Private 24th Regt. 1751.
Body armour had been reduced to a mere relic of defence in the “duty gorget”—a small plate of brass with the Royal Arms, which was suspended by a piece of black ribbon from the neck by officers “on duty”; a custom that obtained up to 1830. There had been no material change in tactics; but the Royal Artillery had become more fully organised in four companies, the uniform being a loose, long, heavily-cuffed blue cloth coat with red facings. The Royal Military Academy, for the education of artillery officers, was also established about 1741, and the “Horse Guards” as an institution about 1750.
The Black Watch, however, the first of the new Highland regiments, was permitted, for some time, to carry a dirk, pistols, and round target. Medals were issued after Culloden, and regimental numbers appeared on the coat buttons about 1767.
Tactics and the “order of battle” were slow in changing, but the growing preponderance of infantry, now organised in three ranks only, was becoming more evident after Dettingen and Fontenoy. Battles were fought on more modern lines, and infantry bore the brunt; while the cavalry at Dettingen had at last discovered its proper rôle, and behaved with the greatest gallantry, in not leading the main attack as at Blenheim, but in meeting its own opposing arm and keeping it in check, and finally in converting the French retreat across the river into very nearly a rout.
The artillery still lacked mobility, and were not vigorously handled, with the exception of some Hanoverian batteries, which pushed up to support the final advance of the infantry, and opened fire on the French flank. So at Fontenoy the infantry had most to do. This was the beginnings of the tactics of the future.
Thus by 1755, or thereabout, the army had been steadily increasing. After the death of Marlborough, the 9th and 10th Dragoons and the 40th and 41st Regiments of infantry came on the permanent establishment, chiefly because of the Jacobite rising of 1715; the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th Regiments of cavalry also date from the same period; the 42nd had been formed from the separate Highland companies into the “Black Watch,” so called from the sombre colour of their tartans; and soon followed the 43rd, 44th, 45th, 46th, 47th, and 48th of the line. The 49th, at first known as the 63rd Americans, dates from 1743.
But still the old jealousy of, and objection to, a large standing army was always recrudescing. On the accession of George II., the cadres only amounted to 17,760 men; and even this small body Mr. Pulteney, M.P., and “downright” Shippen in the House of Commons wished to be reduced to 12,000! The threat of war in 1739 stopped this; but the army was still at the mercy of political partisans, as the Duke of Argyll in his masterly attack on Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Lords conclusively proves. Another hundred years, too, had to pass by before “political services ceased to form the foundation of a claim for military preferment.”
Flogging, long recognised, and rattan punishment, copied, like the absurd uniform and rigid drill, from much-admired Prussia, now became a permanently recognised institution, and so remained until 1878. It is always a wonder that a free country, such as England, ever permitted the correctional system of the crudest of all military despotisms, that of the so-called Frederick the Great, to live so long. But in this, as in uniform and drill, our army has always been more of a copyist of foreign methods than an originator.