chief advantage of New York was that it possessed a direct way to the west from Albany, on the Hudson, up the Mohawk River to Lake Oneida and so to Lake Ontario, whereby it had access to the great fur-trade with the Indians. But this consideration, important though it was commercially, paled before the strategical significance of the port of New York. No more simple method of explaining this can be found than to quote the belief held by many of the English emigrants before they sailed, that New England was an island. In a sense this is almost true, the country being surrounded by the sea, to north, east, and south, and by the rivers Hudson and St. Lawrence to the west. Champlain had already paddled up the Richelieu [246]to Lake Champlain with the design of passing through Lake George, carrying his canoes to the head-waters of the Hudson and re-embarking for a voyage down the river to the sea. He had in fact chosen the highway of lakes and rivers on which the principal battles for the possession of the New World were to be fought. The northern key of that highway was Quebec, the southern New York. France possessed the one, and England the other. The power that should hold both would hold the whole continent.
1670.
1673.
1678.
1680.

Let us now turn for a moment to the proceedings of the French during these same years. Unlike the English, who stuck sedulously to the work of making their settlement self-supporting by agriculture, they were intent rather on trading with the Indians for fur and exploring the vast territory which lay to south and west of them. To these objects may be added the salvation of the souls of the Indian tribes; for beyond all doubt it was zeal for the conversion, or at any rate for the baptism, of these savages that led the Jesuits through endless hardship and danger into the heart of the continent. As early as 1613 Champlain had travelled up the Ottawa by way of Lake Nipissing and French River to Lake Huron, returning by Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario. Jesuit missionaries followed the same track in 1634, and established a mission on the peninsula that juts out from the eastern shore of Lake Huron. From thence they spread to Lakes Superior and Michigan, erecting mission-houses and taking possession of vast tracts of land and water in the name of King Lewis the Fourteenth. Shortly after the restoration of King Charles the Second, Jean Talon, Intendant of Canada, formed the resolution of getting in rear of the English settlements and confining the settlers to a narrow strip of the sea-board; his plan being to secure the rivers that formed the highways of the interior, and to follow them, if they should prove to flow thither, to the Gulf of Mexico, so as to hold both British and Spaniards in check. A young adventurer, named Robert Lasalle, appeared at the right[247] moment as a fit instrument to his hand. In 1670 Lasalle passed through the strait, still called Detroit, which leads from Lake Huron to Lake Erie, reached a branch of the Ohio and made his way for some distance down that river. Three years later a Jesuit, Joliet, striking westward from the western shore of Lake Michigan, descended the Wisconsin and followed the Mississippi to the junction of the Arkansas. In 1678 an expedition under Lasalle explored the passage from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, and discovered the Falls of Niagara, where Lasalle, with immediate appreciation of the strategic value of the position, proceeded to build a fort. Finally, in 1680, Lasalle penetrated from the present site of Chicago on Lake Michigan to the northern branch of the River Illinois, paddled down to the Mississippi, and after five months of travel debouched into the Gulf of Mexico. He took nominal possession of all the country through which he passed; and the vast territory between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains from the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico to the uppermost waters of the Missouri were annexed to the French crown under the name of Louisiana.

The next step was to secure the advantages that should accrue from the discoveries of Lasalle. To this end the fort at Niagara had already been built; and Fort Frontenac was next erected at the northern outlet of Lake Ontario to cut off the English from trade with the Indians. At the strait of Michillimackinac, between Lakes Huron and Michigan, a Jesuit mission sufficiently provided for the same object. Besides these there were established Fort Miamis by the south-eastern shore of Lake Michigan, to bar the passage from the lake to the Upper Illinois, Fort St. Louis, near the present site of Utica, to secure the trade with the tribes on the plains of the Illinois, and yet another fort on the Lower Mississippi.
1682.
1687.
1688.
1689.

Such a monopoly of the Indian trade was by no means to the taste of the British and Dutch, nor of the Five Indian Nations, better known by the French name[248] of Iroquois, whom they had taken under their special protection. Nevertheless, in their simple plodding industry, their zeal for religious controversy and their interminable squabbles over their boundaries, the English colonies took little heed to what was going on in the continent behind them. One man alone saw the danger from the first, namely, Colonel Thomas Dongan, an officer who had begun his career in the French army, but had left it for the British, and after some service at Tangier had been sent out as Governor to New York. Dongan, however, was at first unsupported either by the Government at Whitehall or by the neighbouring colonies. His protests were vigorous to discourtesy, but he had small means for enforcing them. One resource indeed he did possess, namely the friendship of the Iroquois, who were the dominant tribes of the continent; for with all their subtle policy and their passion for interference with native affairs, the French had never succeeded in alienating the Iroquois—who covered the flank of New York and New England towards Canada—from their alliance with the British. Dongan therefore assiduously cultivated a good understanding with these Indians against the moment when he should be allowed to act. Meanwhile the French went yet further in aggression. They destroyed the factories of the Hudson's Bay Company; they treacherously entrapped and captured a number of Iroquois at Fort Frontenac, plundered English traders, and repaired and strengthened the fort built by Lasalle at Niagara. Dongan's indignation rose to a dangerous height; and now at last came a reply from England to his previous reports, and an order to repel further aggression on the Iroquois by force. Assembling a force of local militia at Albany he first insisted on the destruction of the fort at Niagara; and then the Iroquois burst in upon Canada and spread terror to the very gates of Montreal. It was just at this crisis that William of Orange displaced James the Second on the throne of England, and that war broke out between England and France. Therewith New[249] England and New France entered upon a conflict which was to last with little intermission for the next seventy years.

Judging from mere numbers the contest between the rival colonies should have been short, for the population of New England was over ninety thousand, whereas that of Canada did not exceed twelve thousand. But this disparity was more than equalised by other advantages of the French. In the first place, they were compact, united, and under command of one man, who was an able and experienced soldier. In the second, a large proportion of the inhabitants had undergone long military training, the French king offering bounties both of money and of land to officers and soldiers who should consent to remain in the colony. The chief delight of the male population was not the tilling of the soil; they loved rather to hunt and fish, and live the free and fascinating life of an Indian in the forest. Every man therefore was a skilful woodsman, a good marksman, a handy canoe-man, and in a word admirably trained for forest-fighting. Finally, there was a permanent garrison of regular troops, which never fell below, and very often exceeded, fifteen hundred men.

The English settler, on the other hand, knew little of the forest. When not engaged in husbandry he was a fisherman in his native heritage, the sea. Every colony had its own militia, which legally included, as a rule, the whole male population between the ages of sixteen and sixty. In the early days of North American settlement the colonists had been at pains to bring with them trained officers who could give them instruction in the military art. Such an officer was Miles Standish, who had served with the English troops in the Dutch service; such another was Captain John Underhill, who had fought in Ireland, Spain, and the Low Countries, and was reputed a friend of Maurice of Nassau. Under such leaders, in 1637, seventy-seven colonists had boldly attacked an encampment of four hundred Indian warriors and virtually annihilated them; giving, in fact, as fine an[250] exposition of the principles of savage warfare as is to be found in our history.[244] In 1653 again, New England, once assured of Cromwell's favour, made great and expensive preparations for an attack on the Dutch; and Massachusetts supplied two hundred volunteers to Nicolls for the capture of New York in 1664.
1680.
1686.

But as time went on the military efficiency of the colonies decreased; and in the war against the Indian chief, Philip, in 1671, the settlers suffered disaster upon disaster. The officers possessed neither skill nor knowledge; and the men, though they showed no lack of bravery and tenacity, were wholly innocent of discipline. Moreover, they shared the failing of the English militia of the same period, that they were unwilling to go far from their own homes. Again, since the confederacy of New England had been broken up, the jealousy and selfishness of the several provinces had weakened them for military efficiency. In the great peril of 1671 Rhode Island, being full of Quakers, would not move a finger to help her neighbours, and Connecticut, exasperated by extreme provocation, actually armed herself a few years later to inflict punishment on the cantankerous little community.[245] Within the several provinces again there was no great unanimity, and in fact in the event of a war with France every advantage of skill, of unity, and of prompt and rapid action lay with the French. James the Second, who saw the peril of the situation, tried hard to mend matters during his brief reign by uniting New England, New York, and New Jersey under the rule of a single governor, Sir Edmund Andros, an officer of the Guards. The experiment from one point of view was statesmanlike enough, but as it could not be tried without abolishing the representative assemblies of the various states, it defeated its own object by its extreme unpopularity.

[251]

The military aid furnished to the American colonies from home throughout this early period was infinitesimal. New England had never appealed to the mother country for help even in her utmost need. An independent company of regular troops was formed for the garrison of New York while the Duke of York was proprietor, and another company was also maintained for a short time in Virginia; but the first troops of the standing army to visit America were a mixed battalion of the First and Coldstream Guards, which crossed the Atlantic to suppress the Virginian rebellion of 1677. When Andros assumed his government in 1686 he brought with him a second company of soldiers from England. These were the first red-coats ever seen in Boston, and they have the credit of having taught New England to "drab, drink, blaspheme, curse and damn," a lesson which, as I understand, has not been forgotten. Thus though the militia of the colonies under Andros might muster a nominal total of ten or twelve thousand men, these two companies were all that he could have brought to meet the thirty-two or more companies of regular troops in Montreal and Quebec.
1689.

The outbreak of the war in 1689 brought back an efficient soldier, Count Frontenac, to the government of Canada. He knew the country well, having already served there as Governor from 1672 to 1682, and in that capacity seconded the great designs of Lasalle. On his arrival he at once made preparations for an advance on Albany by Lakes Champlain and George and for a rapid movement against New York. The project fortunately issued in no more than a general massacre of the inhabitants on the northern frontier of New York; but when that province called in alarm upon New England for assistance, it was found that Massachusetts had risen in revolution at the news of King James's fall, had imprisoned Andros, and through sheer perversity had cancelled all his military dispositions for the protection of New Hampshire and Maine. The Indians accordingly swept down upon the[252] defenceless borders and made frightful havoc with fire and sword.
1690.
1691.

In the following year the colonies of New York and New England met in congress and agreed to make a counter-stroke against Canada. More remarkable still, Massachusetts for the first time appealed to England for military aid in the furtherance of this enterprise; though, as may be guessed by those who have followed me through the story of King William's difficulties, the appeal was perforce rejected. The colonies therefore resolved to act alone, and despatched fifteen hundred troops by the usual line of inland waterways against Montreal, and thirty-two ships under Sir William Phips against Quebec. The expedition by land soon broke down on its way through dissension, indiscipline, and disease; and the fleet, though it made an easy conquest of Acadia, failed miserably before Quebec. The next year a small force from New York made a second futile raid into Canada; but for the most part the English colonies were content to hound on their Indian allies against the French. The French on their side retaliated in kind, and, as circumstances gave them opportunity, with still greater barbarity. Hundreds of defenceless settlers on the border were thus slaughtered without the slightest military advantage. Frontenac wrote repeated letters to his master urging him to determine the possession of the continent once for all by sending a fleet to capture New York; but either Lewis's hands were too full or he failed to appreciate the wisdom of Frontenac's counsel, for in any case, fortunately, he left New York unmolested.
1697.

The sphere of operations widened itself over Acadia and Newfoundland, and the war dragged on in a desultory fashion with raid and counter-raid, generally to the advantage of the French. To the last the English colonies were blind to the importance of the issue at stake. Jealous, self-centred, and undisciplined, many of them took no part whatever in the war; two only, New England and New York, rose to aggressive[253] action, which, though the stroke was wisely aimed against the tap-root of French power, failed utterly from lack of organisation and discipline. The French struck always at strategic points where their blow would tell with full force and weight. The colonists in their insane jealousy of the crown neglected the defence of these strategic points simply because it was enjoined by the mother country, and refused to provide the contingents of troops requested by the English commander-in-chief.[246] In fine, when the Peace of Ryswick ended the war, the French could reckon that they had achieved one great success; they had broken the power of the most formidable of the Indians, the Iroquois.

Massachusetts, which had suffered heavily from the war, found herself at its close obliged once more to invoke the assistance of England. In an address to the King she prayed for his orders to the several colonial governments to give their assistance against French and Indians, for a supply of ammunition, for the protection of a fleet, and for aid in the reduction of Canada, "the unhappy fountain," as they wrote, "from which issue all our miseries." So far, therefore, the war had taught one useful lesson; but, indeed, even at the time of her greatest disloyalty to the English crown Massachusetts had always soundly hated the French. Obviously closer union of the colonies for military purposes could not but be for the general advantage, and sundry schemes were prepared to promote it; but all alike were unsuccessful, though nothing could be more certain than that further trouble was ahead.
1702.
1707.
1709.

The renewal of war in 1702 brought the usual raids of Indians, stirred up by the French, upon the borders of the English colonies. These barbarous inroads, which meant the massacre and torture of innocent settlers, could serve no military end except to commit the Indians to hostility with the English, and naturally aroused the[254] fiercest resentment. The colonies, however, once again showed neither unity nor zeal for the common cause. New York evinced an apathy which was little short of criminal, Connecticut long held aloof, Rhode Island only after infinite haggling supplied grudging instalments of men and money. Massachusetts alone, true to her traditions, showed some vigour and spirit and actually made an attack on Port Royal in Acadia, choosing that point because it could be reached by sea. The expedition, however, failed with more than usual discredit owing to ignorance and unskilfulness in the commanders and utter indiscipline among the troops. Then the colonies wisely decided that it was useless to attempt to choke the fountain of all their miseries except at its head. An address was sent to Queen Anne praying for help in the conquest of Nova Scotia and Canada, which was favourably received; and for the first time operations were concerted for a joint attack of imperial and colonial troops upon the French in North America. England was to supply a fleet and five regiments of the regular Army, Massachusetts and Rhode Island were to furnish twelve hundred men more, and these forces united were to attempt Quebec; while fifteen hundred men from the other colonies, except from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which selfishly kept apart, were to advance upon Montreal by Lake Champlain. The troops of Massachusetts were mustered and drilled by British officers sent across the Atlantic for the purpose, and all signs pointed to a great and decisive effort. In due time the western contingent advanced towards Lake Champlain, by way of Albany and the Hudson, building on their way a fort at the carrying-place from the Hudson, which we shall know better as Fort Edward, and a second fort at Wood Creek, where the journey by water to Lake George was recommenced, called Fort Anne. There the little column halted, for the brunt of the work was to fall on the fleet which was expected from England. The weeks flew on, but the fleet never appeared. The disaster of Almanza had upset all[255] calculations and disconcerted all arrangements; and the great enterprise was perforce abandoned.
1710.
1711.

In July of the following year, however, an expedition on a smaller scale met with more success. A joint fleet of the Royal Navy and of colonial vessels, together with four regiments from New England and one of British marines, sailed against Port Royal, captured it after a trifling resistance, and changed its name to that which it still bears, of Annapolis Royal. Nova Scotia had changed hands many times, but from henceforth it was to remain British. Thus for the first time a British armament interposed seriously in the long strife between French and English in America. It was the beginning of the end, and of the end of more than French rule over the continent. "If the French colonies should fall," wrote a French officer at the time, "Old England will not imagine that these various provinces will then unite, shake off the yoke of the English monarchy, and erect themselves into a democracy."[247] The idea of the capture of Canada, however, took root just at this time in the new English Ministry, where Bolingbroke and Harley had succeeded in ousting Marlborough from office. The conquest of New France would, they conceived, be a fine exploit to set off against the victories of the great Duke. Massachusetts seconded the project with extraordinary zeal, and in July 1711 a British fleet with seven regular regiments on board sailed into Boston harbour. The disastrous issue of this enterprise has already been told. Bad seamanship cast eight of the transports on the rocks in the St. Lawrence, and seven hundred soldiers were drowned. General Hill and Admiral Walker were not the men to persist in the face of such a mishap, and the whole design was abandoned with disgraceful alacrity. The expedition was in fact simply a political move, conceived by factious politicians for factious ends instead of by military men for the benefit of the country, and accordingly it fared as such expeditions must inevitably fare.

[256]
1713.

Finally came the Peace of Utrecht, which gave England permanent possession of Newfoundland and of Acadia, though still without settlement of the vexed question as to the boundaries of the ceded province. These acquisitions entailed an increase of the British garrisons in America, as has already been told; but the entire strength of the British regular troops in New York, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland did not exceed nine hundred men. The French, for their part, after the loss of Acadia betook themselves to Cape Breton, or, as they called it, L'Ile Royale, and set themselves forthwith to establish in one of the harbours a post which should command the access to Canada, and form a base for future aggression against New England and Nova Scotia. A haven, named Port à l'Anglais, on the east coast was selected, and there was built the fort of Louisburg, the strongest on the Atlantic coast, and as the French loved to call it, the Dunkirk of America. The establishment of this fortress was one of those costly follies to which the French are prone, when failure and defeat allow them no outlet for their vexation and their spite. The climate absolutely forbade the construction of an elaborate stronghold of masonry. Fog and rain prevented mortar from setting all through the short spring and summer, fog and frost split mortar and stones and demolished walls every winter. Repairs were endless, yet the fortress was never in good repair, and the expense was intolerable. Lastly, such a stronghold was worthless without supremacy at sea.
1724.

But the French did not stop here. They lost no opportunity of stirring up the Acadians to discontent and of inflaming the Indians against the British both in Acadia and in New England. The result was a series of raids on the Kennebec, where the French, in order to guard the line of advance on Quebec by that river and Lake Chaudière, had established a chain of mission-stations. The colonists, goaded to exasperation, at last rooted out these missions by force, though not until after long delay owing to the perversity of the Assembly[257] of Massachusetts, which, always jealous of the English Governor, wished to take the control of operations out of his hand into their own, never doubting that their rustic ignorance would be as efficient as the tried skill of one of Marlborough's veterans.
1727.

So this state of outward peace and of covert war continued. France, despite the concessions made at the Peace of Utrecht, still claimed the whole of the North American continent, with some few trifling exceptions, and took every measure to make good her claim. A new fort was erected at Niagara; another fort was built at Chambly to cover Montreal from any English attack by way of Lake Champlain, and in 1731 a massive stronghold of masonry was constructed at Crown Point, on the western shore of the same lake, and christened Fort Frédéric. The ground on which this last fort stood was within the bounds claimed by New York, but the province was too busy over quarrels with her neighbour, New Jersey, to interpose. So although New York and New England alike denounced the encroachment furiously, neither the one nor the other would lift a finger to prevent it. The one movement made by the colonists in counterpoise to the ceaseless activity of the French was the establishment of a fortified trading station at Oswego on Lake Ontario, as a rival to the French post at Niagara. Even this work was done not by the colonists but by Governor Burnet of New York at his own expense; and the debt due to him from the province on this account has never been liquidated to this day.
1744.
1745.
June 17.

Thus matters drifted on until the war of the Austrian Succession. Then, as usual, the French at Louisburg received warning of the outbreak before the English at Boston, and the imperial garrisons at Annapolis Royal and at Canseau were overpowered and captured by the French without an effort. But now the colonists with superb audacity resolved to take the bull by the horns and to attack the French in the most formidable of their strongholds, Louisburg itself. The moving spirit in[258] the enterprise was Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, an Englishman by nationality and a barrister by training, who thought himself a born strategist; and the commander whom he selected was one William Pepperrell, a prosperous merchant of New England, whose father had emigrated as a poor man from his native Devon and had made his fortune. Pepperrell had neither education nor experience in military matters, but he had shrewd good sense; while, being popular, he was likely to command the respect and obedience of his undisciplined troops. After some trouble the Provincial Assemblies were coaxed into approval of the design; four thousand men were raised in New England, a small fleet of armed vessels was collected for the protection of the transports, and the little expedition sailed to its rendezvous at Canseau, some fifty miles from Louisburg. Here by good luck it was joined by a British squadron under Commodore Warren, which threw in its lot with it; and the army of amateurs with its escort of hardy seamen proceeded with a light heart to the siege of the Dunkirk of America. The account of the operations is laughable in the extreme, though the French found them no matter for laughter. Skilled engineers the besiegers had none, and few if any skilled artillerymen, but they went to work with the best of spirits and good humour in their own casual fashion, which puzzled the French far more than a regular siege in form. To be brief, with the help of gunners from the fleet and of extraordinary good fortune they succeeded in capturing the fortress after a siege of six weeks. The performance is certainly one of the curiosities of military history, but must be passed over in this place since it forms no part of the story of the British Army.[248] The colonists were not a little proud of the feat, and with right good reason. Nor did their gallant efforts pass without recognition in England. Pepperrell, who had amply justified Shirley's choice, was created a baronet; and on[259] Warren's suggestion[249] the remains of the colonial troops were taken into English pay and formed into two regiments, with Pepperrell and Shirley for their colonels.
1746.

Though the colonial garrison suffered terribly from pestilence during the ensuing winter,[250] Shirley was anxious to complete the conquest of Canada in 1746; and Newcastle received his proposals with encouragement at Whitehall. Three British regiments—the Twenty-ninth, Thirtieth, and Forty-fifth—arrived in April to occupy Louisburg, and Newcastle promised five battalions more under Lieutenant-General St. Clair, together with a fleet under Warren, to aid in the operations. It was agreed that the British and the levies of New England should sail up the St. Lawrence to attack Quebec, while the remainder should, as usual, march against Montreal by way of Lake Champlain. The colonists took up the enterprise with great spirit, and the Provincial Assemblies of seven colonies voted a total force of forty-three hundred men. The French in Canada took the alarm and made frantic preparations for defence; but though the colonists were ready and eager at the time appointed, the British troops never appeared; Newcastle having detained them in Europe for the ridiculous descent, already described elsewhere, upon L'Orient. Shirley, undismayed, then decided to turn his little force against Crown Point; when all New England was alarmed by intelligence of a vast French armament on its way to retake Louisburg, recapture Acadia and burn Boston. Then the colonists took fright in their turn and equipped themselves for defence with desperate energy; but once again there was no occasion for panic. The French fleet sailed indeed, but after a voyage of disasters reached the coast of Nova Scotia only to be shattered and dispersed by a terrible storm. The Commander-in-Chief died of a broken heart, his successor threw himself on his own sword in despair, and after some weeks of helpless lingering in the harbour which now [260]bears the name of Halifax, the fragments of the French fleet returned almost in a state of starvation to France.
1747.

Not discouraged by this terrible reverse the French Government in the following year sent out a second fleet, which was met off Rochelle by a superior fleet under Admirals Anson and Warren and utterly defeated. It was fortunate, for the British Government with Newcastle at its head gave the Americans no further help. Three hundred soldiers were indeed shipped off to Annapolis, but more than half of them died on the voyage, and many of the remainder, being gaol-birds and Irish papists, deserted to the French. The situation in Acadia was perilous, for the French population did not love their new masters, and the Canadians, particularly the Jesuit priests, never ceased to stimulate them to revolt. Shirley resolved that, though the security of Acadia was the charge of the mother country, the colonists must protect the province for themselves sooner than abandon it. Massachusetts responded to his appeal with her usual spirit, and notwithstanding one severe reverse of the colonial troops, Acadia was still safe at the close of the war. For the rest, the French pursued their old method of hounding on the Indians against the British; and petty but barbarous warfare never ceased on the borders. For once, too, this warfare produced, though indirectly, an important result, since it brought to the front a young Irishman named William Johnson who, having shown an extraordinary power and ascendency over the Indians, was chosen as agent for New York in all dealings of the British with them. We shall see more of this Johnson in the years before us. Finally came the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, when the Americans to their huge disgust learned that Louisburg, their own prize, had been restored to France—bartered away for the retention of an insignificant factory called Madras.
CHAPTER II
The conclusion of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was followed by the usual reduction of the forces in Britain. The ten new regiments and several other corps were disbanded, leaving for the cavalry all the regiments now in the Army List down to the Fourteenth Hussars, and in the infantry the Foot Guards and the First to the Forty-ninth Regiments of the Line. The strength of all corps was of course diminished and the British Establishment was fixed at thirty thousand men, two-thirds of them for service at home and one-third for colonial garrisons. The rest of the Army, thirty-seven regiments in all, but very weak in numbers, was as usual turned over to the Irish Establishment. Efforts were of course made in both Houses of Parliament to cut down the numbers of the Army to a still lower figure, and the antiquated arguments in favour of such a step were repeated as though they had not already done duty a thousand times within the past forty years. Nay, so vigorous is the old age of folly and of faction that men were still found, when the Mutiny Act was brought forward, to urge the needlessness of courts-martial in time of peace. These childish representations, however, received little notice or encouragement; while, on the other hand, divers projects for reform in the Army were brought forward which, even though they led to no result, received at least careful attention and intelligent debate. Of these matters it will be more convenient to speak when the narrative of the war is concluded. For although peace had been proclaimed, and estimates and[262] establishment had been accordingly reduced, the struggle with France, far from being closed, was not even suspended abroad. It would seem that not a few members of both Houses were alive to the fact; while fugitive notices in the newspapers, announcing that "Mr. Clive, a volunteer, had the command given to him to attack a place called Arcourt," may have suggested it even to the gossips of the coffee-houses. The Government, however, was not one which could be expected to take thought for the morrow, or indeed for anything beyond the retention of power. It was that Administration which had been formed by Henry Pelham in 1744, and is generally identified with the name of his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, who is remembered chiefly through his ignorance of the fact that Cape Breton is an island. This deplorable person possessed no talent beyond an infinite capacity for such intrigue as lifts incompetence to high office, and was only less of a curse to England than Madame de Pompadour was to France. One able man, however, there was in the lower ranks of the Administration, William Pitt, who, after a vain effort to become Secretary at War, had accepted the post of Paymaster of the Forces. He now lay quiet, though not without occasional outbursts of mutiny, abiding his time and fulfilling the duties of his place with an integrity heretofore unknown in the Paymaster's Office.
1749.

One important military measure, meanwhile, the Government did take. The number of men disbanded from fleet and army was so large that it was deemed prudent, in the interests alike of humanity and of public security, to make some provision for them. Accordingly fifty acres of freehold land, with an additional ten acres for every child, were offered to all veterans who would emigrate as settlers to Nova Scotia; their passage outward being likewise paid, and immunity from taxation guaranteed to them for ten years. The system was copied from the model given by the French in Canada, and by them doubtless borrowed from ancient Rome;[263] but it was successful. Four thousand persons, with their families, took advantage of the offer, embarked under the command of Colonel Cornwallis and landed at the harbour of Chebucto, from thenceforward called, in honour of the President of the Board of Trade and Plantations, by the name of Halifax. Three companies of rangers were formed for the defence of the settlement, in addition to which two battalions of regular troops were detailed for the garrisons of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. For it was intended that Halifax should be not only a refuge for disbanded soldiers, but a fortified station in counterpoise to the French fortress at Louisburg.

The French in Canada instantly took the alarm, and after their unscrupulous manner incited the Indians to murder the settlers, sparing no pains meanwhile to alienate the hearts of the Acadians from the British. The priests were their instruments in this treacherous policy, and their proceedings were fully approved at Versailles. What was called an Indian war was, in the plain words of Governor Hopson of Nova Scotia, no other than a pretence for the French to commit hostilities on British subjects. Yet through the trying years that followed, the British officials behaved always with exemplary patience and forbearance, though, owing to the incessant intrigues of the French, occasional skirmishes between French and English were unavoidable. But British settlers had touched French America elsewhere on a more tender point even than in Acadia. British traders had found their way across the Alleghanies to the Ohio, and had stolen the hearts of the Indians on the river from their French rivals. To Canada this was a serious matter, for the chain of French posts that was designed to shut off the British from the interior ran from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and if the British should sever this chain at the Ohio French America would be parted in twain. In 1749 a French emissary was despatched from Montreal to vindicate French rights on the river and to bid the[264] English traders depart from it. His reception by the Indians was not encouraging, and even while he was on the spot a company was formed by some capitalists in Virginia to settle the country about the Ohio. The Governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia quickly perceived the importance of the position on the fork of the river where Pittsburg now stands, and were anxious to secure it by a fortified station; but unfortunately the public spirit of the colonies was less intelligent than the private enterprise. The Provincial Assemblies quarrelled with their governors and with each other, and refused to vote a farthing either for building a fort or for presents to conciliate the Indians in the valley of the Ohio.
1752-1753.

Then, as usual, while the colonies debated and postponed the French took prompt and decisive action. In the summer of 1752 a new Governor, Duquêsne, had arrived in Canada, who, as soon as the spring of 1753 was come, sent an expedition of fifteen hundred men through Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, where they landed on the eastern shore and built a fort of logs at Presquile, the site of the present Erie. Thence cutting a road for several leagues southward to French Creek (then called Rivière aux B?ufs), they constructed there a second fort named Fort le B?uf, from which, when the water was high, they could launch their canoes on the creek and follow the stream downward to the Alleghany and the Ohio. The expedition was to have built a third fort at the junction of French Creek and the Alleghany, and descended the Ohio in order to intimidate the Indians, but the project was defeated by the sickliness of the troops. Garrisons were therefore left at Fort le B?uf and Presquile, and the remainder of the force returned to Montreal, having thus secured communications between the St. Lawrence and the Ohio.
1753.
Dec. 11.

Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia no sooner heard of this movement on the part of the French than he sent a summons to the commanders of the forts to withdraw forthwith from the King of England's territory. The bearer of the message was the Adjutant-General of the[265] Virginian militia, a young man of twenty-one with a great destiny before him, George Washington. There were two British trading stations on the Ohio, Venango, at the junction of French Creek and the Alleghany, and Logstown, some miles below the site of Pittsburg. On arriving at Venango, Washington found it converted into a French military station, the officers of which received him hospitably, but told him that they had orders to take possession of the Ohio, and that "by God they would do it." Making his way from thence to Fort le B?uf, Washington delivered Dinwiddie's letter, and returned with the reply that it should be forwarded to Montreal, but that the garrisons had no intention of moving until orders should arrive from thence. Dinwiddie meanwhile had again appealed to the Virginian Assembly to vote money to build forts on the Ohio. He could show a letter from the Board of Ordnance in England approving of the project and offering arms and ammunition, as well as a letter from the King authorising the execution of the work at the colony's expense and the repelling of force by force; but the Assembly, though alive to the danger, would not vote a sixpence.
1754.
February.

Such obstinacy was enough to drive a Governor to despair, but Dinwiddie was blessed with considerable tenacity of purpose. A renewal of his appeal in the ensuing session was more successful, and the Assembly grudgingly voted a small and insufficient sum, with which the Governor was forced to be content. Urgent applications to the neighbouring colonies for aid met with little response. The remoter provinces thought themselves in no way concerned; those nearer at hand refused help chiefly because their governors asked for it. It was in fact a principle with the Provincial Assemblies to thwart their governor, whether he were right or wrong, on every possible occasion; they being, as is so common in representative bodies, more anxious to assert their power and independence than their utility and good sense. North Carolina alone granted money[266] enough for three or four hundred men. However, the British Government had sanctioned the employment of the regular companies at New York and in Carolina, and Dinwiddie having raised three hundred men in Virginia, ordered them to the Ohio Company's station at Will's Creek, which was to be the base of operations. Meanwhile he despatched a party of backwoodsmen forthwith to the forks of the Ohio, there to build, on a site selected by Washington, the fort for which he had pleaded so long. Forty men were actually at work upon it when, on the 17th of April, a flotilla of small craft came pouring down on the Alleghany with a party of five hundred French on board. The troops landed, trained cannon on the unfinished stockade, and summoned the British to surrender. Resistance was hopeless. The backwoodsmen perforce yielded; and the French having demolished their works erected a much larger and better fort on the same site, and called it Fort Duquêsne. The name before long was to be altered to Pittsburg, but the change was as yet hidden behind the veil of years. For the present the French had stolen a march on the British, and Dinwiddie was chagrined to the heart. "If the Assembly had voted the money in November which they did in February," he wrote, "the fort would have been built and garrisoned before the French approached."

The Governor, however, was by no means disposed meekly to accept this defeat. The French had expelled a British party from British territory by force of arms, and both he and Washington treated the incident as equivalent to a declaration of war. Washington, though but half of his troops had yet joined him, presently advanced over the Alleghanies to the Youghiogany, a tributary of the Monongahela; and there on the 27th of May he came upon a small party of French and fired the shots which began the war. A few weeks later he with his little force, something less than four hundred men, was surrounded by twice that number of Frenchmen, and after a fight of nine[267] hours and the loss of a fourth of his men, was compelled to capitulate.

Dinwiddie was vexed beyond measure by this second reverse, and by the delay in the arrival of the reinforcements which had caused it. The two companies of regular troops from New York came crawling up to the scene of action in a disgraceful state. Their ranks were thin, for their muster-rolls had been falsified by means of "faggots"; they were undisciplined; they had neither tents, blankets, knapsacks, nor ammunition with them, nothing, in fact, but their arms and thirty women and children.[251] The troops from North Carolina were still worse than these in the matter of discipline, so much so that they mutinied and dispersed to their homes while yet on the march to the rendezvous. The peril was great; yet the colonies remained supine. The Assembly of Virginia only after a bitter struggle granted Dinwiddie a competent sum; that of Pennsylvania, being composed chiefly of Quakers and of German settlers, who were anxious only to live in peace and to cultivate their farms, refused practically to contribute a farthing. New York was unable to understand, until Washington had been actually defeated, that there had been any French encroachment on British territory; Maryland produced a contribution only after long delay; and New Jersey, safely ensconced behind the shelter of her neighbours, flatly declined to give any aid whatever. New England alone, led as usual by Massachusetts, showed not only willingness but alacrity to drive back the detested French. United action was as yet inconceivable by the colonists or, as the English more correctly called them, the Provincials. It was only in deference to representations from the British Government that New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the four colonies of New England met in congress to concert for joint action in securing the unstable affections of the Indians. A project for colonial union[268] broached by Benjamin Franklin at this same congress was wrecked by the jealousy of Crown and Colonies as to mutual concession of power.
September.

In such circumstances the only hope lay in assistance from the mother country; and Dinwiddie accordingly sent repeated entreaties to England for stores, ammunition, and two regiments of regular infantry. The Ministry at home was not of a kind to cope with a great crisis. Henry Pelham was dead; and the ridiculous Newcastle as Prime Minister had succeeded in finding a fool still greater than himself, Sir T. Robinson, to be Secretary of State in charge of the colonies. Nevertheless, in July ten thousand pounds in specie and two thousand stand of arms were shipped for the service of the colonies,[252] and on the 30th of September orders were issued for the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth regiments, both of them on the Irish Establishment, to be embarked at Cork. Each of these regiments was appointed to consist of three hundred and forty men only, and to take with it seven hundred stand of arms, so as to make up its numbers with American recruits.[253] But the nucleus of British soldiers was presently increased to five hundred men, the augmentation being effected, as usual, by drafts from other regiments; not, however, without difficulty, for the service was unpopular, and there was consequently much desertion. The next step was to appoint a commander; and the choice fell upon General Edward Braddock, sometime of the Coldstream Guards. He was a man of the same stamp as Hawley, and therefore after the Duke of Cumberland's own heart,—an officer of forty-five years' service, rough, brutal,[254] and insolent, [269]a martinet of the narrowest type, but wanting neither spirit nor ability, and brave as a lion. His instructions were sufficiently wide, comprehending operations against the French in four different quarters. The French were to be driven from the Ohio, and a garrison was to be left to hold the country when captured; the like was to be done at Niagara, at Crown Point, and at Fort Beauséjour, a work erected by the French on the isthmus that joins Nova Scotia to the Continent. This plan had been suggested by Governor Shirley of Massachusetts; and in furtherance thereof the British Government had ordered two regiments, each one thousand strong, to be raised in America under the colonelcy of the veterans Shirley and Pepperrell, and to be taken into the pay of Great Britain.[255] There might well be doubt whether the means provided would suffice for the execution of the scheme.
1755.
April.

It was January 1755 before the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth were embarked at Cork, and past the middle of March before the whole of the transports arrived in Hampton Roads. Good care seems to have been taken of the troops on the voyage, for Braddock was able to report that there was not a sick man among them.[256] The transports were ordered to ascend the Potomac to Alexandria, where a camp was to be formed; and there on the 14th of April several of the governors met Braddock in council to decide as to the distribution of the work that lay before them. All was soon settled. Braddock with the two newly arrived regiments was to advance on Fort Duquêsne; Shirley with his own and Pepperrell's regiments was to attack Niagara; William Johnson, on account of his influence [270]with the Indians, was chosen to lead a body of Provincial troops from New England, New Jersey, and New York against Crown Point; and to Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton, an officer of whom we shall hear more, was entrusted the task of overpowering Fort Beauséjour. The first and second of these operations were designed to cut the chain of French posts between the St. Lawrence and the Ohio, and may be described as purely offensive. Why, however, it should have been thought necessary to sever this chain at two points when one point would have sufficed, and why therefore the whole strength of the blow was not aimed at Niagara, are questions not easily to be answered. The capture of Crown Point would serve alike to bar a French advance southward at Lake Champlain and to further a British advance on Montreal, and hence combined objects both offensive and defensive. The reduction of Fort Beauséjour having no other purpose than the security of Acadia, was a measure wholly defensive.

The Council broke up; the commanders repaired to their several charges, and Braddock was left to cope with his task. A great initial blunder had been made by the military authorities in England in sending the troops to Virginia and ordering them to advance on the Ohio by the circuitous route from Wills' Creek. This was, it is true, the line that had been taken by Washington; but Washington, like Shirley, was but an amateur, and a sounder military judgment would have shown that the suggestions of both were faulty. Disembarkation at Philadelphia, and a march directly westward from thence, would have saved not only distance and time but much trouble and expense; for Pennsylvania, unlike Maryland and Virginia, was a country rich in forage and in the means of transport. It was the collection of transport that was Braddock's first great difficulty. The Pennsylvanians showed an apathy and unwillingness which provoked even Washington to the remark that they ought to be chastised. It was only by the mediation of Benjamin Franklin, of all persons,[271] that Braddock at last obtained waggons and horses sufficient for his needs. The General's trials were doubtless great, but his domineering temper, and the insolent superiority which he affected as an Englishman over Americans and as a regular officer over colonial militiamen, could not tend to ease the general friction between British and Provincials. His example was doubtless followed by his officers, the more so since it had been ordained that the King's commission should confer superiority in all grades, and that Provincial field-officers and generals were to enjoy no rank with Imperial officers of the same standing. Nevertheless Braddock was too capable a man to blind himself to the merit of the ablest of his coadjutors; and it was in terms honourable to himself that he invited and obtained the services of Colonel George Washington upon his staff.
May.

On the 10th of May Braddock reached his base at the junction of Wills' Creek with the Potomac, where the former trading station had been supplanted by a fort built of logs and called, in honour of the Commander-in-Chief, by the name of Fort Cumberland. It was a mere clearing in a vast forest, an oasis, as it has happily been termed, in a wilderness of leaves.[257] Here the troops had already been assembled, the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth, each now raised by recruits from Virginia to a strength of seven hundred men, a detachment of one hundred of the Royal Artillery, thirty sailors lent by Commodore Keppel, helpful men as are all of their kind, and four hundred and fifty Virginian militia, excellently fitted for the work before them but much despised by the regular troops. The whole force amounted to about twenty-two hundred men. Fifty Indian warriors, a source of unfailing interest to the bucolic British soldiers, were also seen in the camp in all their barbaric finery of paint and feathers; for Braddock, whatever his bigotry in favour of pipe-clay, was far too wise to underrate the value of Indian scouts.

[272]
May 3.
June 7.

A long month of delay followed, for the cannon did not arrive until a week later than Braddock, and the arrangements were still backward and confused. The General, doubtless with good reason, railed furiously at the roguery and ill-faith of the contractors; but it is sufficiently evident that what was lacking at headquarters was a talent for organisation. And meanwhile, though Braddock knew it not, events of incalculable moment were going forward elsewhere during those very weeks. The French had not failed to take note of the reinforcements sent by England to America, and had replied by equipping a fleet of eighteen ships and embarking three thousand troops to sail under their convoy to Canada. The departure of this fleet was long delayed, and the dilatory British Government had time to despatch two squadrons to intercept it; but the French, putting to sea at last in May, contrived to elude the British cruisers and arrived safely at Louisburg and Quebec. Three only of their ships, having lagged behind the rest, found themselves off Cape Race in the presence of Admiral Boscawen's squadron. The two nations were nominally at peace, but the fleets opened fire, and the engagement ended in the capture of two of the French ships. Whether Newcastle desired it or not, England by this act was irrevocably committed to war.
June 10.
June 16.

It was just three days after this action that Braddock's force moved out of Fort Cumberland for its tedious march through the forest. Three hundred axemen led the way to cut and clear the road, which being but twelve feet wide was filled with waggons, pack-horses and artillery, so that the troops were obliged to march in the forest on either hand. Scouts scoured the ground in advance and flanking parties were thrown out against surprise, for Braddock was no mere soldier of the parade-ground. The march was insufferably slow, the horses being weak from want of forage, and the column dragged its length wearily along, "moving always in dampness and shade,"[258] through[273] the gloomy interminable forest. Who can reckon the moral effect wrought on the ignorant and superstitious minds of simple English lads by that dreary trail through the heart of the wilderness? Day after day they toiled on without sight of the sun, and night after night over the camp-fire the Provincials filled them with hideous tales of Indian ferocity and assured them, in heavy jest, that they would be beaten.[259] The Forty-eighth had stood firm at Falkirk; but the Forty-fourth had suffered heavily at Prestonpans, and such preparation could be wholesome for no regiment. Eight days' march saw the column advanced but thirty miles on its way, many of the men sick and most of the horses worn out, with no prospect ahead but that of a worse road than ever. Then came a report that five hundred French were on their way to reinforce Fort Duquêsne; and by Washington's advice Braddock decided to leave the heavy baggage, together with a guard under Colonel Dunbar, to follow as best it could, and himself to push on with a body of chosen troops. Twelve hundred men were accordingly selected, and with these and a convoy reduced to ten guns, thirty waggons, and several pack-horses, the advance was resumed. Still progress continued to be wonderfully slow. The traditions of Flanders were strong in Braddock, and by dint of halting, as Washington said, to level every molehill and to throw a bridge over every brook, he occupied four whole days in traversing the next twelve miles.
July.

At length, on the 7th of July, the column reached the mouth of Turtle Creek, a stream which enters the Monongahela about eight miles from its junction with the Alleghany, or in other words from Fort Duquêsne. The direct way, though the shorter, lay through a difficult country and a dangerous defile, so Braddock resolved to ford the Monongahela, fetch a compass, and ford it once more, in order to reach his destination. The French meanwhile had received intelligence of his[274] advance on the 5th, and were not a little alarmed. The force at the disposal of M. Contrecoeur, the commandant of Fort Duquêsne, consisted only of a few companies of regular troops, with a considerable body of Canadians and nearly nine hundred Indians. He resolved, however, to send off a detachment under Captain Beaujeu to meet the British on the march, and told off to that officer a force of about seventy regulars, twice as many Canadians, and six hundred and fifty Indians, or about nine hundred men in all. Early in the morning of the 8th this detachment marched away from Fort Duquêsne, intending to wait in ambush for the British at some favourable spot, and by preference at the second ford of the Monongahela.
July 8.

Braddock also had moved off early in the same morning, but it was nearly one o'clock when he forded the Monongahela for the second time. He himself fully expected to be attacked at this point, and had sent forward a strong advanced party under Lieutenant-Colonel Gage, to clear the opposite bank. No enemy however was encountered, for Beaujeu had been delayed by some trouble with his Indians, and had been unable to reach the ford in time. The main body of the British therefore crossed the river with perfect regularity and order, for Braddock wished to impress the minds of any Frenchmen that might be watching him with a sense of his superiority. The sky was cloudless, and the men, full of confidence and spirit, took pride in a movement nearer akin than any other during their weary march to the displays of the parade-ground in which they had been trained. On reaching the farther bank the column made a short halt for rest, and then resumed the march along a narrow track parallel to the river and at the base of a steep ridge of hills. Around it on all sides the forest frowned thick and impenetrable; and Braddock took every possible precaution against surprise. Several guides, with six Virginian light horsemen, led the way; a musket-shot behind them came an advanced party of Gage's vanguard[275] followed by the vanguard itself, and then in succession a party of axemen to clear the road, two guns with their ammunition-waggons, and a rear-guard. Then without any interval came the convoy, headed by a few light horsemen, a working party, and three guns; the waggons following as heretofore on the track, and the troops making their way through the forest to right and left, with abundance of parties pushed well out on either flank.

At a little distance from the ford the track passed over a wide and bushy ravine. Gage crossed this ravine with his advanced guard, and the main body was just descending to it when Gage's guides and horsemen suddenly fell back, and a man dressed like an Indian, but with an officer's gorget, was seen hurrying along the path. At sight of the British, Beaujeu (for the figure so strangely arrayed seems to have been no other) turned suddenly and waved his hat. The signal was followed by a wild war-whoop from his Indians and by a sharp fire upon the advancing British from the trees in their front. Gage's men at once deployed with great steadiness and returned the fire in a succession of deliberate volleys. They could not see a man of the enemy, so that they shot of necessity at haphazard, but the mere sound of the musketry was sufficient to scare Beaujeu's Canadians, who fled away shamefully to Fort Duquêsne. The third volley laid Beaujeu dead on the ground, and Gage's two field-pieces coming into action speedily drove the Indians away from the British front.

Meanwhile the red-coats steadily advanced, the men cheering lustily and shouting "God save the King"; and Captain Dumas, who had succeeded Beaujeu in the command of the French, almost gave up the day for lost. His handful of regular troops, however, stood firm, and he and his brother officers by desperate exertions succeeded in rallying the Indians. The regulars and such few of the Canadians as stood by them held their ground staunchly, and opened a fire of[276] platoons which checked the ardour of Gage's men; while the Indians, yelling like demons but always invisible, streamed away through the forest along both flanks of the British, and there, from every coign of vantage that skilful bushmen could find, poured a deadly fire upon the hapless red-coats. The cheering was silenced, for the men began to fall fast. For a time they kept their ranks and swept the unheeding forest with volley after volley, which touched no enemy through the trees. They could see no foe, and yet the bullets rained continually and pitilessly upon them from front, flank, and rear, like a shower from a cloudless sky. The trial at last was greater than they could bear. They abandoned their guns, they broke their ranks, and huddling themselves together like a herd of fallow-deer they fell back in disorder, a mere helpless mass of terrified men.

Just at this moment Braddock came up to the front. On hearing the fire he had left four hundred men under Colonel Sir Peter Halket of the Forty-fourth to guard the baggage, and had advanced with the remainder to Gage's assistance. As the fresh troops came up, Gage's routed infantry plunged blindly in among them, seeking shelter from the eternal hail of bullets, and threw them likewise into confusion. In a short time the whole of Braddock's force, excepting the Virginians and Halket's baggage-guard, was broken up into a succession of heaving groups, without order and without cohesion, some facing this way, some facing that way, conscious only of the hideous whooping of the Indians, of bullets falling thickly among them from they knew not whence, and that they could neither charge nor return the fire. The Virginians alone, who were accustomed to such work, kept their presence of mind, and taking shelter behind the trees began to answer the Indian fire in the Indian fashion. A few of the British strove to imitate them as well as their inexperience would permit; but Braddock would have none of such things. Such fighting was not prescribed in[277] the drill-book nor familiar in the battlefields of Flanders,[260] and he would tolerate no such disregard of order and discipline. Raging and cursing furiously he drove British and Virginians alike back to their fellows with his sword; and then noting that the fire was hottest from a hill on the right flank of his advance, he ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Burton to attack it with the Forty-eighth. The panic had already spread far, and it was only with infinite difficulty that Burton could persuade a hundred men to follow him. He was presently shot down, and at his fall the whole of his men turned back. The scene now became appalling. The gunners stood for a time to their guns and sent round after round crashing uselessly into the forest; but the infantry stood packed together in abject terror, still loading and firing, now into the air, now into their comrades, or fighting furiously with the officers who strove to make them form. Braddock galloped to and fro through the fire, mounting fresh horses as fast as they were killed under him, and storming as though at a field-day. Washington, by miracle unwounded though his clothes were tattered with bullets, seconded him with as noble an example of courage and devotion; but it was too clear that the day was lost. Sixty out of eighty-six officers had fallen, and Braddock, after the slaughter had continued for three hours, ordered the wreck of his force to retreat.

He was still struggling to bring the men off in some kind of order when he fell from his horse, the fifth that the Indians' fire had compelled him to mount on that day, pierced by a bullet through arm and lungs. The unwounded remnant of his troops instantly broke loose and fled away. In vain Washington and others strove to rally them at the ford; they might as well have tried to stop the wild bears of the mountains.[261] They splashed [278]through the river exhausted though they were, and ran on with the whoops of the Indians still ringing in their ears. Gage succeeded in rallying about eighty at the second ford; but the rest were not to be stayed. Braddock, stricken to the death, begged to be left on the battlefield, but some officers lifted him and carried him away, for not a man of the soldiers would put a hand to him. Weak as he was, and racked with the pain of his wound and the anguish of his defeat, the gallant man still kept command and still gave his orders. On passing the Monongahela he bade his bearers halt, and sending Washington away to Dunbar for provisions and transport he passed the night among the handful of men that had been rallied by Gage.
July 9.
July 10.

On the next morning some order was restored, and the retreat was continued. Meanwhile stragglers had already reached Dunbar's camp with wild tidings of disaster and defeat, and many of the teamsters had already taken to their heels. After one more day of torture Braddock himself was carried into the camp. On the march he had issued directions for the collection and relief of stragglers, and now he gave, or is said to have given, his last order, for the destruction of all waggons and stores that could not be carried back to Fort Cumberland. Accordingly scores of waggons were burned, the provisions were destroyed, and guns and ammunition, not easily to be replaced in the colonies, were blown up or spoiled. Then the relics of the army set out in shame and confusion for the return march of sixty miles to Fort Cumberland. Braddock travelled but a little distance with it. His faithful aide-de-camp, Captain Orme, though himself badly wounded, remained with him to the end and has recorded his last words; but there was little speech now left in the rough, bullying martinet, whose mouth had once been so full of oaths, and whose voice had been the terror of every soldier. It was not only that his lungs were shot through and through, but that his heart was broken. Throughout the first day's march he lay white and silent,[279] with his life's blood bubbling up through his lips, nor was it till evening that his misery found vent in the almost feminine ejaculation, "Who would have thought it"? Again through the following day he remained silent, until towards sunset, as if to sum up repentance for past failure and good hope for the future, he murmured gently, "Another time we shall know better how to deal with them." And so having learned his lesson he lay still, and a few minutes later he was dead.

With all his faults this rude indomitable spirit appeals irresistibly to our sympathy. He had been chosen by the Duke of Cumberland, whose notions of an officer, in Horace Walpole's words, were drawn from the purest German classics, the classics initiated by Frederick William and consecrated by Frederick the Great. It was the passion of the Hohenzollerns, great soldiers though they were, to dress their men like dolls and to manipulate them like puppets; but, dearly though they loved the mechanical exercise of the parade-ground, they knew that the minuteness of training and the severity of discipline thereby entailed were but means to an end. In the eyes of Cumberland, though he was very far from a blind or a stupid man, powder, pipe-clay, and precision loomed so large as to appear an end in themselves. He could point too to the initial success of his attack at Fontenoy, which was simply an elaborate parade-movement; but he forgot that the battlefields of a Prussian army and the adversaries of a Prussian general were to be found on the familiar lands of Silesia, Brandenburg, and Saxony, whereas the fighting-grounds of the British were dispersed far and wide among distant and untrodden countries, and their enemies such as were not to be encountered according to the precepts of Montecuculi and Turenne. It was as a favourite exponent of Cumberland's military creed that Braddock was sent to North America. He was born and trained for such actions as Fontenoy; and it was his fate to be confronted with a difficult problem in savage warfare. His task was that which since his day[280] has been repeatedly set to British officers, namely to improvise a new system of fighting wherewith to meet the peculiar tactics of a strange enemy in a strange country. Too narrow, too rigid, and too proud to apprehend the position, he applied the time-honoured methods of Flanders, and he failed. Other officers have since fallen into the like error, owing not a little to a false system of training, and have failed likewise; and vast as is our experience in savage warfare, it may be that the tale of such officers is not yet fully told. Nevertheless, though Braddock's ideal of a British officer may have been mistaken, it cannot be called low. In rout and ruin and disgrace, with the hand of death gripping tightly at his throat, his stubborn resolution never wavered and his untameable spirit was never broken. He kept his head and did his work to the last, and thought of his duty while thought was left in him. His body was buried under the road, that the passage of the troops over it might obliterate his grave and save it from desecration from the Indians. But the lesson which he had learned too late was not lost on his successors, and it may truly be said that it was over the bones of Braddock that the British advanced again to the conquest of Canada.

The losses in this disastrous action were very heavy; the devotion of the officers, whose conduct was beyond all praise, leading them almost to annihilation. Among the wounded were two men who were to become conspicuous at a later day, Gage the leader of the advanced guard and Captain Horatio Gates of the garrison of New York. Of thirteen hundred and seventy-three non-commissioned officers and men, but four hundred and fifty-nine came off unharmed; and the wounded that were left on the field were tortured and murdered by the Indians after their barbarous manner. The loss of the French was trifling. Three officers were killed and four wounded, all of them at the critical moment while their men were wavering; nine white men also were killed and wounded, and a larger but inconsiderable[281] number of Indians. It was in fact a total and crushing defeat. Yet Count Dieskau, an officer high in the French service in Canada, expressed no surprise when he heard of it, for it was the French rule, founded on bitter experience, never to expose regular troops in the forest without a sufficient force of Indians and irregulars to cover them. The Virginians, whose admirable behaviour had been the one creditable feature in the action, had shown that abundance of good irregular troops were to be found in America; and it was evident that the British needed only to learn from their enemies in order to defeat them.

CHAPTER III
June 16.

The first blow against the French in America had failed; it must now be seen how it fared with the operations entrusted to Shirley, Johnson, and Monckton. Shirley, at Massachusetts, had been busy since the beginning of the year in calling the Northern provinces to arms, and they had responded nobly, Massachusetts alone raising forty-five hundred men, and the rest of New England and New York nearly three thousand more. The point first selected for attack was Fort Beauséjour on the Acadian isthmus, for which object two thousand volunteers of New England were sent up to Monckton. Adding to them a handful of regular troops from the garrison,[262] Monckton sailed away without delay to his work. On the 1st of June the expedition anchored in the bay before Fort Beauséjour, which after a fortnight's siege and the feeblest of defences fell, together with a smaller fort called Fort Gaspereau, into Monckton's hands. This success was followed by the expulsion of the greater part of the French population from Acadia, a harsh measure necessitated entirely by the duplicity of the Jesuit priests and of the Canadian Government, who had never ceased to stir up the unhappy peasants to revolt. From henceforth, therefore, Acadia may be dismissed from the sphere of active operations.

The attack on Crown Point was a more serious matter, for which the force entrusted to William Johnson included some three thousand Provincial[283] troops from New England and New Hampshire, and three hundred Indians. Johnson had seen no service and was innocent of all knowledge of war, but his influence with the Indians was very great, and as he came from New York his appointment could not but be pleasing to that province. His men were farmers and farmers' sons, excellent material but neither drilled nor trained. With the exception of one regiment, all wore their own clothes, and far the greater number brought with them their own arms. After long delay, owing to the jealousies of the various provinces and to defective organisation, the force was assembled at Albany, and in August began to move up the Hudson towards Lake George, a new name bestowed by Johnson in honour of his sovereign. At the carrying-place, where the line of advance left the Hudson, was built a fort, which was first called Fort Lyman but subsequently Fort Edward, by which latter name the reader should remember it. Here five hundred men were left to complete and to man the works, while the remainder, moving casually and leisurely forward, advanced to the lake and encamped upon its southern border.

Meanwhile the French, warned by papers captured from Braddock of the design against Crown Point, had sent thither thirty-five hundred regular troops, Canadians and Indians, under the command of Count Dieskau, an officer who had served formerly under Marshal Saxe. There were two lines by which Johnson could advance against them, the one directly up Lake George, the other by the stream named Wood Creek, which runs parallel with it into Lake Champlain. The junction of both passages is commanded by a promontory on the western side of Lake Champlain, called by the French Carillon, but more famous under its native name of Ticonderoga. To this point Dieskau advanced with a mixed force of fifteen hundred men, and from thence pushed forward to attack Johnson in his camp. The sequel may be briefly told. Johnson had imprudently detached five hundred men with some vague[284] idea of cutting off Dieskau's retreat; and these were caught in an ambuscade and very roughly handled. But when, elated by this success, Dieskau advanced against Johnson's camp he was met by a most stubborn resistance; and finally his troops were driven back in disorder and he himself wounded and taken prisoner. Johnson, however, did not follow up this fortunate success. Shirley repeatedly adjured him to advance to Ticonderoga, but was answered that the troops were unable to move through sickness, indiscipline, bad food, and bad clothing. Johnson lingered on in his camp until the end of November, with his men on the verge of mutiny, and having built a fort at the southern end of the lake, which he called Fort William Henry, retreated to the Hudson. He was rewarded for his victory by a vote of five thousand pounds from the British Parliament and by a baronetcy from the King; but none the less his enterprise was a failure, and Crown Point was left safely in the hands of the French.

The expedition against Niagara was undertaken by Shirley himself, in all the pride of a lawyer turned general. Hitherto he had but planned campaigns on paper; now he was to execute one in the field. His base of operations was, like Johnson's, the town of Albany, and his force consisted of his own regiment and Pepperrell's, which, although the King's troops and wearing the King's uniform, consisted none the less of raw Provincial recruits, together with one regiment of New Jersey militia, in all twenty-five hundred men. From Albany the force ascended the river Mohawk in bateaux to the great carrying-place, where the town of Rome now stands; from which point the bateaux were drawn overland on sledges to Wood Creek,[263] where they were again launched to float down stream to Lake Oneida and so to the little fort of Oswego on Lake Ontario. As might have been expected with an amateur, Shirley's force arrived at its destination long[285] before his supplies, so that his force was compelled to wait for some time inactive and on short rations. The French, too, having learned of this design also from the papers taken at the Monongahela, had reinforced their garrisons not only at Niagara but at Fort Frontenac at the north-eastern outlet of the lake. This materially increased Shirley's difficulties, for unless he first captured Frontenac the French could slip across the lake directly he was fairly on his way to Niagara, take Oswego and cut him off from his base. To be brief, the task, rendered doubly arduous by dearth of provisions, was too great for Shirley's strength; and at the end of October he abandoned the enterprise, having accomplished no more than to throw a garrison of seven hundred men into Oswego.

So amid general disappointment ended the American campaign. Of the four expeditions one only had succeeded; all of the rest had failed, one of them with disaster. Nor did this disaster end with the retreat from the Monongahela, for no sooner had Dunbar retired from the frontier than the Indians, at the instigation of the French, swarmed into Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to the massacre and pillage of the scattered settlements on the border. Washington with fifteen hundred Virginian militia did what he could to protect three hundred miles of frontier, but with so small a force the duty was far beyond his power or the power of any man. Reinforce him, however, the Assembly of Pennsylvania would not. They closed their ears even to the cry of their own settlers for arms and ammunition, and for legislation to enable them to organise themselves for defence. The Assembly was intent only on fighting with the Governor. The members would yield neither to his representations nor to the entreaties of their fellow-citizens; and it was not until the enemy had advanced within sixty miles of Philadelphia that, grudgingly and late, they armed the Governor with powers to check the Indian invasion. It was none too soon, for the French had taken note[286] of the large population of pauperised Germans, Irish, "white servants," and transported criminals in Pennsylvania, and were preparing to turn it into a recruiting-ground for the French service.[264]

Thus closed the year 1755, with hostilities in full play between English and French in North America. Yet war had not been declared, nor, though it was certain to come, had any preparation been made for it. The measures taken at the beginning of 1755 sufficiently indicate the feebleness and vacillation of a foolish and effete Administration. In February some addition had been made to the infantry by raising the strength of the Guards and of seven regiments of the Line; and in March the King sent a message to Parliament requesting an augmentation of the forces by land and sea. The Ministry employed the powers thus given to them in raising five thousand marines in fifty independent companies, and placing them expressly under the command of the Lord High Admiral. It is said[265] that Newcastle refused to raise new regiments from jealousy of the Duke of Cumberland's nomination of officers, and there is nothing incredible in the assertion. But though this measure pointed at least to activity on the part of the fleet, never were British ships employed to less purpose. The squadron sent out under Boscawen to intercept the French reinforcements on their way to Louisburg was considerably inferior to the enemy's fleet, and required to be reinforced, of course at the cost of confusion and delay, before it was fit to fulfil its duty. Fresh trouble was caused in May by the King's departure for Hanover, a pleasure which he refused to deny himself despite the critical state of affairs in England. During his absence his power was delegated, as was customary, to a Council of Regency, a body which was always disposed to reserve matters of importance for the King's decision, and was doubly infirm of purpose with such a creature as Newcastle among [287]its ruling spirits. A powerful fleet under Sir Edward Hawke was ready for sea and for action; and the Duke of Cumberland, remembering the consequences of peaceful hostility in 1742 and 1743, was for throwing off the mask, declaring open war and striking swiftly and at once. He was, however, overruled, and Hawke's fleet was sent to sea with instructions that bound it to a violation of peace and a travesty of war. The King meanwhile was solicitous above all things for the security of Hanover. Subsidiary treaties with Bavaria and Saxony for the protection of the Electorate had for some time existed, but were expired or expiring; and now that some return for the subsidies of bygone years seemed likely to be required, the contracting States stood out for better terms. The King therefore entered into a new treaty with Hesse-Cassel for the supply of eight thousand men, and with Russia for forty thousand more, in the event of the invasion of Hanover.
Sept. 15.

With these treaties in his pocket he returned to England, to find the nation full of alarm and discontent. Nor was the nation at fault in its feelings. In August the news of Braddock's defeat had arrived and had been received with impotent dismay. Yet nothing was done to retrieve the disaster, and two full months passed before a few thousand men were added to all three arms of the Army.[266] Meanwhile Newcastle, after vainly endeavouring to persuade Pitt to serve under him, had strengthened his ministry somewhat by securing the accession of Henry Fox; and on the 13th of November the King opened Parliament, announcing, as well he might, the speedy approach of war. A long debate followed, wherein Pitt surpassed himself in denunciation of subsidiary treaties and contemptuous condemnation of Newcastle; but the party of the Court was too strong[288] for him, and the treaties were confirmed by a large majority. Pitt was dismissed from his office of Paymaster, and Fox having been promoted to be Secretary of State was succeeded by Lord Barrington as Secretary at War. Lastly, some weeks later, General Ligonier was most unjustly ousted from the post of Master-General of the Ordnance, to make way for a place-hunter who was not ashamed thus to disgrace his honoured title of Duke of Marlborough. It seemed, in fact, as though there were a general conspiracy to banish ability from high station.
Nov. 27.
Dec. 5.
Dec. 8.

A fortnight later the estimates for the Army were submitted to Parliament. Notwithstanding the urgent danger of the situation, the number of men proposed on the British Establishment little exceeded thirty-four thousand men for Great Britain and thirteen thousand for the colonies. A few days afterwards the question was debated, and Barrington then announced a further increase of troops; whereupon Pitt very pertinently asked the unanswerable question why all these augmentations were made so late. The House, however, was in earnest as to the military deficiencies of the country. Fox had taunted Pitt by challenging him to bring forward a Militia Bill, and Pitt seized the opportunity offered by a debate on the Militia to give the outlines of a scheme for making that force more efficient. His proposals were embodied in a Bill, which formed the basis of the Militia Act that was to be passed, as shall be seen, in the following year. So far therefore the Commons forced upon the Government and the country at least the consideration of really valuable work.
1756.

