How the Army Made Britain a Global Power - Introduction

Introduction Necessary for Britain’s survival, the army was an institution, a way of life, a collective and an array of individuals. Their experiences were very different, and dramatically so when men survived while their neighbours were shot down. The army’s history in a tumultuous period of British history needs to be understood both on its own, and also in the context of other European, indeed global, forces of the period, and this certainly provides important context in assessing its relative capability.

As this book shows, the tasking of the army became particularly world-wide during this period by the standards of the other armies of the period, whether Western or non-Western. For example, a comparison with the successful Prussian army of Frederick II, ‘the Great’ (r. 1740–86), supposedly the cutting-edge of the Western military, is unhelpful, as the Prussians needed only to fight in Europe and, indeed, within a few hundred miles of their bases. The British Army, in contrast, had to face rebellions, both in the British Isles and in the colonies, had to mount amphibious operations, both within Europe and further afield, had to campaign overseas in Europe, for example in Portugal, and had to fight on distant continents in very different (and far from uniform) physical and military environments.

These requirements interacted, but not to the same degree for Britain’s opponents or comparators. To argue, for example, that Frederick was a better general than his relative William, Duke of Cumberland, or George Washington than his opponent Charles, 2nd Earl Cornwallis, would be to compare commanders with very different challenges: Cumberland had to face rebellion in Britain in 1745–6, and Cornwallis also to command in India and Ireland. So also with more junior commanders and officers,

introduction • xi and with their soldiers. The French fought outside Europe, but none of their major commanders did so, bar Napoleon who went no further than the Middle East.

Capability is always difficult to assess in the abstract because of the major issues posed by the circumstances of particular wars. Timing, for example, was a key cause of the problems facing Britain during the American War of Independence (1775–83), with the British failing to end the revolution before France entered the war in 1778. In turn, in that war, the French did not have to face a challenge comparable to that confronting the British, in large part because France’s colonies lacked a comparable political complexion.

It was not until the French Revolutionary crisis, when the slave colony of St. Domingue rebelled, that France faced a large-scale colonial rising, and then could not mount a major response as it had more pressing challenges in Europe. Furthermore, it was not until after the Peace of Amiens with Britain in 1802 that the French sought to recover St. Domingue; although initially successful, the attempt was vitiated by the difficulties of the task, specifically yellow fever. Moreover, like France, Portugal and Spain failed to suppress the revolutions in their colonies in the New World in the early 19th century; rather than seeing Britain, and its army, as uniquely unsuccessful, it is helpful to look at the more general political and military problems of tackling colonial rebellion.

Similar points can be made about campaigning in Asia. If the British were defeated by the Marathas in 1779, the Chinese had totally failed in successive advances into Burma (Myanmar) in the late 1760s.

The need to maintain forces in the British Isles for home defence, the scale of Britain’s global commitments and the proportion of the army tied up holding outposts around the globe exerted such a huge drain on the limited manpower that comparatively few troops could be spared for offensive operations on the European mainland or elsewhere. Moreover, the political context was not particularly helpful for military capability, as the lack of a militarised culture, both generally and in politics, can be seen in the absence of a united military command structure that would be able to devise and sustain coherent peacetime programmes of planning and improvement. This had a serious impact in limiting developments

xii • how the army made britain a global power, 1688–1815 in capability between conflicts. This drawback reflected the anti-military ethos of British politics, the difficulties of enforcing discipline and diligence on aristocratic officers who owned their positions, and the more general absence of a bureaucratic ethos, certainly as compared to the Royal Navy where, due to the responsibilities and roles of captains, supply issues were more commonly linked to those of command. Again, however, comparisons are valuable. British logistics, for example, were more impressive than those of Russia.

Opposition Parliamentary speakers (such as the ever-melodramatic William Pitt the Elder on 3 February 1738, in a House of Commons’ debate on the size of the army) pressed for a reduction in the size of the army in order to safeguard the constitution and cut taxation, and thus, in their view, reduce popular discontent.1 Other MPs, however, had a different view. That year, William Hay, a ministerial Whig MP of independent mind, told the Commons that it was important to keep up the army: ‘I never think on this subject but I consider this island as situated in the neighbourhood of France. I consider France as its natural enemy, and at the same time as the most powerful of all nations.’2 Just as arguments about the role of the navy reflected divisions within Whig politics, and more broadly in British political culture,3 so even more with the army.

At any rate, parliamentary votes of money were crucial, and no other major state had a comparable constitutional constraint. On 16 March 1786, in the debate on the Mutiny Bill, Philip Francis, a prominent opposition speaker in the Commons, ‘laid it down as a maxim, that the great security which this country had for its liberty, was the dependence of the army for its subsistence on that House.’4 Well aware of foreign awareness of opposition criticism of the size of the army, ministers took care to emphasise the ability of the government to get the necessary legislation through Parliament, as John, Lord Carteret, Secretary of State for the Northern Department, did in 1743.5 Views critical of the army did not preclude an understanding of the need to build it up when necessary. Thus, as the War of the Spanish Succession (for Britain, 1702–13) gathered pace, Parliament voted through funds for 31,254 troops recruited from the British Isles in 1702, 50,000

introduction • xiii by 1706, and 75,000 by 1711. There were also large numbers of foreign troops that were paid, in whole or part, so that, by 1709, Britain had, at least in theory, a total of about 150,000 troops available for campaigning.

