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 They had been concentrated to resist foreign invasion, but had been withdrawn without any attempt to strike a blow.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 conspi............