On the re-assembly of Parliament after Christmas an estimate was presented for the formation of ten new regiments, to be made up in part of certain supplementary companies which had been added to existing battalions in 1755. These new regiments were, in order of seniority, Abercromby's, Napier's, Lambton's, Whitmore's, Campbell's, Perry's, Lord Charles Manner's, Arabin's, Anstruther's and Montagu's, and they are still[289] with us numbered in succession the Fiftieth to the Fifty-ninth.[267] At the same time a new departure was made by adding a light troop apiece to eleven regiments of dragoons, both men and horses being specially equipped for the work which is now expected of all cavalry, but which was then entrusted chiefly to irregular horse formed upon the model of the Austrian Hussars. Yet another novelty was foreshadowed in February when a Bill was introduced to enable the King to grant commissions to foreign Protestants in America. The origin of this measure, according to Horace Walpole, was a proposal made by one Prevost, a Protestant refugee, to raise four battalions of Swiss and Provincials in America, with a British officer for colonel-in-chief but with a fair number of foreigners holding other commissions. Quite as probably this new step was quickened, if not suggested, by the news that the French contemplated the enlistment of recruits among the foreign population of British America. The vote for these four battalions was passed without a division, though Pitt opposed the Bill with all his power and was supported by a petition from the Agent of Massachusetts. He was vehement for the employment of British soldiers to fight British battles; whereas so far the most important military measure of King and ministers had been the hiring of Germans. The Bill was none the less passed, and on the 4th of March the order for the enlistment of the four battalions was given. Lord Loudoun was to be their Colonel-in-Chief, Pennsylvania their recruiting-ground, and their title the Royal Americans, an appellation long since displaced by the famous number of the Sixtieth.
March 23.

Amid all these preparations, however, the nation throughout the first months of 1756 lived in abject terror of an invasion. France on her side had not been backward in equipping herself for the approaching contest. Great activity at Toulon had been followed by equal activity at Dunkirk, and despite good information[290] as to the true object of the armaments fitted out at these two ports, the people naturally, and the Government most culpably, persisted in the belief that they were designed for a descent upon Britain herself. Few troops were ready to meet such a descent, for votes cannot improvise trained officers and men, and the folly of the Administration had done its worst to discourage enlistment. When the danger seemed nearest, many great landowners had interested themselves personally and with great success to obtain recruits; and among others Lord Ilchester and Lord Digby in Somerset had attracted some of the best material to be found in rural England, promising that the men so enlisted should not be required to serve outside the Kingdom. Notwithstanding this pledge, however, these recruits were by order of the Ministry forcibly driven on board transports and shipped off to Gibraltar. Never was there more brutal and heartless instance of the ill-faith kept by a British Government towards the British soldier. Having thus checked the flow of recruits at home, the Ministry turned to Holland and asked for the troops which she was bound by treaty to furnish. The request was refused; whereupon a royal message was actually sent to Parliament announcing that the King in the present peril had sent for his contingent of Hessian troops from Germany, for the defence of England. The message was received with murmurs in the Commons, as well it might be, but it was not opposed; and indeed the climax of disgrace was not yet reached. Whether from desire to embarrass Newcastle or to pay court to the King, Lord George Sackville, an officer whom before long we shall know too well, expressed a preference for Hanoverians over Hessians, and proposed an address praying the King to bring over his own electoral troops. Pitt left his sickbed and came down, ill as he was, to the House, to appeal to the history of the past and to the pride of every Englishman against the motion; yet it was passed by a majority of nearly three to one. The Lords consented to join the Commons in this[291] address, the King granted their prayer, and the result was that both Hanoverians and Hessians were imported to defend this poor Island that could not defend herself.
Jan. 16.

The next business brought before Parliament furnished new evidence of the general confusion of affairs. As might have been foreseen, Frederick of Prussia had viewed with no friendly eye the treaty made by King George with Russia; and he now proposed, as an alternative, that Hanover and England should combine with Prussia to keep all troops whatsoever from entering the German Empire. Since Frederick had already announced his intention of attacking the Russians if they moved across the frontier, and since there was good reason to apprehend that, if driven to desperation, he might join with the French in overrunning Hanover, the Russian treaty was thrown over, and the new arrangement accepted by King George. The pecuniary conditions attached to the agreement were duly ratified by the House of Commons in May, with results that were to reach further than were yet dreamed of. Then at last, apparently as an after-thought, war was formally declared. The country being thus definitely committed to a struggle which might be for life or death, the Lords supported by Newcastle seized the opportunity to reject the Militia Bill, which was the one important military measure so far brought forward. The general helplessness of the moment, owing to the absence of a strong hand at the helm, is almost incredible.
April 8.
April 18.

Meanwhile the French had struck their first blow, not on the shores of Britain, but at Minorca. As early as in January the Ministry had received good intelligence of the true destination of the enemy's armaments, but had made no sufficient preparation to meet the danger; nor was it until the 7th of April that it sent a fleet of ten ships, ill-manned and ill-found, under Admiral Byng to the Mediterranean. On the day following Byng's departure twelve ships of the line under M. de la Galissonière, with transports containing sixteen[292] thousand troops under the Duke of Richelieu, weighed from Toulon, and on the 18th dropped anchor off the port of Ciudadella, at the north-western end of Minorca. General Blakeney, the governor, had received warning of the intended attack two days before, and had made such preparations as he could for defence; but the means at his disposal were but poor. He had four regiments, the Fourth, Twenty-third, Twenty-fourth, and Thirty-fourth of the Line; to which Commodore Edgcumbe, who was lying off Mahon with a squadron too weak to encounter the French, had added all the marines that he could spare before sailing away to Gibraltar. Even so, however, Blakeney could muster little more than twenty-eight hundred men. But his most serious difficulty was lack of officers. He himself had won his ensigncy under Cutts the Salamander at Venloo, and he had maintained his reputation for firmness and courage at Stirling in 1745, but he was now past eighty, crippled with gout and unfit to bear the incessant labours of a siege. Nevertheless he was obliged to take the burden upon him from sheer dearth of senior officers. The lieutenant-governor of the Island, the governor of its principal defence, Fort Philip, and the colonels of all four regiments were absent; nineteen subalterns had never yet joined their respective corps, and nine more officers were absent on recruiting duties. In all five-and-thirty officers were wanting at their posts. It was the old evil against which George the First had struggled in vain, and it was now about to bear bitter fruit.
April.
May.

Richelieu landed on the 18th, and Blakeney at once withdrew the whole of his force to Fort St. Philip in order to make his stand there. This fortress, which commanded the town and harbour of Mahon, was probably the most elaborate possessed by the British, and was inferior in strength to few strongholds in Europe. Apart from the ordinary elaborations of the school of Vauban, it was strengthened by countless mines and galleries hewn out of the solid rock, which[293] afforded unusual protection to the defenders. Blakeney had little time to break up the roads or otherwise to hinder the French advance; and Richelieu, marching into the town of Mahon on the 19th, was able a few days later to begin the siege. His operations, however, were unskilfully conducted, and the garrison defended itself with great spirit. An officer of engineers, Major Cunningham by name, while on his way to England from Minorca on leave, had heard of the French designs upon the Island and had instantly hurried back to his old post to assist in the defence; and his skill and resource were of inestimable value. So clumsily in fact did the French manage their operations that it was not until the 8th of May that their batteries began to produce the slightest effect.

Byng meanwhile had arrived at Gibraltar and had learned what was going forward. He carried the Seventh Fusiliers on board his fleet for Minorca, and had orders to embark yet another battalion from Gibraltar as a further reinforcement. General Fowke, however, who was in command at the Rock, urged that his instructions on this latter point were discretionary only and that he could not spare a battalion, having barely sufficient men to furnish reliefs for the ordinary guards. He therefore declined to grant more than two hundred and fifty men, to replace the marines landed from the fleet by Commodore Edgcumbe. It is instructive to note the difficulties imposed upon the commanders by the neglect of the Government. Hitherto one of the first measures taken in prospect of a war had been the reinforcement of the Mediterranean garrisons. Now, after a full year of warning, they were left unstrengthened and unsupported. Nay, Richelieu had lain in front of Fort St. Philip for three whole weeks before three battalions were at last ordered to sail for Gibraltar.[268] Byng's fleet was so slenderly manned that he required the Seventh Fusiliers for duty[294] on board ship, and therefore asked Fowke for a battalion for Minorca; Fowke's position was so weak that he dared not comply; and Blakeney's force was so inadequate that, though he could indeed hold his own in the fortress, he dared not venture his troops in a sortie.
June 6.
June 9.
June 14.
June 27.
June 28.

At length on the 19th of May Byng came in sight of Fort St. Philip, and on the following day fought the indecisive action and made the unfortunate retreat which became memorable through his subsequent fate. The besieged, though greatly disappointed by his withdrawal, still defended themselves stoutly and with fine spirit. The fortress was well stored and the batteries were well and effectively served. Six more battalions were now sent to Richelieu, and the French plan of attack was altered. New batteries were built, which on the 6th of June opened fire from over one hundred guns and mortars, inflicting much damage and making a considerable breach. The British repaired the injured works and stood to their guns as steadily as ever; but on the 9th the French fire reopened more hotly than before and battered two new breaches. Matters were now growing serious; and on the 14th a party of the garrison made a sally, drove the French from several of their batteries and spiked the guns, but pursuing their success too far were surrounded and captured almost to a man. Still Richelieu hesitated to storm; nor was it until the night of the 27th that he nerved himself for a final effort and made a grand attack upon several quarters of the fortress simultaneously. The defence was of the stubbornest, and the successful explosion of a mine sent three companies of French grenadiers flying into the air; but three of the principal outworks were carried, and the ablest officer of the garrison, Lieutenant-Colonel Jefferies, while hurrying down to save one of them, was cut off and made prisoner with a hundred of his men. Cunningham also was severely wounded and rendered unfit for duty. With hardly men enough left to him to man the guns, Blakeney on the 28th capitulated with the honours of[295] war, and the garrison was embarked for Gibraltar. The siege had lasted for seventy days and had cost the French at the least two thousand men. The losses of the garrison were relatively small, amounting to less than four hundred killed and wounded, and the surrender was no dishonour to the British Army; but there was no disguising the disgraceful fact that Minorca was gone.
July.

On the 14th of July the news reached England, and the nation, frantic with rage and shame, looked about savagely for a scapegoat. Bitter and cruel attacks were made even upon poor old Blakeney, who for all his fourscore years had never changed his clothes nor gone to bed during the ten weeks of the siege. Fowke was tried by court-martial for disobedience of orders in refusing to send the battalion required of him from Gibraltar, and though acquitted of all but an error in judgment and sentenced to a year's suspension only, was dismissed the service by the King. Finally, as is well known, the public indignation fastened itself upon Byng; and the unfortunate Admiral was shot because Newcastle deserved to be hanged. Old Blakeney alone, as was his desert, became a hero and was rewarded with an Irish peerage. Amid all the disgrace of that miserable time men found leisure to chronicle with a sneer that the veteran went to Court in a hackney coach with a foot-soldier behind it. St. James's would not have been the worse for a few more courtiers and lacqueys of the same rugged stamp.
July 23.

More disasters were at hand; but the general paralysis in England continued. Such troops as the country possessed were still distributed as though an invasion were imminent. There was a camp at Cheltenham under Lord George Sackville, and another in Dorsetshire; the Hessians were at Winchester, the Hanoverians about Maidstone, the artillery massed together under the Duke of Marlborough at Byfleet; all doing nothing when there was so much to be done. The news of Braddock's defeat was nearly eight months[296] old when Byng sailed for the Mediterranean, but not a man had been embarked to America. Up to the end of March the only step taken had been the despatch of Colonel Webb to supersede Shirley as Commander-in-Chief, but with instructions to yield the command to General Abercromby, who was also under orders for America, on his arrival; while Abercromby in turn was to give place to Lord Loudoun. At last, towards the end of April the Thirty-fifth Foot and the Forty-second Highlanders were embarked and reached New York late in June; and a month later Lord Loudoun arrived and assumed the command. Pitt before its departure had described the force under Loudoun's orders as a scroll of paper, and the description was little remote from the truth. Of the Sixtieth hardly one battalion was yet raised; Shirley's and Pepperrell's regiments, or what was left of them, were in garrison at Oswego; and the levies of the various colonies as usual were long in enlisting, late in arriving, and not too well supplied. Finally, each several contingent was jealously kept by its province under its own orders and control.

Shirley, undismayed by the failures of the previous year, meditated further operations in the direction of Fort Frontenac and Niagara, and against Crown Point; and with this view he had accumulated supplies along the route to Oswego on the one hand, and at Forts Edward and William Henry on the other. The troops which he had appointed for Niagara were the shattered remains of the Forty-fourth and Forty-eighth, part of his own and of Pepperrell's regiments, four independent regular companies from New York, and a small body of Provincials. The enterprise against Crown Point was assigned to the Provincial forces of New England and New York. Loudoun's instructions seem to have prescribed for him much the same line as Shirley had marked out for himself; but the new Commander-in-Chief conceived an immense and not wholly unreasonable contempt for Shirley and for all his works. In the[297] first place, he found that his predecessor had emptied the military chest, and that there was remarkably little to show for the outlay. Oswego, on inspection by a competent engineer, was declared incapable of defence, being ill-designed and incomplete, while the garrison through sickness and neglect was in a shocking condition.[269] The fact was that the King's boats had been used to transport merchandise for sale by private speculators to the Indians, instead of food for the nourishment of the King's troops. Fort William Henry again was found to be in an indescribably filthy state. Graves, slaughter-houses, and latrines were scattered promiscuously about the camp; no discipline was maintained; provisions were scandalously wasted; and the men were dying at the rate of thirty a week. Loudoun decided almost immediately to abandon the attack on Niagara and to turn all his strength against Ticonderoga and Crown Point.
August 12.
August 9.
August 14.

Meanwhile there were sinister rumours that the French were likely to attack Oswego, and Loudoun sent Colonel Webb with the Forty-fourth regiment to reinforce the garrison. Webb had hardly reached the Great Carrying-place on his way, when the news met him that Oswego had already been captured. On the night of the 9th the Marquis of Montcalm, an energetic officer who had arrived in Canada in May 1755, had swooped down swiftly and secretly upon the fort with three thousand men, and after three days' cannonade had forced it to surrender. Webb at once retired with precipitation, and in alarm at a report that the French were advancing upon New York, burned the fort at the Great Carrying-place and retreated down the Mohawk. Such timidity was worthy of Newcastle's nominee; and this disaster brought the whole of the operations to a standstill. Montcalm having burned Oswego retired to Ticonderoga, where with five thousand men he took up a position from which Loudoun could not hope, with the troops at his disposal, to dislodge[298] him. The British General therefore contented himself with improving the defences of Fort Edward; and therewith ended the campaign of 1756 in North America. Everything had gone as ill as possible. Loudoun had shown great impatience with the Provincials, and the Provincials had taken no pains to help him. In Pennsylvania every conceivable obstacle was thrown in the way of recruiting; in New York there was not less friction over the quartering of the King's troops. There were reasons sufficient in the jealousy, the inexperience, and occasionally the corruption of the Provincials to excuse impatience in the General, but Loudoun was not conciliatory in manner nor had he the ability which commands confidence. He was, in fact, one more of the incompetent men nominated by an incompetent Administration. All that he could show for his first campaign was the loss of Oswego, the station which bound the British colonies to the great Indian trade with the West, the place of arms from which the chain of French posts was to be cut in two, in a word the sharpest and deadliest weapon in the armoury of British North America. Small wonder that the French were filled with triumph and the British colonies with dismay.

The news of yet another reverse heaped fuel on the flame of the nation's indignation against Newcastle; but meanwhile the cloud of war which had hung so long in menace over Europe burst at last in one tremendous storm. For some months past a league had been forming between France, Austria, Saxony, Russia, and Sweden to crush Frederick the Great and partition Prussia. France had been launched into this strange alliance by Madame de Pompadour, in revenge for Frederick's disdainful rejection of a friendly message; the Czarina likewise sought vengeance for an epigram; Austria burned to recover Silesia; Saxony had been enticed by Austria with the lure of a share in partitioned Prussia; and Sweden had been attracted by the bait of Pomerania. Frederick, fully aware of all that was[299] going forward, resolved to meet the danger rather than await it, and boldly invading Saxony began the Seven Years' War. Where it should end no man could divine. All that was certain was that Frederick, far from protecting Hanover, would have much ado to defend himself. Thus, then, on the one side there was Hanover open to attack, and on the other Minorca lost, British naval reputation tarnished, and France triumphant in America. Further, though as yet men knew it not, the news of the loss of Calcutta and of the tragedy of the Black Hole was even then on its way across the ocean. The outcry against the Government rose to a dangerous height; Fox deserted Newcastle, and resigned; and at length, in November, the shifty old jobber himself, after endless intrigues to retain office, reluctantly and ungracefully made way, nominally for the Duke of Devonshire, but in reality for William Pitt.
Dec. 2.
1757.
January.

On the 2nd of December Parliament met, and the spirit of the new minister showed itself at once in the speech from the throne. The electoral troops and Hessians were to be sent back forthwith to Germany; and it was now the royal desire, which it had not been before Pitt took office, that the militia should be made more efficient. In a word, England was from henceforth to fight her battles for herself. Two days later leave was granted for the introduction of a Militia Bill, and on the 15th estimates were submitted for a British Establishment of thirty thousand men for the service of Great Britain and nineteen thousand for the colonies, besides two thousand artillery and engineers; the absence of Minorca from its usual place in the list of garrisons providing a significant comment on the whole. Of the additional troops fifteen thousand had already been appointed for enlistment in September, when orders had been issued for the raising of a second battalion to each of fifteen regiments of the Line.[270] These battalions[300] were erected two years later into distinct regiments, of which ten still remain with us, numbered the Sixty-first to the Seventieth. This addition showed marks of Pitt's influence, but after the Christmas recess his handiwork was seen in a new and daring experiment, namely the formation of two regiments of Highlanders, each eleven hundred strong, which, though afterwards disbanded, became famous under the names of their Colonels, Fraser and Montgomery.[271] The idea was a bold one, for it struck the last weapon from the dying hands of Jacobitism and turned it against itself; and the result soon approved it as a success. The existing Scottish regiments were required to contribute eighty non-commissioned officers who could speak Gaelic;[272] and the Highlander from henceforth took his place not as a subverter of thrones but as a builder of empires. It is remarkable, concurrently, to note the sudden wave of energy which swept over the entire military administration in the first weeks of 1757, when the breath of one great man had once broken the springs and set the stagnant waters aflow. Shirley's and Pepperrell's regiments, which had been crippled and ruined at Oswego, were struck off the list of the Army to make room for more efficient corps.[273] Newcastle's feeble ministers had directed the embarkation of a single battalion only, besides drafts, to America: Pitt, without counter-ordering these, ordered the augmentation and despatch of seven battalions more.[274] The Forty-ninth regiment, which was serving in Jamaica, was increased to nearly double of its former strength, to hearten the colonists in that Island. The Royal Artillery was raised to a total of twenty-four companies and distributed into two battalions, [301]and a company of Miners, first conceived of six months before, was incorporated with it.[275] Finally, the Marines, which had been creeping up in strength ever since the beginning of the war, were augmented from one hundred to one hundred and thirty companies, so that men should not be lacking for the fleet. Nor was it only in the mere activity of departments and ubiquity of recruiting sergeants that the spirit of the master was seen. The nation was stirred by such military ardour as it had not felt since the Civil War, and there was a rush for commissions in the Army.[276]

On the re-assembling of Parliament the Militia Bill was again brought forward, and, though it did not pass the Lords until June, was so essential a feature of Pitt's first short Administration that it may be dealt with here once and for all. The measure was introduced by George Townsend and was practically identical with that which had been rejected in the previous year, though Henry Conway, an officer of some distinction, had prepared an alternative scheme which was preferred by many. The Bill as ultimately passed appointed a proportion of men to be furnished for the Militia in every county of England and Wales, from Devonshire and Middlesex, which were to provide sixteen hundred men apiece, to Anglesey, which was called upon for no more than eighty. These men were to be chosen by lot from lists drawn up by the parochial authorities for the Lords-Lieutenants and their deputies; and every man so chosen was to serve for three years, at the close of which period he was to enjoy exemption until his time should come again. Thus it was designed that every eligible man in succession should pass through the ranks and serve for a fixed term. Special powers were given to justices and to deputy-lieutenants to discharge men from duty on sufficient reason shown, or after two years of service if they were over five-and-thirty years of age. [302]The possession of a certain property was required as a qualification for officers, who likewise were entitled to discharge after four years' service, provided that others could be found to take their places. Provision was also made for the appointment by the King of an adjutant from the regular Army to every regiment, and of a sergeant to every twenty men. The organisation was by regiments of from seven to twelve companies, in which no company was to be of smaller strength than eighty men. The Lord-Lieutenant of each county was in command of that county's militia; and in case of urgent danger the King was empowered to embody the whole force, communicating his reasons to Parliament if in session, when officers and men became entitled to the pay of their rank in the Army and subject to the articles of war. It had been part of the original design, favoured with reservations by Pitt himself, that Sunday should be a day of exercise, as in Switzerland and other Protestant countries; but this clause was dropped in deference to petitions from several dissenting sects, and it was finally enacted that the men should be drilled in half-companies and whole companies alternately on every Monday from April to October. The Act was not passed without much opposition in the Lords, who indeed reduced the numbers of the force to thirty-two thousand men, or one-half of the strength voted by the Commons, and added clauses which clogged the working of the measure. Nor was it at first enforced without dangerous riot and tumult in some quarters, due principally to the unscrupulous employment, already narrated, of men enlisted for duty at home on foreign service. Nevertheless the great step was taken. A local force had been established for domestic defence, and the regular Army was set free for service abroad, or more truly for the service of conquest.

During the early debates on the Militia Bill Pitt himself was absent, being confined to his house by gout; nor was it until the 17th of February that he appeared in his place to support the royal request for[303] subsidies for Hanover and for the King of Prussia. The occasion drew upon him not a few sarcasms, for no man had more vehemently denounced the turning of Great Britain into a milch cow for the Electorate; but he waived the sneers aside in his wonted imperious fashion, for, consistent or inconsistent, he knew at least his own mind. It was one thing for British interests to be subordinated to Hanoverian; but it was quite another for Britain and Hanover to march shoulder to shoulder against a common enemy for their common advantage. The conquest of America in Germany was, as shall be seen, no idle phrase, though few as yet might comprehend its purport. But suddenly at this point Pitt's career was for the moment checked. Notwithstanding this proof of his loyalty to the cause of Hanover, the King was still unfriendly towards his new minister, and actually found, in the peril which threatened his beloved Electorate, a pretext for dismissing him from office. In March 1757 a French army of one hundred thousand men poured over the Rhine; and it was necessary to call out the Hanoverian troops to oppose it. The King was urgent for the Duke of Cumberland to command these forces, but the Duke was by no means so anxious to accept the trust. The memory of past failure oppressed him; and, since he hated Pitt, he was unwilling to correspond with him or to depend on him for instructions and supplies. To obviate this difficulty the King agreed to remove Pitt; and thus a minister of genius was discarded that an unskilful commander might take the field. It was a proceeding worthier of Versailles than of St. James's.

On the 5th of April Pitt, having refused to resign, received intimation of his dismissal; but by this time the nation had been roused to such a pitch that it would suffer no return to the imbecile and disgraceful administration of the past two years. The stocks fell; all the principal towns in England sent the freedom of their corporations to Pitt, and, in Walpole's phrase, for weeks it rained gold boxes. The King turned to Newcastle,[304] but the contemptible old intriguer tried in vain to form a government with Pitt or without him. For eleven whole weeks the negotiations continued and the country was left virtually without a government of any kind, until at length it was seen that Pitt's return to office was inevitable, and on the 27th of July, though Newcastle still retained the post of First Lord of the Treasury, Pitt was finally reinstated as Secretary of State on his own terms, that is to say, with full control of the war and of foreign affairs. "I will borrow the Duke's majority to carry on the Government," he had said, "I am sure that I can save this country and that no one else can."
July 9.

This was the turning-point of the whole war; but during the political struggle much precious time had been lost, all enterprise had been paralysed, and all arrangements dislocated. Thus fresh misfortunes were still at hand to increase the new minister's difficulties. In January Loudoun had received the Twenty-second regiment and the draft sent out to him by Newcastle's Government; but in April he was still awaiting his instructions as to the coming campaign, and meanwhile had little to report but the difficulties thrown by the Provincial authorities in the way of recruiting.[277] Pitt's intention, in deference to Loudoun's own representations, had been that he should attack Louisburg; and the seven battalions already referred to had been ordered to sail to Halifax with that object. These troops had been embarked on the 17th of March but had been detained by contrary winds until after the date of Pitt's dismissal; and though there seems to have been some effort to get them to sea a few days later, it is none the less certain that for one reason or another they did not reach Halifax until July.[278] Meanwhile Loudoun's position was most embarrassing. He had withdrawn [305]all his troops from the frontier to New York, and was waiting only for news of Admiral Holburne's squadron and the reinforcements that he might embark and sail to Halifax to join them. Not a word as to Holburne reached him; and all that he could discover was the unwelcome fact that a French fleet, strong enough to destroy his own escort and sink the whole of his transports, had been seen off the coast.[279] He decided at last that the risk must be run, embarked his troops and arrived safely at Halifax, where ten days later he was joined by Holburne's squadron. The troops were landed, and then, but not till then, steps were taken to obtain intelligence as to the condition of Louisburg. This fact alone enables us to judge of Loudoun's efficiency as a commander. The first reports received, though meagre, were encouraging, and the troops were re-embarked for action; but directly afterwards an intercepted letter revealed the fact that twenty-two French sail of the line were in Louisburg harbour, and that the garrison had been increased to seven thousand men. The French naval force was so far superior to Holburne's that any attempt to prosecute the enterprise was hopeless. The expedition was therefore abandoned, and the troops sailed back to New York.
July 31.
August 4.
August 9.

Meanwhile the disarming of the frontier afforded Montcalm an opportunity for striking a telling blow. At the end of July eight thousand French, Canadians and Indians were assembled at Ticonderoga, and on the 30th twenty-five hundred of them under command of an officer named Lévis started to march to North-West Bay on the western shore of Lake George, while Montcalm with five thousand more embarked in bateaux on Lake Champlain. On the following day both divisions united close to Fort William Henry, and on the 3rd of August Montcalm, mindful of the defeat of Dieskau, laid siege to the fort in form. Fort William Henry was an irregular bastioned square, built of crossed logs filled up with earth and mounting seventeen guns.[306] On the northern side it was protected by the lake, on the eastern side by a marsh, and to south and west by ditches and chevaux de frise. The garrison, which had been reinforced a few days before in view of coming trouble, counted a total strength of twenty-two hundred men, including regular troops, sailors and mechanics, under the command of a veteran Scottish officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Monro of the Thirty-fifth Foot. On the night of the 4th the trenches were opened on the western side of the fort, and two days later the French batteries opened fire. The fort returned the fire with spirit, but it was evident that unless it were speedily relieved its fall could be only a question of time. Colonel Webb lay only fourteen miles away at Fort Edward, and by summoning troops hurriedly from New York and from the posts on the Mohawk had collected a force of over four thousand men; but Montcalm was reported to have twelve thousand men, and Webb did not think it prudent to advance to Lake George until further reinforced. He therefore sent a letter to Monro, advising him to make the best terms that he could, which was intercepted by Montcalm and politely forwarded by him to its destination. The siege was pushed vigorously forward, and by the 8th the besieged were in desperate straits. Over three hundred men had been killed and wounded, all the guns excepting a few small pieces had been disabled, and, worst of all, smallpox was raging in the fort. On the 9th, therefore, Monro capitulated on honourable terms, which provided, among other conditions, that the French should escort the garrison to Fort Edward. On the march the Indian allies of the French burst in upon the unarmed British, unchecked by the Canadian militia, and despite the efforts of Montcalm and of his officers massacred eighty of them and maltreated many more. This, however, though it might well stir the vengeful feelings of the British, was but an episode. The serious facts were the loss of the post at Lake George, and yet another British reverse in North America.

July 26.
Sept. 5.

Such were among the last legacies bequeathed by Newcastle's feebleness; and meanwhile the King's perversity in driving Pitt from office had brought speedy judgment upon himself and upon Cumberland. The Duke was defeated by the French at the battle of Hastenbeck, and retreating upon Stade concluded, or rather found concluded for him, the convention of Klosterzeven, whereby he agreed to evacuate the country. Such were the discouragements which confronted Pitt on resuming office. It was hard to see how he could initiate any operations of value at so late a period of the year, but there was one species of diversion which, though little recommended by experience of the past, lay open to him still, namely a descent upon the French coast. A young Scottish officer, who had travelled in France, gave intelligence based on no very careful or recent observation, that the fortifications of Rochefort were easily assailable; and Pitt on the receipt of this intelligence at once conceived the design of surprising Rochefort and burning the ships in the Charente below it. Somewhat hastily it was determined to send ten of the best battalions and a powerful fleet on this enterprise, and the military command was offered to Lord George Sackville, who not relishing the task found an excuse for declining. Pitt was then for entrusting it to General Henry Conway, but the King objected to this officer on the score of his youth, and insisted on setting over him Sir John Mordaunt, a veteran who had showed merit in the past, but had now lost his nerve and was conscious that he had lost it. He and Conway alike objected to the project as based on flimsy and insufficient information, but both thought themselves bound in honour to accept the trust confided to them.
Sept. 8.
October.

Though the expedition had been decided upon in July, it was not until two months later that it sailed from England, and meanwhile the troops waited as usual in the Isle of Wight.[280] There was much delay in[308] providing transports, and the embarkation was so ill-managed that the troops were obliged to row a full mile to their ships. On the 8th of September, however, the vessels put to sea under convoy of sixteen sail of the line under Sir Edward Hawke, and after much delay from foul winds and calms anchored in Basque Roads, the haven which was to become famous half a century later for an attack of a very different kind. On the 23rd the fortifications of the Isle d'Aix were battered down by the fleet and the island itself captured; but therewith the operations came abruptly to an end. Fresh information revealed that the French were fully prepared to meet an attack on Rochefort; and a council of war decided that any attempt to take it by escalade would be hopeless. It was therefore decided to attack the forts at the mouth of the Charente, but the order was countermanded by Mordaunt; and after a week's delay Hawke gave the General to understand that unless operations were prosecuted forthwith he would return with the fleet to England. The military commanders thereupon decided that they would return with him, which on the 1st of October they did, to the huge indignation of both fleet and army. A court of inquiry was held over this absurd issue to such extensive and costly preparations, and Sir John Mordaunt was tried by court-martial but honourably acquitted. The incident gave rise to a fierce war of pamphlets. It is certain that Mordaunt showed remarkable supineness, and he was suspected of a wish to injure the influence of Pitt by turning the enterprise into ridicule; but with such men as Wolfe, Conway and Cornwallis among the senior officers, the only conclusion is that, in the view of military men, no object of the least value could have been gained by any operations whatever. Military opinion had been against the expedition from the first. Ligonier, a daring officer but of ripe experience and sound judgment, wrote of it in the most lukewarm terms as likely to lead to nothing. On the whole it seems that the troops were sent on a fool's errand, and that the blame[309] lay solely with Pitt. The nation was furious, and the King showed marked coldness towards the generals who had taken part in the failure; but Pitt, who was more hurt and disappointed than any one, took no step except to promote Wolfe, who had advocated active measures, over the heads of several other officers, and thus in one way at least extracted good from evil.

So ended the campaigning season of 1757 with an unbroken record of ill success in every quarter. But the right man was now at the head of affairs and was looking about him for the right instruments. The long period of darkness had come to an end and the light was about to break, at first in flickering broken rays, but soon to shine out in one blaze of dazzling and surpassing splendour.
BOOK X CHAPTER I

Pitt had now a free hand for the execution of such enterprises as he might desire, a freer hand indeed than any of his predecessors for ten years past had enjoyed; for Cumberland, being ill-received by the King on his return from Hastenbeck, had resigned the Commandership-in-Chief and all his military appointments of whatever description. Pitt, conscious that the Duke had been hardly treated, made no secret of his sympathy with him; but there can be no doubt that Ligonier, who succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief, was infinitely more competent as a military adviser and more sympathetic as a military colleague. And there was need for sound military capacity to deal with all the projects that were ripening in the minister's teeming brain.
June 23.
December.

Parliament met on the 1st of December, and the King's speech, after announcing vigorous prosecution of the war in America and elsewhere, begged for support for the King of Prussia. Frederick fortunately stood just at that moment at his highest in the public view, for his two masterly victories at Rossbach and Leuthen; and Parliament did not hesitate to confirm a subsidy to him to enable him to carry on the struggle. But in other respects Pitt could find little to boast of in the past year, and he was obliged to confine his eulogy to Frederick and to Clive, whose victory at Plassey, now just become known in England, could not be ascribed to any extraordinary efforts on the part of a British Ministry. The word "elsewhere" in the King's speech[314] was understood to signify Hanover, though Pitt warmly disclaimed any such interpretation of the term; but the Commons did not quarrel with it nor with the estimates that were submitted in support of the policy. These were presented on the 7th of December and showed a force for the British Establishment of eighty-six thousand five hundred men, thirty thousand of them for Gibraltar and the colonies, and the remainder nominally for service at home. Four thousand of this number, however, were invalids, who were kept for duties in garrison only, a system wisely copied from earlier days and followed from the beginning to the end of the war. One new regiment only had been raised since the formation of Fraser's and Montgomery's Highlanders, namely Colonel Draper's, which had been created for service in India and which brought up the number of the regiments of the Line to seventy-nine. Adding the troops on the Irish to those on the British Establishment the full numbers of the Army may be set down roughly at one hundred thousand men. It was soon to be seen what Pitt could accomplish with them, when he had found officers who would fulfil his instructions.

America first occupied his attention and was dealt with summarily. The first thing to be done was to recall Lord Loudoun from the command, a resolution which was carried out before the year's end,[281] and to appoint a new General in his place. The choice fell upon General James Abercromby, who had been sent out by Newcastle's Administration; and the selection was not a fortunate one. The next step was to summon Colonel Jeffery Amherst from Germany, where he had been employed since 1756 as Commissary to the Hessian troops in the pay of England. Amherst, it will be remembered, was a Guardsman, and was last seen by us as Ligonier's aide-de-camp on the field of Fontenoy; so it is at least probable that his appointment was due to Ligonier's influence. Three new brigadiers were[315] nominated to serve under him, Lawrence, Whitmore, and James Wolfe. The operations to be undertaken in America were threefold. First and foremost Louisburg was to be besieged; and this duty was assigned to Amherst with fourteen thousand regular troops. Concurrently an advance was to be made upon Crown Point, and pushed forward if possible to Montreal and Quebec; which service was entrusted to Abercromby, aided by Brigadier Lord Howe, with about ten thousand regulars and twenty thousand Provincial troops. Lastly, nineteen hundred regular troops and five thousand Provincials under Brigadier-General Forbes were to repair Braddock's failure and capture Fort Duquêsne.[282] The number of Provincial troops to be employed was five times as great as that provided by the colonies in any previous year; but Pitt, while asking for so formidable a force, agreed to supply the troops with tents, provisions, arms, and ammunition, leaving to the provinces the expenses of raising, clothing, and paying them only. Moreover, he had readjusted the former regulations as to the seniority of Provincial and Imperial officers, which had given much offence, in a spirit somewhat less to the prejudice of the Provincials. True to his principle that British battles should be fought by British subjects he grudged no expense to gather recruits from the new British beyond sea.

The troops were to be escorted to America by a fleet under Admiral Boscawen, which was strong enough to overpower any French fleet in American waters. A squadron was also sent under Admiral Osborne to the Mediterranean to intercept any French reinforcements from Toulon, while yet another squadron under Sir Edward Hawke cruised with the like object before Rochefort. Osborne's name has been forgotten, and Hawke's lesser services have been swallowed up in the fame of his action before Quiberon; but it may be said here once for all that both officers performed their parts with admirable ability and signal success. The reader[316] may now begin to judge of Pitt's talent for organising victory.
1758.
Feb. 19.

Boscawen, with twenty-three ships of the line and several smaller vessels, sailed with his convoy of transports on the 19th of February. It had been Pitt's hope that the siege of Louisburg should have been begun by the 20th of April;[283] but fate was against him, and the Admiral did not reach Halifax until the 9th of May. Amherst, who had sailed with Captain George Rodney in H.M.S. Dublin on the 16th of March, was not less unlucky in his passage; and Boscawen, after waiting for his arrival at Halifax until the 28th of May, at last put to sea without him, but fortunately met the Dublin just outside the harbour. The huge fleet, one hundred and fifty-seven sail in all, with eleven thousand troops on board, then steered eastward, and on the 2nd of June sailed into Gabarus Bay, immediately to westward of the tongue of land whereon stood Louisburg. Here there were three possible landing-places: Freshwater Cove, four miles from the town; Flat Point, which was rather nearer; and White Point, which was within a mile of the ramparts. East of the fortress there was yet another landing-place named Lorambec. It was determined to threaten all these points simultaneously, Lawrence and Whitmore with their respective brigades moving towards White Point and Flat Point, with one regiment detached against Lorambec, while Wolfe's brigade should make a true attack upon Freshwater Cove.[284] Nothing very clear was known of the French defences erected to cover these landing-places, and it so happened that the point selected for attack was the most strongly defended of all.
June 8.

For five days all attempts at disembarkation were [317]frustrated by fog and storm; but at two o'clock on the morning of the 8th the troops were got into the boats, and at daybreak the frigates of the fleet stood in and opened a fierce fire upon the French entrenchments at all of the threatened points. A quarter of an hour later the boats shoved off and pulled for the shore. Wolfe's party consisted of five companies of grenadiers, a body of five hundred and fifty marksmen drawn from the different regiments and known as the Light Infantry, and a body of American Rangers, with Fraser's Highlanders and eight more companies of grenadiers in support. The beach at Freshwater Cove, for which they were making, was a quarter of a mile long, with rocks at each end; and on the shore above it more than a thousand Frenchmen lay behind entrenchments, which were further covered by abatis. Eight cannon and swivels had been brought into position to sweep every portion of the beach and of its approaches, but were cunningly masked by young evergreen shrubs planted in the ground before them. The French had not been at fault when they selected the point remotest from the town as the most likely to be attacked by an enemy.

The boats were close in-shore before the French made any sign, when they suddenly opened a deadly fire of grape and musketry. Wolfe, seeing that a landing in face of such a tempest of shot would be hopeless, signalled to the boats to sheer off; but three of them, filled with Light Infantry on the extreme right, being little exposed to the fire, pulled on to a craggy point just to eastward of the beach, which was sheltered from the enemy's cannon by a small projecting spit. There the three officers in charge leaped ashore followed by their men, and Wolfe hastened the rest of his boats to the same spot. Major Scott, who commanded the Light Infantry, was the first to reach the land; and though his boat was stove in against the rocks he scrambled ashore, and with no more than ten men held his own against six times his numbers of French and Indians, till other troops came to his support. The rest of the boats followed[318] close in his wake. Many were stove in and not a few capsized; some of the men too were caught by the surf and drowned; but the greater part made their way ashore wet or dry, Wolfe, who was armed only with a cane, leaping into the surf and scrambling over the crags with the foremost. Arrived at the firm ground beyond, the men formed, attacked the nearest French battery in flank, and quickly carried it with the bayonet. Lawrence's brigade now rowed up, and finding the French fully occupied with Wolfe, landed at the western end of the beach with little difficulty or loss. Amherst followed him; and the French seeing themselves attacked on right and left, and fearing to be cut off from the town, abandoned all their guns, some three-and-thirty pieces great and small, and fled into the woods in the rear of their entrenchments. The British pursued, until on emerging from the forest they found themselves in a cleared space with the guns of Louisburg opening fire upon them. Then the pursuit was checked, for the first great object had been obtained. The total loss of the British little exceeded one hundred in killed, wounded, and drowned; that of the French was not much greater, but the British had gained a solid success.

Amherst pitched his camp just beyond range of the guns of the fortress, and selected Flat Point Cove as the place for landing his guns and stores. The disembarkation of material was a task of extreme difficulty and danger owing to the surf, so much so that over one hundred boats were stove in during the course of the siege. The General, therefore, had ample leisure to examine the ground before him. The harbour of Louisburg is a land-locked bay with an extreme width from north-east to south-west of about two and a half miles. The entrance is rather more than a mile wide, but is narrowed to less than half of that distance by a chain of rocky islets. The defences of the entrance were a battery on a small island on the west side of the channel and a fort on the eastern shore at the promontory of Lighthouse Point. Within the harbour[319] on the northern shore had stood a battery known as the Grand battery, but this was destroyed by the French on the night of Amherst's landing; and on the western shore on a triangular peninsula stood Louisburg itself, the Dunkirk of America, the apex of the triangle pointing towards the harbour, the base towards the land where Amherst's force now lay encamped. The full circuit of its fortifications was about a mile and a half, and the number of cannon and mortars mounted thereon and on the outworks exceeded two hundred. The garrison consisted of five battalions of regular troops, numbering about four thousand men, together with several companies of colonial troops from Canada; the whole being under command of a gallant officer named Drucour. Finally, at anchor in the harbour lay five ships of the line and seven frigates. The strongest front of the fortress was on the side of the land, running from the sea on the south to the harbour on the north: it was made up of four bastions called in succession, from north to south, the Dauphin's, King's, Queen's, and Princess's bastions. The King's bastion formed part of the citadel, and before it the glacis sloped down to a marsh which protected it completely; but at both extremities of the line there was high ground favourable for the works of a besieging force. It was towards the northern extremity, from a hillock at the edge of the marsh, that Amherst resolved to push his first attack.
June 25.
June 29.

Meanwhile the labour to be accomplished before the guns and stores could be brought to the spot was immense. The distance from the landing-place was a mile and a half, every yard of it consisting of deep mud covered with moss and water-weeds, through which it was necessary to make not only a road but an epaulement also, to protect the road; for a French frigate, the Aréthuse, lay in a lagoon called the Barachois at the extreme western corner of the harbour, and swept all the ground before the ramparts with a flanking fire. While, therefore, this work was going forward Wolfe was ordered with twelve hundred men and artillery to the[320] battery at Lighthouse Point, which had been abandoned by the French, in order to fire upon the Island battery and upon the ships in the harbour. After some days the Island battery was silenced with the help of the fleet, and the men of war were driven under the guns of the main fortress. The entrance to the harbour being thus laid open to the British fleet, the French commander under cover of a foggy night sank six large ships in the channel to bar the passage anew.
July 9.
July 14.
July 21.

On the very day when Wolfe succeeded in silencing the Island battery Amherst's preparations were at last completed; and the British began to break ground on the appointed hillock. From thence the trenches were carried, despite the fire of the Aréthuse, towards the Barachois; and it was soon evident that the frigate would be repaid for all the mischief that she had wrought. At the same time Wolfe broke ground to the south opposite to the Princess's bastion, and despite a fierce sortie made by a drunken party of the garrison, pushed his works steadily forward against it. Another three weeks saw the net closing tighter and the fire raining fiercer about the doomed fortress. The Aréthuse, after sticking to her moorings right gallantly under an ever increasing fire, was compelled at last to shift her position. Two days later Wolfe, as busy at the left as at the right attack, made a dash at nightfall upon some rising ground only three hundred yards before the Dauphin's bastion, drove out the French that occupied it, and would not be forced back by the fiercest fire from the ramparts. On the 21st a lucky shell fell on one of the French line-of-battle ships and set her on fire. The scanty crew left on board of her could not check the flames. She drifted from her moorings upon two of her consorts and kindled them also; and all three were burned to the water's edge. The two remaining line-of-battle ships survived them but a little time, for a few nights later six hundred sailors rowed silently into the harbour and surprised and captured both of them. One, being aground, was burned, and the other was[321] towed off, in contempt of the fire from the fortress, to a safe anchorage.
July 27.

By this time Amherst's batteries had reduced Louisburg almost to defencelessness. The masonry of the fortress had crumbled under the concussion of its own guns and was little able to stand the shot of the British. A new battery erected on the hill to the north of the Barachois raked the western front of the French works from end to end, and there was no standing against its fire. On the 26th of July the last gun on that front was silenced and a practicable breach had been made. Drucour then made overtures for a capitulation. Amherst's reply was short and stern: the garrison must surrender as prisoners of war, and a definite answer must be returned within one hour. Drucour replied at first with defiance, but, before his messenger could reach Amherst he sent a second emissary to accept the terms; and on the following day the British occupied the fortress. The casualties of the besiegers were not heavy, little exceeding five hundred killed and wounded of all ranks. The loss of the French is unknown, but must have been very great, from sickness not less than from shot and shell. The number of soldiers and sailors made prisoners amounted to fifty-six hundred, while over two hundred cannon and a large quantity of munitions and stores were surrendered with the fortress. So Cape Breton, and Prince Edward's Island with it, passed under the dominion of the British for ever.

The siege over, Amherst proposed to Boscawen to proceed to Quebec, but the Admiral did not consider the enterprise to be feasible. Drucour's gallant defence, indeed, had accomplished one object, in preventing Amherst from co-operating with Abercromby in the attack on Canada; though, could the siege have been begun at the date fixed by Pitt, his efforts would have been of little avail. Amherst therefore left four battalions to garrison Louisburg,[285] and sent Colonel Monckton, Colonel Lord Rollo, and Wolfe, each with a[322] sufficient force, to complete the work of subjugation on Prince Edward's Island, the Bay of Fundy, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Wolfe having accomplished his part of the task went home on sick leave, and Amherst sailed with five battalions[286] for Boston, where he arrived on the 14th of September and was received with immense though rather inconvenient enthusiasm by the inhabitants.[287] His presence was but too sorely needed to repair the mischief wrought by Abercromby's incapacity.

The prospects of Abercromby at the opening of the campaign were such as might have encouraged any General. Vaudreuil, the Governor of Canada, a corrupt and incapable man, knowing of the intended advance of the British by Lakes George and Champlain upon Ticonderoga and Crown Point, had proposed to avert it by a counter-raid along the Mohawk upon the Hudson. This plan, being vague, and indeed impracticable, was abandoned; and the defence of the approaches to Montreal was committed to Montcalm, who was stationed at Ticonderoga with an insufficient force of about four thousand men, and without support from the posts higher up the lake. To Abercromby, with seven thousand regular troops and nine thousand Provincials, the exposure of this weak and isolated force should have been welcome as the solution of all his difficulties. It must now be seen to what end he turned so excellent an opportunity.

The early months of the summer were occupied with the task, always vexatious and troublesome, of collecting the Provincial troops, and of sending supplies up the Mohawk and the Hudson to Fort Edward. The latter work was tedious and harassing, despite the facilities of carriage by water, for there were three portages between Albany and Fort Edward, at each of which all boats had to be unladen, and dragged, together [323]with their stores, for three or even more miles overland before they could be launched again for easier progress. None the less the business went forward with great energy; and notwithstanding the danger of convoys from the attack of Indians when passing through the forest, the work of escorting was so perfectly managed that not one was molested. These admirable arrangements were due to Brigadier Lord Howe, the eldest of three brothers, all of whom were destined to leave a mark for good or evil on English history.

Howe had been appointed by Pitt to make good the failings which were suspected in Abercromby. He was now thirty-four years of age, and having arrived in America with his regiment, the Fifty-fifth, in the previous year, had been at pains to learn the art of forest-warfare from the most famous leader of the Provincial irregulars. He threw off all training and prejudices of the barrack-yard, joined the irregulars in their scouting-parties, shared the hardships and adopted the dress of his rough companions and became one of themselves. Having thus schooled himself he began to impart the lessons that he had learned to his men. He made officers and men, alike of regular and of Provincial troops, throw off all useless encumbrances; he cut the skirts off their coats and the hair off their heads, browned the barrels of their muskets, clad their lower limbs in leggings to protect them from briars, and filled the empty space in their knapsacks with thirty pounds of meal, so as to make them independent for weeks together of convoys of supplies. In a word, he headed a reaction against the stiff unpractical school of Germany so much favoured by Cumberland, and tried to equip men reasonably for the rough work that lay before them. Such ideas had occurred to other men besides him. Colonel Bouquet of the Sixtieth wished to dress his men like Indians, and Brigadier Forbes went cordially with him, for, as he wrote emphatically, "We must learn the art of war from the Indians." Washington, again, said that if the matter were left to his inclination[324] he would put both men and officers into Indian dress and set the example himself.[288] There was in fact a general revolt of all practical men against powder and pipeclay for bush-fighting, and Howe was fortunately in a position to turn it to account. Possibly it is to his influence that may be traced the formation in the same year of a regiment which, being designed for purposes of scouting and skirmishing only, was clothed in dark brown skirtless coats without lace of any description. This corps ranked for a time as the eightieth of the Line, and was known as Gage's Light Infantry.[289] It must not be supposed that these reforms were accepted without demur. Officers were dismayed to find that they were expected to wash their own clothes without the help of the regimental women, and to carry their own knives and forks with them according to Howe's example; and the German soldiers, of whom there were many in the Sixtieth, sorely resented the cropping of their heads. But Howe was a strict disciplinarian, and not the less, but rather the more, on this account was adored by the men.[290]
July 5.

By the end of June the whole of Abercromby's force, with all its supplies, was assembled at the head of Lake George. On the 4th of July the stores were shipped, and on the following day the men were embarked. The arrangements were perfect: each corps marched to its appointed place on the beach without the least confusion, and before the sun was well arisen the whole army was afloat. The scene was indescribably beautiful. Overhead the sky was blue and cloudless; the sun had just climbed above the mountain tops, and his rays slanted down over the vast rolling slope of forest to the lake. Not a breath of air was [325]moving to ruffle the still blue water or stir the banks of green leaves around it, as the twelve hundred boats swept over the glassy surface. Robert Rogers, most famous of American partisans and instructor of Howe, with his rangers, and Gage with part of his new Light Infantry led the way. John Bradstreet of New England followed next with the boatmen, himself the best boatman among them; and then in three long parallel columns came the main body of the army. To right and left blue coats showed the presence of the Provincial troops of New England and New York, and in the centre flared the well-known English scarlet. Howe led this centre column with the Fifty-fifth, his own regiment; and after him followed the first and fourth battalions of the Sixtieth, the Twenty-seventh, Forty-fourth, Forty-sixth, and last of all the Forty-second with their sombre tartan, each regiment marked by its flying colours of green or buff or yellow or crimson. Then, unmarked by any flag, for colours they had none, came more of Gage's brown coats. Two "floating castles" armed with artillery also accompanied this column, towering high above the slender canoes and whale-boats; and in the rear came the bateaux laden with stores and baggage, with a rear-guard made up of red coats and of blue. So the great armament, stretching almost from shore to shore, crept on over the bosom of the lake, the strains of fife and drum mingling with the plashing of ten thousand oars, till the narrows were reached and the broad front dwindled into a slender procession six miles in length, still creeping on like some huge sinuous serpent on its errand of destruction and death.
July 6.

By five in the afternoon the flotilla had travelled five-and-twenty miles, and a halt was made for the baggage and artillery, which had lagged behind. At eleven o'clock it started again, and at daybreak reached the narrow channel that leads into Lake Champlain by the headland of Ticonderoga. A small advanced post of the French on the shore was driven back, and the[326] work of disembarkation was begun. By noon the whole army had been landed on the western shore of the lake; Rogers with his rangers was sent forward to reconnoitre, and the troops were formed in four columns for the march. The route proposed was to follow the western bank of the channel which connects Lake George with Lake Champlain, since the French had destroyed the bridge over it, and to fall upon Ticonderoga from the rear. The way lay through virgin forest, encumbered with thick undergrowth and strewed with the decaying trunks and limbs of fallen trees. All order became impossible; the men struggled forward as best they could; the columns got mixed together; the guides lost all idea of their direction in the maze; and the army for a time was lost in the forest.

Meanwhile the French advanced party, some three hundred and fifty men, which had fallen back before the British, found its retreat cut off, and had no resource but to take to the woods. They too lost themselves among the trees, and the two hostile bodies were groping their way helplessly on, when the right centre column of the British, with Lord Howe and some rangers at its head, blundered unawares full upon the French party. A sharp skirmish followed, and in the general confusion the main body of the British, hearing volleys but unable to see, became very unsteady. Fortunately the rangers stood firm, and Rogers' advanced guard, turning back at the sound of shots, caught the French between two fires and virtually annihilated them. The British loss in this affair was trifling in numbers but none the less fatal to the expedition; for Lord Howe lay dead with a bullet through his heart, and with his death the whole soul of the army expired.
July 7.

Abercromby's force was for the moment paralysed. Half of his army was lost, nor did he know where to find it. So much of it as he could collect he kept under arms all night, and next morning he fell back to[327] his landing-place, where to his great relief he found the rest of his troops awaiting him. Montcalm meanwhile had been devoured by anxiety. The channel between Lake George and Lake Champlain being impassable by boats owing to rapids, the usual route to Ticonderoga lay across it by some saw-mills at the foot of the rapids, where he had already destroyed the bridge. Nevertheless it was not by these saw-mills but on the western bank of the channel that he had determined to make his stand; nor was it until the evening of the 6th that, yielding to the advice of two of his officers, he decided to retire to Ticonderoga. Accordingly, at noon of the 7th, Abercromby sent Rogers forward with a detachment to occupy the saw-mills. The bridge was rebuilt; and the army, crossing the channel late in the afternoon, occupied the camp deserted by the French. Abercromby was now within two miles of Ticonderoga.

But meanwhile Montcalm had not been idle. The peninsula of Ticonderoga consists of a rocky plateau with low ground on each side, standing at the junction of Lakes George and Champlain. The fort stood near the end of this peninsula; and half a mile to westward of the spot the ground rises and forms a ridge across the plateau. On this ridge Montcalm decided at the last moment to throw up abatis and accept battle. The outline of the works had already been traced, and at the dawn of the 7th every man of his force was at work, cutting down the trees that covered the ground. The tops were cut off and the logs piled into a massive breast-work nine feet high, which was carefully loop-holed. The forest before the breast-work was also felled and left lying with the tops turned outwards, as though, to use the words of an eye-witness, it had been laid low by a hurricane. Between these felled trees and the breast-work the ground was covered with heavy boughs, their points being sharpened and the branches interlaced, so as to present an almost impenetrable obstacle. The French officers themselves[328] were amazed at the work which had been accomplished in one day.
July 8.

Still the position was no Malplaquet, and there was no occasion for Abercromby to dread it. It was open to him either to attack Montcalm in his flanks, which were unfortified; or to bring up his artillery and batter the breast-work to splinters about his ears; or better still to post his guns on a height, called Mount Defiance, which commanded the position, and to rake the breast-work from end to end; or best of all to mask this improvised stronghold with a part of his force and push on with the rest northward up Lake Champlain and so cut off at once Montcalm's supplies and his retreat. The French General had but thirty-six hundred men and only eight days' provisions with him, so that this movement would have ensured his surrender without the firing of a shot. Abercromby's intelligence, however, told him that the French were six thousand strong and that three thousand more were expected to join them at any hour; and he was nervously anxious to make his attack before this reinforcement, which had in reality no existence, should arrive on the spot. Accordingly, at dawn of the 8th, Abercromby sent his engineers to reconnoitre the enemy's position from Mount Defiance. The duty was most perfunctorily fulfilled, and the chief engineer, Lieutenant-Colonel Clark, reported that the works could be captured by direct assault. This was enough for Abercromby. Without further inquiry he resolved that the artillery should be left idle at the place where it had been landed, and that the abatis should be carried with the bayonet.

It was high noon, and the French were still busily strengthening their wooden ramparts with earth and sandbags when shots in the forest before them gave warning that the British advanced parties had struck against their picquets. Instantly they fell in behind the breast-work, three deep, eight battalions of regular troops and four hundred and fifty Canadians, numbering in all little more than a fourth of the British force. The[329] advance of the British was covered by the Light Infantry and rangers while the columns of attack were forming under shelter of the forest. Then the skirmishers cleared the front and the scarlet masses came forward, solid and steady; the picquets leading, the grenadiers in support, the battalions of the main body after the grenadiers, and the Fifty-fifth and Forty-second Highlanders in reserve. It was little that they could see through the tangle of fallen trees and dying leaves; possibly they caught a glimpse of the top of the breast-work but of not a white coat of the defenders behind it. On they came in full confidence, knowing nothing of the obstacles before them, when suddenly the breast-work broke into a sheet of flame and a storm of grape and musketry swept the ranks from end to end. Abercromby's instructions had been that the position should be taken with the bayonet, but all order was lost in the maze of fallen trees, and very soon the men began to return the fire as they advanced, but with little effect, for not an enemy could they see. Nevertheless, though riddled through and through, they scrambled on over the prostrate trunks straight upon the breast-work, when they were stopped by the tangled hedge and sharpened boughs of the inner abatis. Strive as they might they could not force their way through this under the terrible fire that rained on them in front and flank from the angles of the breast-work; and after an hour's struggle they fell back, exclaiming that the position was impregnable. Reports were sent to Abercromby, who throughout the action had never moved from the saw-mills, two miles away, and for all answer there came back the simple order to attack again.

And then came such a scene as had not been witnessed since Malplaquet nor was to be seen again till Badajoz. The men stormed forward anew, furious with rage and heedless of bullets or grape-shot, through the network of trunks and boughs against their invisible enemy. Behind the breast-work the French were cheering loudly, hoisting their hats occasionally above the[330] parapet and laughing when they were blown to pieces, but pouring in always a deadly and unquenchable fire; while the British struggled on, grimed with sweat and smoke, vowing that they would have that wooden wall at any cost. The Highlanders broke loose from the reserve with claymores drawn and slashed their way through the branches to the breast-work, and the British rushed after them to its foot but could advance no further. They had no ladders, and as fast as they hoisted one another to the top of the breast-work they were shot down. Montcalm, cool and collected, moved to and fro among his men in his shirt-sleeves, always at the point of greatest danger, to cheer them and keep them to the fight. The French fire was appalling in its destruction. Men who had passed through the ordeal of Fontenoy declared that it was child's play compared with Ticonderoga. Nevertheless not once only, but thrice more, the British and the Americans with them hurled themselves desperately against the French stronghold, only to be beaten back time after time, until the inner abatis was hung with wisps of scarlet, like poppies that grow through a hedge of thorn, some swaying with the contortions that told of living agony, some limp and still in the merciful stillness of death. The fight had endured for five hours, when some officer of more intelligence than his fellows formed two columns and made a fifth attack upon the extreme right of the French position. The men hewed their way to the breast-work, and for a time the fate of this unequal day hung trembling in the balance. Montcalm hurried to the threatened quarter with his reserves, but only by desperate exertion held his own, for the Highlanders fought with a fury that would yield neither to discipline nor to death. Captain John Campbell and a few of his men actually scaled the wooden wall and dropped down within it, but only to be pierced at once by a score of bayonets. Finally at six o'clock a last attack was delivered, as heroic, as hopeless, and as fruitless as the rest; and then the order was given to retreat. The[331] Highlanders were with the greatest difficulty forced away from their fallen comrades, and under cover of the skirmishers' fire the British withdrew, shattered, exhausted, and demoralised.

And then came one of those strange and dreadful scenes which break an officer's heart. Hardly was the retreat sounded when the very men who for six hours had faced the mouth of hell without flinching were seized with panic and fled in wild disorder through forest and swamp to the landing-place, leaving their arms, their accoutrements, the very shoes from their feet to mark the track of their flight. Fortunately Bradstreet and his armed boatmen mounted guard over the boats and prevented the fugitives from setting themselves afloat. Abercromby came up, as abject as the worst, despatched orders for the wounded and the heavy artillery to be sent back to New York, and followed himself so speedily with his humiliated troops that he arrived at the head of Lake George before his messenger. There he entrenched himself and sat still, while the reckoning of his ignorance and folly was made up. Of the Provincial troops three hundred and thirty-four had fallen before Ticonderoga; of the seven British battalions no fewer than sixteen hundred. The Forty-second lost close on five hundred men and officers killed and wounded, the Forty-fourth and Forty-sixth each about two hundred, the Fifty-fifth and the fourth battalion of the Sixtieth each about one hundred and fifty, the Twenty-seventh and first battalion of the Sixtieth each about a hundred. The loss of the French was less than three hundred and fifty, and Montcalm might well praise his gallant soldiers and hug himself over his victory, for he had fended off attack on Canada for at least one year.
August.

The French General contented himself with strengthening the defences of Ticonderoga and sending out parties of irregulars to harass Abercromby's communications with Fort Edward. Abercromby for his part remained throughout July and the first days of[332] August glued to his camp at the head of Lake George, losing many men from dysentery but attempting nothing. At last he made over to Bradstreet a force of twenty-five hundred men, Provincial troops for the most part, and sent him to attack the French post of Fort Frontenac, which guarded the outlet of Lake Ontario into the St. Lawrence. The project was Bradstreet's own and had been favourably regarded some time before by Loudoun; but it was only under pressure of a council of war that Abercromby's assent to it was wrung from him. Bradstreet accordingly dropped down to Albany, and advanced by the Mohawk and Onandaga to the site of Oswego, where he launched out on to the lake on the 22nd of August, and on the 25th landed safely near Fort Frontenac. The French garrison being little over one hundred strong could make small resistance, and on the 27th surrendered as prisoners of war, leaving nine vessels, which constituted the entire naval force of the French on the lake, in Bradstreet's hands. The fort was dismantled, two of the ships were carried off, the remainder were burned since there was no fort at Oswego to protect them, and Bradstreet returned triumphant to Albany. The service that he had rendered was of vast importance. The command of Lake Ontario was lost to the French, their communications north and south were severed, the alliance of a number of wavering Indian tribes was secured for the British, and Fort Duquêsne, the point against which Pitt had levelled his third blow, was left isolated and alone.

Heartened by this success and by the news of Louisburg, Abercromby began to write vaguely of a second attempt upon Ticonderoga[291] as soon as Amherst should have reinforced him; but it was October before the conqueror of Louisburg reached Lake George, and then both commanders agreed that the season was too far spent for further operations. The troops were accordingly sent into winter quarters, and Canada was[333] saved for another year. It now remains to be seen how matters fared with Brigadier Forbes at Fort Duquêsne.

Forbes himself had arrived at Philadelphia early in April, to find that no army was ready for him. The Provincial troops allotted to him from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina had not even been enlisted; Montgomery's Highlanders were in the south, and only half of Colonel Bouquet's battalion of the Sixtieth was within reach. It was the end of June before the various fractions of his force were on march: and meanwhile the General was seized with a dangerous and agonising internal disease, against which he fought with a courage and resolution which was as admirable as it was pathetic. Forbes's career had been somewhat singular. He hailed from county Fife and had begun life as a medical student, but had entered the Scots Greys as a cornet and had risen to command the regiment. He had served in Flanders and Germany on the staff of Stair, Ligonier, and General Campbell, and finally as Cumberland's quartermaster-general.[292] But though all his training had been in the old formal school he had recognised, as has been seen, that in America he must learn a new art of war. He had studied Braddock's failure, and had perceived that even if Braddock had succeeded he must inevitably have retired from Fort Duquêsne from want of supplies. Instead, therefore, of making one long march with an unmanageable train of waggons, he decided to advance by short stages, establishing fortified magazines at every forty miles, and at last, when within reach of his destination, to march upon it with his entire force and with as few encumbrances as possible. This plan he had learned from a French treatise,[293] though he might have gathered it from a study of Monk's campaign in the Highlands had the opportunity been open to him. Nor was Bouquet, a Swiss by nationality, less assiduous in [334]thinking out new methods. His views as to equipment have already been noticed; but knowing the value of marksmanship in the woods, Bouquet obtained a certain number of rifled carbines for his own battalion, and thus turned a part of the Sixtieth into Riflemen before their time.[294] He also introduced a new system of drill for work in the forest, forming his men into small columns of two abreast which could deploy into line in two minutes. Under such commanders the mistakes of Braddock were not likely to be repeated.[295]
July.

Then came the question whether Braddock's route should be followed, or a new but shorter line of advance from Pennsylvania. Virginia was furiously jealous lest Pennsylvania should reap the advantage of a direct road to the trading station on the Ohio, and Washington was urgent in recommending the old road; but Forbes had no respect for provincial squabbles and decided for Pennsylvania. He had much difficulty in shaping the Provincials into soldiers, the material delivered to him being of the rawest, and destitute of the remotest idea of discipline. It was not till the beginning of July that Bouquet with an advanced party encamped at Raystown, now the town of Bedford, on the eastern slope of the Alleghanies, and that Forbes was able to move to the frontier village of Carlisle and thence to Shippensburg. There his illness increased, with pain so excruciating that he was unable to advance farther until September. Bouquet meanwhile pushed forward the construction of a road over the Alleghanies with immense labour and under prodigious difficulties. The wildness and desolation of the country seems somewhat to have awed even the stern resolution of Forbes. "It is an immense uninhabited wilderness," he wrote to Pitt, "overgrown everywhere with trees or brushwood, so that nowhere can one see twenty yards." Through this with its endless obstacles of jungle, ravine, and swamp Bouquet's [335]men worked their way. The first fortified magazine had been made at Raystown and named Fort Bedford; the next was to be on the western side of the main river Alleghany at a stream called Loyalhannon Creek. Progress was necessarily slow, but Forbes's advance was not made so leisurely without an object. The French had collected a certain number of Indians for the defence of Fort Duquêsne; but if the attack were delayed it was tolerably certain that these fickle and unstable allies would grow tired of waiting and disperse to their homes. Forbes meanwhile lost no opportunity of conciliating these natives; and by the efforts of his emissaries the most powerful tribes were persuaded to join the side of the British, and scornfully to reject the rival overtures of the French.

