The work of disbanding the Army began some months before the final conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. By Christmas 1712 thirteen regiments² of dragoons, twenty-two of foot, and several companies of invalids⁴ who had been called up to do duty owing to the depletion⁵ of the regular garrisons⁷, 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 garrison⁶ in Flanders could be withdrawn⁸, 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 bounty¹⁰ 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 remodelling¹¹ of the Army, by which term was signified the elimination¹² of officers and of whole corps¹³ that favoured the Protestant succession, to make way for those attached to the Jacobite interest. Prompted by such motives¹⁴, 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;

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