The Story of the British Army

by Charles Cooper King

The delay was turned to full account by the English Government. Ill luck had followed the Stuart cause from its outset, and was to continue till the end; even success in battle seemed to bear but little fruit. Regiments were recalled from Flanders, though many were reduced to mere skeletons. Thus, when the king asked where the rest of the 3rd Dragoons were, he was told by their colonel, “I believe the residue is at Dettingen.” But an army was formed by Marshal Stair, and reviewed by the king on Finchley Common; another, under Wade, was in Yorkshire; and a third, under Cumberland, lay at Lichfield.

Thus, when in November the Jacobite force moved into England, and received no adherents as they had hoped to, and might have had if they had started earlier before the Government could prepare for defence, it had only taken Carlisle and reached Derby when the above armies were ready to co-operate and check it.

So the prince turned back, to find that in Scotland the Whig clans had risen, the west was in arms, and Edinburgh had assembled a force of which Cope’s refugees were the nucleus.

The command of the sea in this as in all other cases was of the highest value to one of the combatants. Especially in those days when sea travel was quicker and more certain than land.

The retreat was only molested by the English dragoons at Penrith, for the infantry could advance but slowly owing to the execrable nature of the roads and the inclement season of the year, and the prince moved to Stirling. The discipline of the small army there was excellent, its behaviour to the people was at all times better and more gentle than that of their adversaries, while the “orders” are concise and soldierlike. Hawley, from Edinburgh, with the 1st Royals, 3rd Buffs, 4th, 8th, 13th, 14th, 27th, 34th, 37th, 48th,[25] and 52nd Regiments, the 7th, 10th, and 14th Dragoons, and some local volunteers, was the first to attack it. This he did at Falkirk, but, making the common mistake of undervaluing the enemy, he was defeated, and retired in some disorder to Edinburgh, with the loss of his guns, five colours, tents, stores, and camp equipage. Thus a second English general had failed to defeat the Scottish Jacobites.

The Duke of Cumberland was therefore despatched to Scotland, with Major James Wolfe, of the 20th, as aide-de-camp, and met the prince at Culloden, where he accepted battle with a weak and ill-provided army against one strong in cavalry and artillery, the two arms in which he was notoriously deficient. The story of that dismal battle is one of 10,000 against 4000, of well-fed against fasting men, of cruelty after the fight so revolting that the very names of all concerned in it should be held in execration by every honest man. Wholesale, cold-blooded butchery of wounded and prisoners, the vilest treatment of women, who were then turned naked into the snow to die; these are stories that stain the name of a general who well merited the name he earned. To his credit be it said, however, Wolfe refused to take part in these barbarities, and he must have felt with pride afterwards that because of his conduct “it was remarked that the recusant officer declined visibly in the favour and confidence of his commander.” It was the last real battle that was fought on British land, and the only point worthy of remembrance is the gallantry of the 4th Foot, in whose ranks “there was not a bayonet that was not either bloody or bent.”

It pointed out for the last time the curious clannish pride which characterised the Highland people, for the three Macdonald regiments, who had been placed on the left rather than the right, a post of honour they claimed as theirs since the days of Bruce, for the gallantry of their forefathers at Bannockburn, refused to fight, or even to follow their chieftain Keppoch, who fell, pierced with musket balls.

With Culloden the last hopes of the Jacobite “faction”—for it had again become one now—died. Whatever hold, up to 1745, the Stuart “idea” may have had on a section of the people, the wisest of them saw that it was hopeless, and only the hopeful enthusiasts still had dreams. It is difficult to know in these days whether there ever really was a Jacobite party after “the ’45.” The idea seems to have died in despair. Of course there were feeble and hysterical conspiracies like the, possibly legendary, one of the young Scot who plotted the assassination of the royal family; and the studied ignorance of Sir Robert Walpole, who kept his eyes shut to these last faint flashes of the fire of the cause, may have deepened the hopefulness of those who still dreamed of “another opportunity,” as an old rebel of the name of Scott did. There was one exception, in the cruel treatment and death of Dr. Cameron about 1750 or 1751; but there may be some justification for his execution, as he was no doubt a “go-between” the Pretender in France and the few left faithful to him in the north. The Young Pretender, too, seems to have been as blind as his adherents. Dr. King, in his Anecdotes of His Own Time, states that in 1750 the prince was in London; but he gives prominence to the undoubted fact that the real destruction of the party was due to the decadence, physically and morally, of the last real aspirant to the throne, and to the dread that his mistress—Walkinshaw—was a paid spy of the house of Hanover, her sister being housekeeper at Leicester House. Well might one of the party ask this hopeless scion of a hopeless house, when endeavouring to separate him from this woman, “What has your family done, sir, thus to draw down the vengeance of Heaven on every branch of it for so many ages?” The answer is simple enough. They had done little but bad. Their kingship was only honourable with those who believed that any sovereign was divinely appointed. The last of the Stuarts more than proved the worthlessness of the whole race as far as the English throne was concerned. Whether, as Scott romantically suggests in Redgauntlet, the Young Pretender ever returned to Great Britain about 1765, is improbable. Even if he did, his cause was lost, and that by his own fault. What scion of the house of Stuart but so fell? It is not that the early members of the house of Hanover were really great or good, but it was because the last of the house of Stuart were irretrievably mean and bad that the embers of the Civil War remained such, and never after 1745 burst into a serious flame.

But while the house of Stuart was declining from mere corruption and decay, the almost alien house of Hanover was slowly and securely winning its way into English sympathies. This was natural enough as the successive sovereigns became more English in their feelings and their speech. Until the early Guelphs could speak freely and fully the language of the nation over which they were called to rule, until they were English born and had English ideas, there was, no doubt, ground for a certain amount of antagonism. Thackeray’s Four Georges proves up to the hilt how slow these sovereigns were in learning the very patent fact that they must become English and cease to be German to get a firm hold on our insular mind. And this they did eventually. But, up to the ’45, their rule, which was still very foreign for years after that date, was rather endured as a necessity than loved, their personality regarded as alien rather than English. The one thing that made the nation, up to the first half of the eighteenth century, accept with little complaint, or hostility, princes who still were far too German to please the tastes of English-speaking peoples, was their own honesty of purpose and their personal courage and bravery. The house of Guelph lost nothing by actual want of success in the foreign wars about the time of the really serious Jacobite rising. Englishmen like pluck, and don’t mind a beating, provided good men do their best. This, then, is the story, as far as the army is concerned, of Dettingen and Fontenoy. They were not successes, certainly, but neither king nor soldier had shown want of the good old fighting spirit of Blenheim and Malplaquet. At the worst it was a healthy time, and showed that our mere bull-dog courage was not by itself the only thing by which battles are won.

The causes of the war in which an English reigning sovereign led an army in the field were the guarantee of Great Britain, France, and other States, of the succession of Maria Theresa to the throne of the German Empire, known as the “Pragmatic Sanction,” and the attack upon Silesia by Frederick of Prussia. From this action France and Bavaria were drawn into the struggle against the Empress, and George II., possibly fearing the preponderating growth of his neighbour Prussia as a menace to his Hanoverian dominions, assembled a force of Danes, Hessians, Hanoverians, and British, under the Earl of Stair, numbering forty-four battalions, twenty of which were British, with fifty-three squadrons. This army, about 35,000 strong, met the French, some 25,000 in number, and composed of twenty-four battalions, and thirty squadrons, in position on the left bank of the Maine. The Allies were at Aschaffenburg and Klein Ostheim, and prepared to march through Dettingen on the right bank to join with a Hessian force at Hanau.