But at this critical time a rash exploit of one of Bouquet's officers went near to wreck the whole enterprise. Major Grant of the Highlanders entreated permission to go forward with a small party to reconnoitre Fort Duquêsne, capture a few prisoners, and strike some blow which might discourage and weaken the French. Eight hundred men of the Highlanders, Sixtieth, and Provincial troops were accordingly made over to him; so setting out with these from Loyalhannon he arrived before dawn of the 14th of September at a hill, since named Grant's hill, within half a mile of the fort. With incredible rashness he scattered his force in all directions. Leaving a fourth of his men to guard the baggage, he sent parties out to right and left, took post himself two miles in advance of the baggage with a hundred men, and sent an officer forward with a company of Highlanders into the open plain to draw a map of the fort. Finally, as if to call attention to his own folly, he ordered reveillé to be beaten with all possible parade. The French and Indians at once swarmed out of the fort and drove all the parties back in confusion upon one another. The Highlanders were seized with panic at the yells of the Indians and took to their heels, and but for the firmness of the Virginians[336] of the baggage-guard the whole force would probably have been cut to pieces. As it was, nearly three hundred men were killed, wounded, or taken, and Grant himself was among the prisoners. Forbes, who amid all torments, troubles, and reverses preserved always a keen sense of the ridiculous, declared that he could make nothing of the affair except that his friend Grant had lost his wits; which indeed was a concise and accurate summary of the whole proceeding.
Nov. 18.
Nov. 25.

But such paltry success could avail the French little, for Bradstreet's capture of Fort Frontenac had already decided the fate of Fort Duquêsne. The French commander, his supplies being cut off, was obliged to dismiss the greater number of his men; otherwise Forbes could hardly have penetrated to the Ohio in that year. The elements fought for the French. Heavy rain ruined Bouquet's new road; the horses being underfed and overworked kept breaking down fast; the magazines at Raystown and Loyalhannon were emptied faster than they could be replenished; and Forbes was in despair. All through October the rain continued until at length it gave place to snow, and the roads became a sea of mud over which retreat and advance were alike impossible. At the beginning of November the General, though now sick unto death, was carried to Loyalhannon, where he decided that no attack could be attempted for that season. Intelligence, however, was brought that the French were so weak in numbers as to be defenceless; and on the 18th, twenty-five hundred picked men marched off without tents or baggage, Forbes himself travelling in a litter at their head. At midnight of the 24th the sentries heard the sound of a distant explosion, and on the next day at dusk the troops reached the blackened ruins of what had been Fort Duquêsne. The fortifications had been blown up; barracks and store-houses were in ashes; there was no sign of anything human except the heads of the Highlanders who had been killed in Grant's engagement, stuck up on poles with their kilts hung in[337] derision round them. Their Highland comrades went mad with rage at the sight; but the French and their allies were gone, having evacuated and destroyed the fort and retired to the fort of Venango farther up the Alleghany river. Forbes planted a stockade around a cluster of huts that were still undestroyed, and named it Pittsburg in honour of the minister. Arrangements were then made for leaving a garrison of two hundred Provincials to hold the post, for there could be no doubt that the French would collect a force from Venango and Niagara to endeavour to retake it. The garrison indeed was far too small, but there was not food enough for more; so this handful of poor men was left perforce to make the best of its solitude during the dreary days of the winter.

One duty still remained to be done before Forbes's column turned homeward,—to search for the bones of those who had fallen with Braddock. A party of Pennsylvanians made their way through the forest to the Monongahela, Major Halket of Forbes's staff accompanying them. Among the multitude of ghastly relics two skeletons were found lying together under one tree. Halket recognised the one by a peculiarity of the teeth as that of his father, Sir Peter Halket of the Forty-fourth; and in the other he thought that he saw his brother, who had fallen by his side. The two were wrapped in a Highlander's plaid and buried in one grave, under a volley fired by the Pennsylvanians. The rest of the remains were buried together in one deep trench; and then at the beginning of December the troops marched back to Pennsylvania with the dying Forbes in their midst. With great difficulty the General was brought still living to Philadelphia, where he lingered on through the winter and died in the following March. Though no brilliant action marked his advance to the Ohio he had accomplished his work against endless difficulties and in extremity of bodily torture; and that work was the taking from France of half of her Indian allies, the relief of the western border from Pennsylvania to[338] Maryland from Indian raids, and the opening to the British of the vast regions of the West.

So ended the American campaign of 1758. The French had been struck hard on both flanks, at Louisburg in the north and on the Ohio in the south, but in the centre they had held their own. Two parts out of three of Pitt's design had been accomplished; but the most important success of all was that achieved by Bradstreet in severing the French communications at Fort Frontenac. It may be that Pitt thought best to adhere to the plan of operations mapped out for him by Loudoun, or it may be that he wished to retrieve the reputation lost by Braddock's defeat; but the fact remains that he meditated no attack on Niagara or Fort Frontenac, the capture of either of which would have entailed that of Fort Duquêsne, and that despite the industry of Bouquet and the tenacity of Forbes the advance to the Ohio would have been impossible but for the brilliant and successful enterprise of Bradstreet.

to face page 338
MONONGAHELA, July 8th 1755.
FORMATION OF AMHERST'S FLOTILLA JULY 1759.
From a contemporary plan.
THE REGION OF LAKE GEORGE, 1755.
The Country round TICONDEROGA,
From a Sketch by Lieut. Meyer of the 60th Reg.
CHAPTER II
Feb. 15.
March 31.

The reader will probably have been struck during the narrative of the American campaign of 1758 with the inferiority of the French in numbers to the British at every point. The French colonies were in fact allowed to take their chance, while French soldiers were poured by the hundred thousand into Germany to avenge King Frederick's sarcasm against Madame de Pompadour. A Pitt was hardly needed to perceive that the more employment that could be found for French armies in Europe, the fewer were the men which could be spared for the service of France's possessions beyond sea; and Pitt resolved accordingly to keep those armies fully occupied. By the convention of Klosterzeven, as has already been told, it was agreed that the Hanoverian army should be broken up; but even before Cumberland's return to England, the question of repudiating that convention had been broached, and a fortnight later a message was despatched to Frederick announcing that the army would take the field again, and requesting the services of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick as General-in-Chief. Frederick assented; and on the 24th of November Ferdinand arrived at Stade, fresh from the victory of Rossbach in which he had taken part three weeks before, to assume the command. The whole aspect of affairs changed instantly, as if by magic. Setting his force in motion at once Ferdinand by the end of the year had driven the French back to the Aller, and renewing operations after six weeks spent in winter-quarters pressed the enemy still farther back, even across the Rhine.

[340]
June 5.
June 7.
June 29.
July 1.

It is said that even before Ferdinand had achieved this success Pitt had resolved to reinforce him with British troops, but for the present the minister reverted to his old plan of a descent on the French coast, which might serve the purpose of diverting French troops alike from America and from Germany. The first sign of his intention was seen in April, when the officers of sixteen battalions received orders to repair to the Isle of Wight by the middle of May. Such long notice was a strange preliminary for a secret expedition, for the troops themselves did not receive their orders until the 20th of May; and it was the end of the month before the whole of them, some thirteen thousand men,[296] were encamped on the island. The Duke of Marlborough was selected for the command, and, since his military talent was doubtful, Lord George Sackville, whose ability was unquestioned, was appointed as his second, with the duty of organising the whole of the operations. Two squadrons, comprising twenty-four ships of the line under Lord Anson, Sir Edward Hawke, and Commodore Howe, were detailed to escort the transports, and on the 1st of June the armament set sail, arriving on the 5th at Cancalle Bay, about eight miles from St. Malo. A French battery, erected for the defence of the bay, was quickly silenced by the ships, and on the following day the entire army was landed. One brigade was left to guard the landing-place, and the remainder of the force marched to St. Malo, where the light dragoons under cover of night slipped down to the harbour and burned over a hundred privateers and merchant-vessels. The Duke of Marlborough then made dispositions as if for the siege of St. Malo, but hearing that a superior force was on the march to cut off his retreat, retired to Cancalle Bay, re-embarked the troops, and sailed against Granville, a petty town some[341] twenty miles to north-east of St. Malo. Foul weather frustrated the intended operations; and on the 27th the expedition arrived off Havre de Grace. Preparations were made for landing, but after two days of inactivity Marlborough decided against an attack, and the fleet bore up for Cherbourg. There once more all was made ready for disembarkation, but the weather was adverse, forage and provisions began to fail, and the entire enterprise against the coast was abandoned. So the costly armament returned to Portsmouth, having effected absolutely nothing. It is, however, doubtful whether blame can be attached to the officers, either naval or military, for the failure. Pitt had procured no intelligence as to the dispositions of the French for defence of the threatened ports; so that a General might well hesitate to run the risk of landing, when he could not tell how soon he might find himself cut off by a superior force from the sea.
June 23.
Aug. 21.

Meanwhile Ferdinand following up his success had pursued the French over the Rhine and gained a signal victory over them at Creveld. This action appears to have hastened Pitt to a decision, for within four days he announced to the British Commissary at Ferdinand's headquarters the King's intention to reinforce the Prince with two thousand British cavalry. The troops were warned for service on the same day; but within three days it was decided to increase the reinforcement to six thousand troops,[297] both horse and foot, and a week later the force was further augmented by three battalions. The first division of the troops was shipped off to Emden on the 11th of July, and by the second week in August the entire reinforcement had disembarked at the same port under command of the Duke of Marlborough, joining Prince Ferdinand's army at Coesfeld on the 21st.[298] There for the present we must leave them, till [342]the time comes for Ferdinand's operations to engage our whole attention. Meanwhile the reader need bear in mind only that the British Army is definitely committed to yet another theatre of war.
August.

Even so, however, Pitt remained unsatisfied without another stroke against the French coast. While the troops were embarking for Germany he had formed a new encampment on the Isle of Wight and was intent upon a raid on Cherbourg. So intensely distasteful were these expeditions to the officers of the Army that the Duke of Marlborough and Lord George Sackville used their interest to obtain appointment to the army in Germany, so as to be quit of them once for all. The result was that when Lieutenant-General Bligh, who had been originally selected to serve under Prince Ferdinand, arrived in London from Ireland to sail for Emden, he found to his dismay that his destination was changed, and that he must prepare to embark for France. He accepted the command as in duty bound, the more so since Prince Edward was to accompany the expedition, but he was little fit for the service, having no qualification except personal bravery and one great disqualification in advanced age. Accordingly, obedient but unwilling, he set sail on the 1st of August with twelve battalions[299] and nine troops of light dragoons, escorted by a squadron under Commodore Howe. Not yet had the gallant sailor learned of his succession to the title through the fall of his brother Lord Howe at the head of Lake Champlain.
Aug. 16.
September.

The expedition began prosperously enough. The fleet arrived before Cherbourg on the 6th and at once opened the bombardment of the town. Early next morning it sailed to the bay of St. Marais, two leagues from Cherbourg, where the Guards and the grenadier-companies, having landed under the fire of the ships, attacked and drove off a force of three thousand French[343] which had been drawn up to oppose them. The rest of the troops disembarked without hindrance on the following day and advanced on Cherbourg, which being unfortified to landward surrendered at once. Bligh thereupon proceeded to destroy the docks and the defences of the harbour and to burn the shipping, while the light cavalry scoured the surrounding country and levied contributions. This done, the troops were re-embarked; and after long delay owing to foul winds the fleet came to anchor on the 3rd of September in the Bay of St. Lunaire, some twelve miles east of St. Malo. There the troops were again landed during the two following days, though not without difficulty and the loss of several men drowned. Bligh's instructions bade him carry on operations against Morlaix or any other point on the coast that he might prefer to it, and he had formed some vague design of storming St. Malo from the landward side. This, however, was found to be impracticable with the force at his disposal; and now there ensued an awkward complication. The weather grew steadily worse, and Howe was obliged to warn the General that the fleet must leave the dangerous anchorage at St. Lunaire, and that it would be impossible for him to re-embark the troops at any point nearer than the bay of St. Cast, a few miles to westward. Accordingly he sailed for St. Cast, while Bligh, now thrown absolutely on his own resources ashore, marched for the same destination overland.
Sept. 9.

The army set out on the morning of the 7th of September, and after some trouble with small parties of French on the march encamped on the same evening near the river Equernon, intending to ford it next morning. It speaks volumes for the incapacity of Bligh and of his staff that the passage of the river was actually fixed for six o'clock in the morning, though that was the hour of high water. It was of course necessary to wait for the ebb-tide; so it was not until three in the afternoon that the troops forded the river, even then waist-deep, under a brisk fire from small parties of French peasants and regular troops. Owing to the[344] lateness of the hour further advance on that day was impossible; and on resuming the march on the following morning the advanced guard encountered a body of about five hundred French troops. The enemy were driven back with considerable loss, but their prisoners gave information of the advance of at least ten thousand French from Brest. Arrived at Matignon Bligh encamped and sent his engineers to reconnoitre the beach at St. Cast in case he should be compelled to retreat. Deserters who came in during the night reported that the French were gathering additional forces from the adjacent garrisons; and in the morning Bligh sent word to Howe that he intended to embark on the following day.
Sept. 11.

Constant alarms during the night showed that the enemy was near at hand; and it would have been thought that Bligh, having made up his mind to retreat, would in so critical a position have retired as swiftly and silently as possible. On the contrary, at three o'clock on the morning of the 11th the drums beat the assembly as usual, to give the French all the information that they desired; while the troops moved off in a single column so as to consume the longest possible time on the march. It was nine o'clock before the embarkation began, and at eleven, when two-thirds of the force had been shipped, the enemy appeared in force on the hills above the beach. For some time the French were kept at a distance by the guns of the fleet, but after an hour they found shelter and opened a sharp and destructive fire. General Drury, who commanded the rear-guard, consisting of fourteen hundred men of the Guards and the grenadiers, was obliged to form his men across the beach to cover the embarkation. Twice he drove back the enemy, but, ammunition failing, he was forced back in turn, and there was nothing left but a rush for the boats. The French bringing up their artillery opened a furious fire; and all was confusion. So many of the boats were destroyed that the sailors shrank from approaching the shore and were only kept to their work by the[345] personal example of Howe. In all seven hundred and fifty officers and men were killed and wounded, General Drury being among the slain, and the rest of the rear-guard were taken prisoners. The fleet and transports made their way back to England in no comfortable frame of mind, for the French naturally magnified their success to the utmost; and so ended Pitt's third venture against the coast of France.

There can be little doubt but that Bligh must be held responsible for the failure. It should seem indeed that he was ignorant of the elements of his duty, even to the enforcing of discipline among the troops, who at the first landing near Cherbourg behaved disgracefully. The Duke of Marlborough had met with the same trouble at Cancalle Bay, but had had at least the strength to hang a marauding soldier on the first day and so to restore order. But after all Pitt was presumably responsible for the selection of Bligh; or, if he was aware that he could not appoint the right man for such a service, he would have done better to abandon these raids on the French coast altogether. The conduct of Marlborough and Sackville in shirking the duty because it was distasteful to them does not appear commendable; but Sackville at any rate was no fool, and Pitt might at least have recognised the military objections that were raised against his plans. The truth of the matter is, as Lord Cochrane was to prove fifty years later, that sporadic attacks on the French coast are best left to the Navy; for a single frigate under a daring and resolute officer can paralyse more troops than an expedition of ten or fifteen thousand men, with infinitely less risk and expense. Pitt had not yet done with his favourite descents, but his next venture of the kind was to be directed against an island instead of the mainland, when the British fleet could interpose between his handful of battalions and the whole population of France. Meanwhile Cherbourg had at any rate been destroyed, so like a wise man the minister made the most of this success,[346] by sending some of the captured guns with great parade through Hyde Park to the Tower.
April 30.
Oct. 26.
Dec. 29.

The operations already narrated of the year 1758 were of considerable scope, embracing as they did the advance of three separate armies in America, two raids on the French coast, and the despatch of British troops to Germany; but these by no means exhaust the tale. There were few quarters of the globe in which the British had not to complain of French encroachment, and to this insidious hostility Pitt had resolved to put a stop once for all. Five years before, the merchants of Africa had denounced the unfriendliness of the French on the Gambia, who were building forts and stirring up the natives against them. The Royal African Company also, with its monopoly of the slave-trade, was anxious for its line of fortified dep?ts on the West Coast, and prayed to be delivered from its troublesome neighbours at Senegal and in the island of Goree.[300] One of Pitt's first actions in 1758 was to order an expedition to be prepared against Senegal, a duty for which two hundred marines and twenty-five gunners were deemed a sufficient force. On the 23rd of April Captain Marsh of the Royal Navy sailed into the Senegal river, and by the 30th Fort Louis had surrendered and was flying the British flag. Two hundred men of Talbot's regiment[301] were at once sent to garrison the new possession, and then for some months there was a pause, while the troops for Germany and Cherbourg were embarking for their destinations. But no sooner was Bligh's expedition returned than a new enterprise was set on foot, and Captain Keppel of the Royal Navy received secret instructions to convoy Lieutenant-Colonel Worge with Forbes's regiment[302] and two companies of the Sixty-sixth to the West Coast.[303] Within three weeks the troops were embarked [347]at Kinsale, and by the 28th of December Keppel's squadron was lying off Goree. On the following day the ships opened fire on the French batteries, and at nightfall the island surrendered, yielding up over three hundred prisoners and nearly an hundred guns. So with little trouble were gained the West African settlements of the French.
1759.
Jan. 13.
Jan. 15.

But even before Keppel had received his instructions six more battalions[304] were under orders for foreign service; and his squadron had hardly sailed before another fleet of transports was gathering at Portsmouth. Major-General Peregrine Hopson, who had been Governor at Nova Scotia in the difficult years that preceded the outbreak of war, was appointed to the chief command, and Colonel Barrington, a junior officer, was, despite the honourable protests of his brother, the Secretary-at-War, selected to be his second. The expedition was delayed beyond the date fixed for its departure by bad weather, but at length on the 12th of November the transports, escorted by eight ships of the line under Commodore Hughes, got under way and sailed with a fair wind to the west. On the 3rd of January 1759 they reached Barbados, the time-honoured base of all British operations in the West Indies, and there was Commodore Moore waiting with two more ships of the line to join them and to take command of the fleet. After ten days' stay they again sailed away north-westward before the trade-wind. Astern of them the mountains of St. Vincent hung distant like a faint blue cloud; ahead of them two tall peaks, shaped like gigantic sugar-loaves, rose higher and higher from the sea, and marked the southern end of St. Lucia. Then St. Lucia came abeam, a rugged mass of volcanic mountains shrouded heavily in tropical forest, and another island rose up broad and blue not many leagues ahead, an island which the men crowded forward to see, for they were[348] told that it was Martinique. Still the fleet held on; St. Lucia was left astern and Martinique loomed up larger and bolder ahead; then an islet like a pyramid was passed on the starboard hand, the Diamond Rock, not yet His Majesty's Ship; a little farther and the fleet was under the lee of the island; yet a little farther and the land shrank back to eastward into a deep inlet ringed about by lofty volcanic hills, and a few useless cannon-shot from a rocky islet near the entrance proclaimed that the French were ready for them in the Bay of Fort Royal.[305]
Jan. 16.
Jan. 17.

The ships lay off the bay until the next day, while Hopson thought out his plan of operations. The town and fortress of Fort Royal lies well within the bay on the northern shore, so Negro Point, which marks the entrance to the harbour to the north, was the spot selected for the landing. The ships next morning stood in and silenced two small batteries mounted at the Point, and in the afternoon the troops landed unopposed in a small bay adjacent to it. A camping ground was chosen in the only open space that could be found, between two ravines, and there the army passed the night formed up in square, to be ready against any sudden attack. At dawn of the next morning shots were heard, and the outposts reported that the enemy was advancing and entrenching a house close to the British position. The grenadiers were sent forward to dislodge them, and a smart skirmish ended in the retreat of the French. Hopson would fain have pushed more of his men into action, but the jungle was so dense that they could find no enemy. "Never was such a country," wrote the General plaintively, "the Highlands of Scotland for woods, mountains, and continued ravines are nothing to it."[306] As it was plainly out of the question to attempt to drag the heavy artillery before Fort Royal over such a country, it was decided to re-embark the troops forthwith. Nearly one [349]hundred men had been killed and wounded in the morning's skirmish, but the embarkation was accomplished without further loss.
Jan. 18.

On the following day the fleet coasted the island northward and by evening lay off St. Pierre, the second town in Martinique, which stood nestling in a little plain at the head of a shallow bay. The men-of-war stood in on the next morning to observe the defences of the place, and the fire of the French batteries from the heights to right and left soon convinced the Commodore that the town could not be taken without such damage to his ships as would disable them for further service. It was therefore resolved that Martinique should for the present be left alone, and that the expedition should proceed to Guadeloupe, which was not only the richest of the French Islands but the principal nest of French privateers in the West Indies. So the fleet steered northward once more past Dominica, where the white flag of the Bourbons yet floated over the fort of Roseau; while a single ship was sent forward with the chief military engineer on board to reconnoitre the town of Basseterre, which lies on the western or leeward coast a few miles to north of the most southerly point of Guadeloupe.
Jan. 23.
Jan. 24.
Jan.

The engineer returned with no very encouraging report. The town though lying on an open roadstead was well fortified, and all the approaches to it along the coast were well protected, while the fort of Basseterre, situated on a lofty eminence at the southern end, was declared to be impregnable by the attack of ships alone. Moore, however, was resolute that the town could and should be taken, and at ten o'clock on the morning of the 23rd the ships of the line and bomb-ketches opened a heavy fire on the fort and batteries. In a few hours the town, crammed with the sugar and rum of the past harvest, was burning furiously, and by nightfall every battery was silenced and the town was a heap of blackened ruins. At dawn of the morrow the troops were landed, to find the elaborate lines of defence inland[350] deserted and every gun spiked, while desultory shots from among the sugar-canes alone told of the presence of the enemy. The army encamped in Basseterre, but the firing from the cane-fields increased, and picquets and advanced posts were harassed to death by incessant alarms and petty attacks. Hopson sent a summons to the French Governor to surrender, but received only an answer of defiance. The Governor had in fact withdrawn his force some six miles from Basseterre to an impregnable position such as can be found only in a rugged, mountainous and untamed country. Each flank was covered by inaccessible hills clothed with impenetrable forest; in his front ran the river Galeon with high and precipitous banks, and beyond the river a gully so steep and sheer that the French themselves used ladders to cross it. The position was further strengthened by entrenchments and cannon. To attack it in front was impossible. The only practicable access was by a narrow road which led through dense forest upon one flank; and this was most carefully guarded. Here therefore the French commander lay, refusing to come to action but sending out small parties to worry the British outposts, in the hope that the climate would do the work of repelling his enemy for him.
Feb. 14.

Nor was he without good ground for such hope; for Hopson was in great doubt whether it would not be more expedient for him to re-embark. His own health was failing rapidly, and the men were beginning to fall down fast under the incessant work at the advanced posts and the fatigue of carrying provisions to them. From the day of landing it had been found necessary to push these advanced posts farther and farther inland and to make them stronger and stronger, until at last they embraced a circuit of fully three miles. By the end of January the men on the sick list numbered fifteen hundred, or fully a quarter of the force. Hopson sent six hundred invalids to Antigua in the hope of saving at least some of them, but therewith his efforts[351] came to an end, nor could all the representations of Barrington stimulate him to further action. Yet new operations were by no means difficult either of conception or of execution. Guadeloupe is in reality not one island but two, being divided by a narrow strait known as the Salt River. It is very much of the shape of a butterfly with wings outspread, flying south; the western wing being known as Guadeloupe proper and the eastern as Grande Terre, while the Salt River runs in the place of the butterfly's body. Grande Terre, the most fertile part of the island, still lay open to attack, with an excellent harbour at Point à Pitre, of which the principal defence, Fort Louis, could be reached by the cannon of ships. Moore being fortunately independent of Hopson in respect of naval operations, sent ships round to Fort Louis, which speedily battered it into surrender, and installed therein a garrison of three hundred Highlanders and Marines. But even with this new base secured to him Hopson declined to move. He was indeed sick unto death, and on the 27th of February he died, leaving the command to devolve on Barrington.
March 6.
March 11.
March.

His death came none too soon, for the force was on the brink of destruction. The number of the dead cannot be ascertained, but over and above the six hundred invalids sent to Antigua there were more than sixteen hundred men on the sick list, and the remainder were succumbing so fast that sufficient men could hardly be found to do the daily duty. Barrington resolved to close this fatal period of inaction at once. The defences of the fort of Basseterre had already been repaired and rendered safe against attack, so the Sixty-third regiment was left to hold it while the remainder of the troops were embarked on board the transports. After five days of weary beating against the trade-wind a portion of the ships came to anchor before Fort Louis; but more than half of them had fallen to leeward. The next day was spent by Barrington in an open boat reconnoitring the coast, but on his return in the evening[352] he was met by the bad news that a French squadron had been sighted to northward of Barbados and that Moore felt bound to fall back with his own squadron to Prince Rupert's Bay, Dominica, in order to cover Basseterre and the British Leeward Islands. Finally, as sickness had wrought little less havoc in the fleet than in the army, the Commodore begged for troops to make up the complement of his crews.

Few situations could have been more embarrassing than that in which Barrington now found himself. He loyally gave Moore three hundred soldiers for his ships, and watched the fleet on which his communications depended vanish from sight. Nearly if not quite half of his force had perished or was unfit for duty; while of the rest a part was isolated in Basseterre and fully one moiety was at sea, striving to beat into Point à Pitre. Fort Louis, the only strong position in which he could hope to wait in safety, was found to be untenable; and the French were already preparing to besiege it. Yet with a resolution which stamps him as no common man, he resolved despite all difficulties to begin offensive operations at once. He had at any rate transports though he had no men-of-war, and he resolved to use them; his plan being, if he failed to bring the enemy to action, to ravage the whole island and reduce it by starvation. The cultivated land in such a confusion of mountains could lie only in the valleys, and the settlements must needs lie at the mouths of those valleys where there was communication with other parts of the island by sea or by roads that followed the coast. The French had raised abundance of batteries and entrenchments to protect these settlements, but such multiplicity of defences necessarily implied dispersion of force. Barrington's troops, few though they might be, were at any rate to some extent concentrated; and it was in his power to embark men sufficient to overwhelm any one of these isolated settlements, and so to break up the defences in detail. The operations were not in fact difficult when once a man had thought out the method[353] of conducting them, but it was precisely in this matter of thought that Hopson had failed.
March 27.
March 29.

A fortnight was occupied in strengthening the defences of Port Louis; and on the 27th of March six hundred men were embarked under command of Colonel Crump and sent off to the south coast of Grande Terre, with orders to land between the towns of St. Anne and St. Fran?ois, destroy both of them and ruin the batteries erected for their protection. Crump, an excellent officer, performed this duty punctually and with little loss; and on the 29th Barrington, guessing that the French would certainly have detached some of their troops from Gosier, a port a few miles to westward of St. Anne, sailed with three hundred men against it, and at dawn fell upon the enemy in their entrenchments. The troops, eager for work after long inaction, attacked with great spirit, drove the enemy out with little difficulty and slight loss, and then prepared to force their way back to Fort Louis by land. Barrington had ordered two separate sallies to be made by the garrison upon the lines erected by the French against the fort, but owing to some mistake one only was delivered. Nevertheless his own little detachment did the work unaided, captured a battery of twenty-four pounders which had been planted by the enemy to open on the fort on the next day, and returned to its quarters triumphant.
April 12.
April 13.

By this time the missing transports had succeeded in working into Point à Pitre; but to countervail this advantage there came news from Basseterre that the colonel in command, a valuable officer, had been killed, together with one or two of his men, by an accidental explosion, and that the French were constructing batteries to bombard the fort. Barrington appointed a new commander, with orders to sally forth and capture these batteries without more ado; and the task, since he had chosen the right men to execute it, was performed with little trouble or loss. Moreover, having now ruined the most important settlements in Grande Terre he resolved to apply the same principles of warfare to[354] Guadeloupe. Accordingly on the 12th of April Brigadier Clavering, with thirteen hundred men and six guns, was sent off to a bay close to Arnouville,[307] where they landed unopposed, the enemy retiring to a strong position in rear of the river Licorne. This position was all-important to the French since it covered Mahault Bay, which was the port by which the Dutch supplied Guadeloupe with provisions from the island of St. Eustatia. It was so strong by nature that it needed little fortification by art; access to the river being barred by a mangrove swamp, across which there were but two narrow approaches, both of them protected by redoubts, palisaded entrenchments, and cannon. None the less Clavering determined to attack. Covered by a heavy fire of artillery the Fourth and Forty-second advanced against the French left, firing by platoons as coolly as if on parade, till the Highlanders drawing their claymores made a rush, and the Fourth dashing forward with the bayonet drove the French from the redoubt. Then pushing round to the rear of the entrenchments on the French right they forced the enemy to evacuate them also, and captured seventy prisoners. The French then retreated southward, setting fire to the cane-fields as they passed in order to check the British pursuit, and took post behind the river Lezarde, breaking down the bridge behind them. It was too late for Clavering to attack them on that day, for the only ford on the river was protected by a redoubt and four guns; but keeping up a fire of artillery all night in order to distract the enemy's attention, he passed a party in a canoe across the river below the position of the French, who no sooner saw their right flank turned than they retired with precipitation, abandoning all their guns. Following the coast southward to Petit Bourg, where they had prepared fortified lines and armed redoubts, the French again tried to make a stand; but Barrington had sent a[355] bomb-vessel to await them off the coast, which opened fire with shell and drove them back once more, before they could withdraw their guns from the entrenchments.
April 14.
April 18.
April 19.
May 1.

Then and not till then did Clavering grant his men a halt after their hard work under the tropical sun; but on the 15th he was in motion again, and a detachment of a hundred men was sent to capture the next battery to southward at the town of Gouyave. The French, now thoroughly disheartened, waited only to fire one shot and then fled, leaving seven guns behind them, when the British having spiked the cannon retired to Petit Bourg. On the same day Colonel Crump was sent with seven hundred men to Mahault Bay, where he found the French defences abandoned. Having destroyed them, together with a vast quantity of stores, he marched to join Clavering at Petit Bourg and to help in the work of desolating the country round it. Heavy rain suspended operations during the two following days; but on the 18th the entire force, excepting a garrison of two hundred and fifty men which was left at Petit Bourg, renewed the advance southward upon St. Maries, where all the French troops in the island were assembled to oppose it. The French position was as usual strongly entrenched, but the paths that led to rear of it, being judged impassable, were left unguarded. A detachment was therefore sent to turn the entrenchments by these paths, and the artillery was hastened up to the front; but the guns had hardly opened fire when the French, perceiving the movement in their rear, deserted their fortifications and fled to another entrenched position on the heights beyond St. Maries. The British pursued; and, while the ground was clearing for the artillery to come into action, part of the infantry tried to force a way through the forest and precipices on the flank of the earthworks. The French, weary of finding position after position turned, left their fortified lines to meet this attack, whereupon Clavering instantly launched the remainder of his troops[356] straight at the lines, and despite a heavy fire of artillery and musketry swept the enemy out of this last refuge. On the morrow the army entered the district of Capesterre, reputed the richest in the whole of the West Indies; and the inhabitants, dreading lest it should be overtaken by the fate of the rest, came and begged for terms. A capitulation was therefore granted on liberal conditions, and Guadeloupe, one of the wealthiest of the Antilles, with a harbour large enough to shelter the whole Navy of England from hurricanes, passed for the present to the Crown of Britain.
May 26.

The surrender came in the nick of time, for the ink of the signatures was hardly dry when news came of the arrival of General Beauharnais from Martinique with six hundred French regular troops and two thousand buccaneers. A day earlier this reinforcement would have saved Guadeloupe; but on hearing of the capitulation Beauharnais re-embarked his troops and sailed away. Nothing therefore remained for Barrington but to settle the administration, fortify the harbour, and leave a sufficient garrison to hold it. The island of Mariegalante, which had not been included in the capitulation, made some show of defiance but surrendered on the first display of force. Crump was installed as Governor; the Fourth, Sixty-third, and Sixty-fifth were left with him; the Thirty-eighth returned to its old quarters in the Leeward Islands, the Highlanders were shipped off to America, and in June Barrington, with the remnant of the Buffs, Sixty-first, and Sixty-fourth, returned to England.

So ended the campaign of Guadeloupe. The story is one which is little known, and the name of John Barrington is one of which few have heard; yet surely the achievements of himself and of his troops are such as should not be forgotten. Barrington took over from Hopson an army weakened by sickness, worn to death by defensive warfare of the most harassing kind, and disheartened by the consciousness that it was working to no purpose. He at once shifted his base[357] for more active operations, only to find, to his great mortification, half of his force literally at sea, and the fleet taken from him for other duty. Yet he went to work at once; and knowing that he could not take the island by force reduced it to submission by cutting off and destroying its supplies. I have not hesitated to describe the petty engagements which followed, since there was not one which did not show forethought in the planning and skill in the execution. It is true that the French regular troops on the island were few, and that the enemy which deserted its entrenchments so readily was made up mainly of raw militia and armed civilians; but they never fought except in a strong position protected by artillery. It is true also that the actual work in the field was done by Crump and Clavering, two excellent officers, for Barrington was so much crippled by gout that he could hardly leave Fort Louis. Nevertheless the whole scheme of operations was Barrington's, and no man more cordially acknowledged the fact than Clavering himself. The number of the British killed and wounded in action is unfortunately not to be ascertained, but judging by the casualties of the officers, of whom eleven were killed and twenty-one wounded, it was not very great. But it is not lead and steel that are most fatal in a tropical expedition, and it is not in killed and wounded that its cost must be reckoned. The island had been conquered, but the climate had not; and the climate took its revenge. By the close of the seven months that remained of the year 1759 nearly eight hundred officers and men of the garrison had found their graves in Guadeloupe.

Authorities.—For the expeditions to Cancalle Bay and Cherbourg, see Account by an officer of the late expedition. Entick also gives details from the official documents. For the operations at Goree, see State Papers (Record Office), C. O., Col. Corres., Sierra Leone, 2, 3. For Guadeloupe, see State Papers, C. O., America and West Indies, 100, 101; W. O., Orig. Corres., 26. Entick again gives a confused statement.
CHAPTER III
Dec. 1.

It was late in November before Parliament reassembled, and listened to a speech from the throne, jubilant over the captures of Louisburg, Fort Frontenac, and Senegal, but modestly deploring the inevitable expense of the war. The Commons, however, were practically unanimous in allowing a free hand to Pitt, though the minister himself was startled when he was brought face to face with the estimates. Those for the Army were introduced a week later, and showed but a slight increase in the British Establishment, the total number of men not exceeding eighty-five thousand. Yet the main operations of the coming year were to be conducted on a grander scale than before, while at the same time provision was needed to make good the enormous waste caused by tropical expeditions. Two new regiments only were formed before the actual opening of the operations of 1759, one of them, Colonel Eyre Coote's,[308] serving as a reminder that concurrently with all other enterprises there was progressing the struggle, which shall presently be narrated, for the mastery of the East Indies.
1759.

Pitt's principal effort, as in the previous year, was directed against Canada, and the operations prescribed were little less complicated than those of the last campaign. In the first place a direct attack was to be made upon Quebec, for which purpose Amherst was[359] to make over ten battalions to General Wolfe. In the second, the attempt to penetrate into Canada by way of Ticonderoga and Crown Point was to be renewed. Amherst himself was to take this duty upon him, Abercromby having been rightly recalled; and it was hoped that he might join Wolfe in the capital of Canada or at least make a powerful diversion in his favour. At the same time Amherst was ordered to secure Oswego and Pittsburg, and empowered to undertake any further operations that he pleased, without prejudice to the main objects of the campaign. The General having already twenty-three battalions of the King's troops in America, it was reckoned that, with the regiments to be forwarded to him from the West Indies by Hopson, he would possess a sufficient force for the work. No fresh battalions therefore were sent to him from England.[309]

The selection of James Wolfe for the command of the expedition against Quebec came as a surprise to many. He was now thirty-two years of age, and had held a commission ever since he was fourteen, attaining the rank of captain at seventeen and of major at twenty. He had served in Flanders and distinguished himself as brigade-major at Lauffeld, but it was as Lieutenant-Colonel in command of the Twentieth Foot that he had shown himself most competent. He was an admirable regimental officer, enthusiastic over his profession and well acquainted with its duties, a stern disciplinarian yet devoted to his men, and a refined and educated gentleman. In short he was a commanding officer who could be trusted to raise the tone of any corps.[310] He had attracted Pitt's notice by his constant though fruitless advocacy of action in the abortive descent on Rochefort in 1757, and had come prominently before the public eye by his behaviour [360]at Louisburg. His relations with Amherst, however, appear not to have been very friendly, nor to have been improved by his return home from Cape Breton in 1758; indeed Wolfe was reprimanded as soon as he arrived in England for returning without the King's orders, under misconception of his letter of service.[311] It was possibly under the sting of this censure that he wrote to Pitt declaring his readiness to serve in America and "particularly in the river St. Lawrence"; but be that as it may he received the appointment. There is an anecdote that he filled the great minister with dismay by some extraordinary gasconnade at a dinner to which he had been invited shortly before his departure; but even if, in a moment of elation,[312] he may have given way to excited talk for a time, yet such outbursts were not usual with him, for he was the quietest and most modest of men. The real objection to his appointment was the state of his health. He had never been strong and was a martyr to rheumatism and stone, but he was as courageous against pain as against the bullets of the enemy; in fact, like King William the Third, he was never so happy as when under fire. For the rest nature had cursed him with a countenance of singular ugliness, his portraits showing a profile that runs in a ridiculous curve from the forehead to the tip of the nose, and recedes in as ridiculous a curve from the nose to the neck. A shock of red hair tied in a queue, and a tall, lank, ungainly figure added neither grace nor beauty to his appearance; but within that unhandsome frame lay a passionate attachment to the British soldier, and an indomitable spirit against difficulty and danger.
February.
May.

It was the middle of February when Wolfe sailed from England in H.M.S. Neptune, the flag-ship of a fleet of twenty-one sail under Admirals Saunders, Holmes, and Durell. The voyage was long and [361]tedious, and when at last Louisburg was reached the harbour was found to be blocked with ice, so that the fleet was obliged to make for Halifax. From thence Durell was detached, too late as was presently proved, to the mouth of the St. Lawrence to intercept certain transports that were expected with supplies from France; Holmes was sent to convoy the troops that were to sail from New York; and in May the entire armament for the reduction of Quebec was assembled at Louisburg. Wolfe had been led to expect a force of twelve thousand men; but the regiments which should have been detached from Guadeloupe could not yet be spared, and those drawn from the garrisons of Nova Scotia had been reduced considerably beneath their proper strength by sickness during the winter. The quality of the troops, however, was excellent, and on this Wolfe counted to make good a serious numerical deficiency. The force was distributed into three brigades, under Brigadiers Monckton, Townsend, and Murray, all three of them men of youth, energy, and talent, well qualified to serve under such a commander as Wolfe.[313] The grenadiers of the army were, as had now become usual, massed together and organised in two divisions, those of the regiments in garrison at Louisburg being known as the Louisburg grenadiers.[314] Another separate corps was composed of the best marksmen in the several regiments, and was called the Light Infantry, while six companies of Provincial rangers furnished a proportion of irregular troops. The whole strength of the force was thus brought up to about eight thousand five hundred men. A fortnight sufficed for the final arrangements, for Amherst and his staff had spared no pains to provide all that was necessary;[315] and on the 6th of June the [362]last division of transports, amid a roar of cheering from the men, sailed out of Louisburg for the St. Lawrence.

The French commanders meanwhile had been anxiously making their preparations for defence. There could be no doubt that the British would make at least a double attack upon Canada, from Lake Champlain on the south and Lake Ontario on the west, and every able-bodied man in the colony was called out to repel it. No sooner had the dispositions been settled than news came of the intended advance by the St. Lawrence, which threw the whole colony into consternation. Five regular battalions and the militia from every part of Canada were summoned, together with a thousand Indians, to Quebec; and after much debate Montcalm, who held the command of the troops under the Governor of the city, decided on his scheme of defence. Quebec with its fortifications stands on the north bank of the St. Lawrence, being situated on a rocky headland which marks the contraction of the river from a width of fifteen or twenty miles to a strait scarcely exceeding one. Immediately to northward of this ridge the river St. Charles flows down to the St. Lawrence; and seven miles to eastward of the St. Charles the shore is cut by the rocky gorge through which pours the cataract of the Montmorenci. It was between these two streams that Montcalm disposed his army, his right resting on the St. Charles, his left on the Montmorenci, with his headquarters on the little river of Beauport midway between the two, and his front to the St. Lawrence. All along the border of the great river were thrown up entrenchments, batteries, and redoubts. From Montmorenci to Beauport abrupt and rocky heights raised these defences too high above the water to be reached by the cannon of ships. From Beauport to the St. Charles stretched broad flats of mud, which were commanded by batteries both afloat and ashore, as well as by the guns of Quebec. On the walls of the city itself were mounted over one hundred cannon; a bridge of boats with a strong bridge-head on the eastern side[363] preserved the communication between city and camp; and for the defence of the river itself there was a floating battery of twelve heavy guns besides several gun-boats and fire-ships. The vessels of the convoy that Durell had failed to intercept, together with the frigates that escorted them, were sent up the river beyond Quebec to be out of harm's way; and the sailors were taken to man the batteries ashore. Thus strongly entrenched with fourteen thousand men of one description and another, and firm in the belief that no foreign ship would dare to attempt the intricate navigation of the St. Lawrence, Montcalm waited for the British to come.
June.

It was not until the 21st of June that the first mast-heads of the fleet were seen. For days the British had been groping their way up the river, helped partly by a captured Canadian pilot, more often by their own skill and experience. "Damn me if there are not a thousand places in the Thames fifty times more hazardous than this," growled an old skipper on one of the transports, as he waived the pilot contemptuously aside. So the great fleet crept up the stream, ships of the line passing where the French had feared to take a coasting schooner, and at last on the 26th of June the whole was anchored safely off the southern shore of the Isle of Orleans, a few miles below Quebec. No single mishap had marred this masterly and superb feat of pilotage.
June 27.
June 28.
June 29.
July.

The troops landed without resistance next day on the Isle of Orleans, and on the same afternoon a sudden squall drove many of the ships ashore and destroyed several of the flat-boats prepared for the disembarkation. The storm raised high hopes of providential deliverance in the French, which, however, were speedily dashed, for the tempest subsided as suddenly as it had arisen. On the morrow therefore the Governor of Quebec resolved to launch his fire-ships down the river upon the fleet. The attempt was duly made, but the ships were ill-handled and the service ill-executed. The British sailors coolly rowed out, grappled the burning vessels and towed them ashore, while the troops, formed up in[364] order of battle, gazed at the most imposing display of fireworks that they had ever seen. Meanwhile Wolfe reconnoitred the French lines and the city, but could see no possible opening for a successful attack. One thing alone seemed feasible, to occupy the heights of Point Lévis over against Quebec on the southern shore, and to fire across this, the narrowest part of the river, upon the city. Monckton's brigade accordingly entrenched itself on these heights, threw up batteries, and on the 12th of July opened a fire which wrought havoc among the buildings of Quebec. But however this cannonade might afflict the nerves of the inhabitants, it could contribute little, as Wolfe well knew, to advance the real work in hand.

Accordingly, while the batteries on Point Lévis were constructing, the English General resolved to see whether a vulnerable point could be found on Montcalm's left flank. On the 8th of July, leaving a detachment to hold the camp on the Isle of Orleans, he sent Townsend's and Murray's brigades across to the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, where they proceeded to entrench themselves on the eastern side of the Montmorenci. The movement was highly perilous, since it divided his force into three portions, no one of which could support the other; but the French kept themselves rigidly on the defensive, though the British lay but a gunshot from them across the rocky gorge of the Montmorenci and annoyed their camp not a little with their artillery. Still Wolfe could accomplish nothing decisive. The news that Amherst was advancing against Ticonderoga did indeed discourage the Canadians and increase desertion among them; but in all other respects the operations before Quebec had come to a deadlock.
July 18.
July 28.

Now, however, the fleet which had already vanquished the difficulties in the navigation of the St. Lawrence once more came forward to show the way. It was the opinion of the French that no vessel could pass the batteries of Quebec without destruction; but on the night of the 18th of July H.M.S. Sutherland, of fifty[365] guns, with several smaller vessels, sailed safely up the river, covered by the fire of the guns on Point Lévis, destroyed some small craft which they found there and anchored above the town. This was the first menace of an attempt to take Quebec in reverse, and obliged Montcalm to detach six hundred men from the camp of Beauport to defend the few accessible points between the city and Cap Rouge, some eight miles above it. Wolfe took advantage of the movement also to send a detachment to ravage the country to westward of Quebec; but though he thus added a fourth to the three isolated divisions into which he had broken up his army, Montcalm still declined to move. A second attempt was indeed made to destroy the British vessels by fire-ships, which was frustrated like the first by the coolness and gallantry of the British sailors; but beyond this French aggression would not go. Montcalm was resolved to play the part of Fabius, and he seemed likely to play it with success.

The season was now wearing on, and Wolfe was not a whit nearer to his object than at his first disembarkation. Mortified by his ill-success he now resolved to attack Montcalm's camp in front. The hazard was desperate, for, after leaving troops to hold Point Lévis and the entrenchments on the Montmorenci, he could raise little more than five thousand men with which to attack a force of more than double his strength in a very formidable position. A mile to westward of the falls of the Montmorenci there is a strand about a furlong wide at high water and half a mile wide at low tide, between that river and the foot of the cliffs. The French had built redoubts on this strand above high-water mark, which were commanded, though Wolfe could not see it, by the fire of musketry from the entrenchments above. Wolfe's hope was that by the capture of one of these redoubts he might tempt the French down to regain it and so bring on a general action, or at least find an opportunity of reconnoitring the entrenched camp itself. Moreover, below the falls[366] of the Montmorenci was a ford, by which some at least of his troops on that river could join in the attack, and so diminish in some degree the disparity of numbers. But Wolfe held the Canadian militia in such contempt that he was not afraid to pit against them, at whatever odds, the valour of his own disciplined soldiers.
July 31.

Accordingly on the morning of the 31st of July H.M.S. Centurion stood in close to the Montmorenci, dropped her anchor and opened fire on the redoubts. Two armed transports followed her and likewise opened fire on the nearest redoubt, stranding as the tide ebbed till at last they lay high and dry on the mud. Simultaneously the batteries on the other side of the Montmorenci opened a furious fire upon the flank of Montcalm's entrenchments, and at eleven o'clock a number of boats filled with troops rowed across from Point Lévis and hovered about the river opposite Beauport as if to attack at that point. Time, however, showed Montcalm where real danger was to be apprehended, and he concentrated the whole of his twelve thousand men between Beauport and the Montmorenci. At half-past five the British batteries afloat and ashore opened fire with redoubled fury, and the boats made a dash for the shore. Unfortunately some of them grounded on a ledge short of the flats, which caused some confusion and delay, but eventually all of them reached the strand and set the men ashore. Thirteen companies of grenadiers were the first to land, and after them two hundred men of the Sixtieth; while some distance behind them the Fifteenth and Fraser's Highlanders followed in support. No sooner were they ashore than the grenadiers, the most trusted troops in the army, for some reason got out of hand. Despite the efforts of their officers they would not wait for the supports to form up, but made a rush in the greatest disorder and confusion for the redoubt and drove the French from it. Instantly a tremendous fire was poured upon them from the entrenchments above.[367] The grenadiers recoiled for a moment; then recovering themselves they ran forward again and made a mad effort to struggle up the steep, slippery grass of the ascent, but only to roll down by scores, killed or wounded by the hail of musketry from the French lines. Where the affair would have ended it is hard to say, had not the clouds of a summer's storm, which had hung over the river all the afternoon, suddenly burst just at that moment in a deluge of rain. All ammunition on both sides was drenched, so that further firing became impossible, while the grassy slope became so treacherous that it was hopeless to attempt to climb it. Wolfe, seeing that everything was gone wrong, ordered a retreat; and the troops fell back and re-embarked, the grenadiers and Sixtieth having lost five hundred officers and men, or well-nigh half of their numbers, in killed, wounded, and missing.
August 5.

Wolfe was highly indignant over the misbehaviour of the grenadiers, and rebuked them sharply in general orders for their impetuous, irregular, and unsoldierlike proceedings. The French, on the other hand, were naturally much elated, and flattered themselves that the campaign was virtually at an end. Nor was Wolfe of a very different opinion. It is said, indeed, that he conceived the idea of leaving a part of his troops in a fortified position before Quebec, to be ready for a new attempt in the following spring. Meanwhile for the present he fell back on the tactics, which Barrington had so successfully employed at Guadeloupe, of laying waste all the settlements round about Quebec, with the object of provoking desertion among the militia and exhausting the colony generally. Montcalm, however, was not to be enticed from his lines; he had Indians with him sufficient to make hideous reprisals for Wolfe's desolation, and Canada was not to be won by the burning of villages. Wolfe, therefore, now shifted his operations to the point whither the enterprise of the fleet had led him, above and on the reverse side of Quebec. With every fair wind more and more ships[368] had braved the fire of the batteries and passed through it in safety; and now a flotilla of flat-boats dared the same passage, while twelve hundred men under Brigadier Murray marched overland up the south bank of the St. Lawrence to do service in them. This movement compelled Montcalm to withdraw another fifteen hundred men from the camp at Beauport, to check any attempt at a landing above the city. The duty thus imposed upon this small body of French was most arduous, since it involved anxious watching of fifteen or twenty miles of the shore. So well was it performed, however, under the direction of Bougainville, an officer afterwards famous as the great navigator, that it was only after two repulses that Murray succeeded in burning a large magazine of French stores. The alarm caused by this stroke was so great that Montcalm hastened from Beauport to take command in person; but when he arrived the British had already retired, content with their success.

None the less the French from the highest to the lowest now grew seriously uneasy. Their army was on short rations. All its supplies were drawn from the districts of Three Rivers and Montreal; and, from want of transport overland, these were perforce sent down the river where the British ships lay ready to intercept them. Now was seen the error of sending the frigates up the river and allowing the British squadron to assemble by small detachments above Quebec; but it was too late to repair it. The British fleet had discovered the true method of reducing the city by severing its communications both above and below. The only hope for the French was that winter might drive the shipping from the St. Lawrence and put an end to the campaign, before Quebec should be starved out.
June 15.
July.
July 24.

Meanwhile Amherst's operations to south and west began likewise to tell upon the situation. Taking advantage of the latitude allowed to him by Pitt, he determined to add the reduction of Niagara to the enterprises prescribed to him. This duty he assigned to[369] Brigadier Prideaux with five thousand men;[316] Brigadier Stanwix was entrusted with the relief of Pittsburg; and Amherst in person took charge of the grand advance by Lakes George and Champlain. The operations of Prideaux and Stanwix were to be conducted in combination; for it was intended that while Prideaux was engaged with Niagara, Stanwix should push a force northward against the French posts on Lake Erie, and thence on to Niagara itself, thus releasing Prideaux for an advance to the St. Lawrence. Prideaux was the first to take the field. His force having been assembled on the Mohawk at Senectady, he moved up the stream, left a strong garrison at Fort Stanwix to guard the Great Carrying-place, and moved forward by Lake Oneida and the river Onandaga to Oswego. There leaving nearly half of his force under Colonel Haldimand to secure his retreat, he embarked with the rest on the lake for Niagara. The fort stood in the angle formed by the river Niagara and Lake Ontario, and was garrisoned by some six hundred men. Prideaux at once laid siege in form, though the trenches were at first so unskilfully laid out by the engineers as to require almost total reconstruction. At last, however, the batteries opened fire. Prideaux was unluckily killed almost immediately by the premature explosion of a shell from one of his own guns, but Sir William Johnson, who had joined the force with a party of Indians, took command in his place and pushed the siege with great energy. The fort after two or three weeks of battering was in extremity; when a party of thirteen hundred French rangers and Indians, which had been summoned from the work of harassing the British on the Ohio to the relief of Niagara, appeared on the scene in the very nick of time. Johnson rose worthily to the occasion. Leaving a third of his force in the trenches and yet another third to guard his boats, he sallied forth with the remainder to meet the relieving force, and after a[370] brisk engagement routed it completely. The survivors fled hurriedly back to Lake Erie, burned Venango and the posts on the lake and retired to Detroit. Niagara surrendered on the evening of the same day, and thus were accomplished at a stroke the most important objects to be gained by Stanwix and Prideaux. The whole region of the Upper Ohio was left in undisputed possession of the British, and the French posts of the West were hopelessly cut off from Canada. Now, therefore, the ground was open for an advance on Montreal by Lake Ontario; and Amherst lost no time in sending General Gage to take command of Prideaux's force, with orders to attack the French post of La Galette, at the head of the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and thence to push on as close as possible to Montreal. "Now is the time," wrote Amherst to him, "and we must make use of it."[317]
July 21.
July 26.
August.

Amherst himself had assembled his army at the end of June at the usual rendezvous by the head of Lake George. His force consisted of about eleven thousand five hundred men, five thousand of them Provincials and the remainder British.[318] As was now the rule, he had massed the grenadiers of the army into one corps, and had formed also a body of Light Infantry which he had equipped appropriately for its work.[319] It was not, however, until the 21st of July that the troops were embarked, and that a flotilla little less imposing than Abercromby's set sail with a fair wind over Lake George. It was drawn up in four columns, the light troops and Provincials on either flank, the regular troops in the [371]right centre and the artillery and baggage in the left centre. An advanced and a rear-guard in line covered the head and tail of the columns, and an armed sloop followed in rear of all. Before dark they had reached the Narrows, and at daybreak of the following morning the force disembarked and marched, meeting with little resistance, by the route of Abercromby's second advance to Ticonderoga. The entrenchments which had foiled the British in the previous year had been reconstructed but were found to be deserted; Bourlamaque, the French commander, having withdrawn his garrison, some thirty-five hundred men only, into the fort. Amherst brought up his artillery to lay siege in form, but on the night of the 26th a loud explosion announced that the French had abandoned Ticonderoga and blown up the works. It was, however, but one bastion that had been destroyed, so Amherst at once repaired the damage and made preparations for advance on Crown Point. On the 1st of August he learned that Bourlamaque had abandoned this fortress also, and fallen back to the strong position of Isle aux Noix at the northern outlet of Lake Champlain. Amherst was now brought to a standstill, for the French had four armed vessels on the lake, and it was necessary for him to build vessels likewise for the protection of the flotilla before he could advance farther. He at once set about this work, concurrently with the erection of a strong fort at Crown Point, but unfortunately he began too late. Amherst was above all a methodical man, whose principle was to make good each step gained before he attempted to move again. Possibly he had not anticipated so easy an advance to Crown Point, but, be that as it may, he had made no provision for advancing beyond it, and when at last, by the middle of September, his ships were ready, the season was too far advanced for further operations. He tried to stir up Gage to hasten to the attack on La Galette, but without success. In fact by the middle of August the campaign of the armies of the south and west was virtually closed.

[372]
August.

Nevertheless for the moment the news of Amherst's advance to Crown Point caused great alarm in Quebec, and Montcalm felt himself obliged to send Lévis, one of his best officers, to superintend the defence of Montreal. Gradually, however, as Amherst's inaction was prolonged, the garrison regained confidence; and meanwhile deep discouragement fell on the British. On the 20th of August Wolfe, who was much exhausted by hard work, anxiety, and mortification, fell seriously ill and was compelled to delegate the conduct of operations to a council of his brigadiers. Several plans were propounded to them, all of which they rejected in favour of an attempt to gain a footing on the ridge above the city, cut off Montcalm's supplies from Montreal, and compel him to fight or surrender. The course was that which had been marked out by the fleet from the moment that the ships had passed above Quebec. It was indeed both difficult and hazardous, but it was the only plan that promised any hope of success; and the success, if attained, would be final. Wolfe accepted it forthwith and without demur. The army had lost over eight hundred men killed and wounded since the beginning of operations, and had been weakened still more seriously by disease; but the General was driven to desperation by sickness and disappointment and was ready to undertake any enterprise that commended itself to his officers. On the last day of August he was sufficiently recovered to go abroad once more, and on the 2nd of September he wrote to Pitt the story of his failure up to that day and of his resolutions for the future, all in a strain of dejection that sank almost to despair.
Sept. 3.

On the following day the troops were skilfully withdrawn without loss from the camp on the Montmorenci. On the night of the 4th a flotilla of flat-boats passed successfully above the town with the baggage and stores, and on the 5th seven battalions marched westward overland from Point Lévis and embarked, together with Wolfe himself, on Admiral Holmes' ships. Montcalm thereupon reinforced Bougainville to a strength of three[373] thousand men and charged him to watch the movements of the fleet with the utmost vigilance. Bougainville's headquarters were at Cap Rouge, with detached fortified posts at Sillery, six miles down the river, at Samos yet farther down, and at Anse du Foulon, now called Wolfe's Cove, a mile and a half above Quebec. It was by this last that Wolfe, searching the heights for mile after mile with his telescope, perceived a narrow path running up the face of the precipice. From the path he turned his glass to the post above it, and seeing but ten or twelve tents concluded that the guard was not numerous and might be overpowered. There then was a way found for the ascent of the cliffs from the river: the next problem was how to turn the discovery to good account.

On the morning of the 7th of September Holmes' squadron weighed anchor and sailed up to Cap Rouge. The French instantly turned out to man their entrenchments; and Wolfe, having kept them in suspense for a sufficient time, ordered the troops into the boats and directed them to row up and down as if in search of a landing-place. The succeeding days were employed in a series of similar feints, the ships drifting daily up to Cap Rouge with the flood tide and dropping down to Quebec with the ebb, till Bougainville, who followed every movement with increasing anxiety and bewilderment, fairly wore out his troops with incessant marching to and fro.
Sept. 12.

At last on the 12th of September Wolfe's opportunity presented itself. Two deserters came in from Bougainville's camp with intelligence that at next ebb-tide a convoy of provisions would pass down the river to Quebec. Wolfe sent orders to Colonel Burton, who was in command of the standing camps, that all the men which he could spare from them should march at nightfall along the southern bank of the river, and wait at a chosen place for embarkation. As night fell Admiral Saunders moved out of the basin of Orleans with the main fleet and ranged the ships along the length of the[374] camp at Beauport. The boats were then lowered and manned by marines, sailors, and such few soldiers as had been left below Quebec, while the ships opened fire on the beach as if to clear it for a landing. Montcalm, completely deceived, massed the whole of his troops at Beauport, and kept them under arms to repel the threatened attack. Meanwhile Holmes' squadron, with boats moored alongside the transports, lay quietly anchored off Cap Rouge, nor showed sign of life until late dusk, when seventeen hundred men[320] took their places in the boats and drifted with the tide for some little distance up the stream. Bougainville marked the movement and made no doubt that attack was designed upon his headquarters. Night fell, dark and moonless, and all was quiet. Monsieur Vergor, who commanded the post at Anse du Foulon, gave leave to most of his guard of Canadians to go harvesting, and saw no reason why he should not himself go comfortably to bed. Bougainville remained on the alert, doubtless impatient for the tide to turn, which would carry the British away from his quarters and leave him in peace. He did not know that Wolfe was even then on board the flag-ship making his final arrangements for the morrow's battle, and that he had handed the portrait of his betrothed to Captain John Jervis[321] of H.M.S. Porcupine, to be returned to her in the event of his death.
Sept. 13.

At length at two o'clock in the morning the tide ebbed. Two lanterns rose flickering to the maintop shrouds of the Sutherland; Wolfe and his officers stepped into their boat, and with the whole flotilla astern of them dropped silently down the river. After a due interval the sloops and frigates followed, with the second division of troops on board;[322] and Bougainville with a sigh of relief resolved not to harass his men by a fruitless [375]march after them. For full two hours the boats pursued their way, when the silence was broken by the challenge of a French sentry. "France," answered a Highland officer who had learned the French tongue on foreign service. "What regiment?" pursued the sentry. "The Queen's" (de la Reine) replied the officer, naming a corps that formed part of Bougainville's force. The sentry, knowing that a convoy of provisions was expected, allowed the boats to pass; for though Bougainville had, as a matter of fact, countermanded the convoy, the guards had not been apprised of the countermand. Off Samos another sentry, visible not a pistol-shot away from the boats, again challenged. "Provision-boats," answered the same officer, "don't make a noise or the English will hear." Once more the boats were suffered to pass. Presently they rounded the headland of Anse du Foulon, and there no sentry was to be seen. The leading boats were carried by the current somewhat below the intended landing-place, and the troops disembarked below the path, on a narrow strand at the foot of the heights. Then twenty-four men of the Light Infantry, who had volunteered for a certain unknown but dangerous service under Colonel Howe, slung their muskets about them, threw themselves upon the face of the cliff, and began to drag themselves through the two hundred feet of stunted bush that separated them from the enemy.

The dawn was just breaking as they reached the top, and through the dim light they could distinguish the group of tents that composed Vergor's encampment. Instantly they dashed at them; and the French, utterly surprised, at once took to their heels. Vergor, who was reputed a coward, stood firm and fired his pistols; and the report of three of the British muskets, together with the cheers of Howe's forlorn hope, gave Wolfe the signal for which he waited. He uttered the word to advance, and the rest of the troops swarmed up the cliff to their comrades as best they could. The zigzag path which had first attracted Wolfe's eye was found to[376] be obstructed by trenches and abatis, but these obstacles were cleared away and the ascent made easier. Presently the report of cannon was heard from up the river: the batteries of Sillery and Samos were firing at the rearmost of the boats and at Holmes' squadron. Howe and his Light Infantry were detached to silence them, which they effectually did; and meanwhile the disembarkation proceeded rapidly. As fast as the boats were emptied they went back to fetch the second division from the ships and Burton's men from the opposite shore. Before the sun was well up the whole force of forty-five hundred men had accomplished the ascent, and was filing across the plain at the summit of the heights.

Wolfe went forward to reconnoitre. The ground on which he stood formed part of the high plateau which ends in the promontory of Quebec. About a mile to eastward of the landing-place was a tract of grass, known as the plains of Abraham, fairly level ground for the most part, though broken by patches of corn and clumps of bushes, and bounded on the south by the heights of the St. Lawrence and to north by those of the St. Charles. On these plains, where the plateau is less than a mile wide, Wolfe chose his position for the expected battle. His situation, despite the skilful execution of the movement which brought his army across Montcalm's line of communication, was no secure nor enviable one, for besides Montcalm's army and the garrison of Quebec in his front, he had also to reckon with Bougainville's detachment in his rear. His only chance of success was that the French should allow him to beat them in detail, that, in fact, they should bring out their main army and give him opportunity to crush it in front, before Bougainville should have time to operate effectively in his rear. But there was no reason why the French should do anything of the kind; and Wolfe's dispositions needed to be regulated accordingly. The extent of the ground was too great to permit order of battle in more than one line; and it was in one line that he prepared to meet the main force from the side[377] of Quebec. The right wing rested on the brink of the heights above the St. Lawrence, and here was stationed a single platoon of the Twenty-eighth. Next it, in succession from right to left, stood the Thirty-fifth, three companies of the Louisburg grenadiers,[323] the remainder of the Twenty-eighth, the Forty-third, Forty-seventh, Fraser's Highlanders, and the Fifty-eighth. Straight through the centre of the position, midway between the Forty-seventh and Fraser's, ran the road from Sillery to Quebec, and here was posted a single light field-gun[324] which had been dragged up from Wolfe's Cove. On the extreme left, beyond the flank of the Fifty-eighth, ran the road from Sainte Foy to Quebec, with a few scattered houses on the south side and patches of bushes and coppice beyond it. The line, being three ranks deep, was not long enough to rest its left on this road, much less on the heights above the St. Charles, so the Fifteenth foot was thrown back en potence to prevent the turning of the left flank. The second battalion of the Sixtieth and the Forty-eighth Foot were stationed in rear, the one on the left and the other on the right, in eight subdivisions, with wide intervals. Two companies of the Fifty-eighth were left to guard the landing-place, the third battalion of the Sixtieth was detached to the right rear to preserve communication with it; and finally Howe's Light Infantry occupied a wood far in rear, evidently to hold Bougainville in check. Monckton commanded the right and Murray the left of the fighting line, while Townsend took charge of the scattered troops which did duty for a reserve. Wolfe in person remained with Monckton's brigade.[325] Probably he anticipated that Montcalm would attempt to turn his right and so cut off his retreat.

