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 More could not be reduced until the eight thousand men who were left in garrison in Flanders could be withdrawn, but even so the total force on the British Establishment, including all colonial garrisons, had sunk in 1714 to less than thirty thousand men.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]
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