In 1714, peace brought a reversion to an establishment set at 18,000 troops.

The American War of Independence (1775–83) also saw a transformation: the British and Irish army establishment at the beginning of 1775 was about 36,000 strong, but war brought rapid expansion, and the envisaged strength for 1776 was 96,314, comprising 24,811 in Britain, 8,003 in Ireland, 5,635 in Gibraltar and Minorca (including 2,373 Hanoverians), 3,501 in West Africa and the West Indies, 13,842 in Canada (including 5,780 Germans and 615 Loyalists), and 40,522 in the army under Sir William Howe that was intended to suppress the American Revolution, including 12,982 Hessians, 2,000 Marines and 1,038 Loyalists. In turn, the Army Estimates provided to the House of Commons in December 1779 noted a rise to 179,500 troops, but of these 42,000 were in the militia. Of the 90,000 men then deployed abroad, 15,000 were in the West Indies and West Africa, and 12,000 in Gibraltar and Minorca.

Numbers brought costs in recruitment, pay, equipment and supplies, as well as much business to manufacturers and farmers; hence the clothmakers making uniforms opposed to the Peace of Utrecht with France in 1713. Those were not the sole costs; there were also those of deployment and support. Thus, it was calculated in 1744 that the siege train required by the Allied army in the Austrian Netherlands would ‘amount to 10,000 horses and 2,000 wagons’, at a cost of £50,000 for six weeks.6 The troops raised and money expended were expressions of both nation and empire, and also helped mould them, providing links within the empire that in part could be a matter of coercion and/or intimidation, but that also developed common interests. There was an inclusive Britishness about the army, and notably so as far as Scotland was involved.

In addition, the large number of Irish Catholics in the army in the later decades of our period underlined the extent to which the relationship between Britain and Ireland worked.

Separately, ministers were well aware of the risk of invasion, and the challenge it posed both in peace, for example when relations with France

xiv • how the army made britain a global power, 1688–1815 deteriorated in 1731, and in war. For most of the period from the 1570s, England’s prime overseas opponents were Spain, and, in 1652–74, the Dutch. France took over this role in 1689, and, thanks to its position, resources and military, was in a better position to invade England, to intervene in Ireland, and to threaten what became the nexus of Britain’s alliance system: the Low Countries. Partly as a consequence of this challenge, a great requirement for military manpower pressed on Britain, a society with only modest population growth prior to the mid-18th century, and one for which the navy clearly came first in terms of its strategic requirements and public debate.

The risk of invasion appeared even stronger when France and Spain combined, as they considered doing in 17627 and unsuccessfully tried to do in 1779. The risk of a French or, less commonly, Spanish invasion repeatedly posed a strategic challenge that threatened to fix the army so that it could not act abroad, becoming a key inhibitor to its potential global role, and therefore a dimension that needs to be addressed in its history. This was one of the contexts that it is all too easy to forget or at least underplay, for the history of the army is very much about strategy as well as battle. Thus, in February 1740, François de Bussy, a senior French official who spied for the British, noted in his reports to London information from Spain that its preparations in Galicia (northwest Spain) for a possible invasion of Britain ‘[were] only to create fears in England, and to slacken their [the British] ardour for America [the Caribbean].’

That August, however, James, 1st Earl Waldegrave, the envoy in Paris, warned that the French could assemble troops for an invasion relatively easily: ‘Certainly if the French intended to draw a body together for any attempt against us, the garrisons of Calais, Dunkirk, Gravelines, Lille, Arras, Cambray, Bethune etc. would supply in four or five days a considerable body of men.’8 Allowing for the importance of the changing military contexts faced, and their crucial influence on both funding and tasking for the army, there was also an autonomy of military operations in their context, character and success. Issues such as unit cohesion, morale, weaponry, leadership, and tactics were neither minor nor explained by structural factors including, notably, resource availability. As opposed to an emphasis

introduction • xv on theoretical constructions, the specificity and granularity of military history recur frequently, as, for example, in contrasting the successes of Marlborough in the 1700s with those of his British counterparts in Spain or, indeed, William III in the 1690s.

And so repeatedly, for, whatever the strengths and weaknesses of a military system, it was the ability of men under pressure to achieve their goal that was crucial. This can lead to a set of interests and values that are antithetical to those of much of society in modern Britain, a contrast encapsulated in 2020 by the pressure to discredit, discard, or move from attention the statues of three military heroes of our period, Robert Clive, Sir John Moore and Sir Thomas Picton, who were castigated for their roles in imperial expansion and, in the latter two cases, the treatment of slave opposition. Criticism of such conduct was on occasion voiced at the time, and the wealth Clive obtained in India was a matter of controversy. At the same time, this situation did not lessen the bravery, skill and success of the individuals involved, and these factors are still worthy of note today.