Meanwhile Montcalm had passed a troubled night. [378]The false attack of the fleet on Beauport had kept him in continual anxiety; and he was still more disquieted at daybreak to hear the sound of the cannon of Samos and Sillery above the city. He sent an officer to the Governor's quarters in Quebec for information, but received no answer; so at six o'clock he rode up to look for himself, when on reaching the right of his camp he caught sight, over the St. Charles, of an ominous band of scarlet stretched across the heights two miles away. His countenance fell. "This is a serious business," he said, and he despatched an aide-de-camp at full gallop to bring up the troops from the right and centre of the camp of Beauport. The men, only lately relieved from the manning of the entrenchments, got under arms and streamed away in hot haste across the bridge of the St. Charles and through the narrow streets of the city—Indians, Canadians, and regulars all alike stirred by the sudden approach of danger. Further reconnaissance filled Montcalm with still greater dismay. It was not a mere detachment, but practically the entire British army that had found its way to the heights between him and Montreal. Meanwhile Vaudreuil, the Governor of Quebec, who was also Commander-in-Chief, was not to be found; and there was unity neither of direction nor of obedience. Montcalm applied to Ramesay, who commanded the garrison of Quebec, for twenty-five field-guns which were mounted in one of the batteries: Ramesay declared that he needed them for his own defence and would spare but three. Then there was anxious waiting for the troops from the left of Beauport's camp, which for some reason never came. All was confusion, perplexity, and distraction.

In such circumstances Montcalm appears to have succumbed to nervous strain and to have lost his wits. He held a hasty council of war with his principal officers and decided to fight at once. He was afraid, it seems, lest Wolfe should be reinforced or lest he might entrench himself. Yet there was no occasion for[379] extreme haste. Another two hours would have sufficed, if not to bring up the missing troops from Beauport, at all events to procure more guns and to send a messenger by a safe route to concert measures with Bougainville; and the day was yet young. The supplies of the French were failing, it is true, but their army was not starving; and from whence was Wolfe himself, with Bougainville in his rear, to draw his supplies even supposing that he did entrench himself? The British had two days' provisions with them, but for all further supply they must depend on a single zigzag path wide enough for but one man abreast. Even supposing that Montcalm could not succeed in obtaining the thirty field-guns for which he asked, and which if obtained would almost inevitably have blasted the British army off the field, there was nothing to prevent him from man?uvring with a superior force to keep the British under arms until nightfall, while his Indians and irregulars, of whom he had abundance, harried the British right flank in front and rear under shelter of the scrub, and hindered the bringing up of further stores. What would have been the condition of Wolfe's army on the following morning after a second night under arms, and what opening might there not have been for successful attack? But it was not to be. Whether Montcalm was spurred on by the impatience of his own half-distracted force, or whether he simply gave way to nervous exhaustion, must remain uncertain. At any rate he resolved with the five thousand troops that were with him to accept battle at once.

By nine o'clock his line of battle was formed, some six hundred yards from the British position. On his right, resting on the road to Sainte Foy was a battalion of Canadian militia, and next to it in succession the regular regiments of Bèarn and La Sarre. Next to these, in column on either side of the road to Sillery, were the regiments of Guienne and Languedoc, and to their left regiment Roussillon and another battalion of[380] militia. On the extreme right and left some two thousand Indians and Canadians swarmed forward in skirmishing order in advance of the line of battle. It was with the fire of these sharpshooters that the action began. There was good cover for them not only on the flanks but also among the scattered bushes in the front. Wolfe threw out skirmishers to meet them, and the fusillade became lively, especially on the British left, where Townsend's men began to fall fast. So severe became this pressure on the left that Townsend, alarmed for his flank, brought up the second battalion of the Sixtieth to the left of the Fifty-eighth, detailed part of them to drive the Canadians from the houses by the road and doubled the remainder back en potence in line with the Fifteenth; while at the same time the Light Infantry was called up in support of the Fifteenth to strengthen the flank still further. Thus before the action was well begun the rear-guard and half of the reserve was practically absorbed in the fighting line. On the British right, where the French sharpshooters could not get round the flank, their fire was by no means so deadly; but it does not appear that either of these attacks formed part of any settled plan of Montcalm, for by throwing the mass of his skirmishers against the British left he might have made them very formidable.

Meanwhile Montcalm's three field-guns had opened fire, and were answered by the single gun on the Sillery road with great effect. So the minutes dragged on, until at a little before ten the French line advanced with loud shouts to the true attack, the regulars in the centre moving steadily, a long streak of white edged on either hand with red and with blue, and the militia striving to move as steadily on the flanks. The English, who until now had been lying down, then sprang to their feet and stood steady with recovered arms. At a range of two hundred yards the French muskets opened fire but with little effect, while much confusion and delay was caused by the Canadian[381] militia who, true to their instincts as skirmishers, threw themselves flat on the ground to reload. Wolfe was shot through the wrist, but he merely wrapped his handkerchief round the wound, and called to the men to be steady and reserve their fire. The French recovered their order somewhat and again came on, filling the air with their cries, while the British stood calm, silent and immovable, knowing their chief and trusting him.[326] Nearer and nearer drew the parti-coloured line, gayer and gayer as the blue and scarlet facings on the white coats came into view, brighter and brighter as the detail of metal buttons and accoutrements cleared themselves from the distance, till at length the time was come. Thirty-five yards only separated the opposing arrays, when the word rang out, the still red line sprang into life, the recovered muskets leaped forward into a long bristling bar, and with one deafening crash, the most perfect volley ever fired on battlefield burst forth as if from a single monstrous weapon, from end to end of the British line. A dense bank of smoke blotted the French from sight, and from behind it there rose a horrible din of clattering arms, and savage oaths and agonised cries. The sharp clink of ramrods broke in upon the sound as the British reloaded; and when the smoke rolled away, the gay line was seen to be shivered to fragments, while the bright coats strewed the ground like swathes of gaudy flowers. There was hardly a bullet of that volley that had not struck home.

Montcalm, himself unhurt and conspicuous on a black charger, galloped frantically up and down his shattered ranks in a vain effort to restore order. Wolfe gave the order to advance, and after one more volley the scarlet line strode forward with bayonet and claymore to complete the rout. There was nothing to stop the British, nothing even to gall them except the fire of[382] a few sharpshooters hidden in the scrub. Wolfe himself led them at the head of the Twenty-eighth. A bullet struck him in the groin, but he paused not a moment and was still striding on, when another ball passed through his lungs. He staggered forward, still vainly striving to keep on his feet. "Support me, support me," he gasped to an officer who was close to him, "lest my gallant fellows should see me fall." Two or three men fell out and carried him to the rear, but his fall was noticed by few; and the victorious line pressed on. Some of the sharpshooters continued to fire from behind the shrubs and required to be driven out. Others taking cover nearer to the town opened a biting fire on the Highlanders who, charging as usual with the claymore only, suffered much loss in the attempt to force so wily an enemy from the bush. But other regiments came up and did the work for them with the musket, and thenceforward no further stand was made by the French, but Montcalm's whole force broke up and fled in wild confusion towards the town. He himself, borne away in the rush of the fugitives, was shot through the body, but being supported in the saddle rode in through the gates. "It is nothing, nothing," he called to the shrieking women who saw the red stains on his white uniform; "don't distress yourselves over me, good people." He was lifted from his horse and borne into a surgeon's house to die. The panic among the French increased. Their chief was dying, his second mortally wounded; and among the terrified mob that fled by the St. Charles there rose a cry to destroy the bridge of boats, lest the English should break into the camp of Beauport. This insane movement, which would have sacrificed the whole of the fugitives who had not yet crossed the river, was checked by one or two officers who still kept their wits about them; but none the less the French were not only beaten but demoralised, and the victory of the British was complete.

But the victors also had lost the services both of[383] their General and his second. Monckton had been severely wounded by a musket-shot which for the present disabled him from duty, and Wolfe had been carried to the rear more dead than alive. He begged his bearers to set him down, and refused to see a surgeon. "There is no need," he said, "it is all over with me"; and he sank into unconsciousness. "How they run," cried out one of the attendants, as he watched the French flying before the red-coats. "Who run?" asked Wolfe, waking suddenly to life. "The enemy, Sir, they give way everywhere." "Go one of you to Colonel Burton," ordered the dying General with great earnestness, "and tell him to march Webb's regiment[327] down to Charles River to cut off the retreat from the bridge." He ceased, and turned on his side. "Now, God be praised, I will die in peace," he murmured; and so died.

With his death and the disabling of Monckton the command devolved upon Townsend, who had no sooner assumed it than he found the rear of the army threatened by Bougainville. Turning upon this new enemy with two battalions and two field-guns he soon forced him to retire; and then, the pursuit being ended, he proceeded to entrench himself on the battlefield. The losses of the British were trifling compared with the magnitude of the success, amounting to no more than six hundred and thirty of all ranks killed and wounded.[328] The chief sufferers were the Highlanders, during their onslaught with the claymore, and the Fifteenth, Fifty-eighth and second battalion of the Sixtieth, who bore the brunt of the sharpshooting on the left flank. Before midnight the entrenchments had made good progress, and cannon had been brought up to defend them. A battery also had been mounted at the northern angle of the town, and the French hospital, full of sick and wounded men, had been taken. Nothing is said of the [384]exhaustion of the troops, who had been on duty continuously for at least thirty hours.

Meanwhile utter confusion reigned in the French camp. Vaudreuil called a council of war, and there was tumultuous debate. A messenger was sent to the dying Montcalm for advice, and returned with the reply that there were three courses open, to retreat up the river, to fight again, or to surrender the colony. There was much to be said for fighting, for with Bougainville's force the French could still bring superior numbers into the field; still more to be said for the defence of Quebec; but the demoralisation was too deep to permit any bold action. At nine o'clock in the evening Vaudreuil gave the order to retreat, and, the word once uttered, the entire French force streamed away in disorderly and disgraceful flight to the post of Jacques Cartier, thirty miles up the St. Lawrence. The only instructions left with the garrison of Quebec were to surrender as soon as provisions should fail. Well was it for Montcalm, always a brave and faithful soldier, that his deliverance came to him before the dawn of another day.
Sept. 17.

Townsend for his part pushed his trenches forward against Quebec with the greatest energy. The French, despite their precipitate retreat, were still superior force in his rear; and though certainly demoralised might rally on joining the unbeaten troops of Lévis, and imbibe new courage under the leadership of that excellent officer. It was therefore imperative to press the garrison hard while still overpowered by the despairing sense of its isolation. On the 17th of September the British ships of war moved up against the Lower Town, and a scarlet column approached the walls from the meadows of the St. Charles. The French drums beat to arms, but the Canadian militia refused to turn out, and the white flag was hoisted. An officer was sent to Townsend's quarters to gain time, if possible, by prolonging negotiations. Townsend's answer was peremptory: unless the town were[385] surrendered by eleven o'clock, he would take it by storm; and on this Ramesay signed the capitulation. It was none too soon. Before the messenger with the signed articles had reached Townsend, Canadian horsemen arrived with provisions and with a cheering message that help was at hand; and on the very next morning Lévis marched out from Jacques Cartier, only to learn that he was just too late.
Sept. 18.

On the afternoon of the 18th the British entered the city, and during the following weeks were employed in strengthening the defences and making provision against the winter; for it had been decided that the fortress must be held at all risks. Monckton was still too far disabled to assume command; Townsend, fresh from the House of Commons, had no mind for such dreary duty as winter-quarters; so Brigadier Murray was left as Governor with a garrison of seven thousand five hundred men, his battalions being strengthened by drafts from the Sixty-second and Sixty-ninth, which were serving on board the fleet. At the end of October Admiral Saunders fired his farewell salute and dropped down the river with his fleet, carrying with him the embalmed remains of Wolfe, to be laid by his father's body in the parish church of Greenwich.

So ended the first stage of the conquest of Canada, with better fortune than might have been expected; for there is no gainsaying the fact that the concert of operations intended by Pitt and designed by Amherst had broken down. It should seem indeed that the scheme was too complex, that too much was attempted with the resources at command, that the combination of the various enterprises was too intricate to admit of complete success in a wild and distant country, where the campaigning season was so strictly bounded by the climate. Amherst's operations depended greatly on the help given to him by the Provincials, and the colonial assemblies whatever their good-will were always dilatory, while sometimes, as in the case of Pennsylvania, they were intolerably recalcitrant. Again, though drafts had[386] been sent to the General to make good the losses of the previous campaign,[329] these were not nearly sufficient to fill the gaps made by the slaughter of Ticonderoga and the bitter cold of a Canadian winter. Significantly enough, also, no care had been taken to provide the garrison of Louisburg, most arctic of quarters, even with coverlets, so that the casualties in the winter were far greater than they should have been.[330] Again, it had been ordained that Hopson should reinforce Amherst when his work at Martinique was done, but this arrangement also had broken down; and the least forethought as to the waste of a tropical campaign would have shown that it should not have been reckoned on. The result was that Amherst and Wolfe found themselves with insufficient troops, and that as a natural consequence the former was obliged to cut the margin of his several operations too fine. The death of Prideaux, an excellent officer, was a great misfortune, though Johnson finished his work at Niagara efficiently enough. Stanwix also, after overcoming vast difficulties of transport, succeeded in penetrating to Pittsburg; but here the operations of both columns came to an end. The Ohio happened to be so low that Stanwix could not send up a battalion, as he had been bidden, to reinforce Gage for his advance to La Galette; and Gage, who was not a very enterprising man, to Amherst's great disappointment thought himself not strong enough to move in consequence. On Amherst's own failure to reach Montreal comment has already been passed; but it should be remembered that the whole burden of the preparations for Wolfe's expedition was laid upon him, and that Wolfe gratefully acknowledged the thoroughness of the work. Still the fact remains that the diversions from south and west were an almost total failure, and that Wolfe was consequently obliged to perform his difficult task unaided.

[387]

Fortune was against the British in that the weather delayed the assembling of Wolfe's army at Louisburg; for those few lost weeks might easily have made the entire difference to the campaign. Wolfe, with an inadequate force, was driven to his wits' end to solve the problem assigned to him; and it is quite incontestable that the credit for the fall of Quebec belongs rather to the Navy than to the Army. The names of Saunders and of Holmes are little remembered; and the fame of James Cook the master, whose skill and diligence did much to reveal the unknown channel of the St. Lawrence, is swallowed up in that of Captain James Cook the navigator. Still the fact remains unaltered. It was the audacity of Holmes and his squadron in running the gauntlet of the batteries of Quebec which first threatened the supplies and communications of the city, and forced Montcalm to weaken his main army by detaching Bougainville. It was the terrible restless energy of the same squadron, ever moving up and down the river, which wore out the limbs of the French soldiers and the nerves of their officers; and to the Navy fully as much as to the Army is due the praise for the movement that finally set Wolfe and his battalions on the heights of Abraham. But in truth this last most delicate and critical operation was so admirably thought out and executed by the officers of both services that it must abide for ever a masterpiece in its kind. The British Navy and Army working, as at Quebec, in concord and harmony under loyal and able chiefs, are indeed not easily baffled.

It still remains for enquiry why Wolfe did not take earlier advantage of the opportunities opened to him by the fleet; and even after allowance has been made for his constant illness, the answer is not readily found. The measures which led to the decisive action were, as has been told, taken on the advice of his brigadiers, and, if Montcalm had not succumbed to positive infatuation, would very likely have brought Wolfe to a court-martial. But if instead of wasting the whole of August[388] in futile efforts below Quebec, Wolfe had shifted his operations forthwith to the west of the city, it seems at least probable that he could have attained his object without hazarding that desperate cast on the plains of Abraham. It would presumably have been open to him to gain the heights as he gained them ultimately, to have overwhelmed Bougainville's posts piecemeal, as was done as far as Sillery by a small detachment on the morning of the battle, and to have entrenched himself in the most suitable of them. Then having cut the French communications by land and water, he could have forced Montcalm either to abandon Quebec or to fight on his own terms. But it is easy to be wise after the event; and a brilliant success, however fortunate, is rightly held to cover all errors. Moreover, the praise for the perfection of drill and discipline which won the victory with a single volley is all Wolfe's own. Still it seems to be a fair criticism that the General was slow to perceive the real weakness of Montcalm's position and the vital spot laid open to him by the fleet for a deadly thrust. The consequence was that the work was but half done and, as shall now be seen, only narrowly escaped undoing.
CHAPTER IV
The city of Quebec when the British entered into possession was little better than a shapeless mass of ruins, having been reduced to that state by the guns of the fleet. The population was thoroughly demoralised, and given over to theft and pillage; liquor was abundant and the British soldier was thirsty; in fact it needed all Murray's firmness to restore any kind of order.[331] In December severe weather began in earnest, and the effects of bad quarters, bad food, insufficient clothing and insufficient fuel speedily made themselves felt. The sentries were relieved every hour, yet it was impossible to keep them free of frost-bite. The Highlanders despite their natural hardihood suffered more than their comrades, the kilt being but a sorry protection against a Canadian winter; and they were only relieved by a supply of long woollen hose knitted for them, perhaps as much for decency's as for charity's sake, by the nuns of the city. Still the men remained cheerful, for they were kept constantly at work cutting fuel and dragging it in sledges to their quarters, an errand on which they set forth always with muskets as well as with axes, from fear of Indians and bushrangers. Nevertheless their sufferings were great. Fifty men were frost-bitten on a single day while employed on this duty; three days later sixty-five more were similarly afflicted, and before[390] Christmas there were over a hundred and fifty cases.[332] This, however, would have been a small matter but for the more deadly scourge that was added to it. The garrison was victualled entirely with salt provisions; it was impossible to procure fresh meat for the men; and scurvy grew and increased until there was hardly a soldier in the ranks, even among those reckoned fit for duty, who was wholly free from the disease.
1760.

With such a plague in his midst Murray might well feel apprehensive for the safety of Quebec against the enemy without the walls, for ever since the British occupation of the city the French had made no secret of their intention to recapture it. Murray had established two fortified posts a few miles to westward of Quebec at Sainte Foy and Old Lorette; while the French had established themselves at St. Augustine, only two days' march from the gates, from which position it was soon necessary to expel them. Petty skirmishes such as this were frequent, but ended always with so easy advantage to the British that the troops began to think themselves invincible. Repeated intelligence, however, still arrived of French designs against Quebec, vague enough at first, but, as the winter wore on, gradually assuming more definite form. Lévis, the ablest officer left to the French since the fall of Montcalm, was in fact straining every nerve to organise and equip a force of overwhelming strength for the purpose. He had full information of the state of Murray's army and knew that he had but to bide his time for scurvy to do the best part of his work for him. At the end of March he heard that half of the British were on the sick-list, and the report was not far from the truth. By the middle of April Murray had barely three thousand men fit for duty, while no fewer than seven hundred were lying in the snow-drifts, waiting till spring should unbind the frozen ground to give them a grave.
April 21.
April 26.
April 27.

On the 17th of April Murray, learning that the preparations of the French were complete, occupied the[391] mouth of Cap Rouge River to prevent a landing at that point. Four days later Lévis set out with about seven thousand men, half of them regular troops, and a fleet of bateaux escorted by two frigates and by several smaller craft. The river was not yet free from ice, the weather was bad, and navigation was difficult; but on the 26th the army, reinforced by the garrisons of several outlying stations to nearly nine thousand men, landed at St. Augustine and marched upon the British advanced posts. The British at once fell back from Cap Rouge and Old Lorette upon Sainte Foy. Lévis followed after them all night, despite the difficulties of half-thawed ice and driving rain and tempest, and at daybreak arrived before Sainte Foy to find every house occupied by the British and their cannon playing on his columns as they emerged from the forest. Murray, warned by the information of a French gunner, who had been picked up half dead from the floating ice in the St. Lawrence, had marched out with half of the garrison to cover the retreat of his advanced parties. The position which he occupied was strong, and Lévis being ignorant of the weakness of his numbers would not venture to attack, but resolved to wait until nightfall and then move round the British left flank. Murray therefore was able to retire in safety to Quebec, while Lévis occupied Sainte Foy and pushed his light troops forward to Sillery.
April 28.

Murray's position now was none of the pleasantest. The fortifications of Quebec were in no condition to withstand an energetic cannonade, and the ground was still frozen so hard that it was impossible for him to throw up entrenchments, as he had long desired, outside the walls. The only alternative open to him was to sally out and fight Lévis, at odds of one against two, and beat him if he could. Murray was young, daring and fired by the example of Wolfe; his army was, as he said, in the habit of beating the enemy;[333] and he had a fine train of artillery. He therefore resolved to go out and fight. Accordingly at half-past six on the morning[392] of the 28th he marched out of Quebec at the head of all the troops that he could muster, a bare three thousand men, with three howitzers and twenty field-pieces, and drew them up on the ground which Montcalm had occupied on the famous 13th of September. The force was formed in one line of two brigades, the right or Burton's brigade consisting, from right to left, of the Fifteenth, Fifty-eighth, second battalion of the Sixtieth, and Forty-eighth regiments; the left or Fraser's brigade of the Forty-third, Forty-seventh, Fraser's Highlanders, and the Twenty-eighth. The Thirty-fifth and third battalion of the Sixtieth were posted in reserve in rear of the centre, while the Light Infantry and the Provincial rangers stood wide on the right and left flanks. The field-guns were distributed in pairs to each battalion.

Moving forward to reconnoitre, Murray perceived that the French line was not yet formed. That Lévis had chosen his ground was clear, for he had occupied two block-houses built by the British above Anse du Foulon at the southern edge of the plateau, as well as a house and a fortified windmill at the northern brink, and had extended his vanguard along the ridge between these two points. But the main body was still debouching in columns from Sillery Wood, a mile or more in rear, and two brigades only were as yet deployed by the block-house to form the French right wing. Thinking the opportunity favourable, Murray ordered an immediate advance; and his whole line moved forward, the men dragging their guns with them in the intervals between battalions. The ground was for the most part still covered with snow, which in some places was piled up in drifts and everywhere soft and sodden with rain; and the tramp of three thousand men soon turned the soil into a sea of mud. Arrived at the ground where Wolfe's army had stood, the line halted, and the guns unlimbering opened so destructive a fire on the French columns that Lévis ordered the battalions of his left to fall back to the woods. The man?uvre was not executed without confusion, and Murray, elated by his apparent[393] success, ordered the line to renew its advance, inclining to its right. This movement, however, brought Burton's brigade on to low ground, where the melting snow was knee-deep and the guns could not be worked with effect. The British Light Infantry attacked the windmill and houses on the French left with great spirit, carried them in spite of a desperate resistance, and pressed on in pursuit of the retreating French. But now the battalions of the French left, no longer checked by the fire of artillery, dashed out of the woods in skirmishing order and falling on the rash pursuers fairly overwhelmed them. Over two hundred of the Light Infantry were killed and wounded, and the few survivors hurrying back in confusion upon Burton's brigade prevented it from firing on the advancing enemy. The French seized the opportunity to reform their broken ranks and the combat was hotly maintained for more than an hour, until ammunition for the British artillery failed, the tumbrils being immovably fixed in the snow-drifts.

On Murray's left his hasty advance was little less disastrous. The block-houses were indeed carried and held for a time, but the French fell back into the woods only to advance again in overwhelming force when the fire of the British artillery failed, and to extend themselves along the British front and flank. The two battalions of the reserve were called up and the fight was maintained with indomitable stubbornness; but with both flanks turned the efforts of the British were hopeless, and Murray gave the word to fall back. The men, though but two in three of them remained unhurt, were furious at the order. "Damn it, what is falling back but retreating!" they said; but there was no help for it. So first the left brigade and then the right retired, cursing as they went. Some of the regiments tried to carry off their guns with them, but finding this impossible owing to deep snow and mud spiked and abandoned them. The French followed in pursuit, hoping to cut them off from the city; but Lévis perceiving the orderliness of the retreat judged it more prudent to recall his troops,[394] and Murray brought back the remnant of his force in safety to Quebec.

So ended the action of Sainte Foy after two hours of stern and bloody work. The loss of the British amounted to a thousand killed and wounded or a full third of the entire force. The Fifteenth, Twenty-eighth, and Highlanders[334] were, after the Light Infantry, the greatest sufferers, but in the attenuated state of the battalions it is probable that in seven out of the ten there fell at least one man in three. The loss of the French was admitted to have exceeded eight hundred. Altogether it was an unfortunate affair, though it cannot be called discreditable to the troops. Murray was misled by overweening confidence in his men and miscalculation of the spirit of the French. His past experience doubtless partly excused the mistake; but even if he had failed to grasp that Lévis was a man who could restore confidence to demoralised troops, he might at least have guessed that he would bring up fresh regiments, who had not learned to fear the red-coats, to meet him. As things were, he sacrificed the advantages of his position and of his superiority in artillery and found himself shut up within the miserable fortifications of Quebec, with his force reduced to twenty-four hundred men, nominally fit for duty, but in reality, to use the expressive words of one of them, "half-starved scorbutic skeletons."
May 9.
May 16.

Murray, however, rose to the emergency with a spirit worthy of a British officer. The troops were at first inclined to break loose from discipline, but Murray hanged the chief offender, staved in all the rum-barrels of the sutlers and quickly restored order. Then every soul of the garrison fell to work to strengthen the defences. Officers yoked themselves to cannon and plied[395] pickaxe and spade, and the men with such an example before them strained themselves to the utmost. In a short time one hundred and fifty guns were mounted and at work on the walls of Quebec, while the French, however they might toil at their trenches in the stubborn soil of the plateau, had hardly brought up a single cannon to answer them. None the less incessant labour and bad food were telling heavily on the enfeebled strength of the garrison, when on the 9th of May the Lowestoft frigate sailed up to Quebec with the news that a squadron was at the mouth of the river and would arrive within a few days. The tidings put new heart into the besieged, though had Lévis ventured on an assault they would have found it hard to repel him. On the 15th two more British men-of-war arrived at Quebec, and next morning two frigates sailed up above the city, attacked and destroyed Lévis' ships and with them the French supplies of food and ammunition. That same evening Lévis raised the siege and retreated with precipitation, leaving behind him forty guns, the whole of his material for the siege, and every man of his sick and wounded. Murray marched at dawn to fall upon his rear, but though he captured many stragglers failed to overtake the main body. Thus Quebec was saved; and the advent of spring, together with a supply of fresh provisions, soon turned Murray's sickly battalions into an army fit for service in the field.

During these miserable months of cold, privation, and disease Amherst had been maturing his plans for a decisive campaign. Pitt had enjoined the capture of Montreal upon him as the principal object, and had resolved to demolish the useless fortress of Louisburg, thereby releasing the garrison for active service.[335] The provincial assemblies were called upon once more to furnish large contingents of troops for a supreme effort, and the final blow was about to fall. Amherst's design was to invade Canada simultaneously from east, west, and south. Murray was to ascend the St. Lawrence[396] from Quebec; Brigadier Haviland was to break in by Lake Champlain; and Amherst himself was to lead the main army down the St. Lawrence from Lake Ontario. Of the three lines of advance Amherst's was not only the longest but the most difficult and dangerous, owing to the rapids which obstruct the navigation of the St. Lawrence; but on the other hand the movement would cut off the retreat of the French army to westward and force it back upon Montreal, where Haviland and Murray would close in upon it and fairly throttle it. The plan was delicate in the extreme and called for the greatest nicety of calculation, for the three armies must start from three different points hundreds of miles apart without possibility of inter-communication, and yet arrive at their goal together, lest the French should concentrate and overwhelm Murray's or Haviland's corps in detail. The principal French posts for barring the lines of advance were ?le aux Noix at the head of Lake Ontario, Sorel on the eastern side of Montreal, and La Galette at the head of the rapids of the St. Lawrence.

The year opened ill for Amherst. In March he was compelled to send thirteen hundred men[336] to the south to quell a rising of Cherokee Indians; and he had not long communicated his instructions to Murray when he received tidings of the defeat of Sainte Foy. He at once summoned two battalions from Louisburg to reinforce Murray, but it was not until late in June that he was relieved by news of the safety of Quebec. The provincial governments also were as usual a sore trial and the cause of much vexatious delay;[337] but Amherst was a man of tenacity and patience who never lost sight of his object nor relaxed his industry for a moment. At length, when midsummer was fully past, the net which he had woven began to close round the French.

[397]
July.
August 4.

Murray was the first to move. His garrison had rapidly recovered health and strength, and by July he was able to pick out twenty-two hundred men for the advance on Montreal, while still leaving seventeen hundred behind him for the garrison of Quebec. On the 14th of July his little column embarked in thirty-two vessels with a number of boats and bateaux, and on the following day set sail up the St. Lawrence, leaving Lord Rollo to follow with the Twenty-second and Fortieth Regiments, which had arrived from Louisburg. Murray advanced slowly, skirmishing with small parties of the enemy which hovered about the flotilla on the shore, and disarming the inhabitants as he passed. On the 4th of August he reached Three Rivers, where lay a detachment of the French army; but without delaying to attack it, he passed on to Sorel, where Bourlamaque and M. Dumas with some four thousand men were entrenched along both banks of the river. These officers had been instructed to follow up the flotilla as it moved, so British and French alike advanced towards Montreal, where Lévis lay with the main French army. Murray, meanwhile, by rigour towards the recalcitrant and lenity towards the submissive, persuaded half of Bourlamaque's militia to yield up its arms and take an oath of neutrality. By the 24th, being within nine leagues of Montreal, he sent out a party to seek news of Haviland, and then moving up to ?le Sainte Thérése, just below Montreal, he encamped and awaited the coming of his colleagues.
August 27.

Haviland, meanwhile, had embarked in the third week of August at Crown Point, with two battalions of regulars, and with Provincials and Indians sufficient to raise his force to thirty-four hundred men. Four days brought him to Bougainville's position at ?le aux Noix, where he landed, erected batteries, and opened fire on the fort; while at the same time a party of rangers dragged three guns to the rear of the position and turned them upon Bougainville's sloops of war, which got under way in all haste and stranded in the next[398] bend of the river. Thus Bougainville's communications with the next post, St. John's, down the river Richelieu, were severed, and, as Amherst had foreseen,[338] he was compelled to abandon the island. He joined M. Roquemaure at St. John's with infinite difficulty by a night march through the forest; and both officers falling back from St. John's and Chambly waited with Bourlamaque on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where their force melted away fast through desertion. Haviland opened communications with Murray, and both awaited the approach of Amherst.
August 26.
Sept.
Sept. 5.

The main army had assembled at Oswego during July, Amherst himself arriving on the 9th, but it was not until the first week of August that the last of the appointed regiments appeared at the rendezvous. The force consisted of eight weak battalions of British, numbering less than six thousand men, with four thousand five hundred Provincials and seven hundred Indians, or about eleven thousand in all. The flotilla for the transport of the army was made up of nearly eight hundred whale-boats and bateaux, and was escorted by gun-boats. On the 10th of August the entire force was embarked and by the 15th it had reached Oswegatchie or La Galette, on the site of the present Ogdensburg. Here a French brig of ten guns was attacked and captured by the gun-boats, and the flotilla pursued its way among the Thousand Islands. On an islet at the head of the rapids stood a French post named Fort Lévis, with a garrison of three hundred men, which Amherst forthwith invested, and after three days' cannonade reduced to surrender. Repair of the fort and of his boats detained him until the 30th, and on the 31st the expedition entered upon the most critical of its work, the descent of the rapids. On the 1st of September the flotilla was compelled to proceed in single file, but all went well until the 4th, when the most dangerous of the rapids was reached. On that day over sixty boats were wrecked[399] or damaged and eighty-four men were drowned: but the passage was accomplished without molestation from the enemy, though large numbers of Canadians were on the watch on the banks. The next day was consumed in repairs, and on the 6th, the last rapid having been passed, the boats glided down to La Chine, nine miles from Montreal, on the left bank of the St. Lawrence. Here the army landed unopposed, marched straight upon Montreal and encamped beneath the walls on the eastern side: while Haviland on the 8th arrived on the southern shore against Amherst's camp. Amherst was a little late, having been delayed by the resistance of Fort Lévis. Had he been content to ignore it and simply to cut it off from Montreal, he, Murray and Haviland would have met, punctual to a day, on the 29th of August. As it was the junction was sufficiently complete, and the work of the campaign was practically done.
Sept. 8.

Bougainville, Bourlamaque, and Roquemaure had crossed over to Montreal with the few regular troops remaining with them, for the whole of their militia had melted away, and even the regulars had been greatly reduced by desertion. Thus the army assembled at Montreal, the sole force that remained for the defence of Canada, amounted to barely twenty-five hundred men, demoralised in order, in spirit, and in discipline. Around the city lay an hostile army of seventeen thousand men; the fortifications were contemptible except for defence against Indians, and Amherst's cannon were already moving up from La Chine. The French Governor called a council of war, which resolved that resistance was hopeless. Articles of capitulation were accordingly drawn up, and carried on the 7th by Bougainville to Amherst. The condition on which the French laid greatest stress was that they should march out with the honours of war; but this Amherst flatly refused. The troops, he said, must lay down their arms and serve no further during the present war: the French had played so inhuman a[400] part in stirring up the Indians to treachery and barbarity of every kind, that he was determined to make an example of them. It is probable that the General referred only to the massacre of the wounded after the defeats at Fort William Henry, Ticonderoga, and the Monongahela; but the reckoning to be paid went back to earlier times. There were the wrongs, the encroachment and the double-dealing of a full century to be redressed; and the time for payment was come. In vain the French pleaded for easier terms: Amherst, a man not easily turned from his purpose, remained inflexible. Accordingly on the 8th of September, despite expostulation which rose almost to the point of mutiny on the part of Lévis, the capitulation was signed, and half a continent passed into the hands of Great Britain.

Meanwhile, as if to crown the whole work and to redeem all past failings and misfortunes, the expedition against the Cherokee Indians had been brilliantly successful. Trifling though the affair may seem in comparison with Amherst's momentous operations in the north, it marked the banishment of the panic fear of Indians which had followed on the defeat of Braddock. The command was entrusted to Colonel Montgomery, and the force committed to him was four hundred of the First Royals, seven hundred of his own Highlanders, and a strong body of Provincials. Starting from Charlestown, Carolina, Montgomery marched up one hundred and fifty miles to the township of Ninety-six, so called because it was supposed to be ninety-six miles from the township of Keowee, and pushed forward thence for four days through dense forest and mountainous country without finding any sign of Indians. Concluding therefore that the Cherokees were unaware of his advance, he left all tents and baggage behind and made a forced march to surprise the savages before they could escape. The main body of the Indians, however, retired before he could reach them; and he could accomplish no more than the destruction of crops[401] and villages, after which he returned to a fort on the frontier, having traversed no less than sixty miles over a most difficult country without a halt. It was then resolved to begin the work anew and to make a fresh advance into the forest. On this occasion the Indians lay in wait for the British in a wooded valley and burst upon them suddenly, as they had upon Braddock, with hideous whooping and howling, and a scattered but deadly fire of rifles. The grenadiers and Light Infantry at once plunged into the forest to engage them, while the Highlanders hastened round their rear to cut off their retreat; and after a sharp action of an hour the Indians were put to flight with great slaughter. This engagement cost the British over eighty men killed and wounded, twice as many as Amherst had lost by lead and steel during the whole of his advance from Oswego to Montreal. But the mere comparison of casualties is of small moment. The really weighty matter is that British officers had learned to face the difficulties which had been fatal to Braddock, and to overcome them with a light heart.

It now remained for Amherst to enforce the capitulation on the French posts of the west. The occupation of Detroit, Miamis, and Michillimackinac was entrusted to Rogers, the partisan, with his rangers, who in the course of the winter hauled down the ensign of the Bourbons and hoisted the British flag in its place. There was still to be trouble with these remote stations, but it was not to come immediately, nor directly from the French. The rest of the General's work was principally administrative. Generous terms were granted to the inhabitants, and every precaution was taken to protect them against the Indian allies of the British. Amherst issued a general order appealing to his troops not to disgrace their victory by any unsoldierlike behaviour or appearance of inhumanity; and the army responded to the appeal with a heartiness which amazed the Canadians. A month after the capitulation the General could report that British soldiers and Canadian peasants were joining[402] their provisions and messing together, and that when he had ordered soldiers to leave their scattered quarters so as to be closer to their companies, the people had begged that they might not be moved.[339] Such was not the fashion in which the French were wont to treat a captured territory.

Here then for the present we may take leave of Amherst. Pitt, as shall presently be seen, had further tasks for him, which were to be executed as usual quietly and thoroughly. The fame of the man is lost in that of Wolfe, and yet it was he, not Wolfe, that was the conqueror of Canada. The criticism usually passed upon him is that he was sure but slow, and to some extent it is justified by facts. Yet it should be remembered that, when he took over the command, affairs in North America were in extreme confusion and disorder, and that the work assigned to him was, on a far larger and more formidable scale, that which had fallen to Cumberland in 1745. Braddock had started everything in the wrong direction. Not only had he quarrelled with the Provincials and failed to instruct his troops aright, but he had deliberately forced them to follow wrong methods. Loudoun, again, had not improved relations with the provincial assemblies either by his correspondence with them or by his military operations. Finally Abercromby's imbecility at Ticonderoga had sacrificed hundreds of valuable lives, disgusted the colonists, and heightened the reputation gained by the French at the Monongahela. Then Amherst took the whole of the confused business in hand, and from that moment all went smoothly and well; so smoothly indeed that people quite forgot that it had ever gone otherwise. Yet his difficulties with the Provincials were not less than those of his predecessors nor less trying to his patience than to theirs; nay, even the good-will of the colonists was sometimes as embarrassing to him as their obstruction. It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the atmosphere of young communities, such as were[403] then the North American colonies, is most noxious to discipline. Americans, as their latest military effort has proved, do not yet understand the meaning of the term; the colonists of Australia and New Zealand, which have no such religious traditions as America, have but the vaguest conception of its significance. Thus when Amherst returned from the conquest of Louisburg to Boston, not all his efforts could prevent the inhabitants of that godly city from filling his men with rum; and the same spirit of indiscipline doubtless haunted the army through all the long and dreary months of winter-quarters. There was, again, the additional complication that in the matter of forest-fighting the British had much to learn from the Provincials; and it fell to Amherst to teach his troops greater freedom and independence in action without simultaneous relaxation of discipline. He overcame all these obstacles, however, in his quiet, methodical way. Discipline never failed; for Amherst, though no martinet, could be inexorably severe. Special corps of light troops and of marksmen were organised, and the drill of the whole army was modified to suit new conditions. It was in fact Amherst who showed the way to the reform afterwards carried out by Sir John Moore at Shorncliffe, of reducing the depth of the ranks to two men only. Such a formation would have diminished Wolfe's difficulties and materially have strengthened his dispositions on the plains of Abraham: but apparently so important an innovation never occurred to him. Amherst never fought a great action, so his improvements were never put to the test; but this does not impair his credit as a soldier of forethought and originality.

But the most remarkable quality in Amherst was his talent for organisation. The difficulties of transport in the Canada of his day were appalling. "Canada," says the American historian Parkman, "was fortified with vast outworks of defence in the savage forests, marshes, and mountains that encompassed her, where the thoroughfares were streams choked with fallen[404] trees and obstructed by cataracts. Never was the problem of moving troops encumbered by artillery and baggage a more difficult one. The question was less how to fight an enemy than how to get at him." It was just this problem which Amherst's industry and perseverance had power to solve. We read of his launching forth on to Lake George with a flotilla of eight hundred boats and an army of eleven thousand men, and all sounds simple and straightforward enough. Yet these boats, setting aside the original task of building and collecting them, had to make several journeys to carry the necessary stores and provisions from Albany to the head of the lake, while every one of them, together with its load, required to be hauled overland from three to six miles through forest and swamp from the carrying-place on the Mohawk to Wood Creek. The same provision against the same difficulties were necessary on a smaller scale for Prideaux's attack on Niagara, and, under conditions of special embarrassment, for Stanwix's advance to the Ohio; while over and above this, there was marine transport and all necessaries for the expedition to Quebec to be provided, so as to enable Wolfe to proceed on his mission fully equipped and without delay. Add to this burden of work endless correspondence with the various provinces, as well as constant friction, obstruction, and general dilatoriness, and it becomes apparent that for all his slowness Amherst accomplished no small feat when he achieved the conquest of Canada in two campaigns.

The whole problem was in truth one of organisation, and Amherst was the man to solve it, for he was a great military administrator. Cautious undoubtedly he was in the field, but it would be absurd to contend that a man who took ten thousand men down the rapids of the St. Lawrence, with the dry comment that the said rapids were "more frightful than dangerous,"[340] was wanting in enterprise or audacity. His career as a general in the field was short, and his crowning campaign,[405] having achieved its end without a general action, has little fame. Such is the penalty of bloodless operations, though they be the masterpiece of a mighty genius. Austerlitz is a name familiar to thousands who know nothing of the capitulation of Ulm. So Amherst to the majority of Englishmen is but a name: as though it were a small thing for a colonel taken straight from the classic fields of Flanders to cross the Atlantic to a savage wilderness, assume command of disheartened troops and the direction of discordant colonists, and quietly and deliberately to organise victory. He was the greatest military administrator produced by England since the death of Marlborough, and remained the greatest until the rise of Wellington.

Authorities.—The history of the French in Canada and of the long struggle between them and the English for the mastery of the continent has been admirably written in a series of volumes by Francis Parkman. Following in his footsteps through the original papers in the Record Office (C.O., America and West Indies, vols. lxiii., lxv., lxxiv.-lxxvi., lxxxi.-xciv., xcix.; W. O. Orig. Corres., vols. xiii.-xv.), through the Bouquet and Haldimand Papers, and through other English material, I have found little or nothing to glean, while the information which he has gathered from American sources is most valuable. The histories of Mante and Entick give a general account of the operations. Knox's Journal is one of the most valuable sources of information. Other authorities will be found given in detail by Parkman. Readers who are familiar with his works will have no difficulty in apprehending my obligations to him, which I wish to acknowledge to the full.
CHAPTER V
It is now time to return to the subject of India, which, as will be remembered, was dropped at the conclusion of the truce between France and England in January 1755. Two days after the signing of the articles, Governor Saunders left Madras for Europe, and was followed a month later by M. Godeheu. It is not likely that the departure of the two signatories of the treaty wrought any great influence on the subsequent proceedings of the East India Company; but certain it is that before the instrument was a month old the infraction of its provisions was already begun. It was in fact impossible to observe the truce. Its object seems to have been to terminate hostilities in the Carnatic alone; but it was not to be expected that, while Bussy was exerting his vast ability and energy at Aurungabad for the promotion of French interests, the British could sit with folded hands in submission to the article which bound French and English alike "not to interfere in any difference which might arise between the princes of the country." The British had their puppet as well as the French, and having used him for their own purposes could not suddenly desert him, the less so inasmuch as the Nabob Mohammed Ali had neither resources of his own nor the wits whereby to provide himself with them. When therefore Mohammed Ali begged for a British force to reduce Madura and Tinnevelly, which he conceived to be his tributaries, and to collect his tribute for him, the authorities at Madras assented without hesitation. It was, in fact, unusual,[407] not to say impossible, for Indian tribute to be levied except by means of an armed force; and, since Mohammed Ali had no troops of his own, it might be maintained, at least with some show of reason, that the furnishing of a small army for so innocent a purpose was not an act of war.
February.

Accordingly at the beginning of February twenty-five hundred men, one-fifth of them Europeans, were placed under command of Colonel Heron, an officer lately arrived from England, who proceeded to perform the duty assigned to him. It is unnecessary to enter into details of his operations. Suffice it that he succeeded not only in occupying both Madura and Tinnevelly, but in demoralising his troops and insulting the religious prejudices of the people by scandalous pillage of a pagoda. Mohammed Ali made over the government of the subdued territory to his brother Maphuze Khan, and in June Heron, having done his work, encamped before Trichinopoly. From thence he was summoned to Madras to be tried by court-martial for accepting bribes and for malversation of funds, and was dismissed from the Company's service.

The French lost no time in protesting against this expedition as a violation of the treaty, and with not the less vigour that they were extremely jealous of the reuniting of Madura and Tinnevelly, which had long been severed from the sway of Arcot, to the dominions of Mohammed Ali. The protest was of course answered by indignant disclaimer of any sinister purpose; and M. de Leyrit, the Governor of Pondicherry, thought it more profitable to waste no further words in argument, but simply to follow the British example. An opportunity for doing so soon presented itself. The chieftain of a tract of country known as Terriore, about thirty miles north of Trichinopoly, had for some time past evaded payment of his tributary dues to Mysore. Now the Mysoreans on retiring from Trichinopoly had appointed the French their agents to watch over their interests in the Carnatic; and M. de[408] Leyrit accordingly sent fifteen hundred men under M. Maissin into Terriore to enforce discharge of the arrears of this revenue. Maissin having fulfilled his mission with ease and success led his army eastward to Palamcotah, on territory which the British claimed to be subject to Mohammed Ali. The authorities at Madras threatened to stop him by force if he did not desist; and, De Leyrit giving way, war was for the present averted. But since both sides had now infringed the treaty, it was plain that the renewal of hostilities could not long be deferred.
1756.

The rest of the year passed away without serious trouble; but, however the suspension of arms might be observed in the south, there could be no safety for the Carnatic while Bussy remained at Aurungabad, virtually viceroy of the Deccan. He had been now installed therein since 1751, wielding his great powers with consummate tact and address in the face of intrigue, jealousy, and even conspiracy; nay, he had turned the most formidable of the combinations against him into a means of increasing his influence and of gaining nearly five hundred miles of the eastern coast, from the Chilka Lake southward, for the government of Pondicherry. It is true that this vast tract, which was known as the Northern Sirkars, had for the most part been restored to its native owners under the terms of the treaty, but it was still held by France pending the ratification of the articles, which was not expected to arrive until the middle of 1756; and it was always possible that so degrading a concession might be repudiated at Versailles. Moreover, whatever the fate of the negotiations, the cardinal fact remained that Bussy continued always at the court of the Viceroy of the Deccan, and that it was vital to the British that his power should be undermined—that, in fact, Salabad Jung should be persuaded or forced to dismiss him. The first idea at Madras was to send a force to the assistance of the Mahratta, Balajee Rao, who had frequently carried on hostilities against Salabad Jung;[409] for which duty Clive, who had returned to India with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and Governor of Fort St. David, volunteered his services. Another officer, however, was preferred to him, who died before the work could be begun; and the authorities at Bombay, from which side the operations were to be conducted, allowed the project to drop. Native intrigue nevertheless wrought effectually for the British what they could not do for themselves; and in May the feeble Salabad Jung was prevailed upon to dismiss Bussy and the French troops from his service. But Bussy had still an army with him, and had shown himself not less formidable in the field than in the council-chamber; so his enemies, to decide the matter, applied to Madras for a body of troops to assist in the expulsion of the French. No invitation could have been more pleasing. A force of eighteen hundred men was at once ordered for the service, when in the middle of July came tidings from Bengal which demanded the presence of every British soldier that could be spared from the coast of Coromandel.
May.
May 9.
June.

The provinces of Bengal, Orissa, and Behar had since 1735 been governed by a prince known to the English as Allaverdy Khan, who, like all other viceroys of the Moguls, had become virtually independent. At his death the sovereignty descended, according to his own nomination, to his great nephew Surajah Dowlah, a youth who had early discovered propensities towards cruelty, intemperance, and debauchery such as are rare even in Oriental despots. Surajah Dowlah had always hated the English, and his hatred was not lessened after his succession by the fact that the most formidable of his competitors for the throne had received asylum and permission to deposit his treasures and his family at Madras. At the beginning of April the authorities at Calcutta received warning that the renewal of war with France was inevitable, and accordingly set about the repair of the fortifications of the settlement. Surajah Dowlah, not only irritated but alarmed lest such[410] preparations should be levelled against himself, sent a message to the Governor requiring that the work should cease and that the newly-erected defences should be destroyed. The authorities answered by tendering explanations; but the angry Nabob heard them only to reject them, and ordered his army to march against the fort and factory of Cossimbazar. The place was in no condition to make any defence, and Surajah Dowlah having received its surrender pursued his march upon Calcutta. There the authorities, uninured to such trials as Madras, had weakly endeavoured to appease the wrath of the Nabob by desisting from further work on the fortifications: nor was it until too late that they discovered that their only safety lay in resistance. Letters were hurriedly despatched to Bombay and Madras for reinforcements, though with little hope that these would reach Calcutta in time. Appeals for aid were addressed also to the French at Chandernagore and to the Dutch at Chinsura, but were rejected by both parties, and by the French in particular with studied insolence. By the 16th of June the Nabob's army was before the city. Fort William, the principal defence, was abandoned as untenable, and the British resolved to confine their resistance to the streets. On the 18th the enemy attacked and were gallantly beaten back; but on the 19th they succeeded in carrying the principal batteries: and it was then determined, while there was yet time, to embark the women and children on the shipping in the Hooghly. The resolution was executed with a haste and disorder which soon turned to panic, and there was a general rush to escape. The Governor, who so far had shown firmness and courage, embarked with the rest, and the scanty remnant of Europeans left behind in Calcutta was compelled to capitulate. The tragedy that ensued is well known—how one hundred and forty-six Europeans were packed during the insufferable heat of a summer's night into a room not twenty feet square and with but two small windows; how the unhappy creatures strove for a time[411] to fight with order and discipline against suffocation; how the effort proved, as it could not but prove, beyond their powers, and gave place to a succession of mad struggles for life, renewed and renewed again through hour after hour till at length they were closed by the slow mercy of death; and how when the corpses were cleared away from the door in the morning thirty-three ghastly figures staggered out from among them to tell to their countrymen the tale of the Black Hole of Calcutta.
July.

The Nabob then occupied himself with the plunder of the city and in writing inflated accounts of his conquest to Delhi; which done he left a garrison of three thousand men in Calcutta and departed with his army on the 2nd of July. On his way he extorted large contributions from Chandernagore and Chinsura as the price of their immunity, and so returned to his capital of Moorshedebad.
July 20.
August.
December.

It was not until the 15th of July that the news of the fall of Cossimbazar reached Madras. Two hundred and thirty Europeans under Major Kilpatrick were promptly shipped off to the Hooghly, and arrived at Fulta, five-and-twenty miles below Calcutta, on the 2nd of August. But there was long hesitation as to the expediency of sending further reinforcements to Bengal. News was daily expected of declaration of war with France, and it was held by many of the Council that it would be wiser policy to send aid to Salabad Jung and to complete the discomfiture of Bussy while there was yet time. Fortunately wider and less selfish views prevailed, and ultimately it was decided to send every ship and man that could be spared to the Hooghly. There was still longer debate over the selection of a commander, but the choice finally fell upon Clive, though he was subordinated to Admiral Watson, who commanded the British squadron then lying at Madras. The force entrusted to him consisted of nine hundred Europeans, two hundred and fifty of which were of the Thirty-ninth regiment, and fifteen hundred Sepoys. Thus[412] at last on the 15th of October the transports sailed under convoy of Admiral Watson's four ships of the line, though, owing to divers misfortunes, it was Christmas before the bulk of the fleet arrived at Fulta. Even then two ships, the one containing two hundred European troops, the other the great part of the field-artillery, were still missing.
Dec. 29.

Even more discouraging was the condition of Kilpatrick's detachment which, being perforce encamped on unhealthy ground, had buried over one hundred men and could supply but thirty that were fit for duty. Still there was nothing to be gained by delay, so on the 27th of December the fleet sailed up the river and on the 29th anchored at Mayapore, two miles below the fort of Budge Budge. Here, contrary to Clive's opinion, Watson insisted that the troops should march against the fort overland. Five hundred Europeans and the whole of the Sepoys were accordingly disembarked, and after a most difficult march arrived at the place appointed for camp, a large hollow situated between two villages a mile and a half to north-east of Budge Budge. The men being greatly fatigued were permitted to leave their arms in the hollow and to lay themselves down wherever they thought best; and with inexcusable neglect not a sentry was posted. It so happened that Monichund, the officer left by Surajah Dowlah at Calcutta, had that very day reached Budge Budge with thirty-five hundred men, where on receiving intelligence of Clive's dispositions he laid his plans to attack him at nightfall. The British troops had not been long asleep when they were awaked by the fire of musketry and found the enemy upon them. Instantly they rushed to the hollow for their arms, the artillerymen deserting their guns and flying back with the infantry to take shelter. Clive, always cool and collected, called to his men to stand, knowing that the slightest retrograde movement would produce a panic, and detached two platoons from two different points to make a counter-attack. The British then recovered themselves, the[413] artillerymen returned to their guns, and Clive was able to form his line in order for a general advance. Before the action could become general a round shot passing close to Monichund's turban caused that officer to give a hasty signal for retreat; and so Clive's army was saved, though, indeed, it was by no fault but his own that it had been endangered. H.M.S. Kent then sailed up and silenced the guns of Budge Budge; and on the following night a drunken sailor, who chanced to blunder into the fort, made the discovery that it had been abandoned by the enemy.
Dec. 30.
1757.
Jan. 12.
Feb. 2.
Feb. 3.

On the 30th the fleet pursued its way up to Alighur, where Clive again landed with the army to march on Calcutta, while the ships engaged the enemy at Fort William. The Nabob's troops soon deserted both fort and town, and the fort was occupied, before Clive could reach it, by a detachment under Captain Eyre Coote of the Thirty-ninth Foot, who had sailed from England with two companies of his regiment in the previous November. It was then resolved to recapture Hooghly before the Nabob could advance from Moorshedabad; and accordingly three hundred and fifty of the Thirty-ninth with a due proportion of Sepoys were detached for the purpose, who took the town by storm with trifling loss and a week later returned to Calcutta. Meanwhile news arrived of the outbreak of war between France and England; and the Company fearing lest the French troops at Chandernagore, who numbered three hundred Europeans with a train of artillery, might join the Nabob, endeavoured to come to terms with him. The attempt was vain. Surajah Dowlah, irritated by the attack on Hooghly, collected an army of forty thousand men and moved steadily upon Calcutta. On the 2nd of February his advanced guard came into sight; whereupon Clive, who had taken up a position at the northern end of the town, marched out as if to attack. He decided, however, to wait for a more favourable moment; and on the following day the whole of the Nabob's army was encamped along the eastern side of[414] the town, beside the entrenchment that bore the name of the Mahratta Ditch.
Feb. 4.

Even then, though the French had not joined Surajah Dowlah, Clive was loth to encounter his army without reinforcements, and made a last effort at negotiation; but, on the return of his commissioners without success, he decided to make an attempt upon the enemy's camp on the morrow. At midnight six hundred sailors were landed from the men-of-war, and with these, six hundred and fifty European infantry, a hundred gunners with six guns, and eight hundred Sepoys Clive started before dawn for the Nabob's encampment. His advance was made in a long column of three men abreast, with the artillery in rear; and day had just broken when he struck against the enemy's advanced posts and drove them back. With the coming of the light there came also a dense fog, through which the column continued to move forward, successfully repulsing an attack of the enemy's cavalry as it went, until a causeway was reached, running at right angles to the line of march, which led to the Nabob's quarters within the Mahratta Ditch. There the head of the column changed direction to the right, as it had been bidden, but in the perplexity caused by the fog found itself under the fire of the British field-guns in the rear, and broke up to seek shelter. This movement misled the rear of the column; and very soon the entire force was in hopeless confusion. The enemy opening fire with their cannon increased the disorder; and Clive had much ado to keep his men together. Finally when the fog lifted he found himself surrounded by the enemy's cavalry; and though he succeeded in driving them off he was obliged, owing to the fatigue of his troops, to abandon the attack and return to camp. His losses amounted to one hundred Europeans and fifty Sepoys killed and wounded, against which there seemed little gain to be set. The men indeed were not a little disheartened, and complained with some bitterness of the rashness of their leader.
Feb. 9.
March.
June 4.
June 13.

But if the British were discouraged, much more so[415] was the Nabob. Blind and uncertain though the action had been, he had lost six hundred men and five hundred horses, while the idea of a British force calmly perambulating his camp was utterly distasteful and disquieting to him. Five days later he concluded a treaty whereby he agreed to restore all property taken at Calcutta and to revive all other privileges formerly granted to the British; an agreement which was expanded forty-eight hours afterwards into an offensive and defensive alliance. Clive then proposed to attack the French at Chandernagore, but this the Nabob positively forbade. In March, however, reinforcements of three companies of infantry and one of artillery arrived from Bombay, and Clive resolved to make the attack notwithstanding the Nabob's prohibition. On the 7th of March the army began its march up the river; the siege was opened a week later, and the fort, which held no very strong garrison, was soon forced to capitulate. This defiance of his wishes increased at once the Nabob's dread of the British and his anxiety to evade the obligations of the treaty. The miserable creature writhed under the masterful spirit of Clive. He made overtures to Bussy, to the Mahrattas, to any one whom he thought able to help him out of his difficulties: sometimes he threatened the English, sometimes he apologised to them; and Clive, thoroughly distrustful of this abject ally, determined to keep the whole of his army in Bengal to watch him and hold him to his obligations. Meanwhile aid suddenly reached the British from an unexpected source. The followers of the Nabob, alienated by his folly, his insults, and his caprice, began to fall away from him. Discontent ripened into disaffection, and disaffection into conspiracy. Overtures were presently made to the authorities at Calcutta to join in a plot for the overthrow of Surajah Dowlah and for the setting up of Meer Jaffier, hitherto his commander-in-chief but now foremost among the conspirators, in his place. Long negotiations followed, which have become famous for the blot which, rightly or wrongly, they have left upon[416] the memory of Clive. Finally Meer Jaffier signed the treaty which bound the English to win for him the throne of Bengal, Orissa, and Behar, and engaged himself in return to make over to them all French factories within those provinces, as well as a slight accession of territory about Calcutta, and to give compensation for the damage inflicted by Surajah Dowlah. Meer Jaffier, however, had displayed considerable irresolution during the negotiations, and the secret of the conspiracy had already begun to leak out, so that it became necessary to clench the arrangement by immediate action. Accordingly on the 13th of June, Clive, who had been throughout the leading and deciding spirit, set his force in motion from Chandernagore upon Moorshedabad, and on the following day sent a letter to the Nabob which amounted virtually to a declaration of war.

Before the letter arrived Surajah Dowlah had awaked to his peril and sent emissaries to treat with Meer Jaffier; nay, throwing off all royal state he visited his former vassal in person to entreat humbly for reconciliation. Meer Jaffier yielded; the agreement between the two men was ratified by the usual oaths on the Koran; and Surajah Dowlah, returning a defiant answer to Clive, ordered the whole of his army to assemble some twelve miles due south of Moorshedabad at the village of Plassey.
June.

Meanwhile Clive continued his advance up the Hooghly, the Europeans travelling by water in boats, the Sepoys marching along the western bank. His force consisted in all of nine hundred Europeans, two hundred half-bred Portuguese and twenty-one hundred Sepoys, with ten guns. On the 16th he halted at Paltee, on the Cossimbazar river above its junction with the Jelingeer, and sent forward Major Eyre Coote to secure the fort of Cutwa, twelve miles farther up, which commanded the passage of the river. The governor of the fort was one of the conspirators against Surajah Dowlah, but he met Coote's overtures with defiance, and on the deployment of the British force for attack set fire to the defences and retired[417] together with his garrison. Clive's force encamped in the plain of Cutwa that night; but the behaviour of the Governor was calculated to disquiet him, for Meer Jaffier's letters only reported vaguely that he himself, though reconciled to the Nabob, intended none the less to abide by the treaty with the British. Distrusting so ambiguous a declaration Clive decided not to cross the river into what was called the Island of Cossimbazar,[341] until his doubts should be resolved. On the 20th further letters arrived from Meer Jaffier tending somewhat to allay Clive's misgivings as to his good faith, but holding out little hope of assistance in the coming operations; while simultaneously there came a letter from one of Clive's agents which gave some reason for doubting Meer Jaffier's sincerity. Much perplexed Clive summoned a council of war, and put it to the twenty officers therein assembled whether it would be better to cross the river and attack the Nabob at all hazards, or to halt at Cutwa, where supplies were abundant, until the close of the rainy season, and meanwhile to invoke the assistance of the Mahrattas. He gave his own opinion first in favour of remaining at Cutwa, and was followed by thirteen of the officers, including so bold a soldier as Kilpatrick. Coote and six more, however, gave their votes for immediate action or return to Calcutta. Clive broke up the council, retired alone into an adjoining grove for an hour, and on his return issued orders to cross the river on the morrow.
June 23.

At sunrise of the 22nd the army began the passage of the river, and by four in the afternoon it stood on the eastern bank. Here another letter reached Clive from Meer Jaffier, giving information as to the intended movements of the Nabob. Clive's answer was that he should advance to Plassey at once, and on the following morning to Daoodpoor, six miles beyond it; and that if Meer Jaffier failed to meet him[418] there, he would make peace with Surajah Dowlah. The troops accordingly proceeded on their way, Europeans by water, Sepoys by land; but owing to the slow progress of the boats against the stream, it was one o'clock in the morning before they had traversed the fifteen miles to the village of Plassey. Here they were surprised to learn from the continued din of drums and cymbals that the Nabob's army was close at hand; for they had expected to meet with it farther north. Solaced by this rude music the men lay down in a mango-grove to sleep; but the officers that slept were few, and Clive was not one of them.

The grove of Plassey extended north and south for a length of about half a mile, with a width of about three hundred yards. The trees were planted in regular rows, and the whole was surrounded by a slight bank and by a ditch beyond it, choked with weeds and brambles. The grove lay at an acute angle to the river, the northern corner being fifty yards and the southern two hundred yards from the bank. A little to the northward of it and on the edge of the river stood a hunting-house of the Nabob, surrounded by a garden and wall. A mile to northward of this house the river makes a huge bend to the south-west in the form of a horse-shoe, containing a peninsula of about a mile in diameter, which shrinks at its neck to a width of some five hundred yards from stream to stream. About three hundred yards to south of this peninsula an entrenchment had been thrown up, which ran for above a furlong straight inland and parallel to the grove, and then turned off at an obtuse angle to the north-eastward for about three miles. The whole of the Nabob's army was encamped within this entrenchment and the peninsula, and the angle itself was defended by a redoubt. Some three hundred yards to the east of the redoubt, but outside the entrenchment, stood a hillock covered with trees; half a mile to southward of this hillock lay a small tank, and yet a hundred yards farther south a second and much[419] larger tank, both of them surrounded by a mound of earth.

At dawn the Nabob's forces began to stream by many outlets from the camp towards the grove, a mighty host of thirty-five thousand foot, eighteen thousand horse, and fifty pieces of artillery. The cannon were for the most part of large calibre and were carried, together with their crews and ammunition, on large stages, which were tugged by forty or fifty yoke of oxen in front and propelled by elephants from behind. Forty or fifty French adventurers under M. St. Frais, who had formerly been of the garrison of Chandernagore, took post with four light field-guns at the larger tank, which was nearest to the grove; while two heavy guns under a native officer were posted to St. Frais's right and between him and the river. In support of these advanced parties were five thousand horse and seven thousand foot under the Nabob's most faithful general, Meer Murdeen. The rest of the hostile army extended itself in a huge curve from the hillock before the entrenchments to within half a mile of the southern angle of the grove. Thus the British could not advance against the force in their front without exposing themselves to overwhelming attack on their right flank.

Clive watched these dispositions from the hunting-house, and was surprised at the numbers and confidence of the enemy. But knowing that his only chance was to assume a bold face, he drew his troops out of the grove and formed them in a single line, with their left resting on the hunting-house and their front towards the nearest tank. The European battalion occupied the centre of the line. It mustered on that day about seven hundred men, partly of the Company's troops, since numbered the Hundred and First to the Hundred and Third Regiments, and partly of the Thirty-ninth Foot, while one hundred half-bred Portuguese also were ranked within it. Three six-pounders were posted on each flank of this battalion,[420] manned by fifty men of the Royal Artillery and as many seamen; and to right and left of these guns, twenty-one hundred Sepoys were drawn up in two equal divisions. The line extended for six hundred yards beyond the grove, but the enemy at this point was too remote to fall upon the British flank before dispositions could be made to meet them. Two more field-guns and two howitzers were posted two hundred yards in advance of the left division of Sepoys, under shelter of two brick-kilns. Therewith Clive's order of battle was complete; and the handful of three thousand men stood up to meet its fifty thousand enemies. Its strength lay in the group of white faces in the centre, and the strength of that group lay in the will of one man. It was the first time that British troops had faced such odds; but it was not to be the last.

