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 ev............