At eight o'clock the action was opened by the firing of one of the French guns at the tank. The shot fell true, killing one man and wounding another of the British grenadier-company. Then the whole of the enemy's guns, from the tanks in front along the whole vast sweep of the curving line, opened a heavy and continuous fire. The British guns replied and with effect, but the loss of one of Clive's soldiers was ill compensated for by the fall of ten of the enemy; and after losing thirty men in the first half hour of the cannonade Clive ordered the whole of his force to fall back into the grove. So the little band of scarlet faced about, passed into the trees and vanished from sight; while wild yells of elation rose up from the enemies that ringed them about, and their whole line closing in nearer upon the grove renewed the cannonade with redoubled energy. The shot, however, did little damage, for the British had been ordered to lie down; and Clive's field-guns, firing through embrasures made in the bank, wrought greater destruction, at the closer range, than before. So the duel of artillery continued until eleven o'clock, when Clive called a council of officers, and[421] decided that it would be best to maintain the position until nightfall, and at midnight to take the offensive and attack the enemy's camp.

Then by chance nature interposed, as at Cré?y, to change the whole aspect of the fight. A heavy storm of rain swept over the plain, drenching both armies to the skin. The British had tarpaulins ready to cover their ammunition; but the enemy had taken no such precaution, and consequently most of their powder was damaged. Their fire began to slacken, while that of the British was as lively as ever. Nevertheless, believing that his adversary must be in the same predicament as himself, Meer Murdeen advanced from the tank towards the grove to drive the British from it. His troops were met by a deadly fire of grape, his cavalry was dispersed and he himself mortally wounded. The news of his fall shattered the shaken nerves of the unhappy Nabob, and in abject despair he sent for Meer Jaffier and besought earnestly for his help. He, the sovereign, flung his turban at the feet of his subject and cried, "Jaffier, that turban you must defend." And Jaffier, with the readiness of submissive gesture which graces Oriental duplicity, bowed his head and laid his hands upon his breast, swearing to render his utmost service. Then returning to his fellow-conspirators he forthwith despatched a letter to Clive, advising him to push forward at once, or at all events to attack the Nabob before next dawn. The messenger was afraid to deliver the letter while the fire continued; but Surajah Dowlah, as though aware that no faithful counsellor was left to him, turned to another of his leaders for help. This man, being also of the conspirators, advised him to order the army to fall back within the entrenchment and himself to retire to the capital, leaving the issue of the fight to his Generals. The wretched Nabob acted on this counsel, and mounting a camel set forth with an escort of two thousand horse for Moorshedabad. Thus it was that at about two o'clock the enemy's fire ceased, the teams were harnessed to the guns, and the whole[422] host turning about flowed back slowly towards the entrenchments.

While all this was going forward, Clive, having resolved to make no offensive movement before night, had retired to the hunting-house to snatch a few minutes of sleep after the anxiety and fatigue of the previous day. He was roused by a message from Major Kilpatrick which brought him back speedily into the field. Despite the withdrawal of the Nabob's army St. Frais and his little party still held their position in the tank, and Kilpatrick, perceiving that the position was one from which the enemy's flank could be cannonaded during their retreat, sent word to Clive that he was about to attack it. Clive, waked abruptly from sleep, sharply reprimanded Kilpatrick for taking such a step without orders; but presently seeing that the Major was right, he took command of his two companies, and sending Kilpatrick to bring forward the rest of the army, himself led the advance against the tank.

St. Frais, aware that he could hold his ground no longer, thereupon limbered up, and retiring with perfect coolness to the redoubt at the angle of the entrenchment, made ready for action once more. Meanwhile, during the advance of the British, the southernmost division of the Nabob's army was observed to be holding aloof from the rest of the host and approaching nearer to the grove. These were the troops of Meer Jaffier, but their movement was misconstrued as a design upon the boats and baggage in the grove; and accordingly three platoons and a field-gun were detached to hold them in check. The division therefore retired slowly, but still remained significantly apart from the remainder of the host. But before this, the main body of the British had reached the tank, and planting their artillery on the mound opened fire on the enemy behind their entrenchments. Thereupon many of the Nabob's troops faced about again and moved out into the plain to meet them; the infantry opening a heavy fire, while the artillery likewise wheeled about to enter the fight[423] anew. In effect it was at this moment that the true battle began, though the Nabob's force was by this time without leader or general. Clive perceived that his only chance was to press his attack home before the resistance to him could assume any organised form. He therefore pushed forward half of his infantry and artillery to the lesser tank, and the remainder to some rising ground a furlong to the left of it, at the same time detaching a hundred and fifty men to occupy a tank close to the entrenchments and to keep up a fire of musketry upon them. From these stations the firing was renewed at closer range than before and with admirable efficiency. The enemy suffered great loss, and the teams attached to their heavy artillery were so much cut up that the guns could not be brought into action. Nevertheless St. Frais's field-pieces at the redoubt were still well and regularly served; and the enemy, though lacking leadership, were able, under favour of the ground and of their immense superiority in numbers, to carry on the fight with some spirit in their own irregular fashion. The entrenchments themselves, the hillock to eastward of the redoubt, and every hollow or coign of vantage, were crammed with matchlockmen, while the cavalry hovered round, threatening continually to charge, though always kept at a distance by the British artillery. At length it dawned upon Clive that the isolated division of the Nabob's army by the grove must be that of Meer Jaffier, and that his flank and rear were safe. He resolved therefore to cut matters short. Two parties were detached to make simultaneous attack upon the redoubt on one side and the hillock on the other, while the main body moved up between them in support. The hillock was carried without the firing of a shot, and St. Frais, perceiving that he was now wholly unsupported, abandoned his guns and retired. At five o'clock the British were in possession of the Nabob's entrenchments and camp, and the battle of Plassey was won.

From a military standpoint the action has comparatively[424] little interest, since the issue turned really on the good faith or, if the term be preferred, the ill-faith of the leading conspirators against Surajah Dowlah. The British could not advance until the enemy retired; it was a shower of rain that silenced the Nabob's artillery and began the discouragement which led to their retreat; and even then the British commander needed to be waked out of sleep to follow them. There were no such superb audacity of attack, no such bloody struggle, no such triumph of discipline over numbers, as were to be seen afterwards at Meeanee. The whole loss of the British amounted to but seven Europeans and sixteen Sepoys killed, thirteen Europeans and thirty-six Sepoys wounded. It was a small price to pay for dominion over the provinces of Bengal, Orissa, and Behar, for such and no less were the fruits of the victory. Yet it is not by the mere tale of the slaughtered and the maimed that such successes must be judged. The victory may have been easily won when the moment came for the actual clash of arms; but the main point is that the British were there to win it. The campaign of Plassey is less a study of military skill than of the iron will and unshaken nerve that could lead three thousand men against a host of unknown strength, and hold them undaunted, a single slender line, within a ring of fifty thousand enemies.
June 24.
1758.

The day's work did not end with the capture of the camp. Eyre Coote was sent forward with a detachment to keep the enemy moving, and the army encamped for the night at Daoodpoor. On the following day Meer Jaffier was saluted by Clive as Nabob of Bengal, Orissa, and Behar, after which he hastened with his troops to Moorshedabad, reaching the city on the same evening. Surajah Dowlah had fled before his arrival, but parties were sent out at once in search of him, and a few days later he was brought back and assassinated. On the 29th Clive likewise entered the city and formally installed Meer Jaffier on the throne. He then spent the succeeding months in dividing the[425] spoils of the victory, of which the troops received no small share, and in securing that British interests should be paramount in the new possessions, or, to use plain language, that the Company should be the true sovereign and Meer Jaffier its puppet. On this part of his task I shall for the present dwell no further, except to mention that the agent selected by him to reside at the Court of Meer Jaffier was a young man of five-and-twenty, named Warren Hastings. The work was not fully accomplished for many months, nor was it until the following May that Clive was able to return to Calcutta, having left the greater number of his troops at Cossimbazar to keep watch over Moorshedabad. A month before his arrival events in Southern India had taken a ply which called for the appointment of the ablest possible man as ruler of Bengal; and in June Clive, at the request of the authorities at Calcutta, assumed the office of President. Before long his hand will again be seen busy in the direction of new conquests; but it is necessary first to trace the course of events in Southern India.
CHAPTER VI
Aug. 26.

June.

It might have seemed that, with the recall of Dupleix and the dismissal of Bussy from the court of Salabad Jung, French ascendency in India was already shaken to its foundations. Such, however, was very far from the fact. On the news of Bussy's withdrawal the French governors both at Pondicherry and at Masulipatam had sent him reinforcements, which he contrived by rare skill and daring to join to his own troops, and to use so effectively that within three months of his dismissal he was re-established at Hyderabad with all his former titles, dignities, and honours. For the rest of the year he was fully occupied in the reassertion of his position at the Viceroy's court and of French influence in the Northern Sirkars, those provinces on the eastern seaboard which, as will be remembered, should by the treaty of 1755 have been restored to their native owners. The most dangerous enemy of the British, therefore, though not removed, was fully employed over his own affairs during the year 1756. No sooner was he free, however, than he was once again busy in mischief, reducing Vizagapatam and the British factories on the Godavery, until new intrigues at the Court of the Viceroy recalled him hurriedly to Hyderabad.
May.

Still farther south, at Trichinopoly, matters remained for a time comparatively quiet. Major Caillaud, who commanded the garrison of the city, had received strict orders to abstain from all hostilities; while the French, though still in occupation of Seringham, had been so much weakened by the detachment of reinforcements[427] for the help of Bussy, that until December 1756 they ceased to be formidable. In the following February, however, the dread of French intrigue at Madura and Tinnevelly had forced Caillaud to lead an expedition to both of these districts; and in April the necessity for collecting the revenues of the Nabob Mohammed Ali led the authorities at Madras to send a further expedition to Nellore on the river Pennar. This latter enterprise was unsuccessful, but has a distinct interest of its own for that it was entrusted to Lieutenant-Colonel Forde of the Thirty-ninth Foot, an officer who was soon to win for his name a place beside those of Clive and Lawrence. In this his first command, however, he failed; and the French, though they had received orders to attempt nothing before the arrival of reinforcements, could not resist the temptation to take the field while the forces of Madras were divided between two points so remote as Tinnevelly and Nellore. M. d'Auteuil therefore seized the moment to collect four thousand men, one-fourth of them Europeans, together with a train of siege-artillery, and on the 14th of May appeared with this force before Trichinopoly. The position of the British garrison was never more critical during the whole course of the war than at this moment. The best of the troops were absent with Caillaud; and Captain Joseph Smith, who was left in command, had but seven hundred Sepoys and less than two hundred English with which to hold the fortifications and to guard five hundred French prisoners who were still within the walls. D'Auteuil, thinking to capture Trichinopoly at small cost, tried to scare Smith into surrender by bombardment and by incessant petty attacks, but Smith was not easily frightened and held his ground until the 25th. Then Caillaud appeared, having hastened back with all speed from Madura, and by extreme skill and perseverance passed his force by night unnoticed through the midst of the French camp into the city. D'Auteuil thereupon retired to Pondicherry, and Trichinopoly was once more in safety.

[428]
Sept.

Meanwhile the authorities at Madras had initiated a diversion in favour of Trichinopoly, to which the French answered by reprisals in kind; but the operations were of little interest or significance. In September a French squadron arrived which disembarked one thousand regular troops; but even after the arrival of this reinforcement the enemy's movements were of small importance. Indeed their inactivity at this period was no less surprising than welcome to the British, for the Presidency of Madras, in the face of their superior numbers, had been obliged to withdraw all its troops into garrison and to stand strictly on the defensive. The secret of the French forbearance was that the Governor of Pondicherry, having received positive orders from France to await the arrival of further succours, was fain to content himself with the reduction of a few of the outlying forts of the Carnatic. Thus the campaign of 1757 closed with the advantage to the French of the capture of Chittapett, a post thirty miles south of Arcot, and to the British of the acquisition of Madura.
1758.
April.

The year 1758 opened far more seriously for the British. At daybreak on the 28th of April a fleet of twelve sail was seen standing into the roadstead of Fort St. David and was presently recognised to be French. This was the long-expected armament on which the French had built all their hopes for the expulsion of the British from India, and it had consumed nearly twelve months in its passage. It had left Brest originally in March 1757 and had been driven back by foul weather. Then two line-of-battle ships had been taken from it for service in Canadian waters, and the squadron had waited till May for their place to be supplied by two French East Indiamen fitted out as ships of war. Then the Admiral, d'Aché, for all that a British fleet was hurrying after him, loitered on the voyage to Mauritius, and on leaving that island selected a course which kept him three months on his passage to Coromandel. At last, however, the squadron[429] arrived in the roadstead of Fort St. David, having lost by that time between three and four hundred men through sickness. It carried on board Lally's regiment of infantry and fifty European artillerymen, together with Count Lally himself, who had been appointed to the supreme command of the French in India. Lally de Tollendal, or to give him his real name, O'Mullally of Tullindally (for he was of Irish extraction), was an officer who had been of the Irish brigade in the French service, and who enjoyed the credit of having suggested that movement of the artillery which had shattered the British column to defeat at Fontenoy. How far this training would avail him in India remained still to be seen.
April 29.

Lally's instructions from Versailles directed him first to besiege Fort St. David; and accordingly he himself sailed at once with three ships from that roadstead to Pondicherry to give the necessary orders, while the rest of the fleet worked down two miles to southward and dropped anchor off Cuddalore. But now the consequences of the long protraction of Admiral d'Aché's voyage began to reveal themselves. Commodore Stevens, who had left England with his squadron three months after him, had reached Madras five weeks before him, and joining with Admiral Pocock's squadron in the Hooghly had sailed with it on the 17th of April to intercept d'Aché. Pocock having missed the French squadron on his voyage south bore up to the northward, and on the morning of the 29th came in sight of it at its moorings before Cuddalore. D'Aché at once weighed anchor and stood out to sea; but owing to the heavy sailing of some of the English vessels it was not until the afternoon that Pocock could engage him, with seven ships against nine. The action that ensued though indecisive was decidedly to the disadvantage of the French. They lost six hundred men killed and wounded, while one of their ships of the line was so badly damaged that she was perforce run ashore and abandoned. The British ships lost little over a hundred[430] men, though on the other hand their rigging was so much cut up that they were unable to pursue the enemy. Pocock therefore returned to Madras to refit, while the French fleet anchored some twenty miles north of Pondicherry in the roadstead of Alumparva.
April 30.
May 1.
May 6.

On the self-same day, under the energetic impulse of Lally, a thousand Europeans and as many French Sepoys under Count d'Estaing arrived before Fort St. David from Pondicherry and exchanged shots with the garrison. On the morrow M. de Soupire joined d'Estaing with additional troops and with siege-guns, and on the 1st of May appeared Lally himself, who immediately detached a force under d'Estaing against Cuddalore. The defences of this town were slight and the garrison consisted of five companies of Sepoys only, which were encumbered by the custody of fifty French prisoners. The fort accordingly capitulated on the 4th of May, on condition that the garrison should retire to Fort St. David with its arms, and that the French prisoners should be transported to neutral ground in the south until the fate of Fort St. David should be decided. Two days later d'Aché's squadron anchored again before Fort St. David and landed the troops from on board; and on the 15th the French began the erection of their first battery for the siege.
May 28.
June 2.

Lally had now the considerable force of twenty-five hundred Europeans and about the same number of Sepoys assembled before the town; but his difficulties none the less were very great. The authorities at Pondicherry were disloyal to him; the military chest was absolutely empty; and, long though his arrival had been expected, no preparation had been made for his transport and supplies. In his impatience for action, for he dreaded the return of Pocock from Madras, he had hurried the first detachment forward to Cuddalore without any transport or supplies whatever, with the result that the troops had been obliged to plunder the suburbs for food. Now, since no other means seemed open to him, he took the still more fatal[431] step of impressing the natives for the work of carriage, without respect to custom, prejudice, or caste. For the moment, however, he was successful. The defences of Fort St. David were respectable, but the garrison was too weak in numbers to man them properly, and the quality of the troops was remarkably poor. The Sepoys numbered about sixteen hundred and the Europeans about six hundred; but of the latter less than half were effective, while two hundred and fifty out of the whole were sailors, recently landed from the frigates and most defective in discipline. Major Polier, who was in command, made the mistake of attempting to defend several outworks with an inadequate force, instead of destroying them and retiring into the main fortress. Lally was therefore able to drive the defenders from these outworks piecemeal; and his success sufficed to scare nearly the whole of the Sepoys into desertion. A ray of hope came for a moment to the garrison with the news that Pocock's squadron had arrived at Pondicherry on its way from Madras, and that the French sailors had mutinied, refusing to put to sea until their wages were paid. But Lally, always energetic, contrived to find the necessary funds, and d'Aché set sail in time to prevent any communication between the fleet and Fort St. David. Finally the fort, though not yet breached, capitulated on the 2nd of June, and Lally's first great object was gained.
June 7.

The fall of Fort St. David gave great alarm at Madras, and with reason, for the defence had been discreditably feeble. Polier had formerly proved himself in repeated actions to be a gallant soldier; but making all allowance for the defects of his garrison, his conduct was not such as was to be expected from a countryman of Caillaud and a brother officer of Clive, Lawrence, and Kilpatrick. Moreover, Lally was not a man to be content with a single success. On the very day of the surrender he detached a force under d'Estaing against Devicotah, which was perforce abandoned by the British at his approach; and there[432] was every reason to fear that his energy would now be bent towards the capture of Madras. The government therefore called in all its scattered garrisons in the Carnatic, maintaining only that of Trichinopoly, and concentrated them in Madras; thus adding two hundred and fifty Europeans and twenty-five hundred Sepoys to the strength of that city. On this same day Lally returned to Pondicherry with his army from Fort St. David and made triumphant entry. Te Deum was sung, and thanksgiving was followed by banquets and festivities—all at a time when the public treasury was empty.
June 18.

In fact, however Lally might long for it, there was no possibility for him yet to attack Madras. D'Aché, declaring that his duty summoned him to cruise off the coast of Ceylon, would not spare the fleet to aid in the enterprise against the seat of British power in the Carnatic, and actually sailed for the south on the 4th of June. For a march overland upon Madras Lally's army required equipment; and equipment meant money, which the authorities at Pondicherry averred that they could not supply. Acting therefore on the advice of a Jesuit priest, Lally resolved to march into Tanjore and to extort the cash which he needed from the Rajah. The civil authorities in alarm recalled d'Aché to protect Pondicherry, and on the day following his arrival Lally ordered out sixteen hundred European troops and a still larger number of Sepoys and started with them for the south.
June 25.

The march was one long succession of blunders and misfortunes. The harsh measures employed towards the natives on the advance to Fort St. David had alienated every man of them from taking service with the army; so the force started without transport. Gross excesses committed by the French troops in plundering the country drove the villagers to hide away all their cattle; hence neither transport nor supplies were to be obtained on the march. The soldiers were therefore of necessity turned loose to find[433] provisions as best they might, and their discipline, already seriously impaired, went rapidly from bad to worse. When they entered Devicotah they had not tasted food for twelve hours; and finding that only rice in the husk awaited them there, they set fire to the huts within the fort and went near to kindling the magazines. It was not until they reached Carical, after traversing fully a hundred miles, that the troops at last received a real meal. Fresh follies marked the progress of the march. The town of Nagore was seized and its ransom farmed out to the captain of the French hussars, a corps which had only recently arrived in India and had distinguished itself above all others by violence and pillage. Ammunition again, for even this was not carried with the army, was extorted by force from the Dutch settlements of Negapatam and Tranquebar. Finally, two pagodas of peculiar sanctity were plundered, though to no advantage, and the Brahmins were blown from the muzzles of guns. Lally's difficulties were doubtless great, and his methods were those honoured and to be honoured by his countrymen in many a campaign past and future; but it is hard to understand how a man calling himself a soldier could deliberately have led from three to four thousand men for a distance of a hundred miles from his base without making the slightest provision for its subsistence, or the least effort to maintain its discipline.
August.
Aug. 18.

Lally's sins soon found him out. On his arrival at Carical seven thousand Tanjorines under the Rajah's general, Monacjee, advanced to Trivalore to oppose him; and this force was soon afterwards swelled not only by native allies but by five hundred British Sepoys and ten English gunners, who had been lent by Caillaud from Trichinopoly. Monacjee fell back before Lally step by step to the city of Tanjore, but his cavalry never ceased to harass the French foraging-parties, to drive off the cattle which they had collected, and to intercept supplies. Some days were spent in fruitless negotiation, and on the 2nd of August Lally's batteries[434] opened fire on the city; whereupon Caillaud immediately sent to the Rajah a further reinforcement of five hundred of his best Sepoys. On the 8th disquieting intelligence reached Lally of the defeat of a French squadron by the British, and of a British occupation of Carical, the only port from which his army, already much distressed by want of stores and ammunition, could possibly be relieved. On the 10th, having with difficulty repelled a sortie of the garrison, he raised the siege and retreated towards Carical, leaving three heavy guns behind him. Instantly the Tanjorines were after him, hovering about him on every side during his march, swooping down on stragglers and cutting off supplies. The sufferings of the French troops were frightful. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Lally brought them through to Carical, to find on his arrival that the British fleet was anchored at the mouth of the river.
Aug. 28.
Sept.

For on the 2nd of August Pocock had again engaged d'Aché, though with inferior numbers, and after an action of two hours had so battered the French squadron that it had crowded all sail to escape and taken refuge under the guns of Pondicherry. Moreover, d'Aché was so much disheartened that he not only refused to meet the British again, but announced his intention of returning to Mauritius. Lally had received intimation of this resolve during his retreat to Carical, and had despatched Count d'Estaing to d'Aché to protest against it. On arriving with his army at Pondicherry from Carical he repeated his remonstrances, but in vain. D'Aché had secured thirty thousand pounds by illegal capture of certain Dutch ships in Pondicherry roads, and this he was content to leave with his colleagues; but he was resolute as to his departure from the coast, and on the 2nd of September he sailed away.
Oct. 4.

Whatever Lally's indignation against d'Aché for this desertion, it must be confessed that his operations had been little more successful than the Admiral's. He had injured both the health and the discipline of[435] his troops by the raid into Tanjore, and had failed to extract more than a trifling sum from the Rajah. The money taken by d'Aché, however, furnished him with sufficient funds to initiate preparations for a march on Madras; and since the British had seized the opportunity of his own absence to recapture some of the scattered forts in the Carnatic, he despatched three several expeditions to Trinomalee, Carangooly, and Trivatore to clear the way to Arcot, ordering them to concentrate about thirty-five miles south-east of Arcot, at Wandewash. The several columns having done their work, he joined the united force in person at Wandewash and marched with it on Arcot, which having no British garrison surrendered without resistance. There now remained but two posts in the occupation of the British between him and Madras, Conjeveram on the direct road from Arcot to Madras, and Chingleput on the river Paliar, neither of them strongly garrisoned and both therefore easy of capture. Failing, however, to appreciate the importance of these two forts, and finding that his stock of ready money was exhausted, Lally sent his troops into cantonments, and returned to Pondicherry to collect funds. Thereby he threw away his last chance of worsting the British in India.
Sept. 14.

The authorities at Madras accepted his successes in the Carnatic as the inevitable consequence of the fall of Fort St. David, and were therefore little dismayed. Nevertheless the situation had been apprehended to be serious; and early in August appeal had been made to Bengal for assistance. It was refused. Clive was not indifferent to the peril of the sister Presidency, but he had matured designs of his own for a diversion in favour of the Carnatic, which, as shall presently be seen, was brilliantly executed. Madras being thus thrown on her own resources, the authorities resolved at the end of August to recall Caillaud and all the European troops from Trichinopoly, and to leave Captain Joseph Smith in charge of that city with two thousand Sepoys only. After some inevitable delay Caillaud embarked at[436] Negapatam, and on the 25th of September arrived safely with one hundred and eighty men at Madras. A few days before, a still more welcome reinforcement had been received in the shape of Colonel Draper's regiment,[342] eight hundred and fifty strong, with Draper himself, lately an officer of the First Guards, in command. Such an accession of strength made it possible to profit by Lally's omission to capture Chingleput. That post covered a district which, being rich in supplies, would spare Madras the exhaustion of the stock which had been laid up for the expected siege; and in view of its importance the troops at Conjeveram were withdrawn to it, and the garrison gradually strengthened to a force of one hundred Europeans and twelve hundred Sepoys. Further, it was determined to hire a contingent of Mahrattas and of Tanjorines so as to harass the enemy's convoys and lines of communication during the siege.
June 13.

These preparations were well completed some time before Lally was ready to move. That General was indeed concentrating all the strength of France for his great effort against Madras, but in blind pursuance of this object he had removed the most dangerous enemy of the British from the post in which, of all others, he would have been most formidable. In plain words, he had recalled Bussy, with his army, from the court of Salabad Jung and from the administration of the Deccan. Further, he had ordered him to entrust the occupation of the Northern Sirkars to M. Conflans, an officer who was only just arrived from Europe, together with the smallest possible force that would enable him to maintain it. Bussy obeyed, but in perplexity and despair; for it was hard for him to abandon the work at which he had toiled for so long with unwearied zeal and unvarying success; and it was scarcely to be expected that he should feel cordially towards this new and impulsive commander who, whatever his merits, possessed not a[437] quarter of his own ability. Lally on his side entertained decided antipathy towards Bussy. He looked upon the French authorities in India generally as a pack of rogues, wherein he was not far wrong, but in including Bussy with the common herd he was very far from right. He therefore treated Bussy's supplications to return to Hyderabad as designed merely for the thwarting of his own enterprise, and disregarded them accordingly. The junior officers of the army, with a sounder appreciation of Bussy's powers, generously petitioned that he might rank as their superior, to which request Lally, though with no very good grace, was forced to accede. Thus, for one preliminary disadvantage, there was little prospect of hearty accord and co-operation in the French camp. Then there was the deficiency of funds to be faced, which was only overcome by subscriptions from the private purses of Lally and other officers; though Bussy, the wealthiest of all, declined, if Lally is to be believed, to contribute a farthing. Finally, there were endless troubles over the matter of transport, for which Lally had no one but himself to thank; and, what with one embarrassment and another, it was the end of November before the French troops were fairly on the march for Madras.
Dec.
Dec. 13.

Lally's force comprised in all twenty-three hundred Europeans, both horse and foot, and five thousand Sepoys. The main body moved from Arcot along the direct road by Conjeveram, and a large detachment followed the bank of the Paliar upon Chingleput. Lally in person joined this latter column on the 4th of December, but having reconnoitred Chingleput decided to leave it in his rear, and to continue his march northward to Madras. The defending force collected by the British in that city amounted to seventeen hundred and fifty Europeans and twenty-two hundred Sepoys, the whole under command of Colonel Stringer Lawrence. The Colonel drew the greater part of these troops into the field to watch the French movements, failing back slowly before them as they advanced; and on the 13th[438] Lally's entire force encamped in the plain, rather more than a mile to south-west of Fort St. George. Nearer approach to the fort was barred by two rivers, the more northerly of them, called the Triplicane, entering the sea about a thousand yards south of the glacis; the other, known as the North River, washing the actual foot of the glacis, but turning from thence abruptly southward to join the Triplicane and flow with it into the sea. Lally therefore passed round to the other side of Fort St. George, the British evacuating the outer posts before him as he advanced, and established himself in the Black Town on the north-western front of the fort, and thence along its northern side to the sea. With his right thus resting on the town and his left on the beach, he prepared to open the siege of Madras.
Dec. 14.

The Black Town was rich, and the French troops, with the indiscipline now become habitual to them, fell at once to indiscriminate plunder, with the result that in a short time a great many of them were reeling drunk. Colonel Draper thereupon proposed a sortie in force, and the suggestion was approved as tending to raise the spirit of the garrison. Accordingly, at eleven o'clock on the following morning, Draper with five hundred men and two guns marched out from the western ravelin of the fort, and holding his course westward for some distance turned north into the streets of the Black Town to attack the French right, while Major Brereton with another hundred men followed a route parallel to him, but nearer to the fort, in order to cover his retreat. By some mistake Draper's black drummers began to beat the Grenadiers' March directly they entered the town, and so gave the alarm. The French formed in a cross street to receive the attack, but in the confusion mistook the line of the British advance and awaited them at the head of the wrong street, too far to the westward. Draper therefore came up full on their left flank, poured in a volley, and bringing up his guns opened fire with grape. In a few minutes the whole of the French had taken refuge in the adjoining houses, and Draper,[439] ordering his guns to cease fire, rushed forward to secure four cannon which the French had brought with them. The French officer in charge of them offered to surrender both himself and his guns, when Draper, looking behind him, found that he was followed by but four men, the rest having, like the enemy, fled for shelter to the houses. Had the British done their duty Draper's attack would probably have put an end to the siege then and there; but as things were, the French, hearing the guns cease, quickly rallied, and streaming out of the houses in superior numbers opened a destructive fire. Draper was obliged to abandon the guns and order a retreat, the French following after him in hot pursuit. His position was critical, for he could not retire by the route of his advance, but was obliged to take a road leading to the northern face of the fort. The way was blocked by a stagnant arm of the North River with but one bridge; and it lay within the power of Lally's regiment, on the left of the French position, to reach this bridge before him and so to cut off his retreat. Bussy, however, who was in command on the French left, either through jealousy, or possibly because his men were too much intoxicated to move, took no advantage of this opportunity. Brereton came up in time to cover Draper's retreat, and the British re-entered the fort in safety. They had lost over two hundred men in killed, wounded, and prisoners in this abortive attack; and though the French had suffered as great a loss, yet they were victorious whereas the British were demoralised. Had Lally's regiment done its duty Madras would probably have fallen in a few days. So ended an episode most thoroughly discreditable to both parties.
1759.
Jan.
Feb.
Feb. 9.
Feb. 17.

Lally now began the construction of batteries over against the north and north-western fronts of the fort, from the Black Town to the sea. Meanwhile Caillaud was despatched to Tanjore to obtain troops from the Rajah; and Captain Preston, who commanded the garrison at Chingleput, never ceased to harass the French by constant petty attacks and threatening of[440] their communications. At length, on the 2nd of January, the French batteries opened fire, which they continued throughout the month, but with no very great effect. The indiscipline which Lally had permitted during his earlier operations told heavily upon the efficiency of the besieging force; and everything moved slowly and with friction. At length, on the 30th of January, a British ship arrived to hearten the garrison with ammunition and specie, both of which were sorely needed; and on the 7th of February Caillaud, after endless difficulties at Tanjore, joined Preston at Chingleput and increased his force by thirteen hundred Sepoys and two thousand Tanjorine horse. Though half of the Sepoys and the whole of the horse were worth little, yet this growth of numbers in his rear, and the knowledge that Pocock's squadron was on its way from Bombay to relieve Madras, forced Lally to take strong measures against Chingleput. Accordingly, on the 9th of February, he detached a force of nine hundred Europeans, twelve hundred Sepoys and five hundred native horse, with eight field-pieces, to attack Caillaud in earnest. The action was hot, and Caillaud only with the greatest difficulty succeeded in holding his own; but ultimately the French were repulsed, and Chingleput, that terrible thorn, remained still rankling in Lally's side. His position was now desperate. Supplies, money, ammunition, all were failing, and his troops, both native and European, were melting away by desertion. He had succeeded in battering a breach in the fort, but his officers were averse to attempt an assault. Finally, on the 16th the arrival of Pocock's squadron, at once relieving Madras and threatening Pondicherry, brought his darling project to an end. By the morning of the 17th he was in full march for Arcot, leaving fifty-two guns, all his stores and ammunition, and forty sick and wounded men behind him.

So ended the siege of Madras, the last offensive movement of the French in India. It had cost the[441] garrison thirty-three officers, five hundred and eighty Europeans and three hundred Sepoys killed, wounded and prisoners, while over four hundred more of the Sepoys had deserted. Happily Pocock's squadron brought reinforcements which made good the loss of Europeans. The casualties in the French army remain unknown, but, whether they were considerable or not, the survivors were at any rate demoralised. Lally retired with bitter rage in his heart against the authorities at Pondicherry, to whose apathy and self-seeking he attributed his failure. Doubtless if they had seconded his efforts loyally and truly, his difficulties would have been infinitely less, and his chances of success proportionately greater. But even if the hasty and masterful temper which estranged them from him be excused, nothing can palliate his two cardinal errors as a soldier; first, the omission to secure Chingleput while yet the capture was easy, and secondly the neglect to enforce discipline among all ranks of his army. Violence without strength, energy without foresight, imperiousness without ascendency—such are not the qualities that go to make a great leader in the field.
1758.

And meanwhile the counterstroke prepared by Clive had fallen once and was about to fall again with redoubled force. Affairs in Bengal in the autumn of 1758 stood on no very sure footing. Meer Jaffier was not wholly resigned to his puppet-hood; but his nobles were disaffected, his treasury was empty, and he was threatened on his northern frontier by invasion from Oude; so he was obliged reluctantly to throw himself upon the protection of Clive. So unstable a condition of affairs presented no ideal moment for weakening the small force on which British influence in those provinces might depend; but Clive, perceiving that Bussy's withdrawal from Hyderabad gave him a chance to substitute British for French ascendency at the court of the Deccan, determined at all hazards to seize it. The ruler of one district of the Northern Sirkars, the Rajah Anunderaj, had already risen in revolt against the[442] French, seized Vizagapatam, and appealed to Madras for assistance. An agent was sent to concert operations with him; and Clive, making up a force of five hundred European infantry and artillery, one hundred Lascars and two thousand Sepoys, together with six field-guns and as many battering pieces, shipped them off from Calcutta at the end of September. The command was entrusted to Lieutenant-Colonel Forde.
Dec.
Dec. 9.

The voyage was protracted by foul weather, and it was not until the 20th of October that the expedition reached Vizagapatam, from which it marched to join Anunderaj's troops at Cossimcotah. Here more delay was caused by the unwillingness of the Rajah to fulfil his engagement to pay the British troops; but at length on the 1st of December the force advanced and on the 3rd came in sight of the enemy, who were encamped forty miles north of Rajahmundry within sight of the fort of Peddapore and astride of the high road to the south. The French force, which was commanded by M. Conflans, consisted of five hundred Europeans, six thousand Sepoys and a quantity of native levies. Forde's army, on his side, had received the accession of five hundred worthless horse and a rabble of five thousand foot, chiefly armed with pikes and bows, which represented the contingent of Anunderaj. On the 6th Forde advanced along the high road to within four miles of Conflans, but each officer thought the other too strong to be attacked. Inaction continued until the 8th, when both commanders simultaneously framed independent designs for extricating themselves from the deadlock. Conflans's plan was to send six guns with a sufficient force to a height which commanded the British camp, and which Forde had omitted to occupy. Forde, for his part, had decided to make a detour of three miles to Condore, from which he could turn Conflans's position and regain the high road to Rajahmundry. At four o'clock on the morning of the 9th, accordingly, Forde marched away with his own troops only, while the Rajah's army, which though[443] warned was unready to move, remained in the camp. Forde had not proceeded far before he heard the sound of Conflans's guns in his rear and received piteous messages from the Rajah for assistance. Turning back he met the Rajah's rabble in full flight and rallied them; after which the whole force pursued its march and at eight o'clock arrived at Condore.

Conflans, flattering himself that he had defeated Forde's entire army, followed him quickly, with the idea of preventing his return to his former camp; and in his haste to advance allowed his line to fall into disorder. His European battalion was in his centre, with thirteen field-pieces distributed on its flanks, while his right and left wings were composed each of three thousand Sepoys with some unwieldly native cannon. Forde formed his line in much the same order. In his centre he posted the British, now represented by the Hundred-and-First and Hundred-and-Second Foot, with six guns on their flanks, and his Sepoys, in two divisions each of nine hundred men, on either wing; and he bade the Rajah's troops keep out of the way in the rear. He then advanced under a heavy cannonade from the enemy for some distance before Condore, and halted with his centre in rear of a field of Indian corn, which entirely concealed the Europeans, but left the Sepoys uncovered on the plain on either hand. These Sepoys, being from Bengal, were dressed in scarlet instead of in the white clothing worn by their brethren in the hotter climate of the south. The French had never seen the scarlet except on the bodies of European troops, and Forde was fully aware of the fact; for he ordered the Sepoys to furl the old-fashioned Company flags, which they still carried, as also their regimental colours, that they might be the more easily mistaken for a regular battalion of British.

In the ardour of their advance the enemy's infantry out-marched their guns and moved forward without them. Their line, from its superiority in numbers, far outflanked the British on both wings; but as it drew[444] nearer, the French battalion in the centre suddenly inclined to the right towards Forde's left wing of Sepoys. Conflans had swallowed the bait laid for him by Forde. The French battalion evidently mistook the Sepoys for Europeans, for before engaging them it dressed its ranks, and then opened fire by platoons at a distance of two hundred yards. Long though this range was for the old musket, the Sepoys seeing Europeans in front and natives menacing their flank hardly stood to deliver a feeble volley, but immediately broke, despite all the efforts of Forde, and fled away pursued by the enemy's horse. Conflans at once detached several platoons of his Europeans to join in the pursuit; when to his dismay a second line of scarlet filed steadily up from behind the Indian corn to the ground whereon the Sepoys had stood, halted and fronted as coolly as if on parade, and then with equal coolness opened fire by volleys of divisions from the left.[343] The first volley brought down half of the French grenadiers, and by the time that the fifth and last division had pulled trigger the whole of Conflans's European battalion was broken up, and flying back in disorder to its guns, half a mile in rear.

Forde, unable to curb the eagerness of his men, allowed them to pursue in succession of divisions, the left leading; but every division marched too fast to preserve order excepting the fourth, which was kept well in hand by Captain Yorke as a rallying-point in case of mishap. But no mishap was to come. The French rallied behind their cannon, but had not time to fire more than a round or two when the British fell upon them, drove them from their batteries and captured every gun. The Sepoys and native levies of the French made little or no stand after the defeat of their Europeans, and the British Sepoys of the right, together with some rallied fugitives from the left, advanced to join their victorious comrades. No sooner were they come than Forde made fresh dispositions, and marched on without losing a moment to[445] attack Conflans's camp. The remnants of the French battalion, which were posted in a hollow way before it, made some faint show of resistance; but seeing the British guns coming forward, turned to the right about and fled, with the British in hot pursuit. Many of the fugitives threw down their arms and surrendered; the rest, together with the remainder of the French army, ran away in hopeless confusion. Conflans, after sending off his military chest and four field-guns, jumped on a horse and galloped away, not stopping except to change horses till he reached Rajahmundry, forty miles distant. Of his Europeans seventy-six officers and men were killed, many wounded, and fifty-six taken. Thirty cannon, seven mortars, and the whole of his baggage and transport were captured. The British loss amounted to no more than forty Europeans and over two hundred Sepoys killed and wounded. Had the Rajah's cavalry been of the slightest value, the losses of the French would have been far greater; but Forde's promptness in following up his first success made his victory sufficiently complete. This brilliant little action marked the rise of yet another great leader among the British in India.
Dec. 10.
Dec. 11.

The British battalion being much fatigued was halted after the engagement in the French camp, but on the same evening Captain Knox with the right wing of Sepoys was sent forward to Rajahmundry. On the following day a further reinforcement of Sepoys joined him; and the French, still under the influence of panic, evacuated the fort. Knox at once entered it, and turning the guns on to the fugitives, though far out of range, set them running once more. Thus Rajahmundry, the gate and barrier of the district of Vizagapatam, passed into the hands of the British, with all its artillery, ammunition, and stores. Forde arrived there with the rest of the army on the 11th, eager to pursue his success by an advance on Masulipatam. This, the most important town and the centre of French influence in the province, was doubly important to the enemy as a[446] base from which they might at any time recover their lost territory. Forde, however, was in want of money, for which he had relied on the promises of Anunderaj. The Rajah, as is the way of his kind, now refused either to supply funds or to set his rabble in motion to accompany him. At length after six weeks of negotiation this deplorable potentate was induced, partly by favourable terms of repayment, partly by a severe fright, to fulfil his undertaking; but fifty precious days had been lost, and the French had gained time to recover themselves.
1759.
Feb.
March.

On the 28th of January Forde resumed his march, and on the 6th of February occupied Ellore, forty-eight miles north of Masulipatam. Here again he was compelled to halt by the dilatoriness of the Rajah in sending forward supplies; but he was not on that account idle. Conflans, having got the better of his panic after Condore, had replaced garrisons in Narsipore and Concal, two outlying strongholds to the north of Masulipatam, and had organised an army of observation, consisting of two hundred and fifty Europeans and two thousand Sepoys, under M. du Rocher. The dispositions of this latter force were so faulty as to leave Narsipore in isolation, and Forde lost no time in sending Captain Knox with a detachment of Sepoys to capture it. The French commander of the post was no sooner warned of Knox's approach then he evacuated Narsipore and joined the army of du Rocher. Then came more delay; and it was the 1st of March before Forde was again able to move. Two days later Concal was taken, though most gallantly defended by a French sergeant; and on the 6th Forde came in sight of Masulipatam. Conflans occupied a strong position before the town, which he might have held with advantage; but his heart failed him, and he retired within the fortifications.
March 7-25.
March 27.
April 1.

The defences of Masulipatam had been improved by the French since their entry into possession in 1751, and now formed an irregular parallelogram, open on the south side, where a broad estuary furnished sufficient[447] natural protection, and closed on the three other sides by mud walls faced with brick and strengthened by eleven bastions: there was also a wet ditch and a narrow palisaded space between ditch and parapet, but no glacis. On the landward side the fort was surrounded everywhere by a heavy swamp, the road to the town being carried on a causeway to the main gate on the north-west front. This causeway was covered for a distance of a hundred and twenty yards from the wall by a parapet ending in a ravelin, which commanded the whole length of the road. The only sound ground within reach of the fort was to be found on some sandhills to east and west of it; of which those on the eastern side, being within eight hundred yards of the wall, were selected by Forde for his position. Regular approaches for a formal siege were out of the question for so small a force, so Forde was fain to begin the erection of batteries on the sandhills, to play on the works from thence as best they could. The whole of the eighteen ensuing days were devoted to the work of construction, the siege-guns being landed from ships which had followed the movements of the army along the coast. During this short period it seemed as though fate had laid itself out to raise every possible obstacle against Forde's success. No sooner had he invested Masulipatam than du Rocher's army of observation woke to sudden activity, and moved round upon Rajahmundry and the British communications with the north. The officer in charge of that fort, being unable to make any defence, was obliged to send away to safer custody a large sum in specie which had been received from Bengal; and thus Forde's supply of ready money was cut off. Du Rocher then advanced a little to the northward of Rajahmundry, vowing vengeance against Anunderaj's country, and so terrified the pusillanimous Rajah that he declined to employ either his money or his credit for the service of the British army. Forde was left absolutely penniless. He had already borrowed all the prize-money of his[448] officers and even of his men, and knew not whither to turn for cash for the payment of his troops. The soldiers became apprehensive and discontented, and on the 19th the whole of the Europeans turned out with their arms in open mutiny, and threatened to march away. With great difficulty Forde persuaded them to return; and the men, once conciliated, went back to work with all their former ardour. But the batteries had not been completed two days when news arrived that the Viceroy, Salabad Jung, was arrived at the river Kistnah, not more than forty miles away, with an army of forty thousand men, to expel the intruders who had dared to invade the provinces under his suzerainty. Messengers arrived from him requiring Anunderaj to quit the British immediately and to repair to his standard; and the terrified Rajah actually started to return to his own country. He was only with difficulty recalled by Forde's representations that his one chance of retreat was to remain with the British. In the faint hope of gaining time Forde proposed to open negotiations with Salabad Jung, who to his great relief consented to receive his emissary and undertook for the present to advance no farther. Here, therefore, was a respite, though not such as could be counted on for long endurance.
April 6.

Meanwhile, ever since the 25th of March, Forde's batteries had maintained a hot fire; and, though the damage done to the works by day had been regularly repaired by the besieged at night, three of the bastions had been sufficiently ruined to give foothold to a storming party. But now the weather changed, and on the 5th of April the southern monsoon broke with a flood of rain that soaked the morass around the fort to its deepest. On the morrow the storm ceased, but the day was ushered in by the gloomiest of tidings for Forde. Salabad Jung was advancing from the Kistnah, and du Rocher was on the point of junction with him. Finally, on the same evening, the artillery-officers reported that but two days ammunition was left[449] for the batteries. Here, therefore, was the climax. Before Forde was a fortress with a garrison of greater strength than his own army; behind him was a force which outnumbered his own by more than ten to one; his communications were cut, and his ammunition and his funds were exhausted. It was open to him to embark and retire ignominiously by sea, or to stake all on a single desperate venture. He chose the bolder course and resolved to storm the fort.

During the progress of the siege it had been remarked that at the south-western corner of the fort, adjoining the sound, no ditch had been constructed; the ground without being a mere waste of mire, which might well be accounted a more difficult obstacle than any ditch. Natives, however, had more than once been seen traversing this quagmire; and Captains Yorke and Knox on making trial of it found it to be stiff and heavy indeed, but not more than knee-deep. This, therefore, was a point at which at least a false attack could be made, and Forde resolved to take advantage of it. Another point at which a feint might be directed was the ravelin outside the main gate. The true attack must of necessity be delivered against the front which had been damaged by the batteries; and the north-east bastion, known as the Chameleon, was the place selected. The necessary dispositions were quickly settled. The Rajah's troops were some of them to guard the camp, and the rest to make a demonstration against the ravelin. Captain Knox with seven hundred Sepoys was to conduct the feint attack upon the south-west angle, and the remainder of the troops were detailed for the true assault on the Chameleon bastion. The Europeans, who numbered but three hundred and forty-six, including the gunners, and thirty sailors borrowed from the ships, were told off into two divisions, the first under Captain Callendar, the second under Captain Yorke; while of the seven hundred remaining Sepoys part formed a third division under Captain Macleane, and the remainder a reserve under Forde himself. It was[450] ordered that both the true and false attacks should begin simultaneously at midnight, when the tide would be at ebb and no more than three feet of water in the ditch; and the last stroke of the gongs within the fort was to be the signal for the storming parties to advance.
April 7.
April 8.

All through daylight of the 7th of April the British batteries maintained a fierce fire, playing impartially upon the three bastions of the eastern front. At length night came to silence the guns, and at ten o'clock the troops fell in for the assault. Knox having the longer distance to traverse was the first to move off, and his column presently disappeared into the darkness. The minutes flew by, and the time came for the advance of the European troops; but Captain Callendar, the leader of the first division, was not to be found. There was anxious enquiry and search, but the missing officer could not be discovered; and at length, after a precious half-hour had been lost, Captain Fischer took his place and the column marched off without him. The men were still struggling through the morass towards the Chameleon bastion when the sound of firing told them that Knox, punctual to a second, had opened his false attack. Quickening their speed as best they might, they plunged heavily on, knee-deep in mire over the swamp, waist-deep in mud and water through the ditch; when, just as Fischer's column reached the palisade, a sharp fire from the breach and from the bastions on either hand showed that they were discovered. All the more eagerly Fischer's men hewed and hacked at the palisade; while Yorke's division engaged the St. John's bastion to his left and Macleane the Small-gate bastion to his right. The men fell fast, but presently the palisades were cleared away, and the first division swarming up the breach swept the French out of the Chameleon bastion. Fischer halted for the arrival of Yorke with the second division, and then the two officers parted, Fischer to the right to clear the northern, and Yorke to the left to clear the eastern face of the fort.

[451]

Finding a field-gun with its ammunition in the Chameleon bastion, Yorke at once trained it along the rampart to southward, and was preparing to follow in the same direction himself, when he observed a party of French Sepoys advancing between the rampart and the buildings of the town to reinforce the Chameleon bastion. Instantly he ran down, and seizing the officer at their head bade them lay down their arms and surrender. Startled beyond all thought of resistance they obeyed, and were at once sent back to the captured bastion; while Yorke, taking the way by which they had advanced, pressed on against the St. John's bastion. The French guard, which had sought shelter within the angles from the raking fire of Yorke's field-gun, fired upon him and struck down not a few of his men, but surrendered immediately afterwards. They too were sent back to the Chameleon bastion, where the Sepoys took charge of them; and Yorke pursued his way to the next bastion to southward, named the Dutch bastion, where the same scene was repeated and a fresh consignment of prisoners was sent back to the custody of the Sepoys. The Fran?ois bastion, the most southerly of all, alone remained untaken, and Yorke was eager to prosecute his success; but now the men hung back. The division had been not a little thinned by previous losses and by the detachment of guards for prisoners and for the captured bastions; and the handful of men that remained with the Captain began to wonder where such work was going to end. By threats and exhortations Yorke after a time induced them to follow him; but while passing an expense-magazine a little way beyond the Dutch bastion, one of the men caught sight of powder-barrels within it and cried out "A mine, a mine." Immediately every man rushed back in panic to the Chameleon bastion; and Yorke was left alone, with his black drummers by his side vainly beating the Grenadiers' March. Fortunately the guards in the captured bastions stood fast; and Yorke returning to the fugitives, who were on the point of leaving the fort,[452] stopped the panic by threatening death to the first man who attempted to run. Rallying thirty-six men he went back to complete his work; but the delay had given the French in the Fran?ois bastion time to train a gun upon the line of his advance. Waiting until his party was come within close range they fired, killed sixteen of them outright and wounded several more, including Yorke himself, who was brought to the ground with a ball in each thigh. The survivors picked him up and carried him off; but with his fall the attack in that quarter came, for the time, to an end.

Fischer meanwhile had been even more successful on the northern front. He cleared the two first bastions without difficulty, and on reaching the third, by the causeway, seized the gate and cut off the troops in the ravelin from the fort. Captain Callendar, the missing officer, suddenly appeared, no man knew from whence, in the middle of the affair, but was instantly shot dead; and Fischer was still pushing on, when he received orders from Forde to halt. Conflans throughout the attack had remained by the south front of the fort, quite at his wits' end, and adding to the general confusion by a succession of contradictory orders. Knox's attack distracted him on one side, the Rajah's troops made an unearthly din by the ravelin, and the true assault on the eastern front fairly broke his spirits down. At the very moment when Yorke's men were returning discomfited from the Fran?ois bastion, he sent a messenger to Forde, offering to surrender on honourable terms. Forde was far too shrewd to betray his own weakness. He replied that he could hear of nothing but surrender at discretion; and Conflans, concluding his position to be hopeless, acceded. Five hundred Europeans and two thousand French Sepoys laid down their arms, and the British were masters of Masulipatam.

So ended this daring and marvellous adventure, with the loss to the British of but eighty-six Europeans and two hundred Sepoys killed and wounded. Salabad Jung was within fifteen miles, and du Rocher even[453] nearer at the time of the assault; but the victory was sufficient to paralyse them also. The Viceroy quickly consented to open negotiations, and though he haggled, after the manner of his race, for a whole month, finally concluded a treaty whereby he granted to the British eighty miles of the coast, and engaged himself not only never to entertain French troops again, but even to compel such as remained to evacuate the Sirkars. Thus not only was the district secured, but French influence was displaced in favour of British at the court of Hyderabad. Such were the prizes gained by the will, resource, and resolution of one man, who had strength to rend the toils that fate had woven about him just when they seemed to have closed upon him for ever.
CHAPTER VII
March.

Lally's failure before Madras could not fail to raise British reputation and to depress that of the French; and sundry petty chieftains who had long been wavering in the Carnatic, now threw in their lot definitely with the victors. Nevertheless the British success could be but negative unless the territory adjacent to Madras were at once recovered and protected; and to this task the authorities wisely addressed themselves without delay. The reinforcements which had already arrived, together with two companies lately returned from Bengal, left the British with a force of eleven hundred Europeans, fifteen hundred Sepoys, and three thousand native irregulars fit to take the field; but, owing to the difficulty of collecting transport and supplies, the troops were not in a position to advance until the 6th of March. Meanwhile Lally had moved his army eastward from Arcot to Conjeveram, whence he returned himself to Pondicherry, leaving M. de Soupire in command with orders not to risk a general action. On the British side also the command had changed hands owing to the failing health both of Draper and of Lawrence, and had passed to Major Brereton of Draper's regiment.
April 6.
April 15.

For fully three weeks the two hostile armies remained in sight of each other, de Soupire waiting to be attacked, and Brereton rightly declining to engage him except on the open plain. The capture of Conjeveram was important to the British, since the fort would cover such districts as they had already regained, and so liberate their army for service farther afield. At[455] length Brereton determined to dislodge de Soupire, if possible, by threatening his communications south of the Paliar; so marching upon Wandewash, the most important French station between Madras and Pondicherry, he broke ground before it as if for a formal siege. De Soupire made no attempt to follow him, but finding himself pressed for money and supplies left a small garrison in Conjeveram and retired to Arcot, well content to be able to reach it without hazard of an action. Brereton thereupon made a forced march upon Conjeveram, and before de Soupire was aware that he had moved from Wandewash, had taken the fort, with little difficulty, by storm.
June.

Lally, who at the news of the siege of Wandewash had advanced northward from Pondicherry, halted on hearing of the capture of Conjeveram, and finally took up a position seven miles to westward of the fortress. There Major Monson, who had taken the command from Brereton, thrice offered him battle; but Lally declined, and after a few weeks withdrew from the field, distributing his troops into cantonments at Arcot, Covrepauk, Carangooly, and Chittapett. In truth his army was rapidly going from bad to worse. A recent exchange of prisoners had restored to him five hundred French soldiers, who, having lived an idle and by no means uncomfortable life in custody of the British for five years, were very far from eager to resume hard work in the field. Their discontent soon extended itself to their comrades, and spread not the less rapidly since all alike were irregularly paid. Indeed, the garrisons both at Arcot and Covrepauk offered to betray these stations to the British for money, though, their hearts failing them at the last moment, they renounced their bargain. But events had begun to turn steadily against the French, while the British gathered strength on every side. At the end of June two hundred recruits arrived from England, and brought news that Colonel Eyre Coote was likewise on his way to Madras with his own battalion, one thousand strong, which had been[456] lately raised in England. Brereton, who was once again in command, seized the opportunity afforded by his own strength and by French disaffection to make a dash upon Covrepauk, which surrendered almost without resistance. The flood-tide of British power was crawling slowly but surely to the south.
July.

Meanwhile disquieting symptoms had been observed in another quarter, from which British influence had for some years suffered little trouble. There was intelligence of a Dutch armament fitting out at Batavia for the Bay of Bengal, which, although nominally designed merely to reinforce the Dutch garrisons, could not, from the known jealousy of the Dutch over the British successes in Bengal, be credited with any very friendly intentions. Admiral Pocock, who was cruising off Pondicherry in daily expectation of a French squadron, had already picked up transports with five companies of Coote's regiment, and had received permission to keep these troops to man his ships pending the engagement, for which he waited, with Admiral d'Aché. A sight of the Dutch fleet at Negapatam, however, convinced him that the troops would be needed ashore; and he accordingly sent them to Madras, recommending that at least a part of them should be forwarded to Bengal. It will presently be seen that Pocock acted with admirable judgment and foresight.
August.
Sept. 10.
Sept. 26.
Sept. 29.

This complication added not a little to the anxiety of the British, though some relief was afforded by news of Lally's continued troubles with his troops. At the beginning of August his own regiment, which was in garrison at Chittapett, broke into open mutiny and marched out of the fort with the avowed intention of joining the British. Their officers followed them, and by promises to discharge the arrears of their pay, now several months overdue, succeeded in conciliating most of them; but sixty men persisted in their resolution and deliberately carried it out. The authorities at Madras seized the moment to order an advance on Wandewash; but before the troops could march there came fresh[457] important intelligence. D'Aché had arrived off the coast and had for the third time been engaged by Pocock; and the action though severe had ended indecisively in the retirement of the French squadron to Pondicherry. It was therefore uncertain what reinforcements might have been landed for the defence of Wandewash; besides which, as a further ground for caution, there were uncomfortable signs of renewed French intrigue at Hyderabad. But Brereton, knowing that Eyre Coote must shortly arrive to take the command from him, was burning to advance; and the authorities had not the heart to bid him halt. Accordingly, after some delay owing to heavy rain, Brereton marched from Conjeveram, with fifteen hundred European and twenty-five hundred native infantry, besides cavalry and artillery, and, misled by false information as to the strength of the French garrison, attacked Wandewash with a thousand British only. Though successful at the outset he was eventually repulsed with a loss of two hundred men. The reverse was unfortunate at so critical a time, but luckily was insufficient to shake the confidence of the British troops in themselves.
Nov.

In any case, moreover, Lally was in no position to take advantage of his success. D'Aché, though personally a brave man, was so much chagrined by his third failure that he sailed, in defiance of all protests, to Mauritius, leaving Pocock master of the sea. His desertion was a hard blow to Lally, for the indiscipline of his troops was ever increasing. In despair of help from other quarters he reverted to that from which he had at first so hastily withdrawn, the court of Hyderabad; though affairs there had altered greatly since the departure of Bussy. Salabad Jung had been won to the British cause by the storm of Masulipatam; his brother Nizam Ali had always been Bussy's worst enemy; but there was still a third brother, Basalut Jung, who hated his brethren and had shown a friendly disposition towards Pondicherry. Him Bussy now[458] approached with the offer of the Nabobship of the Carnatic, if he would join the French with a body of native troops. The terms were agreed upon; Basalut Jung began to advance along the Pennar; and Bussy was on his way to him with five hundred Europeans, when he was recalled by the outbreak of a dangerous mutiny of the garrison which he had left behind him at Wandewash. Turning back, he succeeded by payment of six months' arrears in reducing the men to obedience; but the incident was fatal to his negotiations with Basalut Jung; and after a few days of fruitless haggling he returned to Arcot, with no accession to his force but a few irregular levies of horse and foot.
Nov. 24.
Nov. 29.
Dec. 12.

Foiled in this direction Lally in despair determined to make a diversion in the south, and sent a force of nine hundred Europeans and a thousand Sepoys under M. Crillon to alarm Trichinopoly, while he himself marched northward to join Bussy at Arcot. Crillon duly succeeded in capturing the island of Seringham, and left a battalion of French there to keep the city in awe; but Lally's rash division of his force between points so distant as Arcot and Trichinopoly gave the British an opportunity which they did not fail to grasp. Coote with the remainder of his regiment, in all six hundred men, had arrived at Madras, and though compelled to send two hundred men forthwith to Bengal, had been able to make good the deficiency with about the same number of exchanged prisoners who had arrived from Pondicherry. On the 21st of November Coote arrived at the British camp at Conjeveram, where he was joined two days later by the newly arrived troops. He had already made up his mind to attack Wandewash; but to conceal his intentions he despatched one detachment under Brereton to seize the fort of Trivatore on the road, sent another detachment with the heavy artillery to Chingleput, and himself marched upon Arcot. Brereton captured Trivatore without difficulty, and advancing forthwith upon Wandewash drove in the French outposts and[459] began to construct batteries. Coote thereupon joined him instantly by forced marches; on the 29th his batteries opened, and on the same day Wandewash surrendered. Without delay Coote pushed on to Carangooly, five-and-thirty miles to eastward, and took that also after a few days of siege. Then calling in all detachments to him, he on the 12th of December reunited his entire force at Wandewash.
Dec. 19.

Now Lally perceived the evil consequences of his diversion in the south. The capture of Wandewash and of the other posts retrieved at once any reputation that the British might have lost by Crillon's success at Seringham, while the possession of these forts was a solid gain to his enemy. He therefore hastily recalled Crillon, bidding him leave three hundred men only in Seringham and join him with the rest of his troops at Arcot. Meanwhile Bussy's irregular horse from that city spread desolation on the north of the Paliar to within twenty miles of Madras itself. The terror of these marauding bands drove all the natives from the open country to take refuge in the hills; and Coote, who had moved up to within a few miles of Arcot, as if to intercept Crillon on his march, was compelled by lack of supplies and inclement weather to cross the Paliar and distribute his troops into cantonments. So ended for the present the disjointed and indecisive operations in the Carnatic for the year 1759.
Oct.
Nov.

During these latter months any hope that Lally might have built on diversion of the British forces to Bengal by the menaces of the Dutch, had already been dashed to the ground. The Dutch armament, so much suspected of Pocock, had sailed to the mouth of the Hooghly in October; and Meer Jaffier, weary of his subjection and dependence, had gone to Calcutta to concert with them the overthrow of the British in Bengal. The Dutch force consisted of seven hundred Europeans and eight hundred trained Malays on board the fleet; while at Chinsura, their settlement on the Hooghly, there were one hundred and fifty Dutch[460] soldiers, as well as native levies, which by Meer Jaffier's connivance and help were daily increasing in number. To meet this danger Clive could raise in and about Calcutta but three hundred and thirty men of the Hundred-and-First, and twelve hundred Sepoys; but he was a man accustomed to face heavy odds. Summoning to him every man that could be spared from outlying stations, he called out the militia for the defence of Calcutta, organised two tiny bodies of volunteers, both horse and foot, ordered the British ships to sail up the Hooghly, and strengthened the batteries that commanded the river. At the beginning of November Forde and Knox arrived fresh from the triumph of Masulipatam, in time to furnish Clive with two admirable commanders. To Knox was assigned the command of the batteries, and to Forde that of the troops in the field.
Nov. 24.

In the second week of November the Dutch addressed a long letter of remonstrance and complaint to Calcutta, and shortly afterwards followed it up by seizing some small British vessels and burning the British agent's house at Fulta; after which they weighed anchor and stood up the river. Clive thereupon ordered Forde to move forward by Serampore upon Chinsura. Forde started accordingly with one hundred of the Hundred-and-First, four hundred Sepoys and four guns, and on the 23rd encamped in the suburbs of Chandernagore, three miles distant from Chinsura. The Dutch on the same evening sent one hundred and twenty Europeans and three hundred Sepoys from Chinsura to take up a position in the ruins of Chandernagore and bar his further advance. These Forde attacked and utterly defeated on the following morning, capturing their guns and pursuing them to the walls of Chinsura. Thus one part of the Dutch force was disposed of, which, had it waited for the co-operation of the troops on the river might have placed Forde between two fires.

On the evening of the fight Knox joined the[461] Colonel and raised his force to three hundred and twenty European infantry, fifty volunteer cavalry, eight hundred Sepoys, and one hundred native cavalry; with which Forde faced about to deal with the rest of the enemy. The Dutch squadron, for want of pilots, had moved but slowly up the river, but on the 21st it anchored just below the British batteries, and landed the troops on the western bank, with orders to march to Chinsura; which done, the ships dropped down the stream again to Melancholy Point. There on the following day Clive's armed East Indiamen under Captain Wilson attacked them, three ships against seven, and captured six of them on the spot, leaving only one to escape and to fall an easy prey to two British men-of-war that had arrived at the mouth of the river. This splendid little action cut off the Dutch troops from their base and ensured that any reverse must be fatal to them. Nor was that reverse long in coming. On the same evening Forde learned that the Dutch army would come up with him on the morrow, and wrote to Clive for instructions. Clive was playing whist when the letter reached him. He put down his cards, and without leaving the table wrote on the back of the letter, "Dear Forde, fight them immediately. I will send you the Order in Council to-morrow." Then taking up his hand again, he went on with the game.
Nov. 25.

Accordingly early in the morning of the 25th Forde took up a position midway between Chandernagore and Chinsura and astride of the road that connects them. His right rested on the village of Badara and his left on a mango-grove, both of which he occupied; while his front was covered by a broad, deep ravine behind which he posted his four guns. About ten o'clock the Dutch forces were seen approaching over the plain; and as soon as they were within range Forde's artillery opened fire. The Dutch advanced none the less with great firmness, until to their dismay they found themselves stopped by the ravine, of which they knew nothing. The leading files perforce halted abruptly, while the[462] rear, not understanding the cause, pushed on and threw the whole body into confusion. Forde continued to ply them with artillery and musketry until they wavered, and then seized the moment to hurl his handful of European cavalry at them. This threw them into still greater disorder; and the native horse charging in their turn completed the rout. The entire force of the enemy, excepting sixty Dutchmen and two hundred and fifty Malays, was killed, wounded, or taken; and the Dutch settlements, humbled to the dust, sued not only for mercy but for protection. Clive used his opportunity so to shackle them that they could never again threaten British supremacy in Bengal; and the Dutch in Europe, being in alliance with England, disavowed the action of their fleet and paid compensation for the damage that it had done. Thus, far from diverting British troops from the principal conflict, the Dutch expedition served only to strengthen the foundations of British ascendency by the ruin of a still older rival than the French. In such fashion could Clive and Forde wrench profit out of adversity.
1760.
Jan. 8.
Jan. 13.
Jan. 15.
Jan. 21.

The death-blow to French rivalry also was now near at hand. On the 8th of January Crillon's force reached Arcot; and in the evening of the 11th, after three days of man?uvring, Lally divided his army into two columns, and leaving Bussy with one of them at Trivatore, made a forced march with the other upon Conjeveram. So effectively had his Mahratta cavalry screened his movements that Coote knew nothing of them, until he received a message from the officer commanding at Conjeveram itself. He at once made a forced march to save the fort, but on arriving found that Lally had been content with the plunder of the town and had marched to rejoin Bussy at Trivatore. Taking five hundred Europeans, a thousand Sepoys, and six hundred and fifty French and Mahratta horse, Lally left Trivatore on the 14th and marched on Wandewash, which had been his true object from the first. Coote received intelligence of his departure on the same[463] evening, and on the following day marched also by the direct road to the same point. Lally meanwhile, anxious to recapture the post before Coote's arrival, had in the morning of the 15th attacked a small British detachment in the southern suburb and driven it with some difficulty into the fort; after which he began to erect batteries against the walls. On the 17th he learned from Bussy that Coote was advancing against him; by which time the British had actually arrived at Outramalore, about fifteen miles to north-east of Wandewash. Here Coote halted, being secure of his communications with Chingleput and Madras, and resolved not to risk an action until the French were ready to assault the fort. The French works meanwhile progressed but slowly; and it was not until the 20th that the batteries opened fire, Bussy's column having meanwhile joined Lally from Trivatore. On the next day Coote advanced to within seven miles of Wandewash, and on the 22nd, having directed that the rest of the army should immediately follow him, he went forward at sunrise with his cavalry to reconnoitre.
Jan. 22.

About seven o'clock Coote's advanced guard struck against an advanced party of Lally's native horse; and presently three thousand Mahratta cavalry came swarming over the plain in his front. Coote brought up a couple of guns masked behind his own cavalry, and wheeling his squadrons outwards, right and left, when within close range, opened a fire which sent the Mahrattas flying back with heavy loss. Then halting the main body of his army he went forward to examine the French camp. He found it marked out in two lines about two miles to the east of the fort and facing eastward, the left flank of each line being covered by a large tank. In advance of their left front were two smaller tanks, of which the foremost had been turned into an entrenchment and armed with cannon, so as to enfilade the whole front of the camp and command the plain beyond it. Leaving the advanced guard halted where it stood, he returned and brought up his main army, formed in[464] two lines, in order of battle before the camp. Finding after a short halt that no notice was taken by Lally, he caused the whole force to file to its right across the French front towards the foot of a mountain, which stood about two miles to northward of the fort. As soon as the leading files had reached some stony ground, impassable by cavalry, close to the mountain's base, Coote again halted and fronted, at a distance of about a mile and a half from the enemy. Seeing that this movement also passed unnoticed, he ordered the army to file along the skirt of the mountain round the French left flank. By thus coasting the hill until he came opposite to the fort he would be able to form his line with his left resting on the mountain and his right covered by the fire of the fort, thus at once securing communications with the garrison and threatening the French flank and rear.

Before this masterly man?uvre could be fully completed, Lally came hurriedly out of his camp; and presently the whole of the French army was observed to be in motion. Coote thereupon desisted from his movement round their left flank, halted his filing columns, and fronting them to the left, formed his line of battle obliquely to the enemy. Lally was thus compelled to cancel his preconcerted dispositions, to change front from east to north-east, and, while still resting his left on the entrenched tank, to move forward his right in order to bring his line parallel to that of the British.[344] None the less this tank remained the pivot[465] of his position. His army was formed in a single line in the following order. On the extreme right were three hundred European cavalry; next to them stood Regiment Lorraine, four hundred strong; next to Lorraine the European Regiment of India formed the centre; and to the left of the centre stood Regiment Lally with its left flank resting on the entrenched tank, the entrenchment itself being manned by marines, with four guns. Three guns were also posted between the tank and Lally's regiment, and as many more in the intervals between the different corps of the line, making sixteen guns in all. The smaller tank, which by the change of disposition was now in rear of the entrenched tank, was held by four hundred native infantry; while nine hundred Sepoys were ranged on a ridge before the camp. The total force drawn out for the action amounted to twenty-two hundred and fifty Europeans,[345] cavalry and infantry, and thirteen hundred Sepoys; some five hundred men more of both nationalities being left in the batteries before Wandewash. The Mahratta horse, having tasted the fire of the British artillery earlier in the day, had no relish for further share in the action.

Coote's army was drawn up in three lines. The first line was composed of four European battalions, with a battalion of nine hundred Sepoys on either flank. Of the Europeans, Draper's regiment held the right; the Hundred-and-Second, in two weak battalions, the centre; and Coote's the left. Three field-guns were[466] posted in the intervals on each flank of Draper's and of Coote's, and two more with an escort of two companies of Sepoys were detached a little in advance of the left of the first line. The second line was made up of three hundred European grenadiers in the centre, with a fieldpiece and a body of two hundred Sepoys on each flank. The third line consisted entirely of cavalry, eighty Europeans forming the centre, with natives on either flank. The total force in the field was nineteen hundred and eighty Europeans, twenty-one hundred Sepoys, and twelve hundred and fifty native horse, with sixteen guns.

In this order the British advanced; but before they arrived within cannon-shot Lally caught up his squadron of European hussars, and making a wide sweep over the plain came down with it upon the cavalry in the British third line. Coote's native cavalry at once broke and fled away, and the left divisions of Sepoys, while changing front to meet the attack, showed signs of wavering; but the weak squadron of British horse stood firm, and the two detached guns of the left front under Captain Barker coming into action at short range in the nick of time, brought down ten or fifteen men and horses at their first fire. The French horse thereupon broke despite all Lally's efforts to stop them, and would not be rallied until they had galloped far to the rear. During this attack the British halted, while the French batteries fired wildly and unsteadily with grape, though their enemy was not yet within range of round shot. Coote coolly continued his advance until his guns could play effectively, and then opened a most destructive fire. Lally finding his men impatient under the punishment placed himself at their head, and gave the word to move forward. Coote thereupon halted the whole of his force excepting the Europeans of the first and second lines, and advanced to meet him with these alone. Like Forde at Condore he staked everything on the defeat of the French regular troops.

Coote, true to the English rule, intended to reserve[467] his volley for close range; but some few Africans who were mingled in the ranks of the British opened fire without command, and this disorder was only with difficulty prevented from spreading to the whole line. Coote, galloping from right to left of the line, actually received two or three bullets through his clothes. Order being restored, he took up his station on the left by his own regiment; and at about one o'clock the fire of musketry became general. Coote's regiment had fired but two rounds, when Lally formed Regiment Lorraine on the French right into a column of twelve men abreast, and ordered it to charge with the bayonet. Anticipating Wellington's tactics of a later day Coote met column with line, reserved his fire until the French were within fifty yards, and then poured in a volley which tore the front and flanks of Lorraine to tatters. None the less the gallant Frenchmen, unchecked by their losses, pressed on the faster; and in another minute the two regiments had closed and were fighting furiously hand to hand. The column broke by sheer weight through the small fragment of line opposed to it; but the remainder of Coote's closed instantly upon its flanks; and after a short struggle Lorraine, already much shattered by the volley, broke up in confusion and ran back to the camp, with the British in hot pursuit, carrying dismay into the ranks of the Sepoys. Coote paused only to order his regiment to be reformed, and galloped away to see how things fared with Draper on the right.

As he passed, a flash and a dense cloud of smoke shot up from the entrenched tank, followed by a roar which rose loud above the din of battle. A lucky shot from the British guns had blown up a tumbril of French ammunition. The commander of the entrenchment was killed, eighty of his men were slain or disabled around him, and the rest of his force, abandoning the guns, fled in panic to the French right, followed by the Sepoys from the smaller tank in rear. Coote instantly ordered Draper's regiment to advance and occupy the entrenchment; but Bussy, who[468] commanded on the French left, brought forward Lally's regiment to threaten their flank as they advanced, and forced them to fetch a compass and file away to their right. Bussy thus gained time to rally some of the fugitives and to re-occupy the tank with a couple of platoons; but Draper's men, with Major Brereton at their head, moved too fast to allow him to complete his dispositions, and coming down impetuously upon the north face of the tank swept the French headlong out of it. Brereton fell mortally wounded in the attack, but bade his men leave him and push on. The leading files hurried round to the southern face of the tank, opened fire on the gunners posted between Lally's regiment and the parapet, and drove them from their guns; while the rest hurriedly formed up on their left to resist any attempt upon the eastern face. Bussy did all that a gallant man could do, but the odds were too great for him; and he could hope for no help, since all the rest of the line was hotly engaged. He wheeled Lally's regiment round at right angles to the line to meet the fire on its flank, and detached a couple of platoons from his left against the western face of the tank; but his men shrank from the British fire and would not come to close quarters. Then two of Draper's guns came up, and opening on the right flank of Lally's regiment raked it through and through. As a last chance Bussy placed himself at the head of his wavering troops and led them straight at the southern face of the tank; but his horse was shot under him, and on looking round he saw but twenty men following him, the rest having no heart for the conflict. Two platoons of Draper's at once doubled round to cut them off, while Major Monson came up with part of the grenadiers of the second line to support Draper's attack. Bussy and his devoted little band were surrounded and made prisoners, and the whole of Lally's regiment was captured or dispersed.

The battalions of the centre on both sides had throughout kept up a continual fire at long range;[469] but when the French Regiment of India perceived both its flanks to be uncovered, it faced about and retreated, hastily indeed but in good order. Lally had some time before attempted to bring forward the Sepoys from the ridge, but they had refused to move; and the Mahrattas took themselves off when they saw how the day was going. Nothing was left to Lally but his few squadrons of French horse, which came forward nobly to save his army. A few men of Regiment Lorraine, heartened by their appearance, harnessed the teams to three field-guns and joined with the cavalry in covering the retreat. The British squadron was too weak to attack, and Coote's native horse refused to face the French cavalry; so Lally was able to set fire to his camp, collect the men from his batteries, and to retire in better order than his officers had dared to hope.

None the less the victory was sufficiently complete. Two hundred of the Frenchmen lay dead on the field, as many more were wounded, and one hundred and sixty were taken, so that Lally's loss amounted to close on six hundred Europeans. Besides this, twenty-four guns were taken, together with all the tents, stores, and baggage that remained unburnt. Against this the British had lost but sixty-three killed and one hundred and twenty-four wounded, Draper's being the regiment that suffered most severely. The native troops had few casualties, for practically none but Europeans were engaged. The speedy defeat of the French was doubtless due to the explosion which gave away the key of their position; and there can be no question but that this fortunate accident immensely simplified Coote's task for him. On the other hand, it may be asked why, seeing that this tank was the key of the position, Lally should have garrisoned it with sailors and marines, the worst instead of the best of his troops. It is improbable that, even without this stroke of luck, the ultimate issue of the action could have been different, especially if Lally's own figures as to the strength of[470] his own force be accepted as correct. It is plain that he felt no great confidence in his troops, and that his distrust was justified. His cavalry would not stand by him in his first attack on Coote's rear; his artillery was unsteady; he did not venture to attack the British infantry except with column against line; he seems to have advanced in the first instance chiefly because his men chafed under the fire of the British artillery; and his attack on Coote's left was not only a failure in itself but took all the heart out of his Sepoys. Coote, on the other hand, felt perfect reliance on his troops, and proved it by advancing finally with his infantry only, leaving his guns to follow as they could. Moreover, he had the choicest of his troops, the grenadiers, still in reserve at the close of the action; so that it would have been open to him, after the defeat of Lorraine, to have turned these or his own regiment upon the flank of the French battalions in the centre, and to have rolled up their line from right to left instead of from left to right. In fact, from the moment that he forced Lally to come out and fight, the superiority of his troops assured him of victory; and it is probable that Lally himself was painfully aware of the fact. The tragic fate of the French commander a few years later made him an object of compassion to foe and friend, but it is plain that the disaster of Wandewash was principally of his own making. Bussy had begged him to desist from the siege on Coote's approach, but he would not, and was therefore unable to oppose his full strength to his enemy. Finally, though he wished to decline any engagement except a direct attack on his camp, he was out-man?uvred and compelled to fight on his adversary's terms. In the face of such facts, whatever our sympathy with a gallant and unfortunate man, it is idle to ascribe his defeat to mere accident, although that defeat was a mortal blow to French domination in India.
Jan. 29.
Feb. 9.
Feb. 29.
April 5.

Lally on the next day fell back to Chittapett, and[471] sending the Mahrattas and native troops to Arcot retired to Gingee to cover Pondicherry. Coote on learning of his withdrawal from Chittapett determined to attack that post, while yet he might, with his whole army; and after a few hours' cannonade compelled it to surrender. Then instead of following Lally up further, he bent himself, after the fashion of Amherst, to systematic reduction of all the minor posts held by the French. Arcot, the first object chosen, fell after a siege of a few days; Timery, a few miles to south-east of Arcot, fell at the same time; Trinomalee surrendered on the last day of February; Permacoil and Alumparva were taken after some resistance early in March. Coote, however, was wounded at Permacoil; and the capture of Carical, the one French station left on the coast, was entrusted to Major Monson, who speedily effected it with the help of Admiral Cornish's squadron, which had arrived on the coast six weeks before. The possession of Carical was of importance, since, being an outlet from the rich country of Tanjore, it could have kept Pondicherry supplied with provisions; while it was also a port wherein a French squadron could obtain not only victuals but also intelligence before proceeding to Pondicherry. Lally, amid all his preparations for defence, in his heart gave up the capital for lost after its fall.
July 17.
August.

On the 7th of April Coote re-assumed command, and drawing a chain of posts around Pondicherry from Alumparva to Chillumbrum, closed in slowly upon the doomed city. Lally had allowed him to capture far too many of his men piecemeal in different garrisons; but he now called in all French troops from Trichinopoly and other posts in the south, and entered into an agreement with Hyder Ali, then commander of the forces at Mysore, engaging to concede large tracts of territory in return for the services of eight thousand men. This accession of strength to the enemy hampered Coote not a little for the moment, the more so since a detachment which he sent to check the[472] advance of the Mysoreans was totally defeated. But the relief to Lally was short-lived; for dearth of provisions and unwillingness to be attached to the losing side soon caused his new allies to withdraw. Even so, however, the British force was not strong enough to undertake a regular siege of Pondicherry, and Coote was obliged to content himself with a mere blockade.
Sept. 2.
Sept. 4.
1761.
April 5.

At length reinforcements arrived for the Company's troops, together with half a regiment of Morris's Highlanders[346] under Major Hector Munro. Three men-of-war also came with the transports, raising the squadron before Pondicherry to seventeen sail. Lally, rightly guessing that more vigorous operations would follow on this increase of the British force, devised a plan of extreme skill and daring for the surprise of their camp; but fortune was as usual against him. His combinations miscarried; and his troops after showing conspicuous gallantry were repulsed. From that day the end drew rapidly near. Coote indeed forsook the siege for a time on finding that Colonel Monson had been promoted over his head, but was soon obliged to take command again on the disabling of Monson by a wound. It would be of no profit to linger over the dying agony of Pondicherry. Lally, despite shameful disloyalty and opposition from the civil authorities, resolved to fight on to the end, trusting that d'Aché might come with his squadron to his relief; and his regular troops worked for him with a fidelity and devotion worthy of the best traditions of France. Once there came a gleam of hope. On the last day of 1760 a sudden hurricane burst over the city and harbour which overwhelmed three of the British ships with all hands on board, drove three more of them ashore, and ruined all the works of the besiegers. But the surviving ships returned within a week to resume the blockade, and no d'Aché arrived to interrupt them. The British works were repaired and pushed forward;[473] and on the 15th of January the garrison, being on the brink of starvation, surrendered. A few weeks sufficed to reduce the few isolated fortresses which were still held by French garrisons; and on the 5th of April the white flag of the Bourbons had ceased to fly in India.

So after fifteen years of strange vicissitude ended the long struggle of French and English for empire in the East. That the result was due as much to the shortcomings of the French Government as to the prowess of her adversary is unquestionable; for the corruption and mismanagement both at Versailles and at Pondicherry were sufficient to wreck any empire. Still the failure of the French was due to something more than mere maladministration. Though no people is so patriotic where the soil of their own country is at stake, Frenchmen once passed across the sea appear to be cursed with a fatal tendency to jealousy, distrust, and disunion. In Canada as in India the same forces were always at work to undermine French influence and neutralise French success. Individual Frenchmen are found wielding vast power and authority with consummate ability; yet such men are always alone; not one of them can command the loyal service of his countrymen. Even Dupleix, the Napoleon of India, was thwarted at every turn by his subordinates; for Bussy may be considered to have held practically an independent command. Again, setting aside individuals of brilliant talent, the general average of capacity was lower on the French side. It may have been that ability was by some strange coincidence absent; or that commanders had no power or were too jealous to select the ablest of their subordinates for important work; or indeed that capable subalterns found the acceptance of a great trust too thankless at the hands of such superiors. In any case the result remains the same. There are Dupleix, Bussy, and Paradis on one side, and on the other Clive, Saunders, Lawrence, Forde, Coote, Brereton, Caillaud, Kilpatrick, Knox,—captains, lieutenants and ensigns innumerable, all prepared to accept[474] independent command and yet to work loyally for the common cause. Before long there will have to be told a story of administrative cupidity and corruption in Calcutta as shameful as ever disgraced Pondicherry; and yet always young officers come forward to undertake the most perilous work and to carry it to a successful end. Such a contrast points to a distinction between the two nations which is more deeply rooted than in mere accidents of administration. Partly no doubt the victory of the British was due to the traditions that kept archer and man-at-arms together at Crecy, and may be ascribed to peculiarities of social and political organisation. But beyond this there appears to be something in the national character which makes it difficult for a Frenchman, outside the borders of France, to assume high station without dangerous exaggeration of his self-esteem; while the Briton, for all his energetic and imperious nature, has the grim humour and the deep melancholy of his kind, ever whispering to him of the vanity of great place.

Authorities.—Orme's Military Transactions continues to be the chief authority though it unfortunately closes without giving account of Forde's action at Badara. The actions of Wandewash, Condore and Badara are described at length in Colonel Malleson's Decisive Battles of India, where the authorities are quoted. The French side of the story is presented by the same author in his History of the French in India, based chiefly on the memoirs of Lally and Bussy. Wilks's History of Mysore, the Memoirs of Stringer Lawrence, and the Biographies of Clive by Malleson and Malcolm are also of value.

Walker & Boutall del.

To face Page 474.
TRICHINOPOLY.
COVREPAUK, Feb. 3 14 1752.
PLASSEY, June 23rd 1757.
MASULIPATAM, The Assault of 8th April 1759.
WANDEWASH, 22nd Jan. 1760.
CHAPTER VIII
For convenience of arrangement I have followed the conquests both of Canada and of India without interruption to their close. In the earlier stages of the war, when England had not yet succeeded in obtaining for herself the minister that she desired, it was possible and in the fitness of narrative to turn from enterprise to enterprise, fitfully undertaken, insufficiently provided for, and committed to the wrong hands for execution; since all were symptoms of one organic disorder. While the heart of England beat weak, palpitating and intermittent, it could not but fail to drive the blood to the extremities, and leave them cold and paralysed. But when, under the treatment of Pitt, the heart revives and throbs with strength and regularity, then we can watch member after member tingling with new life and waking to new power; and the action of each may be traced independently, for while their energy continues, it is certain that the heart must be vigorous and sound. Since, however, that work is now done, it behoves us to return, after long digression, to England and to Pitt, and to take up the study where it was laid down, in the spring of 1759.
1759.

With the mighty enterprises, even now not yet wholly told, of that year in memory, it is remarkable to note that the estimates for 1759 showed little sign of what was to come. The British Establishment was set down at but eighty-five thousand men, or one thousand more than in the previous year; and the fact is the more extraordinary in that, ever since the previous winter, the French had been preparing for an invasion of Great[476] Britain at three different points with sixty-three thousand men. Vast numbers of flat-bottomed boats had been collected at Dunkirk, Brest and Havre de Grace; and the menace was serious, for the regular troops left in England were but few, and the country was crowded with French prisoners. Pitt, while reposing his chief trust in the navy, was sufficiently disquieted in January to offer special terms to recruits who would enlist for short service within the kingdom only; and in May he called out the newly-embodied militia. Yet only two new regiments of regulars were raised during the first half of the year. The first of these, Eyre Coote's, has already been seen at Wandewash; the second demands lengthier notice since it signified a new departure. Mention has already been made of the addition of light troops to certain regiments of cavalry: it was now determined to form a complete regiment of Light Dragoons; which service was entrusted to Colonel George Augustus Elliott,[347] an officer who was to become famous for his defence of Gibraltar, though not before his regiment had already won fame both for him and for itself. Its actions will come before us very soon, so for the present it will suffice to say that Elliott's Light Dragoons are still with us, retaining the original number of their precedence, as the Fifteenth Hussars.

Such additions were trifling enough if in view of no more than the danger of invasion, but, seeing that Pitt abated not one jot of his aggressive designs, they were of astonishing insignificance. With the nature and extent of those designs the reader has already been in great part acquainted; but it will be convenient to recall the military situation in all parts of the world in the spring of 1759. Goree had already surrendered and was occupied by a British garrison; Barrington was busy over the conquest of Guadaloupe; in America Amherst was organising his expedition against Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Forbes was struggling with the first difficulties of his advance to Fort[477] Duquêsne, and Wolfe was on his way to Quebec; in India Lally had lately raised the siege of Madras and liberated the garrison for work in the field, Forde had lately fought Condore and was advancing on Masulipatam, and Clive was at Moorshedabad securing the fruits of his victory at Plassey. Lastly, ten thousand British troops were about to enter on their first campaign under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick. Yet it never occurred to Pitt to recall one man of them, notwithstanding the peril of invasion. It may be asked why the ten thousand, being so near home, were not summoned from Germany, and of what possible service they could have been on the Continent. The answer, which has already been hinted at, will occur readily to those who have had the patience to follow me so far, who have seen Guadeloupe worried into submission by a handful of sickly troops, and watched Montreal and Pondicherry drop at last into British hands like fruit ripe for the plucking. Pitt spoke but half the truth when he spoke of conquering America in Germany; it was not only America, but the East and West Indies, in a word the British Empire. The war in Germany was in fact nothing more than a diversion on a grand scale, and it is as such that it must now be followed. The French likewise pursued their idea of a diversion when they threatened a descent upon the shores of Great Britain. It was a plan which they had employed with some success in the days of King William and of Queen Anne, but it had not saved them from Marlborough at Oudenarde, and it was not to deliver them from the busy designs of Pitt.

Before entering on the campaigns of Prince Ferdinand it is indispensable to attempt to grasp the general purport of the operations on either side. The French had invaded Germany primarily to take vengeance upon Prussia for King Frederick's scornful treatment of Madame de Pompadour. Frederick, being already occupied with the Saxons and Austrians to the south and with the Russians on his flank to the eastward, could[478] hardly have escaped disaster with the French pressing on his other flank from the west. He had indeed, in 1758, with the swiftness that characterised his operations, made a dash upon the French and hurled them back at Rossbach, and within a month dealt the Austrians as severe a buffet at Leuthen with the same army. But to defeat two armies at two points over two hundred miles apart within a few weeks, was a strain that could not be repeated; and it was primarily to guard Frederick's right or western flank that Ferdinand's army was called into being. So far as Frederick was concerned it quite fulfilled its purpose; but in the eyes of England its mission was somewhat different. Under the Duke of Cumberland the force had been called an army of observation, to secure the frontiers of Hanover; and Cumberland, despite Frederick's warnings, had endeavoured to cover Hanover by holding the line of the Weser, with results that were seen at Hastenbeck. Under Ferdinand the army became an Allied Army for active operations in concert with King Frederick;[348] but none the less its chief function was to cover Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and Brunswick. For the French army, being lax in discipline, behaved with shameful inhumanity towards the inhabitants of German territory during this war; and there was always apprehension lest the rulers of Hesse and Brunswick, from sheer compassion towards their suffering people, should withdraw from the Alliance.

Throughout the operations about to come under our notice the French acted with at least two armies, jointly superior to Ferdinand's in numbers, along two different lines. The northern army was known as the Army of the Rhine, its base being Wesel on the Lower Rhine, an outlying possession of King Frederick's, which had perforce been abandoned by him at the opening of the war, and which despite Ferdinand's efforts could never be recovered. This army was destined to advance into Westphalia, and thence, if possible, into Hanover; and a glance at the map will show that its[479] simplest line of advance was by the river Lippe. The second or southern army of the French was known as the Army of the Main; having provided itself with a base on that river by the treacherous capture of Frankfort.[349] This was one of the many unscrupulous actions whereby the French made themselves loathed in Europe; for Frankfort being an Imperial Free Town was held always to be neutral. Still the thing was done; and thereby was secured to the Army of the Main, which had begun life as the Army of the Upper Rhine, not only an excellent base but a sure means of retreat. For the Allies, even if they defeated it, could not bar its way to the Rhine until Frankfort should be first besieged and captured, which could not but be a very arduous undertaking. The primary function of this second army was the invasion of Hesse.

Ferdinand's task, with an inferior force, was in its essence defensive. For him the supremely important thing was to retain possession of the line of the Weser, on which waterway he depended for his supplies alike from Germany and from England. Thus, roughly speaking, the field of operations lay between the Rhine on the one side and the Weser on the other, with the sea and the Main for northern and southern boundaries; and the normal front of the French would be to the east and of the Allies to the west. But it must be remembered that in addition to the army operating from Wesel against Ferdinand's front there was another operating from Frankfort upon his left or southern flank; while there was always the further danger that the Saxons might elude a Prussian corps of observation, which was posted to check them, on the south-east, and steal in upon Ferdinand's left rear. To defeat these combinations it was of vital importance to Ferdinand to hold in particular two fortresses—Münster in Westphalia, since the French, if they took it, could push on unhindered to the Weser and cut off his[480] supplies; and Lippstadt on the Upper Lippe, which secured communications between Münster and Cassel, or in other words between Westphalia and Hesse, and contrariwise impeded the joint action of the two French armies. For the rest it will be useful to take note of three rivers which barred the advance of the French northward from Frankfort to Cassel and beyond: namely, counting from south to north, the Ohm, the Eder, and the Diemel. With the last in particular, as the final barrier between Hesse and Westphalia, we shall have much to do; so the reader would do well to grasp its position once for all, not neglecting its relation to the neighbouring waters of the Lippe and the Weser.
End of March.
April 13.

At the close of the campaign of 1758 Ferdinand's winter quarters extended from Coesfeld, a little to westward of Münster, through Münster, Lippstadt and Paderborn to the Diemel, his front facing thus somewhat to south of south-east. The French army of the Rhine under Marshal Contades was cantoned along that river from Wesel southward almost to Coblentz; while the army of the Main, under the Prince of Soubise, the defeated General of Rossbach, lay just to north of the river about Frankfort. Ferdinand's first trouble was with an advance of the Austrians upon his left flank by the river Werra. This he headed back by a rapid march to Fulda; and, being freed from this danger, he resolved to turn this enforced movement to southward to account by making a bold stroke upon Frankfort, so as, if possible, to paralyse the operations of the French on that side by snatching from them their base. Unfortunately for him, the incapable Soubise had been recalled to command the army for invasion of England, and Marshal Broglie, who had succeeded him, had entrenched himself in a strong position at Bergen, a little to the north of Frankfort. There on the 13th of April, just five days after the storm of Masulipatam, Ferdinand boldly attacked him,[350] but was repulsed with[481] a loss of over two thousand men, and compelled to fall back to Ziegenhain, on the road to Cassel. His audacious attempt to cripple one French army, before the campaign had even been opened, had failed.
May.
May 27.
May 29.

After this alarm the French employed themselves busily in entrenching themselves on the Main. Prince Henry of Prussia, by King Frederick's direction, marched northward to relieve Ferdinand from further trouble from the Austrians; and the enemy made little movement during the ensuing month. On the 25th of April Contades arrived at Düsseldorf from Paris with an approved plan of campaign in his pocket, and proceeded to distribute the army of the Rhine into four corps, two of them about Wesel, a third at Düsseldorf, and a fourth about Cologne. This grouping, as Contades intended, left Ferdinand in doubt whether his main design was aimed at Westphalia or Hesse. The corps which guarded Westphalia included the British contingent under Lord George Sackville, who had been appointed to the command on the death of the Duke of Marlborough in the previous year, and it lay a little to the west of Münster, under the orders of the Hanoverian General von Sp?rcke. That officer growing uneasy over Contades's movements, Ferdinand on the 16th of May marched from Ziegenhain, leaving sixteen thousand men under General von Imhoff to protect Hesse, and on the 24th, having effected his junction with Sp?rcke, cantoned his troops along the Lippe from Coesfeld to Hamm. Meanwhile Contades, detaching a corps of fifteen thousand men under Count d'Armentières to threaten Münster, marched southward from Düsseldorf upon Giessen, there to join Broglie and begin operations against Hesse. Ferdinand, in the faint hope of recalling him to the Rhine, despatched a corps under the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick, a most brilliant officer, to alarm the French garrisons at Düsseldorf and other points on the river; but Contades, adhering to his purpose, pushed forward an advanced corps under M. de Noailles from Giessen to Marburg, evidently intent[482] on prosecuting his march to the north. Contades was in overwhelming force. Noailles's corps at Marburg numbered twenty thousand men, his own at Giessen close on sixty thousand, while Broglie's reserve-corps at Friedberg, a little to the south of Giessen, included close on twenty thousand more. He now sent Broglie forward by Fritzlar upon Cassel, while he himself continued his march due north through Waldeck upon Corbach. Imhoff, fearful of being cut off and unable to defend Cassel, fell back towards Lippstadt; and Broglie having left a force to occupy Cassel, turned westward to rejoin Contades. On the 14th of June the whole were again assembled together, Contades' corps lying a little to the south of Paderborn, and Broglie's at Stadtbergen.
June 11.
June 18.

These movements caused Ferdinand the deepest anxiety. On the 11th of June he concentrated and marched eastward to Büren, where he halted and picked up Imhoff's corps; but even so he was weaker than the enemy, for though he had recalled the Hereditary Prince from Düsseldorf, he had been obliged to leave nine thousand men under General Wangenheim at Dülmen, to watch d'Armentières's designs against Münster. But worse was to come; for on the 18th Broglie's corps, moving up to the right of Contades's, began to edge Ferdinand's left wing back to the westward. Ferdinand, accepting the inevitable, fell back on Lippstadt and crossed the Lippe to Rietberg. His embarrassment was now extreme. He could not divine whether the enemy designed to besiege Lippstadt or Münster or both, or whether they meant to force a battle upon him against greatly superior numbers. He was inclined to risk a battle, seeing that, for all that he could do to prevent it, both fortresses might be taken before his eyes; in which case he must needs cross to the east side of the Weser. So critical did he consider the position that he wrote to King George the Second for instructions, and begged that ships might be ready to transport the garrison in case it should be necessary[483] to evacuate Emden. The King's answer showed the Guelphic loyalty and courage at its noblest. He said that since Ferdinand was inclined to hazard an action he also was ready to take the risk, but that he left his General an absolutely free hand, only assuring him that his confidence in him would be unabated, whatever the result; and, lest Ferdinand should be in any doubt, he caused a second letter to be written to him to the same effect, but in stronger terms even than the first.[351]
June 29.
July 3.
July 8.
July 10.
July 14.

Meanwhile Contades marched up to Paderborn and halted for some days, keeping Ferdinand still in doubt as to his intentions. At last on the 29th he moved northward and pushed his light troops forward to Bielefeld, showing plainly that his true aim was the capture either of Hameln or of Minden on the Weser. Ferdinand therefore recalled Wangenheim's corps from Dülmen to the main army; whereupon, as he had expected, d'Armentières at once advanced to besiege Münster. On the same day Ferdinand himself moved northward and encamped parallel to Contades at Diessen, comforting himself with the reflection that though his enemies might be nearer to Minden than he, he at any rate was nearer to his food-supplies than they.[352] It was, however, extremely difficult for him to obtain intelligence of the French movements, since the two armies were separated by a broad chain of wooded hills; and he consequently hesitated for some days before he decided, on false information of a French advance, to move towards Osnabrück. His intention was to turn eastward from thence, and to take up a position which would render it perilous for the French to attempt the siege either of Hameln or Minden. He had made, however, but one march from Osnabrück when he received the news that Broglie had surprised Minden on the day before, and that the French had thus secured a bridge over the Weser and free access into Hanover. This [484]was a most unpleasant surprise for Ferdinand. For a day he hesitated whether or not to return to Münster, and then decided to fall back to the Lower Weser, so as to save his magazine at Nienburg, and, since the French had set the example of lawlessness at Frankfort, to occupy the Imperial Free Town of Bremen. On the 14th of July accordingly his headquarters were fixed at Stolzenau, between Nienburg and Minden on the Weser, and a detachment was sent to Bremen.
July 17.

Meanwhile Contades proceeded to reap the fruit of his very successful movements. Part of his light troops seized upon Osnabrück, and the rest were sent to levy contributions in Hanover; M. de Chevreuse was detached with three thousand men to besiege Lippstadt; d'Armentières continued to besiege Münster; Broglie's corps crossed the Weser on the 14th to invest Hameln; and on the 16th Contades with the main army debouched into the basin of Minden, and pushed a part of his army as far to the northward as Petershagen. Ferdinand, though he could bring but forty-five thousand men into the field against sixty thousand, advanced southward next day to offer him battle; but Contades retired without awaiting his arrival and withdrew to an unassailable position immediately to south of Minden. If he could hold Ferdinand inactive while his several detachments did their work, it was of no profit to him to hazard a general action.
July.

So far Contades's operations had been masterly. He had taken Cassel, the capital of Hesse, and had invested both Lippstadt and Münster; he had further taken Minden and invested Hameln; and thus he bade fair to possess himself of the line of the Weser and to carry the war straight into Hanover. Ferdinand's position was most critical, and was not rendered more pleasant to him by a series of uncomplimentary messages from Frederick the Great. But Contades, from the moment that he declined battle, seems to have taken leave, possibly from excessive confidence, of all energy and ability. His position was, it is true,[485] impregnable. His army lay immediately to the south of Minden, communicating by three bridges with Broglie's corps on the other side of the Weser. His right rested on the town and the river, his left on a mass of wooded hills—the end of the range that had separated his army from Ferdinand's—and the whole of his front was covered by a wide morass, through which ran a brook called the Bastau. But though unassailable from any point, the position had conspicuous defects. In the first place, it did not leave the army free to move in all directions; and in the second, it necessitated the detachment of troops to the south to maintain communication through Gohfeld and Hervorden with the French base at Cassel. It was for Ferdinand, by skilful use of these defects, to entice Contades from his pinfold to meet him in the open field.
July 28.
July.

Returning to camp at Petershagen after Contades's withdrawal to Minden, Ferdinand's first step was to push his picquets forward into a chain of villages that lay in his front: Todtenhausen on the bank of the Weser, Fredewald immediately to west of Todtenhausen, Stemmern and Holthausen somewhat in advance of Fredewald, and Nord Hemmern, Sud Hemmern, and Hille still farther to south and west. The occupation of Hille brought his advanced posts to the western edge of the morass that covered Contades's front, and to the head of the one causeway that led across it. On the 22nd Wangenheim's corps, about ten thousand strong, was pushed forward to Todtenhausen, where it remained conspicuous, in advance of the army. In the midst of these movements came the bad news of the fall of Münster, which enabled d'Armentières to march from thence to besiege Lippstadt, and Chevreuse to return with his detachment to Minden; but this misfortune only quickened Ferdinand to action. On the 27th the Hereditary Prince marched with six thousand men south-westward towards Lübbecke, and on the following day drove from it a body of French irregulars which was stationed there for the protection of[486] Contades's left flank. Then turning eastward he pursued his march against the French communications. Simultaneously, on the 28th, General Dreve led the garrison of Bremen against Osnabrück, retook it, and hastened eastward to join the Hereditary Prince. The junction effected, the two pressed on towards Hervorden, and on the 31st established themselves astride of the road by which all Contades's supplies must be brought up from the south.

Here, therefore, was a menace in his rear to make the French General uneasy in his position behind the morass; and now Ferdinand added a temptation in his front to induce him the more readily to quit it. On the 29th the Prince, leaving Wangenheim's corps isolated about Todtenhausen, led the whole of the rest of the army a short march to the south-west, and encamped between Fredewald and Hille. Headquarters were at Hille, under guard of the Twelfth and Twentieth Regiments of the British Foot, for the red-coats held the place of honour on the right of the line; and picquets were pushed on to Sud Hemmern, Hartum, and Hahlen, villages on the eastern side of Hille, by the border of the morass. Finally, from two to three thousand men were ordered to Lübbecke to maintain communication with the Hereditary Prince. Such dispositions might well have appeared hazardous; but Ferdinand had thought them out in every detail. Wangenheim's corps, though isolated, was strongly entrenched, with several guns; while his position covered the only outlet by which the French could debouch from behind the marsh. Thereby two important objects were gained. First, the safe passage of convoys from the Lower Weser was assured; and secondly, it was made certain that, before Contades could deploy to attack Wangenheim in force, Ferdinand with the main army would have time either to fall upon his flank or simply to join his own left to Wangenheim's right. To ensure the swift execution of this latter critical movement, Ferdinand directed all Generals to acquaint themselves[487] carefully with the ground, and in particular with the outlets that led from his position to the open plain before Minden.

Contades meanwhile reasoned, as Ferdinand had hoped and intended, in a very different fashion. The Allied army was, to his mind, dispersed in every direction. Ten thousand men were with the Hereditary Prince at Gohfeld; at least two thousand more at Lübbecke; Ferdinand himself, with the greater portion of the army, seemed so anxious to be within supporting distance of the Prince that he had left Wangenheim in the air; while even Wangenheim's corps was not united, but had detached a few battalions across the river to keep an eye on Broglie. Still the interruption of his own communications with Cassel was troublesome; and it would be well to put an end to that and to all other difficulties by a decisive blow and a brilliant victory. He therefore despatched the Duke of Brissac with eight thousand men to Gohfeld to hold the Hereditary Prince in check, threw eight bridges over the Bastau for the passage of his troops across it in as many columns, and ordered Broglie to be ready to cross the Weser with his corps to form a ninth column upon his right. The total force which he could bring into the plain of Minden was fifty-one thousand men with one hundred and sixty-two guns. Against it, if all went well, Ferdinand could oppose forty-one thousand men and one hundred and seventy guns.
Aug. 1.

A fresh gale was blowing from the south-west which drowned the stroke of the clocks of Minden, as midnight closed the last day of July and ushered in the first of August. Already the French camp was all alert in the darkness, and the columns were moving off, not without confusion, to the bridges of the Bastau. An hour later two white-coated deserters were brought in by a picquet to the Prince of Anhalt, General Officer of the day in the Allied army, with the important intelligence that the whole French army was in motion. Ferdinand had seen signs of some stir on the previous[488] evening, and had directed that, on the observance of the slightest movement at the advanced posts, information should be brought to him at once. Yet two o'clock came, and three o'clock, before a belated messenger arrived at headquarters from Anhalt with the news. Instantly Ferdinand called the whole of his troops to arms, and ordered them to march to their appointed positions. His orders had already been issued, and were clear and precise enough. The advance was to be in eight columns, and the formation for battle, as usual, with infantry in the centre and cavalry on each flank. The first or right-hand column consisted of twenty-four squadrons of cavalry under Lord George Sackville, fifteen of them being British squadrons of the Blues, First and Third Dragoon Guards, Scots Greys, and Tenth Dragoons. The second was made up entirely of German artillery; and the third under Major-General von Sp?rcke comprised the Twelfth, Twentieth, Twenty-third, Twenty-fifth, Thirty-seventh, and Fifty-first regiments of the British Line. Seven out of the eight columns were formed and marched off with great promptitude; but in Sackville's column all was confusion and delay. Some of the regiments were ready and others were not; and Sackville himself was not to be found. It was no good beginning for the British cavalry.

Having given the alarm Ferdinand hastened, with a single staff-officer accompanying him, to see for himself how matters stood. It is not difficult to conceive of his anxiety. Owing to the unpardonable neglect of Anhalt the French had gained two hours upon him; and now, when the army had been at last set in motion, the cavalry of his right wing was not moving with the rest. There was therefore every likelihood that the village of Hahlen, on which he had intended to rest his right flank, might be occupied by the French before Sackville could be there to prevent them. Instantly galloping away to Hartum he ordered the picquets stationed therein to move at once to Hahlen, and then hurried[489] back with all speed to the latter village, only to learn the bad news that it was already in possession of the French. Meanwhile not a word had come from Wangenheim, who, for aught he knew, might be in serious difficulties. Despatching his solitary aide-de-camp to Todtenhausen to ascertain how matters were going on the left, he galloped on alone with his groom into the plain of Minden. The wind was blowing so furiously that not a sound even of cannon could be heard in the direction of the Weser; but before long he caught sight of the French advancing on Kuttenhausen, and of a dense cloud of smoke rising before Todtenhausen. Evidently Wangenheim was hotly engaged. But meanwhile from windward there came the roar of a furious cannonade about Hille, where the causeway issued from the western end of the morass. This could only be a diversion, for Ferdinand had already sealed up the outlet of the causeway with five hundred men and two guns; but to make assurance still surer he now ordered two more guns and the detachment from Lübbecke to Hille, and sent information to the Hereditary Prince of what was passing. Then, galloping for a moment to the left, Ferdinand satisfied himself that his columns were advancing, and turned back in the teeth of the wind to Hahlen. There once again the stupidity of the Prince of Anhalt had set matters wrong. He had duly brought up the picquets from Hartum before Hahlen, as directed, but had halted instead of clearing the French out of the village, and had thereby delayed the deployment of the whole of Sp?rcke's column. He was bidden to take the village at once, which he did without difficulty; but having done so this hopeless officer proceeded to instal himself and his picquets as if to stay there for ever.[353]

After the occupation of Hahlen, however, matters on the right began to adjust themselves. Ferdinand ordered Captain Foy's battery to the front of the[490] village to cover the formation of the troops, and was soon satisfied by the admirable working of these British guns that all was safe in that quarter. Meanwhile his aide-de-camp returned from Todtenhausen with intelligence that Wangenheim was holding his own, though the enemy had gained ground on his right, where his flank was uncovered. Probably few commanders have passed through two worse hours than did Ferdinand at the opening of the battle of Minden.

Fortunately for him the French had not executed their own man?uvres without confusion and delay. It was one defect of Contades's position that he could not debouch from behind the morass by daylight, since he would have brought Ferdinand down instantly upon his flank; and the indiscipline of the French army among both officers and men was not calculated to favour orderly movement in the dark. Broglie, a capable officer, had crossed the river, taken up his appointed position on the right, and made his dispositions to fall upon Wangenheim, punctually and in good order; but he dared not attack until the rest of the army was formed, so contented himself with a simple duel of artillery. The rest of the columns shuffled here and there in helplessness and confusion; and it was not until Broglie had waited for two full hours that most of them were at last deployed in some kind of order. The French line-of-battle was convex in form, following, as it were, the contour of the walls of Minden, with the right resting on the Weser and the left on the morass. Broglie's corps on the right was drawn up in two lines, the first of infantry, the second of cavalry, with two powerful batteries in advance. On his left stood half of the infantry of Contades's army in two lines, with thirty-four guns before them. Next to these, in the centre, were fifty-five squadrons of cavalry in two lines, with a third line of eighteen more in reserve; and next to this mass of horse stood the left wing, composed of the rest of the infantry in two lines, with thirty guns. Thus to all intent the French line-of-battle[491] consisted of a centre of cavalry with wings of infantry; but the left wing of infantry was late in arriving at its position, and its tardiness was not without effect on the issue of the action.

Observing the excellent practice of Foy's battery before Hahlen, Ferdinand had already sent Macbean's British battery to join it and ordered Hase's Hanoverian brigade of heavy guns to the same position. Then seeing Sp?rcke's column of British infantry in the act of deployment, he sent orders that its advance, when the time should come, should be made with drums beating. The order was either misdelivered or misunderstood, for to his surprise the leading British brigade shook itself up and began to advance forthwith. A flight of aides-de-camp galloped off to stop them; and the line of scarlet halted behind a belt of fir-wood to await the formation of the rest of the army. In the first line of Sp?rcke's division stood, counting from right to left, the Twelfth, Thirty-seventh, and Twenty-third, under Brigadier Waldegrave; and in the second, which extended beyond the first on each flank, the Twentieth, Fifty-first, and Twenty-fifth, under Brigadier Kingsley, Hardenberg's Hanoverian battalion, and two battalions of Hanoverian guards. There then they stood for a few minutes, while the second line, which was only partially deployed, hastened to complete the evolution; when suddenly to the general amazement the drums again began to roll, and the first line stepped off once more, advancing rapidly but in perfect order, straight upon the French horse. The second line, though its formation was still incomplete, stepped off likewise in rear of its comrades, deploying as it moved, and therefore of necessity dropping somewhat in rear. And so the nine battalions, with the leading brigade far in advance, swung proudly forward into a cross-fire of more than sixty cannon, alone and unsupported from the rest of the line.

No aide-de-camp, gallop though he might, could stop them now; and their majestic bearing showed that[492] they would not easily be stopped by an enemy. The British, being on the right, were the more exposed to destruction, for the French batteries on their left were too remote to maintain a really deadly fire; but what signified a cross-fire and three lines of horse to regiments that had fought at Dettingen and Fontenoy? For nearly two hundred yards of the advance the French guns tore great gaps in their ranks; but they passed through the tempest of shot unbroken and untamed, and pressed on with the same majestic steadiness against the huge motionless bank of the French horse. Then at last the wall of men and horses started into life, and eleven squadrons coming forward from the rest bore straight down upon them. The scarlet battalions stood firm until the enemy were within ten yards of them; then pouring in one volley which strewed the ground with men and horses, they hurled the squadrons back in confused fragments upon their comrades, and continued their advance. Ferdinand, perceiving the disorder of the French, sent an aide-de-camp at full speed to Lord George Sackville to bring up the British cavalry and complete the rout. Sackville disputed the meaning of the order for a time, and then advancing his squadrons for a short distance, as if to obey it, brought them once more to a halt. A second messenger came up in hot haste to ask why the cavalry of the right did not come on, but Sackville remained stationary, and the opportunity was lost.

Then shamed and indignant at their defeat the French horse rallied. Four brigades of infantry and thirty-two guns came forward from the French left to enfilade the audacious British foot; and Ferdinand, since Sackville would not move, advanced Phillips's brigade of heavy guns in order to parry, if possible, this flanking attack. Then the second line of the French horse came thundering down, eager to retrieve their defeat, upon the nine isolated battalions. For a moment the lines of scarlet seemed to waver under this triple attack; but recovering themselves they closed up their ranks and[493] met the charging squadrons with a storm of musketry which blasted them off the field. Then turning with equal fierceness upon the French infantry they beat them also back with terrible loss. Again an aide-de-camp flew from Ferdinand's side to Sackville, adjuring him to bring up the British squadrons only, if no more, to make good the success; but it was not jealousy of the foreign squadrons under his command that kept Sackville back. The messenger delivered his order; but not a squadron moved. Meanwhile Ferdinand had hurried forward fresh battalions on his right to save the British from annihilation; and now the third line of French horse, the Gendarmerie and the Carbineers, essayed a third attack upon the nine dauntless battalions and actually broke through the first line; but was shattered to pieces by the second and sent the way of its fellows. A fourth messenger was sent to Sackville, but with no result. Ferdinand's impatience waxed hot. "When is that cavalry coming?" he kept exclaiming. "Has no one seen that cavalry of the right wing?" But no cavalry came. "Good God! is there no means of getting that cavalry to advance," he ejaculated in desperation, and sent a fifth messenger to bring up Lord Granby with the squadrons of Sackville's second line only. Granby was about to execute the order, when Sackville rode up and forbade him; and then, as if still in doubt as to these repeated orders, Sackville trotted up to Ferdinand and asked what they might mean. "My Lord," Ferdinand is said to have answered, calmly, but with such contempt as may be imagined, "the opportunity is now passed."

Nevertheless the astonishing attack of the British infantry had virtually gained the day. Ferdinand's line had gained time to form and to join with Wangenheim's; and the guns of the Allies coming up gradually in increasing force silenced the inferior artillery of the French. Ferdinand's left wing then took the offensive, and the German cavalry by a brilliant charge dispersed the whole of the infantry opposed to them.[494] Between nine and ten o'clock the struggle was practically over. The French were completely beaten, and retreating rapidly under the guns of Minden to their pinfold behind the marsh. Had Sackville's cavalry come forward when it was bidden, it might have cut the flying French squadrons to pieces, barred the retreat of most if not all of the French left wing, and turned the victory into one of the greatest of all time. As things happened, it fell to Foy and Macbean of the British Artillery to gather the laurels of the pursuit. Hard though they had worked all day, these officers limbered up their guns and moved with astonishing rapidity along the border of the marsh, halting from time to time to pound the retreating masses of the enemy; till at last they unlimbered for good opposite the bridges of the Bastau and punished the fugitives so heavily that they would not be rallied until they had fled far beyond their camp.

Meanwhile the Hereditary Prince had engaged the Duke of Brissac at Gohfeld and defeated him, so that the French communications with Hervorden and Paderborn were hopelessly severed. The news of this misfortune seems to have smitten Contades almost with panic. Had he chosen to fall back by the line of his advance he could hardly have been stopped by the inferior force of the Hereditary Prince, and he would have found supplies and a good position at Hervorden. But his defeat had crushed all spirit out of him. Abandoning his communications with Paderborn he crossed the Weser in the night, broke down the bridge of Minden, burned his bridges of boats, and retired through a difficult and distressing country to Cassel, with an army not only beaten but demoralised.

Walker & Boutall del.

To face page 494.
MINDEN. Aug. 1st 1759.
The Action at the moment of the attack of the British Infantry.

So ended the battle of Minden, a day at once of pride and disgrace to the British. The losses of the Allies amounted to twenty-six hundred killed and wounded, of which the share of the British amounted to close on fourteen hundred men.[354] Of the six devoted regiments who went into action four thousand four[495] hundred and thirty-four strong, seventy-eight officers and twelve hundred and fifty-two men, or about thirty per cent, were killed or wounded; while the Hanoverian battalions with them, being on the left or sheltered flank, lost but twelve per cent. The heaviest sufferers were the Twelfth, which lost three hundred and two, and the Twentieth, which lost three hundred and twenty-two of all ranks; these regiments holding the place of honour on the right of the first and second lines. The casualties of the French were acknowledged in the official lists to amount to seven thousand, though the letters of Broglie and Contades state the numbers at from ten to eleven thousand; and the defeated army lost in addition the greater part of its baggage, seventeen standards and colours, and forty-three guns. From a military standpoint the most remarkable feature in the action was the skill with which Ferdinand contrived to entice his adversary into the field, reflecting perhaps even more credit on his judgment of men than on his knowledge of his profession. Once drawn from behind the morass into the plain, Contades made singularly feeble and meaningless dispositions: and the formation of his line with cavalry in the centre and infantry on the flanks was, in the circumstances, simply grotesque. He seems indeed to have had no very clear idea as to what he really meant to do. If he had designed to overwhelm Wangenheim's isolated corps—and no doubt he had some vague notion of the kind—the obvious course was to launch Broglie straight at him independently, and himself to protect Broglie's flank with the main army. What he actually did was to turn Broglie's corps into the right wing of an united army, and so practically to fetter it for all decisive action. On the other hand, all preconcerted arrangements on both sides were upset by the extraordinary attack of the British infantry, a feat of gallantry and endurance that stands, so far as I know, absolutely without a parallel. "I never thought," said Contades bitterly, "to see a single line of infantry break through three lines of cavalry[496] ranked in order of battle, and tumble them to ruin." "Never," grimly wrote Westphalen, the chief of Ferdinand's staff, "were so many boots and saddles seen on a battlefield as opposite to the English and the Hanoverian Guards." Next to this attack the feature that seems to have attracted most attention among both contemporary and modern critics, was the remarkable efficiency of the British artillery. The handling of the artillery generally at Minden, which was entrusted to the Count of Lippe-Bückeburg, was very greatly admired: but Westphalen, who passed lightly over the deeds of the infantry, went out of his way to write that, though every battery had done well, the English batteries had done wonders. And indeed some British guns which were attached to Wangenheim's corps on the left earned not less praise than those of Foy and Macbean on the right. The palm of the cavalry fell to the Germans, and in particular to a few squadrons of Prussian dragoons lent by Frederick the Great, which earned it brilliantly. It would have fallen to the British but for Sackville.

The part played by this deplorable man did not end with the battle. Ferdinand in general orders made scathing allusion to his conduct without mentioning his name; and Sackville was presently superseded and sent home. There he was tried by court-martial and pronounced unfit to serve the King in any military capacity whatever—a hard sentence but probably no more than just. Sackville was admitted to be an extremely able man; and as he had passed through Fontenoy and been wounded in that action, it is not easy to call him a coward. But the courage of some men is not the same on every day; and the evidence produced at the court-martial shows, I think, too plainly that on the day of Minden Sackville's courage failed him.[355] The King published the sentence of his dismissal from the Army in a special order, with very severe but not undeserved comment; and Lord George Sackville henceforth disappears from British battlefields. But we shall meet[497] with him again as a Minister of War, and the meeting will not be a pleasant one.
Aug. 2.
Aug. 5.
Aug. 18.
Aug. 24.
Aug. 25.
Sept. 19.

On the day following the battle the Hereditary Prince crossed the Weser in pursuit of the French, and overtaking their rear-guard at Einbeck captured many prisoners and much spoil, but failed to arrest the retreat of the main body. Contades, therefore, succeeded in bringing his troops back to Cassel, half starved, worn out by hard marching, and utterly demoralised by indiscipline and pillage. D'Armentières, on hearing of his chief's defeat, raised the siege of Lippstadt and marched eastward to meet him. Ferdinand meanwhile, having received the surrender of Minden, advanced by Bielefeld and Paderborn south-eastward upon Corbach, so as to turn Contades's left flank. On the 18th Contades, seeing his communications endangered, evacuated Cassel and retired by forced marches to Marburg, where he took up a strong position. Cassel capitulated to the Allies on the following day; and Ferdinand, while still pursuing his march southward, detached seven thousand men to recapture Münster. Marshal d'Estrées then arrived to supersede Contades; but little came of this change of command. Renewed menace from the westward upon the French communications forced him to withdraw from the line of the Ohm and Lahn, and to fall back to Giessen. Ferdinand at once laid siege to Marburg, which fell within a week, and finally on the 19th of September he encamped at Kroffdorf, a little to north-west of Giessen, over against the French camp.
Nov. 21.

Meanwhile the siege of Münster had gone ill for the Allies, and had been turned into a blockade. Ferdinand, after sending additional troops thither, found himself too weak to attempt further operations until the fall of the town; and during this interval Broglie, who had been appointed to the supreme command, had received a reinforcement of ten thousand Würtembergers. Thus strengthened he tried incessantly with a detached corps of twenty thousand men to interrupt Ferdinand's communications with Cassel, but in vain; and finally the[498] Hereditary Prince attacked this corps at Fulda, defeated it signally, and then turning upon Broglie's right flank forced him to retire to Friedberg. Ferdinand then blockaded Giessen; but at this point further operations were stayed. Ever since his disastrous defeat by the Russians at Kunersdorf in August, Frederick the Great had pressed Ferdinand for reinforcements; and the detachment of twelve thousand troops to the King not only rendered the Prince powerless for further aggression, but obliged him also to raise the blockade of Giessen. In January 1760 both armies retired into winter-quarters. The French occupied much the same ground as at the beginning of the campaign; and the Allies likewise were distributed into two divisions, the army of Westphalia extending from Münster through Paderborn to the Weser, the army of Hesse from Marburg eastward to the Werra. Thus ended the campaign of 1759, leaving both parties in occupation of the same territory as at its beginning; but it had branded the French with the discredit of a great defeat, and had heightened in the Allies their contempt for their enemy and their confidence in their chief.
CHAPTER IX
Never in the whole course of her history had come to England such a year of triumph as 1759. Opening with the capture of Goree in January, its later months had brought one unbroken tale of success, of Madras saved and Masulipatam taken in India, of Quebec captured in Canada, of Minden won in Germany, of one French fleet worsted by Boscawen off the Portuguese coast, of another defeated by Hawke in the romantic action of Quiberon Bay. Such was the story with which King George the Second met his Parliament for the last time in his life; and Pitt did not fail to turn it to good account. A monument was voted to Wolfe in Westminster Abbey; thanks were given to Hawke, Saunders and Holmes of the Navy, and to Monckton, Murray and Townsend of the Army; and the military estimates were passed with little difficulty. It was ordered that Ferdinand's army should be augmented from Great Britain, Brunswick, and Hesse alike. The full number of national troops voted for the British Establishment exceeded one hundred thousand men; the embodied militia augmented this total by twenty thousand, and the German troops in the pay of England by fifty-five thousand more; while another twelve thousand men at home and abroad, which were borne on the Irish Establishment, raised it to close on one hundred and ninety thousand men. Before the campaign of 1760 was opened, the infantry of the British Line had increased to ninety-six regiments; England contributing one new corps, Wales one, Scotland five, and Ireland four, all of[500] which were disbanded at the close of the war.[356] To these there were added later in the year six new regiments of Light Dragoons. The first was formed in August under Colonel John Burgoyne, which took rank as the Sixteenth Dragoons, and is now known to us as the Sixteenth Lancers; the second, created in October by Lord Aberdour, soon perished and left no mark behind it; and the third was raised under rather remarkable conditions by Colonel John Hale in November. Colonel Hale, originally of the Blues and later of the Forty-third Foot, was the officer who brought back the despatches reporting the victory of Quebec. Finding on his arrival in England in October that there was still some alarm of a French invasion, he volunteered to form a regiment of the footmen and chairmen of London and to lead them against the best household troops of France; an offer which so delighted Pitt that he reported it to the House of Commons. Finally, he engaged himself to raise a strong regiment of light dragoons without levy-money for men or horses, promising that any men or horses objected to on review by the inspecting officer should be replaced without expense to the country, and that the whole corps should be completed within two months. The offer was accepted, and the regiment was raised at the sole expense of the officers within the space, as it is said, of seventeen days. The number was not inappropriate; for though first known, during the few years while Aberdour's lasted, as the Eighteenth, this regiment, still conspicuous by the white facings and[501] the badge of skull and crossbones which Hale selected for it, remains with us as the Seventeenth Lancers. The three remaining corps, which raised the number of regiments of dragoons to twenty-one, were too short-lived to merit more than mere mention.[357]
1760.
Feb.

The menace of French invasion was rather ludicrously realised in February by a descent of the French privateer, Thurot, with five ships upon Carrickfergus. Landing about a thousand troops, he received the surrender of the town after a skirmish with the garrison, plundered it, contrary to the terms of the capitulation, and re-embarked. His squadron, however, was almost immediately caught by three British men-of-war, when after a short action Thurot was killed and every one of his ships captured. This tragic termination to Thurot's escapade relieved the general tension, and restored the country's confidence.

So foolish a raid was not likely to produce any change in Pitt's preparations for the reinforcement of Ferdinand, who needed to be specially strengthened after the disasters that had befallen King Frederick at Kunersdorf and at Maxen. In January it was decided to send three more regiments of British cavalry to Germany; and a few weeks later the number was increased to five. In May a further reinforcement of six battalions and two regiments of Highlanders was promised, and in June two additional regiments of cavalry; making up a total of close on ten thousand men.[358] The troops were shipped to the Weser instead of, as heretofore, to Emden, and seem to have been despatched with commendable promptitude; for the six regiments of foot, though only warned for service [502]on the 1st of May, were actually reviewed by Ferdinand in his camp at Fritzlar on the 17th of June, and were declared by him to be in a most satisfactory condition.[359]
May.
June 20.
June 22.
June 24.
July.

The campaign of 1759 having been prolonged so far into the winter, Ferdinand gave his army rest until late in May. At length on the 20th he called the infantry of the army of Hesse from its cantonments, and posted the main body under his own command at Fritzlar, with one corps advanced to Hersfeld on the Fulda to protect his left, and a second under General Imhoff at Kirchhain, on the Ohm. It was his intention that, in case of the enemy's advance, Imhoff should call in the detachment from Hersfeld to Homberg, a little to the south of Kirchhain on a bend of the Ohm, where there was a position, before long to be better known to us, in which he could bar the way to a far superior force. Simultaneously the army of Westphalia moved to its line of the previous year, from Coesfeld eastward to Hamm. In these positions the Allies remained for nearly a month before the French made the least sign of movement; when at last the army of the Lower Rhine under the Count of St. Germain assembled at Düsseldorf, and crossing the Rhine advanced to Dortmund. From this centre it was open to St. Germain to advance either northward against Münster or eastward against Lippstadt; but it was tolerably evident that his real design was to join the army of the Main, and to operate against the right flank of the Allied army of Hesse. At about the same time Broglie concentrated the army of the Main a little to the east of Giessen, and began his advance northward. The Hereditary Prince at once fell back from Hersfeld with his detachment towards the Ohm, while Ferdinand moved southward as far as Ziegenhain to join Imhoff, with every intention of making Broglie fight him before he advanced another mile. To his infinite disgust, however, he learned that Imhoff had abandoned the[503] position entrusted to him, and had ordered the whole of the advanced corps back to Kirchhain. Thus the most effective barrier in Hesse was opened to the French; Ferdinand perforce halted; and Broglie pushed on without delay to Homberg, whence turning eastward he encamped in the face of Ferdinand's army at Neustadt. In this situation both armies remained for a whole fortnight inactive, though not two hours' march apart, neither daring to attack the other, and each waiting for the other to make the next movement.
July 8.
July 10.

Broglie brought the deadlock to an end. Sending orders to St. Germain to march from Dortmund on the 4th of July, and to meet him at Corbach, he marched on the night of the 7th north-westward upon Frankenberg. Ferdinand on learning of his movements next day marched also northward with all speed, pushing forward a strong advanced corps under the Hereditary Prince by way of Sachsenhausen upon Corbach, to bar the outlet of the defile through which Broglie's army must pass into the plain, and so to hinder his junction with St. Germain. The French, however, had gained too long a start. St. Germain, though he distressed his troops terribly by the speed of his march, succeeded in passing through the defile from the north; and Broglie, hastening up from the south, found his troops forming in order of battle just as the Hereditary Prince debouched into the plain from Sachsenhausen. As not more than ten thousand of the French were yet deployed, the Prince attacked; but was soon driven back by superior numbers as the rest of the French came up, and finally retired with the loss of five hundred men and fifteen guns, seven of which last were British. It fell to the British infantry with the Prince, the Fifth, Twenty-fourth, Fiftieth, and Fifty-first regiments, to cover the retreat; but so hard were they pressed that the Prince only extricated them by putting himself at the head of two squadrons of the First and Third Dragoon Guards, and leading them to a desperate charge. Fortunately the squadrons responded[504] superbly,[360] and so the rear-guard was saved; but the Prince had received an unpleasant reverse, and the French had secured their first object with signal success.
July 12.

The Allied army of Westphalia, under General von Sp?rcke, arrived on the scene in obedience to orders two days after the action, and was posted at Volksmarsen on the Diemel to protect Ferdinand's right; and then once more the two hosts remained motionless and face to face, the French at Corbach, the Allies at Sachsenhausen. Ferdinand's total force was sixty-six thousand men only, while that of the French numbered one hundred and thirty thousand;[361] yet such was the difference in the quality of the two armies that Broglie dared not act except with extreme caution. His principal object was to envelope Ferdinand's right and cut him off from Westphalia at the line of the Diemel; and Ferdinand accordingly resolved to distract Broglie's attention to the opposite flank.
July 15.
July 16.

Having intelligence that a party of the enemy under General Glaubitz, consisting of six battalions, a regiment of Hussars, and a number of light troops, was on its way to Ziegenhain from Marburg, evidently with the object of disturbing his communications, Ferdinand, on the night of the 14th, detached the Hereditary Prince to take command of six battalions which were lying at Fritzlar, and to attack it. Accordingly on the following morning the Prince marched rapidly southward, being joined on the way by a regiment of German hussars, and by the Fifteenth Light Dragoons, which had just arrived from England. On reaching the vicinity of Ziegenhain, he found that Glaubitz was encamped farther to the west, near the village of Emsdorff. His troops being exhausted by a long march, the Prince halted for the night at Treysa, and continuing his advance early on the morrow, picked up [505]two more bodies of irregulars, horse and foot, which were on their way to him, and pushed on with his mounted troops only, to reconnoitre the enemy's position. He found the French posted at the mouth of a gorge in the mountains, fronting to north-east, astride of the two roads that lead from Kirchhain to Fritzlar and to Ziegenhain. Their right lay in rear of the village of Erxdorff, and their left in front of the village of Emsdorff, resting on a forest some three miles long. The Prince and General Lückner, who was with him, entered the forest, but found neither picquets nor sentries; they pushed forward through the corn-fields to within half a mile of the camp, but saw neither vedettes, nor patrols, nor so much as a main-guard; nay, Erxdorff itself, though within less than a mile of the camp, was not occupied. They stole back well content with what they had seen.

Waiting till eleven o'clock for his infantry to join him, the Prince posted one battalion, Lückner's regiment of hussars and the Fifteenth Light Dragoons, in a hollow a mile before Erxdorff; then taking the five remaining battalions, together with the irregular troops and four guns, he fetched a compass through the forest and came in full upon the enemy's left flank. The French were completely surprised. Two battalions had barely time to form towards the forest before the Prince's infantry came upon them, poured in a volley which laid three hundred men low, and drove back the rest upon Glaubitz's remaining infantry, which was falling in hurriedly in rear of the camp. Simultaneously Lückner, at the sound of the firing, came galloping up on the French right with his cavalry; whereupon the entire French force abandoned its camp and retired through the woods in their rear towards Langenstein. Here they rallied; but Lückner's single battalion hurried on beyond them to bar their way over the Ohm to westward, while the Fifteenth, pressing on along their flank, stationed itself across the road to Am?neberg, and charging full upon them headed them back from that[506] side. With some difficulty the French repelled the attack, and turning about to south-eastward made for a wood not far away, hoping to pass through it and so to escape to the south. But on arriving at the southern edge of the wood they found every outlet blocked by the Prince's mounted irregulars. Perforce they turned back through the wood again and emerged on to the open ground on its western side, trusting that some marshy ground, which lay in the way of the Prince's cavalry, would secure them from further pursuit. But they had not marched over the plain for more than a mile before the hussars and light dragoons were upon them again, and the Fifteenth for the second time crashed single-handed into the midst of them, cutting them down by scores and capturing one battalion complete. With great difficulty the remnant of the French beat back their pursuers and continued the retreat: half of them had been killed or captured, or had dropped down unable to march farther, but the rest struggled gallantly on. Reaching an open wood they again halted and formed for action. The Prince, still close at their heels with his cavalry, thereupon surrounded them and summoned them to surrender; and the French commander, despairing of further resistance in the exhausted state of his troops, was obliged to yield.

So ended the action which is still commemorated on the appointments of the Fifteenth Hussars by the name of Emsdorff. The French camp had been surprised at noon; and the last fragment of their force capitulated at six o'clock in the evening, having striven manfully but in vain to shake off the implacable enemy that had hunted them for nearly twenty miles. The loss of the French in killed and wounded is unknown, though it must have been considerable, but the prisoners taken numbered twenty-six hundred, while nine colours and five guns were also captured. The total loss of the Prince's troops did not exceed one hundred and eighty-six men and one hundred and eighty-one horses, of[507] which one hundred and twenty-five men and one hundred and sixty-eight horses belonged to the Fifteenth. It was the Fifteenth, in fact, that did all the fighting. The other regiments engaged did not lose twenty men apiece. The infantry could not keep pace with the pursuit after they reached Langenstein, and the two other corps of cavalry, though they did excellent work in heading back the enemy, never came to close quarters. Lückner's hussars did not lose a man nor a horse, and of the mounted irregulars but twenty-three men and horses were killed or wounded. It was the Fifteenth alone, a young regiment that had never been under fire, which thrice charged five times its numbers of French infantry and rode through them; and the success of the action was ascribed to them and to them only. Their gallantry indeed was the amazement of the whole army.[362] The tradition of charging home, as shall be seen in due time both in Flanders and in Spain, remained with the regiment, and doubtless remains with it to this day.
July 23.
July 25-27.
July 29.
July 30.

This brilliant exploit was some compensation to the Allies for past mishaps; but a week later Broglie sought to turn the scale by more serious operations. On the 23rd he divided his army into three corps, of which he sent one round Ferdinand's left flank under Prince Xavier of Saxony to threaten Cassel, and a second to force back Sp?rcke on his right from Volksmarsen, while the main body under his own command advanced to Sachsenhausen. Perforce Ferdinand retreated north-westward to Kalle, his rear-guard being incessantly and severely engaged throughout the movement; whereupon Broglie, seeing the way to be clear, detached a corps under the Chevalier de Muy, who had recently arrived to relieve the Count of St. Germain, across the Diemel to Warburg, in order to cut off the Allies from Westphalia. The Marshal himself meanwhile moved up parallel to Ferdinand on the eastern side towards Kalle, and Prince Xavier pressed still closer upon Cassel. It[508] being evident to Ferdinand that either Cassel or Westphalia must be abandoned, he detached a force under General Kielmansegge to strengthen the garrison of Cassel and resolved to attack de Muy. Accordingly, on the afternoon of the 29th Sp?rcke's corps crossed the Diemel to Liebenau, followed on the same evening by that of the Hereditary Prince; and on the 30th their combined force, not exceeding in all fourteen thousand men, encamped between Liebenau and Corbeke with its left on the Diemel, facing west. At dawn of the same morning Broglie's army debouched from several quarters simultaneously against the Allied camp at Kalle, but drew off after some hours of cannonade; and Ferdinand, satisfied through other signs that this demonstration was intended only to cover the movement of the French towards Cassel, resolved to pass the Diemel without delay and to deliver his stroke against de Muy.

Sp?rcke and the Hereditary Prince had meanwhile reconnoitred de Muy's position and had recommended that their own corps should turn its left flank, while Ferdinand with the main army advanced against its front. De Muy, with about twenty thousand men, occupied a high ridge across a bend of the Diemel, facing north-east, with his right resting on Warburg and his left near the village of Ochsendorf. To his left rear rose a circular hill crowned by a tower, and on his left front lay a village named Poppenheim. It was arranged that the corps of Sp?rcke and the Hereditary Prince should advance westward in two columns from Corbeke and form up in three lines between the tower and Poppenheim, so as to fall on de Muy's left flank and rear, while Ferdinand crossing the Diemel at Liebenau should attack his centre and right. As the camp between Liebenau and Corbeke lay about ten miles from de Muy's, and as Ferdinand's camp lay some fifteen miles to the south of the Diemel from Liebenau, the operation called for extreme nicety in the execution.
July 31.

At nine o'clock on the evening of the 30th[509] Ferdinand's army marched from Kalle, and at six o'clock on the following morning the heads of his columns passed the Diemel and debouched on the heights of Corbeke. They arrived, however, at later than the appointed hour. The passage of the Diemel had caused much delay; and not all the haste of officers nor the eagerness of men could bring the army forward the quicker. At seven o'clock Sp?rcke and the Hereditary Prince, after much anxious waiting, decided to march from Corbeke before more time should be lost. The northern column, which included the right wing of all three arms, moved by Gross Eider and Ochsendorf upon the tower; the southern, composed of the left wing, by Klein Eider and Poppenheim. Both columns were led by British troops—the northern by the Royal Dragoons, whose place was on the extreme right of the first line, while the British grenadiers, massed in two battalions under Colonels Maxwell and Daulhatt,[363] marched at the head of the infantry. The southern was headed by the Seventh Dragoons, with Keith's and Campbell's Highlanders[364] following them to cover the grenadiers in second line.

At half-past one the Hereditary Prince, having posted his artillery on the outskirts of Ochsendorf and Poppenheim, opened fire as the signal for attack; and at the same time the British grenadiers began to file through Ochsendorf. Certain French battalions, which de Muy had thrown back en potence to protect his left flank, thereupon retired without firing, until it was perceived that the Allies were making for the steep hill in rear of the French position. Then one battalion of Regiment Bourbonnois deliberately faced about and marched off to occupy the hill. To permit such a thing would have been to derange the whole of the plans of the Allies, so it was necessary to prevent it at [510]any cost. Colonel Beckwith with ten grenadiers ran forward, keeping out of sight of the French, to reach the hill before them; the Prince himself with thirty more hurried after him; and with this handful of men, all panting and breathless, they crowned the crest of the height. Bourbonnois arriving on the scene a little later found itself greeted by a sharp fire, and, being unable to see the numbers opposed to it, halted for ten minutes to allow its second battalion to come up. The delay gave time for Daulhatt's entire battalion of grenadiers to join Beckwith's little party; and then the two battalions of Bourbonnois attacked in earnest, and the combat between French and British, at odds of two against one, became most fierce and stubborn. The disparity of numbers however, was too great; and Daulhatt's men after a gallant struggle were beginning to give way, when Maxwell's battalion came up in the nick of time to support them. This reinforcement redressed the balance of the fight; Daulhatt's men speedily rallied, and the contest for the hill was renewed. The French, however, prepared to send fresh battalions in support of Bourbonnois, and the situation of the British became critical; for a battery of artillery, which was on its way to the hill to support them, got into difficulties in a defile near Ochsendorf and blocked the advance of the rest of the northern column. Fortunately it was extricated, though none too soon, and being brought up to the hill was speedily in action; while the head of the southern column likewise coming up took the French reinforcements in flank and drove them back in disorder. The Royals and Seventh Dragoons were then let loose upon the broken French battalions, completing their discomfiture and taking many prisoners.

So far the turning movement had succeeded; but its success was not yet assured, for only a portion of the southern column was yet formed for action, and the troops on the field were becoming exhausted. De Muy might yet have hoped to turn the scale in his left, when[511] his attention was suddenly called to the advance of troops upon his front. After desperate but fruitless efforts it had been found that the infantry of Ferdinand's army could not hope to arrive in time to take part in the action. The British battalions, urged by General Waldegrave, struggled manfully to get forward, but the day was hot, and the ground was difficult and in many places marshy: the men would not fall out, but they dropped down insensible from fatigue in spite of themselves. Ferdinand therefore ordered Lord Granby, who had succeeded to Sackville, to advance with the twenty-two squadrons of British cavalry and the British artillery alone. Away therefore they started at the trot, the guns accompanying them at a speed which amazed all beholders.[365] Two hours of trotting brought them at last within sight of the enemy; and Granby at once turned them upon the cavalry of de Muy's right wing. The pace was checked for a brief moment as the squadrons formed in two lines for the attack. In the first line from right to left were the First, Third, and Second Dragoon Guards, in one brigade, the Blues, Seventh, and Sixth Dragoon Guards in another; in the second line were the Greys, Tenth, Sixth, and Eleventh Dragoons. Then the advance was resumed, Granby riding at the head of the Blues, his own regiment, and well in front of all. His hat flew from his head, revealing a bald head which shone conspicuous in the sun, as the trot grew into gallop and the lines came thundering on. The French squadrons wavered for a moment, and then, with the exception of three only, turned and fled without awaiting the shock. The scarlet ranks promptly wheeled round upon the flank and rear of the French infantry; whereupon the three French squadrons that had stood firm plunged gallantly down on the flank of the King's Dragoon Guards, and overthrew them. But the Blues quickly came up to liberate their comrades; and the devoted little band of Frenchmen was cut to pieces. The French infantry,[512] finding itself now attacked on both flanks, broke and fled; and the whole of de Muy's men, horse and foot, rushed down to the Diemel, and, without even looking for the bridges, threw down their arms and splashed frantically through the fords. A party of French irregulars in Warburg tried likewise to escape, but was caught by the cavalry and well-nigh annihilated. Finally, the British batteries came down to the river at a gallop, unlimbered on the bank, and played on the fugitives so destructively as wholly to prevent them from reforming. Granby presently crossed the river in pursuit with ten squadrons; and the fragments of de Muy's corps retired in disorder to Volksmarsen. Thus brilliantly ended the action of Warburg.

The loss of the French was set down at from six to eight thousand men, killed, wounded, and taken, while twelve guns remained as trophies in the hands of the victors. The Allies lost just over twelve hundred men, of whom no less than two hundred and forty belonged to Maxwell's grenadiers; Daulhatt's battalion also suffering very severely. The losses of the cavalry were trifling. Altogether the action was a brilliant little affair, well designed and, despite the tardiness of Ferdinand's arrival, well executed. For the British it redeemed the character of the cavalry which had been so shamefully sacrificed by Sackville at Minden; since it was evidently the recollection of that disgrace which spurred Granby on to so rapid an advance and so headlong an attack. For Ferdinand the victory effectually opened the way into Westphalia.
Aug. 10.

Meanwhile it had been found impossible to defend Cassel against Broglie's overwhelming numbers; and the town was accordingly abandoned. It was no fault of Ferdinand's that Hesse was thus laid at the mercy of the French; indeed, with an army weaker in numbers by one-half than his enemy's, he had done well to save Westphalia. He now took up a position along the Diemel from Trendelburg to Stadtbergen, so as to seal up every passage over the river, while Broglie posted his[513] main army over against him on the opposite bank. The Marshal's superiority in numbers, however, enabled him, while holding the Allies in check with the bulk of his army, to detach independent corps for minor operations, though he took even such enterprises in hand with redoubled caution after the lessons of Emsdorff and Warburg. His first essay was the reduction of Ziegenhain, which surrendered after a siege of ten days; and concurrently he moved a corps under Prince Xavier eastward against Münden, which occupied G?ttingen and pushed detachments forward as far north as Nordheim and Einbeck. This latter movement carried the war unpleasantly far into Hanoverian territory; but Ferdinand none the less remained immovable on the Diemel. Broglie thereupon broke up his camp on that river and shifted his position eastward to Immenhausen, to support the operations of Prince Xavier. This placed Ferdinand in an awkward dilemma. He had sent a few troops to Beverungen on the Weser to check Xavier's advanced parties; but this detachment, though it had done its work well, was not strong enough to make head against an invasion in real force. Moreover Einbeck was disagreeably near to the border of his brother's dominions of Brunswick, which he would fain have saved from invasion if he could. Yet he could not move to the east bank of the Weser without uncovering Lippstadt, the one fortress which enabled him to prevent the perfect concert of the French armies of the Rhine and Main. In fact the situation was one of extreme trial and embarrassment.
Sept.

Ferdinand, whose light troops and irregulars were never idle while they could make mischief, first tried the effect of a raid with a flying column upon Broglie's communications with Frankfort; but this enterprise, though it alarmed the French and somewhat threw back their preparations, only partially achieved its object. On the other hand, it was always open to Ferdinand to stay where he was till want of forage should compel Broglie to retire; but this, though an infallible method, was[514] slow, and would mean that the country would be converted into a desert, through which it would be impossible to follow the French during their retreat. He therefore resolved to make a diversion by carrying the war suddenly to the Rhine. Broglie, in his anxiety to invade Hanover and Brunswick, had denuded Wesel of the greater part of its garrison. If Ferdinand could snatch Wesel, the base of the Army of the Rhine, from him, the diversion would be a telling stroke indeed.[366]
Sept. 23.
Oct. 1-2.
October.

All through the first days of September Ferdinand's preparations for this undertaking went steadily and silently forward; and on the 22nd a powerful train of siege-artillery, under the Count of Lippe-Bückeburg, marched away for Wesel, followed three days later by the Hereditary Prince with about ten thousand Hanoverians and Hessians. The Count was to conduct the siege and the Prince to cover it. Broglie, on learning of their departure, at once detached a strong corps under the Marquis of Castries to follow them; to which Ferdinand retorted by sending to the Prince one Hanoverian and ten British battalions, together with a Hessian regiment and three British regiments of cavalry.[367] Meanwhile the Prince's advanced parties had crossed the Rhine below Wesel on the 29th of September, and had surprised two or three small garrisons. The commandant of Wesel thereupon broke down the bridge which connected it with the western bank of the Rhine; and none too soon, for on the 30th the Prince came up and invested the fortress. The siege, however, progressed but slowly owing to rain and stormy weather; and meanwhile Castries was advancing by forced marches, despite the dreadful state of the roads, along a route full fifty miles south of the Prince's, to the Rhine. On the 12th of October he crossed the river at Cologne and pushed on without delay to Rheinberg, where he was [515]joined by reinforcements from Brabant. Considering the unspeakable difficulties of foul weather and almost impassable roads, this march of Castries stands out as a very fine feat of resolution and endurance.

The advance of French troops from the side of Brabant was a complication which neither Ferdinand nor the Hereditary Prince had foreseen. In fact it almost deprived the advance to Wesel of the character of a diversion. Castries had in Rheinberg thirty battalions and thirty-eight squadrons besides irregular troops, and was expecting further reinforcements; whereas the Prince, weakened by the absence of men in the trenches before Wesel, could muster but twenty-one battalions and twenty-two squadrons to meet him. It was open to the Prince either to fight against superior numbers or to retreat; and he elected to fight. Castries had taken up a position behind the Eugenian Canal, facing north-west, with his right resting on Rheinberg, and with the abbey of Kloster Kampen, on the northern side of the canal, before his left front. Immediately before his left, but on his own side of the canal, stood the village of Kampenbr?ck, consisting of several scattered houses with gardens, ditches, and hedges. In front and to the left, or western, side of Kampenbr?ck was a morass covered by a straggling wood of sparse and stunted trees, through which were cut paths to a bridge that connected the village with the abbey on the other side of the canal. Across this bridge lay the Prince's only way to penetrate into the French camp; and Castries had been careful to guard the passage by posting no less than two thousand irregular troops in and about the abbey. The only possible chance for the Prince lay in an attack by surprise.

Waiting until the 15th to collect his troops, the Prince marched from before Wesel in dead silence at one hour before midnight. The force was disposed in five divisions. The Fifteenth Light Dragoons, Royal and Inniskilling Dragoons, and Prussian hussars formed the advanced guard; then came the support, of two[516] battalions of Highlanders and as many of British grenadiers; then the main body of the Twentieth and Twenty-fifth British Foot, with eight Hanoverian battalions, all under command of General Waldegrave; then the reserve, of the Eleventh, Twenty-third, Thirty-third and Fifty-first British Foot, with three German battalions, under General Howard; then a rear-guard of the Tenth British Dragoons and ten German squadrons.
Oct. 16.

At three o'clock on the morning of the 16th the advanced parties of the Allies come upon the outposts of the French irregulars, a mile and a half beyond Kloster Kampen. Despite the strict orders of the Prince one or two shots were fired, but fortunately without alarming the enemy; and the Allies pursued their march unmolested to the bridge, thus cutting off the irregulars in the abbey from the French main body. These isolated troops were then attacked and utterly dispersed; and while the musketry was still crackling loud round the abbey's walls the Prince stealing silently on with the British grenadiers penetrated into the wood and into the village of Kampenbr?ck, so quietly and yet so swiftly that he was in possession before the enemy were aware of his presence. The French in camp had, however, been alarmed by the firing, and some of the principal officers had turned the men out and gone forward to the wood to reconnoitre. One of these, the Chevalier d'Assas, on his way to visit the picquets of his regiment, suddenly found himself among the British grenadiers, but distinguishing no one but the Prince in the darkness advanced towards him with the words, "Sir, you are my prisoner." "On the contrary," answered the Prince, "you are mine, for these are my grenadiers"; and as he spoke the men closed round d'Assas with bayonets fixed. "Auvergne, Auvergne, the enemy is on us,"[368] shouted d'Assas to his regiment without a moment's hesitation at the top of his voice; and before the words were out of his mouth a dozen bayonets pierced through his body and laid him dead on[517] the ground. None the less the devotion of the gallant man sufficed to save the French army. Regiment Auvergne came down at once to d'Assas' call; Castries hastily brought down two more battalions to support it; and three more battalions arrived directly after to protect their flank. The supports of the Allies came up in their turn; and the fight swayed furiously backward and forward until daylight, when the French brought up additional battalions from their right. The reserves of the Allies were promptly and frequently summoned, but through some mistake were not to be found. Still the little force of British and Hanoverians fought desperately on, until the Prince himself fell wounded from his horse; and then, their ammunition being exhausted, they yielded to superior numbers in front and flank and suddenly gave way. The French broke their ranks with loud cries of exultation for the pursuit, when the Fifteenth Light Dragoons swooped down upon them, charging home as their custom is, broke up two battalions completely, and drove the rest flying back in confusion upon their comrades. The French cavalry now came forward in overwhelming numbers and handled the British squadrons very roughly; but the charge of the Fifteenth had given the infantry time to rally, and to make their retreat in good order. The reserve appeared at Kloster Kampen in time to cover the retiring troops, and by noon the fight of Kloster Kampen was over.

The loss of the Allies amounted to nearly twelve hundred killed and wounded and sixteen hundred prisoners, in addition to which one gun and one British colour were captured. That of the French was as heavy and heavier, amounting to twenty-seven hundred killed and wounded and three hundred prisoners. The struggle was unusually stubborn and murderous, and the fire of the British was so rapid and deadly that three French brigades were almost wiped out of existence.[369] Yet it is said that after this action the Hereditary Prince[518] would never take British troops under his command again.[370] He admitted that General Waldegrave did wonders in the combat,[371] but he complained of the behaviour of his troops, though Waldegrave bore witness that not a man retired until his ammunition was exhausted. It may have been that the Prince was irritated by the failure of the reserve to arrive when it was wanted; but no blame is imputed to any one for this mischance, which appears to have been due simply to bad luck. Mauvillon, who is always very frank in his criticism of the British, says flatly that he does not believe in their misconduct on this occasion; and as the only extant list of casualties, though very far from complete, shows that they lost five hundred killed and wounded, it should seem that the Prince's strictures were ill deserved. It was hard, too, that he should have forgotten all that they had done for him at Emsdorff and at Warburg, to say nothing of the fact that the heroic charge of the Fifteenth probably saved his force from total destruction at Kloster Kampen itself. Whether he himself should have hazarded such an action against odds of two to one, with the French bringing up reinforcements from the west, is another question; for it was not as though the fall of Wesel were likely to ensue speedily even if Castries were beaten, while the diversion had proved to be no diversion whatever. On the other hand, the destruction of his corps, or of the best part of it, would have been a severe blow to Ferdinand. Nevertheless the stake, if he should win it, was worth winning; though if he could have foreseen what was immediately before him he would probably have hesitated to play so desperate a game.
October.

After the action he retreated northward to Büderich, to find that the bridge which he had thrown over the Rhine had been swept away by floods, and that he could go no farther. His situation was now desperate, [519]for not only was his retreat cut off, but his ammunition was exhausted. Still, wounded though he was, he faced his difficulties with his usual energy, entrenched himself among his waggons, reconstructed his bridge, and on the 18th crossed the river unmolested, picking up the troops from before Wesel on the eastern bank. Castries followed him as he retreated eastward, thereby forcing him to remain in Westphalia for the protection of Lippstadt and Münster, though the Prince none the less made shift to detach a portion of his force to the assistance of Ferdinand.
Aug. 15 and
Nov. 3.

For to Ferdinand also the failure before Wesel was a serious matter. Any further stroke upon the French was impossible; and the utmost for which he could hope was to drive them out of Hesse and to hold Westphalia safe. He made an effort to expel the French from G?ttingen, but without success; and at last, driven to desperation by three months of continuous rain, he cantoned a force in winter-quarters before the town and closed the campaign, leaving the French in possession of Hesse, of the Principality of G?ttingen, and of the defiles of Münden, which gave them free ingress into Hanover and Brunswick. His own headquarters were fixed at Warburg; those of the French at Cassel. Despite all his efforts, superior numbers had told heavily against him; and though he had fired a feu de joie for the capture of Montreal, he probably found less consolation in this than in the victories of his master Frederick at Leignitz and Torgau, and in the expulsion of his enemies' forces from Saxony.
CHAPTER X
Meanwhile on the 20th of November Parliament had met to hear his first speech from a new king. For on the 25th of October, just before the coming of the news of Kloster Kampen, King George the Second had died suddenly, having lived to see the glories of Queen Anne's reign brought back by Pitt, and the fame of Blenheim and Oudenarde revived not only by Minden and Warburg but by Wandewash and Quebec. George the Third struck a new and strange note in his speech from the throne. "Born and educated in England," he said—and the words were of his own insertion—"I glory in the name of Briton"; and the phrase fell pleasantly on ears that did not love the sound of Hanover; though what this sudden outburst of insular patriotism on the King's part might portend to his German allies was not yet revealed. The estimates for the Army were passed with little difficulty, though the Establishment showed a considerable increase. The new regiments that appeared on the list, indeed, were few, for a system had been initiated of raising an indefinite number of independent companies; but these were gradually combined into regiments, and before the campaign opened there was already a corps numbered the hundredth of the Line.[372] The total number of men voted on the British Establishment was one hundred[521] and four thousand; besides which the embodied militia was increased from eighteen to twenty-seven thousand, making, together with the troops on the Irish Establishment, over one hundred and forty thousand men raised in the British possessions alone. Adding the mercenary forces of Hanover, Hesse, and Brunswick, the number of soldiers in British pay fell little short of two hundred thousand.
1761.

Yet for the present no considerable reinforcement was despatched to Ferdinand. A battalion from each regiment of Guards had indeed been sent to him late in the past campaign, together with the usual drafts to fill up vacancies. But Pitt had another enterprise in hand as a diversion in Ferdinand's favour. A scheme of the kind had indeed been on the point of execution in the autumn of 1760; and eight thousand men had actually been embarked for a secret expedition under General Kingsley, but had been returned to the shore on receipt of the news of Kloster Kampen.[373] In January, however, the same regiments were again warned for service under Major-General Hodgson,[374] and on the 29th of March they sailed from Spithead under convoy of ten ships of the line, besides smaller vessels, under Admiral Keppel, for their unknown destination.[375]
April.
April 22.

On the 7th of April the fleet anchored off the island of Belleisle on the French coast, and on the following day sailed round it looking for an undefended point. Finally Port La Maria on the south-eastern side was selected; the troops were shifted into flat-bottomed boats, and an attempt was made to storm some French entrenchments which covered the landing-place. But the ground was so steep that only sixty men of the [522]Thirty-seventh succeeded in making their way to the top of the heights above the sea, and these after a gallant attempt to hold their ground were overpowered by superior numbers. The attempt was therefore abandoned, and the troops were re-embarked, having lost about five hundred men, killed, wounded, and taken. The island was in fact so strong by nature, and so skilfully fortified by art, that Keppel despaired of a successful descent.[376] The commanders, however, decided that, if feint attacks were made on La Maria and Sauzon some footing might be obtained by ascending the rocks between them, which being judged inaccessible had been left undefended. The attempt was accordingly made on the 22nd and was brilliantly successful. The grenadier-company of the Nineteenth contrived to scramble up the rocks and to hold its own on the summit until reinforced, when the men charged with the bayonet, drove back the enemy and captured three guns. The French then retired into the fortress of Palais and proceeded to strengthen the defences; while Hodgson, to his infinite mortification, was obliged to lie idle for a fortnight, being unable to land his heavy artillery owing to continual gales. At length on the 2nd of May ground was broken, and on the 13th the entrenchments were carried by storm. The French thereupon retired into the citadel, which after a most gallant defence was compelled on the 7th of June to surrender. The losses of the British throughout the whole of the operations were about seven hundred killed and wounded. Thus Belleisle was secured as a place of refreshment for the fleet while engaged in the weary work of blockading the French coast.
Feb.

Any hopes that might have been built on the value of this expedition as a help to Ferdinand were very speedily dissipated. Ferdinand himself had sought, while it was yet mid-winter, to make good the losses of the past campaign by a bold stroke for the recapture of Hesse. Moving out of his winter-quarters on the 11th[523] of February he distributed his army into three columns. The left or eastern column, under Sp?rcke, was designed to march to the Werra and Unstrut, and to join with a detachment of Prussians in an attack upon the Saxons in that quarter; the main or central army, under Ferdinand himself, was to march to the Eder; and the right or westward column, which was composed of the troops cantoned in Westphalia under the Hereditary Prince, was to advance on Fritzlar, while a separate corps was detached to attempt the capture of Marburg.
March 20.
March 21.
March.

Sp?rcke for his part did his work well and gained a brilliant little victory at Langensalza; but the rest of the scheme went to wreck. Broglie on learning of Ferdinand's movements left a garrison in Cassel and retreated first to Hersfeld, behind the Eder, and finally to the Main. But meanwhile the Hereditary Prince had been delayed for two invaluable days by unexpected resistance at Fritzlar; and Ferdinand, though he had driven the enemy for the moment from Hesse, had left Cassel, Ziegenhain, and Marburg, invested indeed but untaken, behind him. He dared not linger to master these places one after another, for the whole country was laid waste, and the strain of hauling all supplies from the Weser was intolerable. The road from Beverungen to the central column of the army was paved with dead horses, the corpses tracing the whole line of the advance. He was therefore obliged to hasten on to a district where supplies were still obtainable, trusting that good fortune would throw the strong places into his hands before it was too late. But it was not to be. Broglie quickly concentrated his troops on the Main, summoned twelve thousand men from the Lower Rhine and advanced northward to Giessen; whereupon Ferdinand, who had penetrated as far south as the Ohm, was compelled to fall back to the Eder. On the following day the Hereditary Prince was attacked by superior numbers at Grünberg and compelled to retreat with loss of two thousand prisoners; and this misfortune neutralised all the advantages so[524] far gained by the enterprise. Ferdinand, therefore, raised the siege of Cassel and fell back with all speed by forced marches; for Broglie had now eighty thousand troops against his own twenty thousand. Arrived at his old position to north of the Diemel he dispersed his troops once more into winter-quarters. His stroke had failed; and the operations are interesting chiefly as exemplifying the futility, in those days of slow communication, of an advance into an enemy's country, unless at least one fortress were first captured as a place of arms. It is easier to understand the reason for the laborious sieges of Marlborough and Wellington when it is observed that Ferdinand, though he drove the French before him from end to end of Hesse in a few weeks, was obliged to abandon the whole of it and to retreat because he had left Cassel uncaptured in his rear.

The Allies had suffered so terribly from hardship and exposure during this winter's expedition that it was two months before they were again fit to take the field;[377] and the French, partly from the same cause, partly owing to the magnitude of their preparations, needed little less time than they. The Court of Versailles had, in fact, resolved to make a gigantic effort and to close the war forthwith by employment of an overwhelming force. The army of the Rhine was raised to one hundred thousand men, under the Prince of Soubise, and that of the Main to sixty thousand men under Broglie. Soubise was to advance from the Rhine against Ferdinand early in May; thus forcing the Prince either to abandon Westphalia, together with Münster and Lippstadt, in order to gain time for recuperation of his army, or to march with his troops, still weakened and exhausted by the winter's campaign, to fight him. His task in fact was simply to keep Ferdinand's army in motion until Broglie's troops were refreshed, and ready to advance either into Hanover or to Hameln on the[525] Weser. When Broglie thus occupied the attention of Ferdinand, Soubise would find himself with a free hand in a free field. The weak point of the plan was that the two French armies were to act independently, and that the stronger of them was entrusted to Soubise, an incompetent commander but a favourite with Madame de Pompadour. But in any case the outlook for Ferdinand was formidable, since at the very most he could muster but ninety-three thousand men against one hundred and sixty thousand of the French.
April.
May 14.

Soubise duly arrived at Frankfort on the 13th of April and summoned Broglie to discuss matters with him. Then, instead of taking the field early in May, he remained motionless behind the Rhine on various pretexts until the beginning of June. Further, he determined, contrary to the advice given to him at Versailles, to pursue operations to the south of the Lippe, and between that river and the Ruhr, in order to effect a junction with Broglie. The motives that may have dictated this resolution are unknown; but it was conjectured that he shrank from engaging so formidable an adversary as Ferdinand without a colleague to share the risk and responsibility. Meanwhile Ferdinand, selecting the least exhausted of his troops, sent a corps under the Hereditary Prince to Nottuln, a little to the west of Münster, to watch Soubise, and by great exertions contrived within ten weeks to render both his army and his transport fit to take the field. Soubise's army was known to be encumbered by a vast train of baggage; one troop of Horse Guards, for instance, with a strength of one hundred and forty men, travelling with no fewer than twelve hundred horses attached to it. So all the forage about Münster was destroyed, the inhabitants and their herds being provided for by the King's commissaries, and every step was taken to embarrass the French in their advance to the east.
June.
July 1-2.
July 3.
July 4.
July 6.

At length on the 13th of June Soubise crossed the Rhine at Wesel, and arrived ten days later at Unna, a[526] few miles to eastward of Dortmund, where he entrenched himself, with his front to the east. Ferdinand thereupon concentrated his army on the 19th at Paderborn, leaving twenty thousand men under Sp?rcke on the Diemel to watch Broglie, and a smaller corps of observation before G?ttingen. On the 20th he marched westward, and on the 28th encamped over against Soubise, where he was joined by the corps of the Hereditary Prince. Finding that the French position was too formidable to be attacked, he determined on a bold stroke, made a forced march of thirty hours round Soubise's left flank by Camen, and appeared suddenly at Dortmund full in his rear and across his line of communication. The movement left Soubise free to unite with Broglie; but this was rather an advantage than otherwise to Ferdinand, since the two commanders being on bad terms might neutralise each other, whereas each of them independently was at the head of a stronger army than Ferdinand's. On the 4th of July Ferdinand advanced against the rear of Soubise's camp; whereupon the French General at once moved on, always with the Allies close at his heels, to Soest, where Broglie came to concert with him the junction of the two armies.
July 10.
July.

Broglie himself had on the 29th of June advanced to the Diemel and obliged Sp?rcke to abandon Warburg and to retreat, not without loss of part of his artillery. He had then turned westward upon Paderborn, which he had occupied, and thence to Soest, where his army joined that of Soubise on the 10th of July. The joint strength of the two armies at Soest, after deducting the detachments made from both of them, was just about one hundred thousand men. Ferdinand's force, after the arrival of Sp?rcke, who had made his way to him from the Diemel with all haste, amounted to no more than sixty thousand men. Even with such odds against him, however, Ferdinand stood firm, refusing to cross to the north bank of the Lippe and abandon Lippstadt, as the French commanders had hoped. He[527] was determined that they should fight him for Lippstadt; and they, knowing their adversary, were not too eager to hazard the venture.

After sundry small changes and shiftings of position between the 7th and 11th of July Ferdinand made the following dispositions. General von Sp?rcke with about eight thousand men was left on the north bank of the Lippe at Hersfeld, to watch Prince Xavier of Saxony, who lay with a corps in the vicinity of Paderborn. The main army was encamped on the south bank of the Lippe, with its left resting on the river; from whence the left wing extended to the village of Kirchdünckern on the Ase, a brook impassable except by bridges. Vellinghausen, Ferdinand's headquarters, lay midway between the Ase and the Lippe at the foot of a declivity called the Dünckerberg. From the Lippe to Vellinghausen the ground was occupied by Wutgenau's corps, of seven battalions and five squadrons, all of them German troops. From Vellinghausen to Kirchdünckern the heights were held by Granby's corps, consisting of two battalions of British grenadiers, the Fifth, Twelfth, Twenty-fourth and Thirty-seventh Foot under Brigadier Sandford, Keith's and Campbell's Highlanders, six foreign battalions, the Greys, Seventh and Eleventh Dragoons in one brigade under General Harvey, and eight foreign squadrons, together with a regiment of Hanoverian artillery. From the Ase the position was prolonged to the right along a similar line of heights by the villages of Sud Dünckern and Wambeln to the rear of Werle at Budberg, the whole of the front being covered by a marshy brook called the Salzbach. From the Ase to Wambeln the ground was occupied by Anhalt's corps of ten German battalions and the First, Sixth, and Tenth British Dragoons; to the right of Anhalt stood Conway's corps, of three battalions of British Guards with their grenadiers massed into a fourth battalion, Townsend's brigade of the Eighth, Twentieth, Twenty-fifth, and Fiftieth Foot, and the First, Third, and Seventh Dragoon Guards; to[528] the right of Conway stood Howard's corps, consisting of Cavendish's brigade of the Eleventh, Twenty-fifth, Twenty-third, and Fifty-first Foot, two German battalions, the British light batteries and two brigades of Hessian artillery; and finally the extreme right from Wambeln to Hilbeck was held by the Hereditary Prince's corps of twenty-five battalions and twenty-four squadrons of Germans. The Salzbach was an obstacle well-nigh insuperable, the only passage by which the French could cross it being by the village of Scheidingen, opposite to Conway's corps, where an old redoubt, dating from the days of Turenne, still remained to bar the way. The weak point of the position was its right flank which, though more or less protected by marshy ground, lay practically in the air, and could have been turned with little difficulty.
July 15.

The plan of the French commanders, though it took no advantage of this defect, was not ill conceived. Broglie was to attack the corps of Wutgenau and Granby, but particularly that of Granby between the Lippe and the Ase, with his whole force; while Soubise kept the rest of the Allies distracted by an attack on Scheidingen, at the same time sending a cloud of light troops round the right flank of the Allies to Hamm, five miles in their rear, so as to create confusion and embarrass their retreat. The attack was fixed for the 13th but was deferred for two days; and it was not until the evening of the 15th that Ferdinand was apprised of the advance of the French in force against his left. For some reason Wutgenau's corps had been encamped a thousand yards in rear of its position in the line of battle; and although it had received orders at noon, in consequence of suspicious movements by the French, to strike tents and march forward, yet this order had been cancelled. Thus Broglie's attack came upon it as a complete surprise. Granby's corps had only just time to seize its arms and turn out, leaving the tents standing; the Highlanders indeed hardly emerging from their tents before the French guns opened fire[529] on them. Yet there was no confusion, and Granby's dispositions were so good that he was able to hold his own till Wutgenau's troops came up. The two corps then made a fine defence until darkness put an end to the combat; but none the less the French had succeeded in taking Nordel, a village on Granby's right front, and had made good their footing in Vellinghausen.

Meanwhile Soubise had not yet moved forward against Scheidingen. The time fixed by the Marshals for their decisive attack has been, in fact, the early hours of the 16th, so that Broglie's advance had been premature. He excused himself by saying that he had intended only to drive in the outposts of the Allies, but that he had been encouraged by his unexpected success to bring forward more troops to hold the ground that he had gained, and that he had accordingly appealed to Soubise to hasten his movements likewise. Had Broglie really pushed his attack home he would probably have succeeded, for the Allies were too weak to stop him and were, moreover, short of ammunition. But the Marshal was too timid a man to take responsibility on his own shoulders; so instead of making a bold attempt to carry the Dünckerberg, which if successful must have forced Ferdinand to retreat, he stopped short at Vellinghausen, leaving the Allies in their position unmoved.
July 16.

The night passed uneasily in the Allied camp. Between the Lippe and the Ase skirmishing never ceased. The road to Hamm was full of waggons going and returning with loads of ammunition; Anhalt's corps, together with all the British of Howard's corps, was streaming across the Ase to reinforce Granby; and Conway's and the Hereditary Prince's were extending themselves leftward to cover the ground thus left vacant. For Ferdinand knew Broglie to be his most dangerous antagonist, and was determined to stop him at all costs by fresh troops. Broglie, on his side, was equally busy replacing the battalions that had already been engaged; and the dawn was no sooner come than his columns deployed and attacked in earnest.[530] The ground was so much broken up by hedges and ditches that in many places the troops engaged, though no more than one hundred and fifty yards apart, were unable to see each other, and fired furiously, not without destructive effect, at every puff of smoke that betrayed an enemy's presence. From four until eight o'clock this fusillade continued, neither side gaining or losing an inch of ground, until at last it slackened from the sheer exhaustion of the men, after more than twelve hours of intermittent action.

Meanwhile Broglie looked anxiously for Soubise's demonstration against the Allied centre and right, but he looked in vain. Soubise, though he did indeed bring forward troops against Scheidingen, made but a faint attack, often renewed with unchangeable feebleness and as often repulsed. Then after half an hour's respite, the fire opened again on the Allied left. Sp?rcke had detached six battalions to Wutgenau from Hersfeld; and the arrival of fresh troops infused new life into the engagement. Broglie too showed symptoms of reviving energy, for two French batteries were observed in motion towards a height opposite the Dünckerberg, from which they might have made havoc of Granby's corps. Ferdinand ordered that the height should be carried at all costs; and Maxwell's grenadiers, Keith's and Campbell's Highlanders and four foreign battalions advanced forthwith to storm it. The French were so much exhausted that they appear hardly to have awaited the attack. They broke and fled precipitately, abandoning their dead, their wounded, and several guns. Maxwell's grenadiers alone made four battalions prisoners; and Broglie, disheartened by his failure and by the apathy of Soubise, gave the word to retreat. The ground was too much broken for the action of cavalry; so he was able to draw off his troops with little loss indeed, but not without shame and disgrace.
July.

Thus ended the battle of Vellinghausen, one of the feeblest ever fought by the French army. The losses were not great on either side for the numbers engaged.[531] Those of the French were reckoned at from five to six thousand men, besides eight colours and nineteen guns; those of the Allies did not reach the figure of sixteen hundred men, of whom over nine-tenths belonged to the corps to the north of the Ase. The brunt of the fighting fell of course on Granby's troops; but the casualties of the British with him little exceeded four hundred men, while those of the British in other parts of the field did not amount to fifty. The victory was in fact trifling except for its moral effects; but these were sufficient. The French were humbled at the failure of a hundred thousand men against fifty thousand; and Broglie and Soubise, who had left the camp with embraces, returned to it sworn enemies, each bitterly reproaching the other for the loss of the battle. Lastly, Broglie, who possessed some military talent and had hitherto been anxious to bring his enemy to action, came to the conclusion that a general engagement with Ferdinand was a thing henceforth not to be courted but to be shunned.
July 27.
August.
Aug. 16.
Aug. 22.
Aug. 28.

The remainder of the campaign is reckoned to be the finest example of Ferdinand's skill as a general; but it is impossible in this place to sketch it in more than the faintest outline. After the action, Soubise made up Broglie's army to forty thousand men, and therewith the two commanders separated; Broglie marching on Paderborn for operations against Hanover and Hesse, while Soubise made for Wesel to threaten Westphalia. The Hereditary Prince was detached to follow Soubise and to harass his rear-guard, while Ferdinand marched some thirty miles eastward to Büren, to be ready to move into Hesse and threaten Broglie's communications with Frankfort. At the same time Granby's corps was sent forward to Stadtberg, to drive back a French corps under Stainville, which covered Hesse at the line of the Diemel. At Büren Ferdinand remained, with his eye always on Lippstadt, until the 10th of August; when, Stainville having been forced back to Cassel and Soubise to the Rhine, both at a safe distance from the precious[532] fortress on the Lippe, he marched away to keep watch over Broglie's army. That officer had used his time to advance to H?xter, aiming at the capture of Hameln and the mastery of the line of the Weser, and had detached a corps under Prince Xavier of Saxony into the Principality of G?ttingen. Ferdinand by swift marches brought his army to northward of Broglie's at Reilenkirchen, thus heading him back from Hameln; while a separate corps, which he had sent across the Weser, attacked the French detachments about G?ttingen. The Hereditary Prince, finding nothing to fear from Soubise, also returned from the Rhine to threaten Broglie from the south. The Marshal thereupon crossed the Weser; and Ferdinand, for all his unwillingness to move to the east bank of the river, perforce followed him; carefully avoiding an engagement, however, lest Soubise should seize the opportunity to march on Lippstadt. Soubise, finding himself unwatched, moved eastward again towards Hanover; whereupon the Hereditary Prince flew back to look after him, and Ferdinand retiring with the rest of the army to the Diemel, advanced against Broglie's communications with Marburg and Frankfort. This movement brought Broglie back hurriedly to Cassel; whereupon Ferdinand retired quietly to Geismar on the Diemel, having accomplished his object of occupying Broglie's attention for weeks and of rendering his movements absolutely purposeless, without the risk of an action.
Sept. 20.

It was a whole fortnight before Broglie ventured to return to the east side of the Weser, having meanwhile reinforced Stainville's army for the protection of Hesse, and furnished him with most careful instructions for his guidance. No sooner was the Marshal's back turned, than Ferdinand made a sudden dash upon Stainville just to south of the Diemel, and though he failed to inflict any great damage on him, forced him to retire to Cassel and brought Broglie back in all haste from Hanover. Meanwhile the lethargic Soubise had made a diversion towards the sea, had actually taken Emden, and was[533] threatening Bremen. The Hereditary Prince was as usual despatched to hunt him back to the Rhine; and Ferdinand's communications with Holland were restored.
October 10.

There still remained some weeks, however, before the campaign could be closed; and Broglie, despite all Ferdinand's activity, was strong enough to detach a corps under Prince Xavier into Brunswick, which captured Wolfenbüttel and bade fair to capture Brunswick itself. The loss of these two fortresses would have been serious, since the French could have turned them into bases of operations for the next campaign, when Ferdinand would have found it impossible to attend both to Brunswick and to Lippstadt. He therefore hastened northward at once from the Diemel to save his brother's capital; whereupon Prince Xavier, though Ferdinand had travelled no further than Hameln on his way, at once withdrew from before Brunswick and evacuated Wolfenbüttel. Much relieved at the news of this deliverance, Ferdinand halted at Hameln until November, when Soubise went into winter-quarters. He then made a final effort to drive Broglie from the eastern bank of the Weser, but succeeded only in thrusting him back for a short distance from his northernmost post at Einbeck. Broglie then went into winter-quarters along the Leine from G?ttingen to Nordheim, and the Allies followed his example; their chain of posts running from Münster along the line of the Lippe and Diemel, and eastward through the Sollinger Forest to Ferdinand's headquarters at Hildesheim.

So ended this most arduous campaign, in which, though overmatched by two to one, Ferdinand had won a victory on the battlefield and lost little or no territory. The exertion demanded from his troops by incessant and severe marches told heavily upon their efficiency, and the more so since many of the men had been already much weakened by the winter's campaign in Hesse. The waste of the army was in fact appalling, amounting to no fewer than five-and-twenty thousand out of ninety-five thousand men. Of these some few[534] had been killed in action, considerably more had deserted, still more had been invalided, and fully one-half had died of hardship and disease. It was only at such a price that Ferdinand could make one army do the work of two; and the task would have been beyond even his ability had not one of the commanders matched against him been utterly incompetent, and the other hampered by constant interference from Versailles. The extreme laxity of discipline among the French also helped him not a little, and served to heighten the moral superiority of his own troops. But, making all such allowance in his favour, the campaign remains memorable in the annals of war for the consummate skill with which Ferdinand kept two armies, jointly of double his strength, continually in motion for six months, without permitting them to reap the slightest advantage from their operations.
CHAPTER XI
Jan. 4.

Before the campaign closed in Germany, the great Minister who had revealed to England for the first time the plenitude of her strength in arms, and had turned that strength to such mighty enterprises, was fallen from power. The accession of the new King had brought with it a steady increase in the ascendency of John, Earl of Bute, long a trusted member of his household and now his chief adviser and friend. Blameless in private life and by no means lacking in culture or accomplishments, Bute was both in council and debate a man of distressing mediocrity. Possessing neither sense of the ridiculous nor knowledge of his own limitations, and exalted by mere accident to a position of great influence, he interpreted the caprice of fortune as the reward of merit and aimed at once at the highest office. He was, in fact, one of the many men who, finding it no great exertion to climb up the winding stairs of a cathedral tower, press on, ducking, stooping, and crawling to the top, to find when they reach it that they dare not look down. Being weak as well as ambitious he was compelled to fall back on intrigue in default of ability to help him upward, and having succeeded in displacing Lord Holderness as Secretary of State in March 1761, he turned next to the ousting of Pitt himself. The opportunity soon came. The French Court, weary of the war, approached Pitt with proposals for peace. Resolved, as he said, that no Peace of Utrecht should again sully the annals of England, Pitt not only made large demands for the[536] benefit of Britain, but insisted that even a separate peace between Britain and France should not deter King George from giving aid to the King of Prussia. Curiously enough the negotiation was broken off owing precisely to one of the most disgraceful concessions made at the Peace of Utrecht. The Bourbon King of Spain, Charles the Third, who had succeeded to the throne in 1759, cultivated the friendship of the Bourbon King of France; and the result was a secret treaty of alliance between them, which presently became famous as the Family Compact. Pitt no sooner obtained an inkling of this agreement than he put an end to negotiations with France, and advocated immediate declaration of war against Spain. As shall presently be seen, he made his preparations, which were effective enough; but above all he desired to strike at Spain while she was still unready for war. The Cabinet, however, was alarmed at so bold a measure, being too blind to see that in such a case aggression is the truest precaution. Many of the ministry had only with difficulty been persuaded to second Pitt in the lofty language which he had held towards France; and Bute, who abhorred all interference with affairs on the Continent, was a leader among the dissentients. Lord Temple alone stood by his great chief, so Pitt, unable to prevail, resigned, and his solitary supporter with him. All power passed into the hands of Bute; and within three months Spain, having gained the time that she needed for her military preparations, assumed so offensive a tone that Bute, as Pitt had predicted, was to his huge vexation obliged to declare war against her himself. Such is the fashion in which politicians make difficulties for generals.
1761.
June.

Fortunately the designs of Pitt for the new year against both France and Spain were fully matured, and the means of executing them were ready to hand. In June 1761 two new regiments[378] had been either raised or formed out of existing independent companies,[537] and thirteen more had been added in August and October,[379] thus bringing the number of regiments of the Line up to one hundred and fifteen. The total number of men voted by Parliament for 1762 was little short of one hundred and fifty thousand men, making with the German mercenaries a total of two hundred and fifteen thousand men in British pay. There were thus men in abundance for any enterprise; and the sphere of operations had been marked out by Pitt. The conquest of Canada having been completed by the end of 1760, there was no object in leaving a large number of troops unemployed in America; and as early as in January 1761 Pitt had written to Amherst that some of them would be required in the autumn for the conquest of Dominica, St. Lucia, and Martinique. Amherst was therefore instructed to send two thousand men forthwith to Guadeloupe; to concert with the Governor the means of taking the two first of the islands mentioned; and to despatch six thousand more men rather later in the year for the capture of Martinique.[380] Accordingly in the first days of June 1761 transports from America began to drop singly into Guadeloupe, the fleet having been dispersed by a storm. By the 3rd of June four ships had arrived, together with Lord Rollo, who had been appointed by Amherst to take the command; and on the following day the whole of these, together with one ship more from Guadeloupe itself, made sail under [538]escort of Sir J. Douglas's squadron to beat back against the trade-wind to Dominica.[381] By noon of the 6th they had arrived before Roseau, where the inhabitants were summoned to surrender. The French replied by manning their batteries and other defences, which included four separate lines of entrenchments, ranged one above another. Rollo landed his men and entered the town; when reflecting that the enemy might be reinforced in the night he resolved, though it was already late, to storm the entrenchments forthwith. He attacked accordingly, and drove out the French in confusion with trifling loss to himself. The French commander and his second being both taken prisoners, no further resistance was made; and on the following day Dominica swore allegiance to King George.

Therewith the operations in the West Indies for the time ceased, though the preparations continued always; but, notwithstanding all possible secrecy, the French in Martinique got wind of the intended attack on that island, and took measures for their defence. Their force was not wholly contemptible in so mountainous a country, for it included twelve hundred regular troops, seven thousand local militia, and four thousand hired privateersmen.[382] The neighbouring English islands did what they could to help the mother country. Antigua sent negroes and part of her old garrison, the Thirty-eighth Foot, which had never left her since Queen Anne's day; and Barbados raised five hundred negroes and as many white men, which were the more acceptable since that island was, as usual, the rendezvous for the expedition.[383] The first troops to arrive in Carlisle Bay were a detachment from Belleisle,[384] where, as well as in America, regiments had been lying idle; and on [539]Christmas Eve appeared the main army from America under command of General Monckton. This was made up of eleven different regiments,[385] besides a few companies of American rangers. In all, the force entrusted to Monckton must have amounted to fully eight thousand men.
1762.
January.
Jan. 24.

On the 5th of January the transports weighed anchor and sailed away to leeward, under escort of Admiral Rodney's fleet, past the Pitons of St. Lucia, past the port of Castries and the bay which Rodney was twenty years later to make famous, and on the 7th anchored in St. Ann's Bay, just round the southern extremity of Martinique, on the western side. Two brigades were then landed in the Anse d'Arlet, a bay farther up the western coast, from which they marched to the south of the bay that forms the harbour of Fort Royal, but, finding the road impracticable for transport of cannon, were re-embarked. On the 16th the entire army was landed without loss of a man at Case Navire, a little to the north of Negro Point. This Point forms the northern headland of the harbour, and had at its foot a road leading due east over the mountains to the capital town of Fort Royal,[386] some three miles away. The way was blocked by deep gullies and ravines; while the French had erected redoubts at every point of vantage, as well as batteries on a hill beyond, named Morne Tortenson. Monckton was thus compelled to erect batteries to silence the French guns before he could advance farther. By the 24th this work was complete, and at daybreak a general attack was made under the fire of the batteries upon the French defences on Morne Tortenson, a party being at the same time detached to turn the enemy's right flank. The turning movement was completely successful; and the redoubts by the sea, on the enemy's left, having been carried, the troops stormed post after post, until at nine o'clock [540]they were in possession not only of the detached redoubts but of the entire position of Morne Tortenson, with its guns and entrenchments. The French retired in great confusion, some to Fort Royal and some to Morne Grenier, a still higher hill to the north of Morne Tortenson. Simultaneously two brigades under Brigadiers Haviland and Walsh attacked other French posts to the north of Morne Tortenson and, after great difficulty owing to the steepness of the ground, succeeded in driving them also back to Morne Grenier. The losses of the British in this action amounted to thirty-three officers and three hundred and fifty men killed and wounded.
Jan. 25.

On the following day Monckton, being now within range, began to throw up batteries against the citadel of Fort Royal, but finding himself much annoyed by the French batteries on Morne Grenier to his left, decided that these must first be silenced. Fortunately the enemy saved him from further trouble by taking the offensive. On the afternoon of the 27th they suddenly debouched in three columns from Morne Grenier upon Haviland's brigade and the Light Infantry of the army, on Monckton's left, and with unexpected temerity ventured to attack. Unhappily for them, one column exposed its flank to the Highlanders and was almost instantly routed. The two remaining columns thereupon gave way, and the whole fled back to Morne Grenier with the British in eager chase. Such was the impetuosity of the pursuers that they plunged down into the intervening ravine after the French, and swarming up Morne Grenier "by every path, road, and passage where men could run, walk, or creep,"[387] hunted the fugitives headlong before them. Night came on, but the British officers would not stop until they had cleared every Frenchman off the hill and captured all the works and cannon. Monckton at once sent off more troops to support the pursuers, and by one o'clock in the morning of the 28th[541] Morne Grenier was securely occupied, at a cost of little more than one hundred British killed and wounded. The batteries on Morne Tortenson were then completed, new batteries were constructed within four hundred yards of the citadel, and on the 3rd of February Fort Royal surrendered. Nine days more sufficed to reduce the rest of the Island, and by the 12th of February Monckton's work was done.[388]
Feb. 26-
March 3.
June.

He at once shipped off detachments to St. Lucia, Grenada, and St. Vincent, which islands fell without resistance, and had made his arrangements for the capture of Tobago also, when he received orders requiring the presence of his troops elsewhere. War had been declared against Spain; Lord Albemarle had been appointed to command an expedition against Havanna; and Amherst had been directed not only to embark four thousand men from America to join him, but to collect eight thousand more for an attack on Louisiana.[389] The stroke meditated by Pitt three months before was now about to fall. In February 1762 Albemarle's troops embarked; and on the 5th of March he sailed with four regiments only,[390] under convoy of Admiral Sir George Pocock, to pick up the remainder of his forces in the West Indies. On the 20th of April he arrived at Barbados, and on the 25th at Fort Royal, Martinique, where he took over from Monckton what he termed "the remains of a very fine army," much reduced by sickness, which brought his force to a strength of twelve thousand men of all ranks.[391] Thence continuing his voyage he came on the 6th of June into sight of Havanna. Twelve sail of the line were [542]detached to the mouth of the harbour to block in the Spanish fleet, and on the following day the troops were landed safely a little to the northward of the city. On the 8th the army advanced westward, brushing away a force of militia that stood in its path, and on the same day arrived before the principal defences of Havanna.
July.

The entrance to the harbour of Havanna lies through a channel about two hundred yards wide, which was defended by two forts at its mouth, Fort Moro on the northern shore, and Fort Puntal opposite to it, the town also being situated on the southern shore. On the north side the ground rises rather abruptly from the harbour into a ridge known as the Cavannos, at the end of which stands Fort Moro, abutting on the open sea. A detached redoubt on these heights was carried without difficulty on the 11th of June, and, Fort Moro being found after reconnaissance to be surrounded with impenetrable brushwood, the construction of a battery was begun under cover of the trees. The work progressed slowly, for the soil was thin, while the Spanish ships in the harbour caused the besiegers no slight annoyance; so on the 13th a part of the British force was landed at Chorera, on the other side of the harbour. It was not until July that the British batteries could open a really effective fire, but by the 15th, with the help of the fleet, the enemy's guns were for the time silenced; and since trenches were impossible in ground so rocky, approaches to Fort Moro were made of gabions and cotton-bales. Still the work made little progress, for the climate had begun to tell on the troops, and little more than half of the men were fit for duty. Meanwhile the garrison of Fort Moro continued to defend itself with the greatest obstinacy, due in part to its confidence in the strength of the fort. The ditch at the point of attack was seventy feet deep from the edge of the counterscarp, except in one place, where a narrow ridge of rock made it possible to reach the wall of the fort without scaling-ladders. The only way to[543] surmount such an obstacle was to sink a shaft and blow the counterscarp into the ditch, but powder was already running short; and Albemarle grew extremely anxious over the issue of his operations.
July 30.

At length on the 27th Colonel Burton arrived from America with three thousand men of the Forty-sixth, Fifty-eighth, Gorham's rangers and Provincial troops, having lost five hundred men captured by the French on the voyage. Three days later the mine under the counterscarp was sprung with success, and Fort Moro was carried by storm with trifling loss, the Spaniards offering but little resistance. New batteries were then pushed forward along the shore at the foot of the Cavannos in order to play on the town. On the 10th of August these opened fire and on the same evening silenced Fort Puntal. The Spaniards then proposed a capitulation; and Albemarle, in consideration of their defence, granted them the honours of war, being in truth devoutly thankful to obtain possession of Havanna on any terms. His army was melting away rapidly from disease; there was indeed one brigade of four battalions which could not muster twenty men fit for duty. Albemarle hastened to ship it back to America; but Amherst could spare no more troops to replace these, having already reduced his garrison to a strength of less than four thousand men.[392] Albemarle hoped that rest and better quarters might restore the health of the army after the work of the siege was done; but on the contrary sickness increased. The losses actually caused by the enemy's fire during the siege were rather less than a thousand men killed and wounded, yet by the 18th of October the British had buried over five thousand men dead from sickness alone.[393] Nor did the transfer of the troops from Cuba to America serve to abate the plague among them; for the hapless brigade first shipped off by Albemarle lost three hundred and sixty men within a month after its return. Yet at any [544]rate Cuba was taken, and Cuba in those days was reckoned a prize little less rich than India.
June 27.
Sept. 18.

The virtual destruction of the army before Havanna put all ideas of an attack on Louisiana out of the question; and the French seized the opportunity offered by the removal of so many troops from Canada to send a small squadron and fifteen hundred troops against Newfoundland. The British garrison being only one hundred strong could offer no resistance, and the island was accordingly surrendered. Amherst, however, sent his brother with a sufficient force to recover it; and the French after a short defence capitulated as prisoners of war. As Amherst's losses did not exceed fifty men, and the captured French garrison numbered six hundred, the enemy gained little by this brief occupation of Newfoundland.

Walker & Boutall del.

To face page 544.
GUADELOUPE, 1759.
HAVANNA, 1762.
MARTINIQUE, 1762.
BELLEISLE, 1761.
Aug. 1.
Sept. 24.
Sept. 25.
Oct. 4.
Oct. 5.

But in India also there were troops lying idle since the fall of Pondicherry, which could be employed against Spain. In June Admiral Cornish received secret orders for an expedition, which he communicated to the authorities at Calcutta; and on the 1st of August the fleet sailed away to eastward with a force of one thousand Europeans, half of them of Draper's regiment, and two thousand Sepoys, under General Draper. On the 24th of September, after much delay owing to stormy weather and the extremely defective condition of Cornish's ships, the expedition entered the bay of Manila and anchored off Fort Cavita. Draper decided not to waste time in reducing the fort, so landed his troops unopposed on the following day through a heavy surf, about a mile and a half from the walls of the city. On the 26th he seized a detached fort which had been abandoned by the Spaniards within two hundred yards of the glacis, and began to construct a battery, while the ships sailed up to draw the fire of the town upon themselves. On the 30th a storeship arrived with entrenching tools, but was driven ashore on the very same evening by a gale, and there lay hard and fast. By singular good fortune, however, she had taken the[545] ground at a point where she served exactly to screen the rear of Draper's camp from the Spanish cannon, while her stores were landed with greater speed and safety than would have been possible had she remained afloat; for the gale continued for several days and forbade the passage of boats through the surf. Four days later the battery and the ships opened a furious fire, which in four hours silenced the enemy's guns, and by the next day had made a practicable breach. That night the Spaniards made a sally upon the British position with a thousand Indians, who, despite their ferocity and daring, were driven back with heavy loss; and at dawn of the 6th Draper's regiment and a party of sailors attacked the breach and carried the fortifications with little difficulty. Thereupon Manila, with the island of Luzon and its dependencies, surrendered to the British, paying four million dollars for ransom of the town and of the property contained therein. Thus fell Manila within ten days of the arrival of the British; but the siege though short was attended by much difficulty and hardship. Regular approaches were impracticable owing to the incessant rain; while the surf made the landing of troops and stores a matter of extreme labour and peril. Had not the defences of the town been for the most part feeble and the spirit of the garrison feebler still, the capture of the Philippines would have been no such simple matter. The story of Manila is, however, interesting as a comment on Wentworth's proceedings at Carthagena, justifying to the full Vernon's predilection for a direct assault at the earliest possible moment in all operations against the Spaniard.
Aug. 26.

Yet another expedition brought the British face to face with their new enemy on more familiar ground than Luzon. The Spaniards, on the pretext of Portuguese friendship with England, in April invaded Portugal, overran the country as far as the Douro from the north, and threw another force against Almeida from the east. The injured kingdom appealed to England for help; and in May orders were sent to Belleisle for the despatch[546] of four regiments of infantry,[394] together with the detachment of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons, to Portugal. Two more regiments were added from Ireland,[395] bringing the total up to about seven thousand men; and simultaneously a number of British officers were sent to take up commands in the Portuguese army. Unfortunately there was some trouble over the selection of a commander; and though the two regiments from Ireland were actually in the Tagus by the first week in May, it was not until June that the rest of the troops arrived, with the Count of Lippe-Bückeburg, the famous artillerist, as Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces, and Lord Loudoun in command of the British. The operations that followed were so trifling and of so short duration that they are unworthy of detailed mention. The Spaniards captured Almeida early in August; and Bückeburg was obliged to stand on the defensive and cover Lisbon at the line of the Tagus. Two brilliant little affairs, however, served to lift an officer, who so far was little known, into a prominence which was one day to be disastrous to himself and to England. This was Brigadier-General John Burgoyne, Colonel of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons, who with four hundred troopers of his regiment surprised the town of Valencia de Alcantara after a forced march of forty-five miles, annihilated a regiment of Spanish infantry and captured several prisoners. Not content with this, he a month later surprised the camp of another party of Spaniards at Villa Velha, on the south bank of the Tagus, dispersed it with considerable loss and captured six guns, at a cost of but one man killed and ten wounded. Such affairs, which in Ferdinand's army were so common as seldom to be noticed, made Burgoyne and the Sixteenth[396] the heroes of this short campaign; but [547]though the regiment has lived the rest of its life according to this beginning, Burgoyne's career will end for us twenty years hence at Saratoga.

From these scattered enterprises against Spain I return to Ferdinand's last campaign against the old enemy in Germany. We left the contending parties in their winter-quarters, the French army of the Rhine cantoned along the river from Cleve to Cologne; the army of the Main extending from Altenkirchen, a little to north of Treves, north-eastward to Cassel and from Cassel south-eastward to Langensalza; and the Allies, facing almost due south, stretched from Münster to Halberstadt. The whole situation was, however, changed in various respects. The French had resolved to throw their principal strength into the army of the Main, which was accordingly raised to eighty thousand men under the command of Soubise and Marshal d'Estrées; Broglie having been recalled to France. The army of the Rhine was reduced proportionately to thirty thousand men under the Prince of Condé. The total numbers of the French, though less than in previous years, still remained far superior to Ferdinand's; but, on the other hand, owing to the change of ministry in England and the reopening of negotiations by Bute, the Court of Versailles was content to hold the ground already gained without attempt at further conquest. Soubise and d'Estrées were therefore instructed to cling fast to Cassel and G?ttingen, to spare the district between the Rhine and the Lahn with a view to winter-quarters, and to destroy the forage between the Eder and the Diemel so as to prevent Ferdinand from man?uvring on their flanks and rear.

Ferdinand on his side, though still outmatched by the armies opposed to him, was relatively stronger in numbers than in any previous year, having a nominal total of ninety-five thousand men ready for the field. Winter-quarters were little disturbed during the early months of 1762, the country having been so much devastated that neither side could move, from lack of forage,[548] until the green corn was already grown high. Towards the end of May both armies began to concentrate; and Ferdinand, though much delayed by the negligence of the British Ministry in recruiting the British regiments to their right strength, determined to be first in the field.
June 18.
June 22.

Having detached a strong corps under the Hereditary Prince to watch the movements of Condé, he concentrated at Brakel, a little to the east of Paderborn, and advanced to the Diemel, where he posted the main army about Corbeke, with Granby's corps to westward of it at Warburg. Hearing at the same time that the French had left a corps under Prince Xavier on the east of the Weser to invade Hanover, he detached General Lückner with a small force across the river to keep an eye on him, sending also parties to seize the Castle of Zappaburg, some few miles to south-east, to secure communications with Lückner, and to occupy the passes leading from the south of the Diemel into Hesse. Meanwhile, on the 22nd of June, Soubise and d'Estrées moved northward from Cassel with the main body of the army as far as Gr?benstein, fixed their headquarters at Wilhelmsthal and halted. The design of this movement is unintelligible unless, as is conjectured by one writer,[397] they wished simply to amuse themselves at the castle of Wilhelmsthal; but in any case they neglected all necessary precautions. Their right flank rested on the large forest known as the Reinhardswald, and might have been rendered absolutely secure by the occupation of the Zappaburg, which commanded every road through that forest; yet they had suffered this important post to fall into Ferdinand's hands. Again, the occupation of the passes to the south of the Diemel would have secured their front; but here also they had allowed the Allies to be before them. None the less there they remained, careless of all consequences, at Wilhelmsthal; while to tempt an active enemy still farther, they stationed a corps under M. de Castries before their right front at Carlsdorff, in absolute[549] isolation from their main body. Ferdinand saw his opportunity, and though he could bring but fifty thousand men against their seventy thousand, resolved to strike at once.
June 23.

On the 23rd he recalled Lückner from across the Weser to Gottesbühren, a little to the north of the Zappaburg; and on hearing of his safe arrival at eight o'clock of the same evening, ordered the whole army to be under arms at midnight. For Lückner's corps was but one of the toils which he was preparing to draw around the unsuspecting French; and the places for the rest had already been chosen. Sp?rcke, with twelve battalions of Hanoverians and several squadrons, was to advance from the left of the main body, turn a little to the eastward upon Humme after crossing the Diemel, and, marching from thence southward, was to fall upon the right flank and rear of Castries' corps at Hombrechsen. Lückner, with six battalions and seven squadrons, was to march south-west from Gottesbühren through the Zappaburg to Udenhausen, and form up to the left of Sp?rcke on Castries' right rear. Colonel Riedesel was to push forward from the Zappaburg with a body of irregulars to Hohenkirch, on the south and left of Lückner. Meanwhile Ferdinand was to advance with the main body in five columns between Liebenau and Sielen, upon the front of the French principal army, while Granby should move south upon Zierenberg and fall upon its left flank. Supposing that every corps fulfilled its duty exactly in respect of time and place, there was good hope that the entire force of the French might be destroyed.
June 24.

Riedesel and Lückner were punctually in their appointed places at seven o'clock on the morning of the 24th. Sp?rcke's two columns, on emerging from the Reinhardswald at five o'clock, found only two vedettes before them on the heights of Hombrechsen, and ascended those heights unopposed. Then, however, not seeing Castries' corps, which, as it chanced, was hidden from them by a wood, they turned to their left[550] instead of to their right, and advanced unconsciously towards the front of the French main army. The startled vedettes galloped back to give the alarm; and Castries hurriedly calling his men to arms prepared to retreat. Pushing forward his cavalry right and left to screen his movements from Sp?rcke and from Riedesel, Castries quickly set his infantry in order for march; and having contrived to hold Sp?rcke at bay for an hour, began his retreat upon Wilhelmsthal and Cassel. Lückner came up as he had been bidden at Udenhausen, but meeting part of Sp?rcke's corps on its march in the wrong direction was fired upon by it; and in the confusion Castries was able to make his escape. Riedesel being weak in numbers could not stop him, though he fell furiously with his hussars upon the rear-guard and cut one regiment of French infantry to pieces; but except for this loss Castries retired with little damage. Thus, as so often happens, failed the most important detail of Ferdinand's elaborate combinations.

Meanwhile the French main army, startled out of its sleep by the sound of the guns about Hombrechsen, was in absolute confusion. Fortunately for the Marshals, the unlucky mistake as to Lückner's corps which had saved Castries, saved them also, since it checked Sp?rcke's advance against their right. Breaking up their camp with amazing rapidity, they formed upon the heights and hastened their baggage away towards Cassel. Lückner, awake to the miscarriage of the turning movement on the French right, now begged Kielmansegge, who commanded the left column of Sp?rcke's corps, to hasten with him to Hohenkirchen, from whence a cross way to westward would enable them to bar every road between Wilhelmsthal and Cassel. But Kielmansegge persisted in attacking the right flank of the French main body, despite the fact that it was covered by a brook running through a swampy valley; and before he could effect his passage over this obstacle, the opportunity for cutting off the French retreat was lost.

[551]

Meanwhile the troops under Ferdinand in the centre advanced against the French front, though very slowly. Sp?rcke's right column formed up on their left, but being out of its right place hampered the advance of the rest and caused lamentable delay. The French main army, having cleared its baggage out of the way, was falling back in several columns towards Wilhelmsthal, when the appearance of Granby on their left showed them the full extent of their peril. The flower of the French infantry was then collected under M. de Stainville and thrown out on the left to cover the retreat of the main body at any cost; and now the action began in earnest. Taking up a strong position in a wood Stainville prepared to do his utmost. Granby's infantry consisted of three battalions of British Guards, the British grenadiers in three battalions, and the Fifth and Eighth Foot,—some of the finest troops in the British Army—but the fight was long and stubborn. Stainville appears at first to have taken the offensive and to have fallen upon the head of Granby's columns before the whole of his troops had come up, but to have been gradually forced back as more and more of the British battalions advanced into action. French and English came to close quarters, guns were taken and retaken, and for a time two British cannon remained in the hands of the French. Granby, however, seems to have got the upper hand at last, to have surrounded the wood on two sides and to have made his dispositions for surrounding it on all sides, when Ferdinand's troops at last came up on Stainville's rear and put an end to the conflict. The gallant Frenchman's corps was nearly annihilated; fifteen hundred men were killed and wounded, nearly three thousand surrendered to the Fifth Foot alone,[398] and two battalions only made good their escape. The Allied army[552] advanced a little to the south of Wilhelmsthal; and so the action came to an end.

The losses of the Allies were small, reaching but seven hundred men killed and wounded, of which four hundred and fifty belonged to Granby's corps. The result of the action was in fact a great disappointment, due partly to the mistakes of Sp?rcke and Kielmansegge, partly to the extreme slowness of Ferdinand's advance in the centre. The main body of the Allies indeed seems to have taken five hours to move from Gr?benstein to Wilhelmsthal, a distance of little more than four miles; and the fact would appear to indicate considerable clumsiness on the part of some officer or officers in the handling of their men. Still the fact remained that forty thousand men had attacked seventy thousand and driven them back in confusion; and the French were not a little shamefaced and discouraged over their defeat.
July 1.
July 24.
Aug. 30.

On the night of the action Soubise and d'Estrées fell back across the Fulda and took up a position between Cassel and Lutternberg. Ferdinand therefore ordered Granby's corps to a position near Cassel and sent forward a detachment to clear the enemy from the north bank of the Eder; whereupon the French evacuated Fritzlar and retiring across the Fulda took post upon its eastern bank. Both armies remained in this position until the 1st of July, Ferdinand trying always to force the French back, but obliged to act with caution, since Prince Xavier's Saxons had joined the French at Lutternberg and might at any time give trouble on the eastern side of the Weser. Finally on the 24th he boldly attacked the French right at Lutternberg and completely defeated it.[399] The French thereupon fell back to Melsungen on the Fulda, while Ferdinand took up a position opposite to them on the western bank of the river and threatened their communications with Frankfort. The Marshals then summoned Condé from the Rhine, but Ferdinand continued[553] to press their communications so hard that at length they evacuated G?ttingen and retreated by Hersfeld and Fulda to Vilbel, a little to the north of Frankfort; Ferdinand marching parallel with them on their western flank to the Nidda, in the hope, which was disappointed, of preventing their junction with Condé. So far he had done well, for he had for the present driven the French armies from Hesse.
Sept. 7.
Sept. 15.

Meanwhile Condé, obedient to orders, had marched towards Frankfort, joining Soubise a little to the south of Friedberg on the 30th of August. The Hereditary Prince, who had followed him closely all the way from the Rhine, attacked him on the same day, apparently in ignorance of the presence of Soubise's army, and was repulsed with considerable loss. For the next few days the two armies remained inactive, Ferdinand between the Nidder and Nidda with his headquarters at Staden, facing south-west, and the French opposite to him between Friedburg and Butzbach. Such a position, while forces were so unequal, could not continue long; and on the 7th of September the French moved northward by Giessen towards the Eder. Ferdinand, divining that their design was to cut him off from Cassel, which it was his own intention to besiege, at once hurried northward to stop them. It was a race between the two armies. The French travelled due north by Giessen and Marburg, crossing the Lahn above the latter town. Ferdinand made for Homberg on the north bank of the Ohm, and turning north-westward from thence marched on by Kirchhain and Wetter, where he overtook the French advanced guard. On the following day he offered battle; but Soubise declined, and, turning to the right about, repassed the Lahn and encamped along the line of the Ohm, with his left at Marburg and his right over against Homberg. Ferdinand thereupon took post in full sight of the enemy on the opposite bank of the river, with his left at Homberg and his right extended beyond Kirchhain. This was the position from which he had intended[554] Imhoff to cover Hesse in 1760; and he had no intention now of allowing the French to break through it to Cassel, for he had made up his mind to recover Cassel for himself.
September.

The valley of the Ohm south-eastward from Kirchhain is about eleven hundred yards broad, rising gradually on the east bank of the river to a height called the Galgenberg, and on the western bank to a steep basaltic hill known as the Am?neberg. The Ohm itself between these hills is from twenty to thirty feet wide and from five to seven feet deep, flowing between steep banks. Just to the south of the Am?neberg was a stone bridge by which stood a water-mill, consisting of a massive court with a group of houses. The steep sides of the Am?neberg frown close to it on the northern hand; but to westward the ground rises in a gentle slope, through which a hollow road, covered by an old redoubt, ran down to the mill. The town and castle of the Am?neberg itself was surrounded with a wall and towers strong enough, on the south and south-western sides, to defy all but heavy artillery. The bridge with the mill and the castle beyond it were for some reason neglected by the Allies. There had been some attempt to secure the bridge itself, and a redoubt had been begun on Ferdinand's side of the river for its defence; but the breastwork was not above three feet high and as many feet thick, so that it could be commanded by an enemy's fire, and the more easily since the western or French bank of the river was the higher. The court of the mill was occupied by but thirteen men; the old redoubt appears not to have been occupied at all; and the garrison of the castle of Am?neberg consisted of a single battalion of irregulars only. Yet the Am?neberg was an advanced post over against the enemy's left wing and on the enemy's side of the river; and the possession of the bridge was of vital importance to the Allies, not only to ensure communication with that advanced post, but to bar the advance of the French across the Ohm and to secure to Ferdinand the[555] means of taking the offensive. The carelessness which allowed these points to remain so slenderly guarded is therefore almost inexplicable.
Sept. 21.

The French were not slow to take advantage of the opening thus afforded to them. On the night of the 20th they invested the castle of the Am?neberg so closely that not a man of the garrison could pass through their lines, and, driving the thirteen men from the mill, occupied the court as well as the old redoubt with light troops. This done they waited till morning, and at six o'clock, under cover of a dense mist, opened a heavy fire on the bridge and on the unfinished redoubt beyond it. The men in that redoubt, two hundred Hanoverians, resisted stoutly, in order to gain time for their supports to come up and for their artillery on the Galgenberg to answer the French batteries. The corps in occupation of the ground immediately before the Brückemühle (for so the mill was named) was Zastrow's of seven battalions, seven squadrons and six guns; while Wangenheim's corps of about the same strength lay on his left, and Granby's[400] on the heights of Kirchhain to his right. Ferdinand on hearing the sound of the firing hastened to the scene of action and found the redoubt still safe, the two hundred Hanoverians having held it stubbornly for two hours until relieved by Zastrow. But meanwhile the French brought forward more guns behind the veil of the mist; and presently thirty pieces of cannon were playing furiously upon the redoubt, while the infantry under cover of the fire renewed their attack on the bridge. Zastrow continued to feed the redoubt with fresh troops, and so held his ground; but the full significance of the attack was not realised until at ten o'clock the mist rolled away, when it was seen by the French dispositions that the enemy was bent upon carrying the bridge at any cost. Then at last Ferdinand ordered[556] up Granby's corps from Kirchhain to Zastrow's assistance.
Sept. 22.

Meanwhile the fight waxed hotter. The superiority of the French in artillery made itself felt; nine out of twelve of Zastrow's guns were dismounted by noon, and the rest were silent for want of ammunition. At length at four o'clock the British Guards and the Highlanders arrived; and twelve German field-pieces attached to Granby's corps came also into action. The French likewise brought up reinforcements and the combat became livelier than ever. So far the reliefs for the garrison in the redoubt had marched down in regular order, but the fire of the French artillery was now so terrible that the men were ordered to creep down singly and dispersed, as best they could. British Guards replaced Hanoverians, and Hessians replaced British Guards; regiment after regiment taking its turn to send men to certain destruction. So the fight wore on till the dusk lowered down and the flashes of the guns turned from yellow to orange and from orange to red. The Hessians piled up the corpses of the dead into a rampart and fired on, for the redoubt though untenable must be held at any cost. At seven o'clock the French by a desperate effort carried the passage of the bridge and fought their way close up to the redoubt, but they were met by the same dogged resistance and repulsed; and at eight o'clock, after fourteen hours of severe fighting, they abandoned the attack. Zastrow's and Granby's corps bivouacked about the bridge, and Ferdinand took up his quarters in the mill; but on the next day, none the less, the French after several unsuccessful assaults forced the garrison of Am?neberg to an honourable capitulation.
November.

The loss of the Allies in this action was about seven hundred and fifty killed and wounded, more than a third of whom were British; the Scots Guards suffering more heavily than any corps of the troops engaged. The loss of the French rose to twelve hundred men, and the failure of their attack decided the fate of Hesse.[557] Ferdinand, who on his advance southward had left behind a force to blockade Cassel, was able within three weeks to spare troops enough for a regular siege. On the 16th of October the trenches were opened, and on the 1st of November the town surrendered. A few days later came the news that preliminaries of a treaty had been signed. For despite all the successes of the year nothing could deter Bute from his resolution to make peace; and, indeed, knowledge of this fact had latterly made English commanders negligent and British troops backward in the field.[401] So with the fall of Cassel the war came to an end.

The terms, including as they did the cession by the French of India, except Pondicherry and Chandernagore, of French America, Canada, Tobago, Dominica and St. Vincent, might not seem unfavourable to England. But it was reasonably thought at the time that Goree and Martinique should have been added, though Bute was in such haste to bring the war to an end that it was only as an afterthought that he exacted the cession of Florida by Spain in exchange for Havanna. But the true blot on the treaty was the desertion of Frederick the Great and the conclusion of a separate peace, an exhibition of selfishness and folly which recalled the Peace of Utrecht. Nevertheless Frederick was able to insist on the conditions from which he had from the first resolved not to recede, namely the retention of all that he had taken from Austria in Silesia. In February 1763 the peace was finally concluded, and Frederick entered Berlin with Ferdinand of Brunswick, who had through five campaigns guarded his right flank, appropriately seated at his right side.

The story of the war in Germany should not be closed without some few words as to Ferdinand, who, little though we know of him, was the greatest commander that led British troops to victory in Europe between Marlborough and Wellington. It was no small feat to have fought through five campaigns successfully,[558] always with one army against two, and with at most four men against five. It is true that the conception of his most skilful movements may often be traced to Westphalen, the chief of his staff; but it is not every commander who knows when to take advice and how to act on it, or is so sure of the confidence of his troops that he can trust them always to make the best of it. Moreover, he was confronted, though in a smaller degree, with many of the difficulties that afflicted Marlborough. His army was not an army of Allies, though generally so styled, but a mercenary army of German troops in the pay of England. So far he had the advantage of the great Duke; but his force was compounded of several different elements, British, Hanoverians, Hessians, Brunswickers and Bückeburgers, who were divided by not a little jealousy as to their respective precedence, privileges, and superiority. Of all of these the British gave him the most trouble. Their insular contempt for all foreigners was heightened by the knowledge that their comrades were mercenaries paid by their own nation; and they claimed the best quarters, the post of danger and the post of honour on all occasions. In one respect perhaps they did show superiority to the rest of the army, namely when actually on the field of battle; for beyond all doubt theirs is the chief credit for the success at Minden, at Warburg, at Emsdorff, at Wilhelmsthal, and in a lesser degree at Vellinghausen. In every action indeed they did well, and at Minden and Emsdorff they accomplished what probably no other troops in the army would have attempted. But there were scores of minor actions fought during these campaigns by German troops only, which could be matched against any other of their achievements; and there were grave defects which marred not a little the general efficiency of the British. In the first place there was a large number of British officers of all ranks from the general to the ensign who, though brave enough, knew nothing of their duty. In the second, as Turenne had noticed a century earlier in[559] Flanders, they were extremely negligent in the matter of outposts, patrols, and guards, owing partly to inexperience, partly to their more luxurious life at home, and partly to the contempt of danger and the spirit of gambling which is so strong in the race. Frequently Ferdinand, though quite alive to the valour of British troops in action, dared not trust them as advanced parties; whereupon the red-coats themselves, quite confident of their own sufficiency, grumbled because the foremost place was not given to them. Such jealousies as these gave endless trouble; and the disposition of the various corps, particularly of Granby's division of the Guards and Blues, required careful study as a matter not of military exigency but of policy and tact, lest the various nationalities in the army should fall at variance and take to fighting among themselves. Lastly, the British soldiers, taken as a whole, were men of inferior character to the Germans and of less experience in war; and by loose behaviour in quarters and on the march they set a bad example, which came ill from the men that looked down on all the rest of the army.

Such were the troubles which hampered Ferdinand and his staff at every turn; yet under his guidance the machine worked always with the least possible friction and the greatest development of power. He was in fact not only a great soldier but a great governor and leader of men. He combined patience, tact, and self-control with a genial and hearty courtesy, he had the faculty of selecting good men for his instruments, and above all he worked without fear or favour in noble singleness of purpose for the common cause. Of his merits as a General his campaigns speak sufficiently; and it is only necessary to add that their history was thought worthy of official study and compilation fifty years ago by the Prussian General Staff. British troops may feel proud to have so served under so able a soldier and so great and gallant a man in the campaigns which they fought in Germany for the conquest of their own empire.

[560]

Authorities.—For the expedition to Belleisle there is little beyond the official papers in the Record Office, W.O., Orig. Corres., vol. xxi., and the accounts to be found in such histories as Entick's. The like is true of the operations in Portugal, except that few original papers are to be found in the Record Office. As to Martinique there is again little besides the Official Papers, C. O., America and West Indies, vol. cii., with the letter in the Bouquet Papers already quoted. For Havanna there is a printed account of the siege, and the original papers in C. O., America and West Indies, Havanna. For Manila, see Admiral's despatches, East Indies, and the account in Entick. The Annual Register is also a source of information in default of better in all the above expeditions.

For Ferdinand's campaigns, the most readable account is that of Mauvillon, being written in German of rare clearness and simplicity. There are also the histories of Tempelhof and Archenholtz, La Vie Militaire de Ferdinand, Mémoires de Bourcet, and Westphalen's Feldzüge Herzogs Ferdinand, in which last is printed every document that came to Ferdinand's headquarters, besides a great many more, with quotations from all other writers on the subject—an exhaustive work of six huge volumes, without an index. Ferdinand's original letters, with some from Granby and other officers, will be found in the Record Office, F. O. Mil. Auxiliary Expeditions, vols. xxviii.-xxxi., xxxiii., xxxiv., xxxvii.-xliv., xlix., l. The letters in the Belvoir Papers, Hist. Manuscript Commission, are disappointing.

Walker & Boutall, del.

To face page 560.
WARBURG, 31st July 1760.
WILHELMSTHAL, 24th June 1762.
Dispositions at the opening
of the attack of the Allies.
VELLINGHAUSEN,
15th 16th July 1761.
The attack of 16th July.
Part of HESSE-CASSEL
CHAPTER XII
I have followed with little interruption the long tale of hostilities which opened with the declaration of war with Spain and closed with the Peace of Fontainebleau; for despite the brief truce made by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the armies of England and France were eternally in collision either in the far east or the far west, so that to all intent the struggle resolved itself into one long war. Little though she knew it, England, when she entered wantonly and with a light heart upon the attack on the Spanish Main, had really set herself to wrestle with the French for the empire of the world. For nearly seventeen years she waited for the man who would carry her victorious through the contest; and at last he appeared. The instant change which came over the spirit of the nation when he assumed command has already been shown in the narrative of the operations. It remains only to study more closely the conduct of the war in the departments at home, and to trace the progress, not only in the organisation and training of the various branches of the Army, but also in the general administration.

The war with Spain opened, as will be remembered, while the nation had not yet ceased to rail at the iniquity of a standing Army, when the ascendency of the civilian element at the War Office was overpowering, and when the attitude of the ordinary citizen towards the soldier was unfriendly even to aggression. These evils, as may be guessed, did not pass away at once, even though the obnoxious red-coats were embarked or embarking for[562] foreign service. In 1741 there was a general refusal of innkeepers to supply soldiers with food and forage, owing to the dearth caused by a winter of extraordinary severity. Such refusal was not unreasonable; and it was proposed to meet the difficulty by a new clause in the Mutiny Act. It will hardly be believed that one member of the House of Commons made this suggestion a pretext for urging that the Mutiny Act should be dispensed with altogether, his argument being that if the system of billets should break down it would be necessary to build barracks, which would result in the subjection of the country to military government.[402] Two years later again[403] advantage was taken of an address to the King respecting his hired Hessian troops, to insert words, designed evidently for purposes of insult only, referring to, the burthensome and useless army at home. Nor did such amenities end even after the warning of 1745, for the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which left the air still electric with war, was no sooner signed than the old foolish arguments against a standing Army reappeared in the House of Lords, propped by such stable epigrams as "To a free state an army is like drams to a constitution." Yet the full measure of the intoxicant which was distilled for the ruin of the nation was a niggardly draught of nineteen thousand men. These childish outbursts continued until 1754, when they ceased, at any rate until the close of the war, having served their mischievous purpose in keeping alive old animosities which common patriotism and common sense would have buried without ceremony. The ill-will of publicans and of municipalities continued likewise unabated for a few years,[404] but rapidly dwindled away before more generous feelings; and unreasonable complaints from this quarter almost disappear from the correspondence of the War Office after Dettingen.

The War Office itself was slower to mend its ways. [563]The Secretary-at-War was quite equal to such petty jobbery as procuring the promotion of sergeants and corporals; but for all other purposes the Office showed itself at first to be utterly and hopelessly inefficient. Glimpses of maladministration have already been seen in the account of the expedition to Carthagena; but the blindness and ignorance of the officials became still more patent when Lord Stair's force was despatched to the Netherlands. The Office had not been at the pains to keep even its records in order. Not a soul seems to have known what were the rules as to allowances for forage, baggage, and the like, for troops embarking on active service; and the officials were obliged to apply to old officers who had served with Marlborough to gather precedents on such purely departmental matters as these.[405] From such beginnings it is not difficult to judge of that which must have come after.

The Office of Ordnance also was at the outset as badly disorganised as the War Office. Its shortcomings have already been shown in the matter of the train sent out to Carthagena; but even a year after the departure of Cathcart it seems to have made no improvement. Transports destined for the West Indies in 1741 were obliged to put in at Cork because the water shipped at Spithead was undrinkable, and the provisions supplied for the men unfit to eat.[406] Stair, again, was despatched to the Netherlands without artillery or engineers, a deficiency which brought his force into immense contempt with the French; and when he asked for siege-guns he found that all England could afford him was but twenty twenty-four pounders.[407] Small arms again were so scarce that, when the king rearmed the infantry, it was necessary to purchase ten thousand muskets and bayonets [564]abroad.[408] In Scotland again the inquiries of Hawley and Handasyde revealed not less flagrant neglect.[409] But this was by no means all. The general condition of the national defences both at home and abroad was most alarming; and the result was that at the opening of 1743 there was a regular panic among all the seaports, great and small, on the coast of England. Frantic applications poured into the Office of Ordnance for guns, carriages, and ammunition. It seems to have been the custom for the minor ports to erect batteries at their own expense, and to apply to the Government for their armament; so that the blame for these shortcomings must rest in part upon local authorities. But there is no such excuse for carelessness in respect of regular strongholds, such as Pendennis Castle, where forty-six guns were found to be in charge of a master-gunner ninety years of age, aided by a single assistant. It was not until 1756, when ministers should have been looking after Minorca, that the Government suddenly took the alarm and threw up lines of defence at Chatham, Portsea, and Plymouth Dock.[410]

Colonial stations, for which the British Government was responsible, were in little better order. Newfoundland was in a deplorable condition,[411] and Gibraltar even worse; nor could all the representations of officers procure attention for them. As late as in May 1757, even after the actual fall of Minorca, Governor Lord Tyrawley wrote furiously of the state of affairs at the Rock. There had been total stagnation for many [565]years; letters had not been answered; requests often repeated had remained unheeded. The guns mounted on the fortress were too short, the spare carriages were too few, the palisades better fitted for hen-coops than for fortifications; in fact the defences were reduced to dangerous weakness by years of systematic neglect.[412] At St. Kitts, again, the Thirty-eighth Foot, which for years had formed the standing garrison, was in a miserable condition; not forty per cent of the men were fit for service; their clothing was in rags; they had neither hats nor shoes nor cartridge-boxes nor swords.[413] Nor were the self-governing colonies more careful than the mother country. Wealthy West Indian Islands, notwithstanding the incessant warnings of their governors, found themselves at the outbreak of the war in dangerous want of arms and ammunition; and there was a rush of all the colonies both in the West Indies and in America for guns and stores, which ought to have been ready in their own magazines.[414] British carelessness, aggravated by the evil example of factious politicians in the mother country, and by the spectacle of such a creature as Newcastle in high place, had well-nigh stripped the empire of its defences.

As to the Army itself, enough has been said in the account of the operations to show how unstable, despite the abundance of individual heroism, were the foundations upon which it rested. The interference of civilian administrators and of irresponsible politicians with military discipline had wrought mischief untold. Officers could not be brought to do duty with their regiments. Stair found the difficulty insuperable; so also did Hawley; so even did Cumberland in Scotland; while in the garrison of Minorca the evil transcended all bounds. Thus both the personnel and matériel of the Army were nearly ruined, the former by persistent [566]jobbery and meddling on the part of civil officials, the latter by the equally persistent carping of factious critics in the House of Commons, which forbade the presentation of estimates for necessary works. The military system was in fact a chaos; and it was only by the strenuous efforts of two men, who strangely enough abominated each other, that this chaos was reduced to order.

The first of these two was Cumberland. Though in many respects a martinet of a narrow type, and no great commander in the field, Cumberland was an able man, a strong man, and an administrator. He it was who first took the Army seriously in hand and set himself to reduce it to discipline. He began during his first campaign by teaching the officers that they must obey. Hitherto it seems that they had taken the field as if they were going to a picnic, after the fashion of the French, travelling comfortably if not luxuriously, and neglecting all duties except that of displaying gallantry in action. Cumberland quickly put a stop to this. The number of wheeled carriages, even for general officers, was strictly limited, and two only, one for the colonel and one for the sutler, were allowed in each regiment; while in order to reduce baggage still further, it was ordered that no officer under the rank of brigadier-general should appear either in camp or in quarters, on or off duty, except in his regimental coat, old or new.[415] Such orders may appear ludicrous at the present day, but they point to a tightening of the reins of discipline that was very sorely needed. Cumberland, too, was impatient of useless officers. He disliked the system of purchase[416] and chafed at the retention of old colonels, some so unfit for duty as to be confined in a mad-house, whose permanent presence on the active list prevented the [567]advancement of deserving officers.[417] His own selections were not always fortunate, as witness Hawley and Braddock, but he was fully alive to the merit of such men as Ligonier, Wolfe, and Conway, to whom, though not of his school, he gladly gave promotion.

But it is after the close of the first war, when the Duke had returned to be Commander-in-Chief in time of peace, that his work is seen to greatest advantage. The whole tone of the War Office is changed. The Secretary-at-War almost reverts to his old position of clerk to the Commander-in-Chief. Military authority is predominant in military matters, and "Secretary-at-War's leave of absence" becomes a thing of the past. The functionary, who not many years before was ready to perpetrate a job for any officer with vote or interest, suddenly develops virtuous scruples and objects to the once familiar phrase, as he never grants leave without the King's signature.[418] But it is less by isolated examples, such as this, than by a general alteration in the methods of transacting business, that the Duke's hand may be traced. There is no longer the indiscriminate correspondence with every rank of officer; but due regard is paid to the rights of superior officers as channels of communication and discipline, and to the authority of the Commander-in-Chief as the supreme motive power. In fact, a work of great and beneficial reform is seen to accomplish itself imperceptibly through the will and influence of a single strong man; and Cumberland's services herein have never received the recognition that they deserve. The Duke, indeed, with all his foibles and prejudices was no ordinary man; and it is no surprise to one who has followed his administrative work to find that Horace Walpole ranked him with his father, Sir Robert Walpole, with Granville, Mansfield, and Pitt as one of the five great men that he had known. It is no disparagement of other members [568]of the Royal Family to say that he was the ablest man which it has produced during the two centuries of its reign in England.

The other man who raised the tone of the Army beyond estimation was of course Pitt. His share in the work, however, was very different in its nature from Cumberland's; though, without the preliminary reforms of Cumberland, his influence could hardly have been so successful as it was. Pitt's instincts respecting military administration, as distinct from the statesman's choice of a theatre of war, were thoroughly sound. He was for allowing officers to do their work, and for backing them loyally as they did it. Thus when in 1750 George Townsend, afterwards Wolfe's brigadier, proposed a clause in the Mutiny Bill to prevent non-commissioned officers or privates from being punished except by sentence of court-martial, Pitt crushed him with words which deserve to be remembered. "We," he said, "have no business with the conduct of the Army, nor with their complaints one against another. If we give ear to any such complaint we shall either destroy all discipline, or the House will be despised of officers and detested of soldiers." Cumberland himself would have asked for no severer criticism than this; and yet Pitt, though perhaps unconsciously, was probably more obnoxious in his military even than in his political views to Cumberland. The Duke, as has been repeatedly illustrated, was a soldier of the rigidest German type. "He was as angry," to use Walpole's happy phrase, "at an officer's infringing the minutest precept of the military rubric as at his deserting his post, and was as intent on establishing the form of spatterdashes and cockades as on taking a town or securing an advantageous situation." In other words, he lacked that sense of proportion in matters of discipline which distinguishes the disciplinarian from the martinet. Now, despite the influence of Cumberland, there was growing up in the Army a school of officers quite as strict as he was in needful matters of discipline, but less rigid, less narrow,[569] and more humane—officers who looked upon their men not as marionettes to be dressed and undressed, used up and thrown away, but as human flesh and blood, with good feelings that could be played on, good understandings that could be instructed, self-respect that needed only to be cultivated, and high instincts that waited only to be evoked. Such an officer, as his regimental orders can prove, was Wolfe, who contrived to turn even the work of road-making in Scotland to excellent disciplinary account; and indeed I am disposed to think that this same road-making, first begun under the direction of the mild and gentle Wade, had much to do with the foundation of the new school. The officers were brought very much more into contact with their men off parade, being obliged to supervise them while at work and to enjoin on them conciliatory bearing and behaviour towards the inhabitants; and the men, on their side, were happy and well-conducted, for they were kept constantly employed and received a welcome addition to their pay. It must be remembered that the gulf fixed between officer and man at that time was much wider than at present. Nowadays it is nothing for the subalterns of the smartest regiment of cavalry to pull off their coats and work with their men at the unshipping of horses from a transport; then it was almost painful to men to see their officers lay their hand to any but officer's work. A sergeant of Murray's garrison at Quebec describes the labours of his officers when hauling up the guns almost with tears. Such things were not seemly for gentlemen to do. But beyond all doubt the new school introduced a healthier feeling between officers and men, having the courage to utter its sentiments in print. "Never beat your men," says an officer's manual of the year 1760; "it is unmanly. I have too often seen a brave, honest old soldier banged and battered at the caprice of an arrogant officer." And then follows a protest against picketting, tying neck and heels, the wooden horse and other punishments of torture, which were never inflicted by[570] court-martial, but by the authority of officers only.[419] Such teaching was not in accordance with the system of Cumberland as expounded by himself or by his favourites Braddock and Hawley.

Yet it was to officers of this new school that Pitt, when he could have his way, preferred to entrust his work, partly perhaps on account of their youth and vigour, but more probably owing to their freedom from the fetters of pipeclay. Amherst, though he maintained an excellent tone among his troops, was hardly a perfect representative of the school, but Howe and Wolfe were pre-eminently of it, as were likewise such of Wolfe's pupils as Monckton and Murray. India seems spontaneously to have produced men who commanded in virtue of personal ascendency, though the only training of Lawrence, Forde, and Coote had been that of regimental officers. Still these men, though appointed by sheer force of circumstances and by no nomination of Pitt's, served to confirm the correctness of his judgment.

By giving scope to this new stamp of officer Pitt rendered the Army signal service, apart from the spirit which he infused into it, as into every body of Englishmen, of energy and adventure. He was too good a master for men to be willing to return to him, unless they had fulfilled their mission or exhausted every effort to fulfil it. It is possible even that the raids on the French coast, which are a blot on his fame as a minister of war, might have been more successful (though they could never have been profitable) could he have appointed commanders of his own choice. But in truth the work of Pitt as a designer of campaigns and operations of war was by no means flawless. He had skill in thinking out how a body of men could be passed rapidly on from enterprise to enterprise, as from Guadeloupe to Canada, from Canada back to Martinique, from Martinique to Havanna, and from Havanna, as[571] he hoped, to Louisiana. But he never made sufficient allowance for the waste of men in the process, nor, apparently, for the loss of life entailed by maintaining large garrisons in tropical territory. In some respects, too, the military administration was little better in his day than in Newcastle's. Notwithstanding the warning given by the terrible losses of the troops during the occupation of Louisburg, no proper care was taken to provide them with special clothing in subsequent winters in Canada; while the arrangements for the hospitals in Germany were so deficient that few of the invalids of the campaign of 1760 ever rejoined their regiments.[420] Hodgson, again, before starting for Belleisle, complained bitterly of his want of officers and of the inadequacy of the preparations made by the Office of Ordnance. These abuses were, it is true, due to the shortcomings of departments only, and therefore must not be charged against a minister who bore the burden, not only of the direction of the war, but of foreign affairs also on his shoulders; but it is, I think, a reproach to Pitt's military administration that he did not appreciate the importance of husbanding the lives of his troops. The British soldier, to put the matter in its least sentimental and most brutally practical light, has always been a most expensive article; no prodigality can be more ruinous than the careless squandering of his life, no economy so false as the grudging of his comfort. But this failing in Pitt, serious though it be, is far outweighed by the profound policy which converted the militia into an efficient force for defence against invasion, thus liberating the regular army for purposes of conquest; and by the military insight which kept King Frederick subsidised, and Prince Ferdinand's army afoot as auxiliary to Frederick, thus turning the whole war in Europe into a diversion in England's favour. Nor was this policy wholly selfish, for loudly though the Prussians still complain of the withdrawal of Pitt's subsidies by Bute, Pitt remained in office long enough to tide Frederick[572] over the deadliest of his peril, and so to establish the corner-stone of the present German Empire. Yet even these achievements pale before the mighty genius and the lofty enthusiasm which called the English-speaking people to arms on both sides the Atlantic to wrest from France the possession of the world. The minister of war is swallowed up in the statesman of the Empire.

The next subject of inquiry is the manner of raising that Army, large beyond precedent in English history, which was accumulated by the end of the war. It will be remembered that the regiments of cavalry rose to thirty-two, and that in the infantry of the Line the numbered regiments were one hundred and twenty-four, besides two corps of Highlanders (which for some reason were known by titles of a different kind) and the brigade of Guards, making altogether a total little short of one hundred and fifty battalions. To provide recruits for such a force on the ordinary terms was impossible; and the struggle with France had hardly begun before recourse was made to the system of short service. In the session of 1743-44 was passed the first of a series of Recruiting Acts on the model of those which had been passed under Queen Anne. The bounty offered to volunteers was four pounds, while parish-officers were empowered to impress unemployed men, for each of which they received a reward of one pound and the parish of three pounds. The standard for recruits was fixed at five feet five inches; and it was enacted that every volunteer or enlisted man should be entitled to his discharge at the end of three years. In the following session the Act was somewhat altered. The bounty to volunteers was abolished; the gift to the parish was reduced to two pounds; the standard was lowered by one inch, and the term of service was extended to five years. But as yet of course the real drain on the supply of Englishmen was not begun.

After the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle an effort was made in the House of Commons to establish the principle of short service in time of peace. In February 1750[573] Mr. Thomas Pitt, a kinsman of the Great Commoner, brought forward a bill to enact that soldiers should henceforward be enlisted for ten years, and that the price of discharge should be fixed at three pounds. The scheme was opposed on the ground that men would always claim discharge after receiving their new clothing, and so defraud the colonel; that the country would be filled with idle vagabonds; and that the Pretender's adherents would take advantage of the measure to obtain military training, which would later be turned against England herself. One speaker, who supported the bill, thought ten years too long a term; and Colonel Henry Conway, an officer of much promise, while approving the principle contended that the bill as it stood would be useless, since no man would enlist for service in Ireland or the Colonies without a bounty, nor accept smaller bounty than the cost of his discharge. More than one member who took part in the debate deplored the system of enlisting men for life, which by depriving them of hope made them idle and disorderly; but all agreed that the limitation of the term of service must inevitably lead to increased expense, since it would entail the need of a larger number of recruits. The expense of recruiting fell at that time of course on the officers, pay being allowed for a few fictitious men on the muster-rolls, and the proceeds turned into a recruiting fund. While this practice lasted, it was futile to speak of enlisting more recruits, for the officers simply could not afford it. It was useless to urge, as Conway and Oglethorpe did, that the expense of recruiting at ordinary times should be borne not by the regiment but by the public; for this would have meant an augmentation in the military estimates which was not to be thought of for a moment. So after a useful debate the bill was defeated by one hundred and fifty-four to ninety-two.[421]

On the renewal of the war a Recruiting Act identical with that of 1744-45 was passed; but in the following year (1756-57) a bounty of three pounds was again[574] offered to volunteers, who were also allowed to take service for three years only. With this latter Act the measures sanctioned by Parliament came to an end, and though this particular enactment was passed, as usual, for one year only, I conceive that it must have been renewed annually to the close of the war.[422] There were of course the usual abuses in the enforcement of these Acts, abuses which rose to a grave height towards the end of the war. The country was so much exhausted in 1762 that the standard was reduced to five feet two inches,[423] by which time men made a regular living by hanging about the recruiting officers, ready to accompany them before a justice and to swear that some hapless creature had taken the King's bounty.[424] Practically there was impressment for the army as for the navy; and indeed as early as in 1744 the newspapers speak openly of a general press made in Southwark for the Army and marines, with the satisfactory result of a haul of two hundred men.[425] Nor was impressment without its usual romantic consequences. On one of the ships of Admiral Boscawen's squadron in 1748 was a marine named James Gray, who was duly landed with the rest for the siege of Pondicherry. In the course of the siege Gray had the misfortune to be wounded, apparently by splinters, receiving six wounds in one leg, five in the other and a bullet in the groin. This last hurt the injured marine did not submit to the doctors, contriving to extract the bullet without assistance, and so to make a good recovery. In due time Gray returned to England; and then there came a petition to the Duke of Cumberland setting forth that James Gray was in a reality a woman named Hannah Snell. Her sweetheart had been impressed, so she had enlisted and followed [575]him to India, braving all the misery of the voyage and the hardships of the siege to be with him; but all had been to no purpose, for the sweetheart had died, leaving her alone, maimed, friendless and penniless. It is satisfactory to learn that Cumberland at once obtained for her a pension of thirty pounds a year from the King's own bounty.[426]

It should be remembered, meanwhile, that since the Highlands had been thrown open, the old recruiting grounds had been considerably enlarged, and that the prospect of bearing arms had attracted great numbers of Highlanders to the ranks. Exclusive of the Forty-second there were at least a dozen Highland battalions on the list in 1762. Irish Catholics again were admitted to the Army, at any rate in America, and distinguished themselves particularly in the Twenty-eighth Regiment at Quebec, where Wolfe himself charged at their head.[427] But to what other shifts the Government may have resorted I have unfortunately been unable to discover. It is more than probable that several corps were formed under peculiar conditions of service. At least one whole regiment of Highlanders, the Duke of Sutherland's, was raised explicitly for three years only or till the close of the war;[428] and the same principle was doubtless extended to other cases. Private enterprise also came to the help of the country. Very early in the war a society was formed in London to promote the enlistment of marines; and after Minden the Common Council of London opened subscriptions to encourage recruiting, and promised to admit men so enlisted to trade within the city forthwith, if discharged with a good character on the close of the war.[429] Then again there were regiments like Hale's and Granby's [576]Light Dragoons which were raised by patriotic officers without cost to the country; and it is probable that these were not solitary examples. Similar advantages of economy seem to have dictated the creation in 1760 and the following years of innumerable independent companies, which after a few months of isolated existence were sorted together into regiments. The history of this system is exceedingly obscure, but it appears to have amounted practically to the offer of a commission to every man who could or would raise a hundred recruits. It was adopted amid considerable difference of opinion, and was not a success, the men so enlisted being generally unfit to carry a musket.[430] Speaking broadly, it may be asserted that during this war the ranks were filled by compulsion far more than by attraction, and by compulsion so ruthless that recruits would resort to self-mutilation to escape service.

An interesting experiment in the inner organisation of the recruiting service was instituted by advice of Lord Stair, namely the formation of two extra companies of infantry and one extra troop of cavalry for all regiments on active service. The object was to maintain a depot at home to refill all vacancies in the ranks abroad, and so to obviate the necessity of sending back recruiting officers from abroad to England. The plan did not at first commend itself to the King, and Stair was obliged to urge it repeatedly before he could obtain for it a trial; but the suggestion seems to have been approved by Cumberland, and to have been put into practice for a time, though the additional companies were presently amalgamated into distinct regiments.[431] Therewith the whole system of the feeding [577]of regiments abroad fell back on the old plan of drafting; and during the Seven Years' War regiments at home, particularly the dragoons,[432] were raised to a considerable strength to serve simply as recruiting depots for regiments abroad. From a regimental standpoint the story of the war is one of drafting, drafting, drafting, with of course all the vices that had been condemned by Marlborough attendant on the practice. The garrisons of captured places suffered terribly from this evil, particularly in the West Indies, where service was still abominated by the men. There was no such reluctance to go to the East Indies, where there was some prospect of spoil; and men and officers gladly took advantage of the opportunity afforded to them not only to go to India, but to stay there in the Company's service after their regiments had been recalled.[433] But the West Indies were held in horror and loathing. It became more and more the practice to pardon deserters and bad characters on their accepting service in that unpopular quarter, though even so there were men who preferred to take a thousand lashes.[434] As the operations in the West Indies grew wider of extent, resort was made as usual to drafting; whereupon the colonels, to whom it fell to supply the drafts, of course seized the opportunity to rid themselves of their worst men, heedless of the unhappy corps to which they consigned them.[435] The [578]government of a captured island in the Antilles on such terms was no very enviable post.

But the British Isles were by no means the only recruiting ground of the Army during this long struggle. Braddock as early as in 1755 was ordered to fill up his regiments with recruits from America; and the system, as has already been seen, was carried farther and farther as the war progressed. There were at first considerable difficulties, which the British Government attempted to meet by proclaiming that two hundred acres of land should be granted free of rent for ten years to all recruits, after the close of the war.[436] It should seem, however, that this temptation was of small effect, for the Americans enjoyed all the British prejudice against a red-coat, and at first drew little distinction between a soldier and a negro. The Sixtieth in particular found great obstruction to recruiting in Pennsylvania; the lawyers, justices, and people at large being violently opposed to enlistment[437] even for short terms of three or four years. Violent controversies raged over the recruiting of indented servants, the "white servants" or white slaves to which I have already referred; their owners pleading not without reason that, having paid for the passage of these men, they were entitled to consider them as their own property, or, to use their own phrase, as "bought servants." This difficulty was settled by providing for compensation to the owners for loss of such men; but even so the most serious obstacles remained unremoved. In New Jersey, for instance, the justices would persuade recruits not to be attested, or would grant warrants against them for fictitious debts and throw them into gaol until the regiment that sought them had marched away. Finally in 1760 Amherst wrote that, though his battalions were seven thousand men below the proper strength, he could obtain no recruits owing to the vast bounty [579]offered by the provincial authorities to their own troops. These facts should not be forgotten in view of the far greater contest between mother country and colonies which lies close ahead of us. The colonists boasted constantly, and not without just cause, of the sacrifices which they had made throughout the war; but they overlooked the incessant difficulties which they threw in the way of the King's commanders.[438]

Intimately connected with the subject of recruiting is the general condition of the private soldier. There was little or no alteration in his pay or allowances during the period under review; and such changes as there were tended if anything rather to his disadvantage. It appears that the War Office had not yet learned that the rigid rules applicable to service at home were impossible of enforcement abroad, and either through blindness or ignorance insisted that all additional burdens, imposed by differences of climate and remoteness from civilisation, must be borne by the soldier. The mutiny roused at Louisburg by excessive stoppages from the pay of the men has already been related; but so dangerous a warning even as this produced no result, for the grievance remained unredressed and led to a second mutiny of the troops in Canada in 1763.[439] The meanness of the Government in respect of such matters was indescribable. It would not even supply extra blankets for the garrison of Quebec, but decided that the price must be deducted from each soldier's pay, and this although recruits were already hardly obtainable for garrisons abroad.[440] Not an official, notwithstanding the repeated representations of military officers, seems to have been capable of devising a new system to cover new conditions. The old formul? were stretched and stretched again till they became a mere confusion of [580]rents and patches, barely sufficient to cover the nakedness of maladministration.

It is true that the Government was not wholly to blame; it was rather that spirit of carping and meddlesome criticism in the Commons which in these days has led to what is called legislation by reference, with the result that few Acts of Parliament are intelligible without a complete body of the Statutes of the past century to elucidate them. In mortal dread of distasteful discussion of the military estimates, the civil authorities clothed every possible grant of money in the garment of pay for so many men, and made it over to regimental officers to do their best or worst with it. Hence arose a chaos of strange terms which are the bewilderment and despair of every student. The mysteries of the "recruiting-fund" have already been laid bare, and the veil which shrouds the "widow's man" has likewise been lifted; but the list is unfortunately far longer than this. As though widow's men were not sufficient, there were also "contingent men," fictitious men kept on the rolls of every company that their pay might discharge the contingent expenses of the captain.[441] Then there was an item known as "grass-money," an allowance of similar nature, but of so complicated a description that it can be shown only in tabulated form.[442] [581]There were also curious devices whereby the foot-soldier likewise was provided with certain necessary portions of his equipment. Then there was yet another source of regimental income called the stock-purse, which applied originally to dragoons only, and was made up partly from the recruiting fund, partly from the vacant pay of men when the troop was below its established strength, and partly from the value of cast horses. The fund so collected was placed in the hands of the[582] agent, to defray contingent expenses and current cost of recruiting. As all horses were cast at the age of fourteen, and as four horses, at a price not exceeding twenty guineas apiece, were replaced every year irrespective of those lost by death or accident, it may be imagined that a stroke of bad luck might reduce a troop to ruin. All this, however, was part of the system which made the Army pay for itself, and was therefore preserved in defiance of the trouble and confusion to which it inevitably led. It may now be understood why officers who loved their regiments frequently bequeathed large sums of money to the regimental funds, to enable their successors to secure good recruits and to uphold the fair name of the corps.

Thus it is sufficiently evident that the Army, notwithstanding the wild ravings in Parliament, did far more for itself than the country did for it; though there are signs that as an institution it was gradually finding acceptance with the nation. In 1740 the nickname of "lobster" for a soldier, which thirty or forty years[583] ago was common enough, first made its appearance, curiously enough with the Christian name of Thomas prefixed to it.[443] Then in the same year Parliament called for and printed a return of the officers of the Army, which was continued yearly and ripened into the annual Army List.[444] Another change also helped to give regiments a surer identity in the popular mind, namely the substitution of a number for the colonel's name for the distinction of corps from corps. This reform crept in during July 1753;[445] but it was many years before the colonel's name was altogether discarded, while the numbers did not find a place on the buttons until 1767. Then, to pass to minuter matters, sufficient deference was paid to the popular love of military music to relieve the colonels in part of the burden of hiring bandsmen, who, in some regiments at any rate, were after 1749 enlisted as soldiers and placed under military discipline.[446] In the cavalry, where the trumpeters supplied six or eight men more or less skilled in the playing of a wind-instrument, the issue of horns and bassoons to these sufficed more cheaply to form a band of music;[447] but the main burden of supporting a band has always lain, as it still lies, upon the officers. Private enterprise, which thus forced military musicians upon the country, strove also to impose another modern fashion, but without success. After his march to Fort Duquêsne General Forbes caused a medal to be struck, of extremely florid design, and authorised such of his officers as might desire it to wear the same in gold suspended from their necks by a blue ribbon.[448] The hint, however, was not taken at [584]home,—possibly the fame of it never reached official ears,—and though a medal might have increased the flow of recruits and reconciled men to service beyond sea, not one was issued. Ferdinand of Brunswick received the Garter, and Amherst the red ribbon of the Bath, but nothing was done to commemorate for lesser men the share that they had taken in the conquest of an empire.

I turn now to consideration of the military progress in the three combatant branches of the Army. In the Cavalry an early change, which has been perpetuated by certain regimental titles to the present day, was the conversion of the three senior regiments of Horse into Dragoons, with the names which they still retain of the First, Second, and Third Dragoon Guards. This was done in December 1746 and was apparently part of a general scheme of economy; for at precisely the same time the Third and Fourth troops of the Life Guards were disbanded, and two troops only reserved, together with two troops of Horse Grenadier Guards.[449] But there seems also to have been somewhat of a craze for dragoons at the moment,[450] first because their pay was small, and secondly, because Frederick the Great, in imitation of the Austrians, had made greater mobility the rule for all cavalry. In truth the old distinctions between Horse and Dragoons were disappearing fast and becoming very much a question of names. The French indeed still made it a rule not to place dragoons in the line of battle; but the horse in their army was distinguished by being heavily clad in defensive armour. [585]Ligonier, who loved the cavalry above all arms, boldly advised the disregard of all fanciful differences, and the issue of defensive armour to the British dragoons; but his recommendation remained unnoticed for twelve years, when, in a true spirit of pedantry, cuirasses and iron skull-caps were given in 1758 to the Blues and in 1760 to the Third and Fourth Horse, or to give them their present names, the Sixth and Seventh Dragoon Guards.[451] Another defect noted by Ligonier in the organisation of the cavalry was the extreme weakness of the British squadrons as compared with the French; for remedy of which he purposed to raise the strength of troops of horse to fifty and of dragoons to seventy-five troopers. Such a reform would have been valuable as a return to Cromwell's system of making the units strong enough to provide full employment for the officers; but the authorities settled the question in a far more simple fashion by ordaining that three troops, instead of two as heretofore, should be the strength of a squadron on service.[452] The country has waited long for Ligonier's suggestion to be adopted, and it is only within very recent years, if now, that it has at last grasped the soundness of the principle.

More important as a step forward was the institution of Light Dragoons, begun, as has been told, by the establishment first of light troops and later of complete light regiments. The example in this case came from a corps formed during the Scottish rebellion of 1745, the Duke of Kingston's Light Dragoons, which did so good service that, though disbanded after Culloden, it was at once reformed as the Duke of Cumberland's own. As such it distinguished itself greatly at Lauffeld, and Cumberland pleaded hard that it might be spared after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; [586]but with the usual blindness it was disbanded, and thus a regiment of quite unusual value and promise was sacrificed.[453] Happily the Fifteenth Light Dragoons made a most brilliant beginning for the new branch of the cavalry, and assured its success. The light dragoons were distinguished by wearing a helmet of lacquered copper or leather, and were armed with carbine, bayonet, pistol, and sword, carrying also entrenching tools in their holsters. Their horses are described as of the nag or hunter kind, standing from fourteen hands three inches to fifteen hands one inch; and their saddlery was lighter than that of the ordinary dragoon. Being intended for employment as irregular troops they were known from the first in England as hussars;[454] but though they received special training in horsemanship and in firing, even at a gallop, from the saddle, they had little or no instruction in the duties of reconnaissance, which were the peculiar function of the hussar. Nothing could be more characteristic of the difference between the true and the false light cavalry than the behaviour of the Fifteenth at Emsdorff, who charged through and through the French infantry without hesitation, while the Prussian hussars, never coming to close quarters, lost not a man nor a horse. Fortunately it was not the true hussar that was most sorely needed on that day.

For the rest, before the opening of the war the old system of man?uvre by turning every horse in his own ground had given place to that by wheeling of small divisions, although the ranks were still formed three deep. It does not appear that the drill introduced by Frederick the Great for field-movements was adopted either in whole or in part, though possibly it may have been practised by individual colonels. Shock-action our cavalry did not need to learn from Frederick, [587]having learned it already of Marlborough; but our squadrons seem as usual to have been prone to their besetting sin of unwillingness to rally after a successful charge. It was this wild galloping forward that wrecked Ligonier's heroic regiments at Lauffeld. On the other hand, Granby's squadrons, for all their leader's impetuosity, seem to have been well in hand at Warburg, and to have done their work with spirit and yet subject to control. But a trot of two hours before coming into action had probably rubbed the keen edge off both horses and men.

Passing next to the Artillery we approach the most remarkable development observable during this period in the whole Army. Notwithstanding the early disgraces at Carthagena and the shortcomings of the Office of Ordnance, the gunners after 1741 are found to raise the reputation of their corps steadily in all parts of the world. Their place as yet was still on the left of the line, yielding precedence to the whole of the rest of the Army, but they were entitling themselves to a higher station. This sudden change is doubtless in great measure attributable to the foundation of the Academy at Woolwich, with an allowance at first of two hundred pounds, which after a few months was increased to a thousand pounds, a year.[455] In 1744 the forty gentlemen cadets were formed into a single company, and their pay was raised from one shilling to sixteenpence a day; their number also was increased to forty-eight, and from thenceforth the cadet-company stood as the senior company of the corps.[456] The growth of the Royal Regiment in numbers in itself is remarkable. In 1741 it possessed but three marching companies, but from that year onwards it was constantly increased by one, two, or four companies, until in 1757 it consisted of twenty-four companies in two battalions and in 1761 of thirty-one companies in three battalions, or close on thirty-two hundred of all ranks. Finally, in 1760, a warrant [588]was issued for the formation of a distinct regiment of Royal Irish Artillery.

At first the gunners are seen at work principally with the battalion guns, light three-pounders or six-pounders, which though attached to the infantry were served by artillerymen;[457] but they are always distinguished, whether at Fontenoy or before Trichinopoly, by the rapidity and accuracy of their fire. In Germany, however, we find the guns before Minden scientifically concentrated and handled in large masses by the skill of the Count of Lippe-Bückeburg; and there the British batteries win the admiration of the most critical artillerists in Europe, and their officers the special praise of Ferdinand of Brunswick himself. The influence of the Academy had told early; but it is a still more significant fact that British Artillery officers, not obtaining their commissions by purchase, did not rise to command without knowledge of their work. The variety of guns issued for the field was very great, and though three-pounders seem to have given place in the Seven Years' War to light six-pounders as the lightest ordnance employed,[458] yet there were also heavy six-pounders, light and heavy twelve-pounders, howitzers and twenty-four pounders. It was probably the light six-pounders that amazed the whole army at Warburg by advancing at the gallop, a feat which was the more remarkable since drivers and horses were still hired, and not part and parcel of the corps as at present.[459] Finally, Mauvillon bears witness that the British guns were kept far the cleanest and in the most perfect order of any in the whole Allied army.

Of the Engineers it is impossible to speak as favourably; [589]indeed it is almost an extreme assumption to assert their existence except in name. A school of engineering was founded in 1741; and the small establishment of engineers as fixed in 1717 having been largely increased in 1756 was finally reorganised with a strength of sixty-one officers in 1759.[460] There seem to have been no men, except a strong company of miners, which, however, was borne on the strength of the Royal Artillery.[461] The results of the school were singularly small compared with those of the Academy at Woolwich. Wentworth possessed one efficient engineer at Carthagena, but Stair had not even one in the Low Countries, and was obliged to engage Dutch and Austrian officers;[462] while the engineers employed with Boscawen at Pondicherry, Abercromby at Ticonderoga, and Hodgson at Belleisle were all alike inefficient. The fact is less remarkable when it is remembered that the sea obviates the necessity for the fortification of inland towns in England. In truth the French engineers, in respect both of the skill of the officers and the organisation of the men, seem to have stood far above the rest of Europe,[463] while the British probably stood lowest of all.

Lastly we come to the Infantry. Attention has already been called to the reforms initiated by Howe, Washington, Forbes, Bouquet, and Amherst, which, though still too much advanced to receive welcome at home, were to be realised by Sir John Moore forty years later. The great characteristic of the British infantry throughout the war is the excellence of their fire-discipline and the deadly accuracy of their fire. It is curious, therefore, to read in the most popular military handbook of the time[464] that it was precisely in the matter of fire-discipline that the British were reckoned defective, so defective that they were accounted inferior to the Dutch and were obliged to [590]comfort themselves with the reflection that the Dutch were naturally more phlegmatic of temperament. The author is careful to point out that Dutch superiority lay in discipline only, so it is reasonable to infer that the British improved rapidly in this respect during the war. And such indeed is the conclusion to be drawn from the study of the various actions. At Dettingen the fire though deadly was unsteady; at Fontenoy it was nearly perfect; at Minden, where the British stood motionless until the French cavalry was within ten paces, it was quite admirable; at Quebec it was simply superlative. It is commonly supposed that this improvement was due to the adoption of Prussian methods, but I can find no ground for the assumption. The Prussian manual and firing exercise did indeed find its way to the First Guards in 1756;[465] and there still exists record of a petition from some aged pensioners against the cruelty of an ensign who drilled them every day through the winter in the Prussian exercise, though they had hardly clothes to cover their nakedness;[466] but this has no bearing on the action of Fontenoy in 1745. The truth is that in the matter of attack the British had nothing to learn from the Prussians, either in the cavalry or the infantry. Marlborough had taught them the superiority of shock-action and platoon-fire long before Frederick the Great was born; and all that the Prussian school had to teach, apart from this and from the discipline which went to its perfect execution, was the precision of march learned from pendulum and pace-stick, and certain undeniable improvements in the man?uvre of a regiment or battalion. It has been suggested, indeed,[467] that a Prussian column at Fontenoy might have man?uvred its way to victory by sheer perfection of drill and discipline; but this begs the question whether they would have preserved their order as admirably as the British during [591]the advance. Certainly it is hardly conceivable that even Prussian regiments could have behaved more perfectly under very heavy fire and in the presence of an overwhelming force of cavalry than the six British battalions at Minden.

But the most important changes in the infantry were akin to those in the cavalry. The first was the practice of massing the grenadiers of the army into battalions, which though forbidden by the King as an Austrian innovation when first proposed by Stair,[468] was ultimately adopted both in America and in Germany. The next was the introduction of light troops for the work of skirmishing and for such rapid movements and special duties as were committed in the cavalry to hussars. In the British Army the first representatives of this class of infantry were the Highlanders, who for this reason were armed with short muskets or carbines and were drawn up outside the line in the formal order of battle. Stair[469] had begged for Highlanders in their native dress as early as in 1742, and to his influence probably was due their presence at Fontenoy. During the Seven Years' War, as has been seen, they were employed in every quarter of the globe and did excellent service. Amherst, however, and Wolfe after him, were not content with Highlanders only, but formed those bodies of marksmen, often armed with rifles, which prepared the way for the Light Companies and the complete corps of Light Infantry and Riflemen that were to follow at a later day. Indeed, there was actually a regiment (which during its short life took precedence as ninetieth of the Line) that was called Morgan's Light Infantry. This was probably an imitation from some continental model; but the British had found a far better model for their own purposes in America.

In truth, though there were lessons which the [592]British might learn with profit from foreign nations, both as to what they should imitate and what they should avoid, the best of their instruction was that which they gained from their own hard experience in lands remote from Europe. The influence of King Frederick the Great was perverted in great measure for ill to the Army. The King and Cumberland had both of them a passion for minute details of dress, facings, lace, buttons, cockades, and the like, and were dear lovers of the tight clothing and inelasticity of movement which characterised the Prussian school. There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that strict insistence on cleanliness and smartness is indispensable, and that correctness and uniformity of dress are valuable aids to discipline and to esprit de corps. Such little distinctions as that the coats of Horse should be lapelled to the skirt and of Dragoons to the waist, while those of Light Dragoons should be without lapels of any kind, are harmless in themselves, and give men a pride and an interest in their branch of the service; but the powdering of hair, the docking of the old-fashioned serviceable coats, and the straitening of every article of raiment were no gain to efficiency, no improvement to health, and in the eyes of Englishmen, at first, no embellishment as to appearance.[470] Had the King turned his thoughts to diminishing the weight on a soldier's back,[471] [593]or devising suitable equipment for tropical climates, he might have saved lives untold; but many years were still to elapse before such simple matters as these were to receive due notice. The beautiful accuracy of drill enjoined by Frederick was turned to good account by the British on many fields in Europe and in India; but his excellent discipline on active service both on and off duty was by no means so faithfully copied, as Ferdinand of Brunswick found out to his cost.[472] Yet at any rate the British had an example of the worst that they must eschew in the armies of the French. Therein "there was no discipline, no subordination, no order on the march, in the camp or even in the battlefield. The very subalterns had their mistresses with them, and officers often left their men to accompany them on the march in their carriages. Everything that could contribute to the luxury of the officers was found in the French camp.... At one time there were twelve thousand waggons accompanying Soubise's army which belonged to sutlers and shopkeepers, though the army was not fifty thousand strong.... Balls were given in camp and officers often left their posts to dance a minuet. They laughed at the orders of their leaders and only obeyed when it suited them."[473] From such folly and disgrace as this Cumberland's attachment to the stricter models of Germany delivered the Army; but its best lessons came not from Germany but from America, not from Frederick the Great but from Howe, Washington, Wolfe, Bouquet, and Amherst.

The End