All the kings men, p.16
All the King’s Men, page 16
Captain Grimston of Kilnwick who is raising a Company of Blues at Beverly [sic] came past me as I was sitting at Sutton Salts and he seeing that I was young &likely for Service ask’d me if I would inlist to which I told him I had no inclination. He told me as the rebellion was broke out so strong he greatly question’d but every one must as able to bear arms &he desired me to consider of it &enter with him.
Todd did reconsider and, two days later, enlisted at Beverley. ‘We receiv’d five shillings entrance and one shilling a day, &I was quarter’d at John Tongues at the Cross Keys [inn] &we paid sixpence a day for our quarters &we receiv’d a blue coat faced with red, a cockade, hat and haversack etc.’55 A few weeks later Bonnie Prince Charlie invaded England and it seemed that Todd and his comrades would have to fight. But the danger passed with the Jacobites’ retreat from Derby, and Todd was discharged in February 1746.
Soon after, having enjoyed his brief taste of military service, he enlisted in the regular army. The date is uncertain because for the next three years he made no journal entries. When it resumes, in June 1749, he is a corporal in the 30th Foot, stationed in Kilkenny in the west of Ireland (a city, according to Todd, ‘remarkable for its coals having no smoak’, a ‘fine fresh’ river ‘with plenty of salmon trouts in it’, and its streets ‘paved with marble’).56 Todd’s early years in Ireland were relatively uneventful as the 30th was moved from one garrison town to another. But violence erupted within the regiment in November 1751 when one soldier killed another in a fight – probably over a woman – and was later hanged by the civil authorities. A year later Todd was sent back to Yorkshire with a recruiting party and told to ‘hire a drummer at Hull &to recruit every market day at each place’. He eventually returned to his regiment with the new soldiers the following March.57
The first real excitement for Todd was in November 1753, when he and a small party of soldiers cooperated with the Royal Navy to capture a notorious smuggler who had murdered a Customs Officer, ‘where by £500 was offered for the apprehending &takeing him dead or alive’. Todd recorded:
We sailed all day along the shore till about 11 o clock at night we run into a small break betwixt two large mountains. Our guide order’d us to land &we march’d very silent about 3 miles until we came to some small cabins or huts where our guide shew’d us his hut. Our officer immediately ordere’d us to surround it &every man upon his guard &to fire at any one who should attempt to break out of the house … His wife &other two women hearing our guns &being very much frighten’d came out &begged their lives, which was granted them, he being in the house with four or five men more. They fired &wounded two of our men out of the windows with blunderbusses, but we set his house on fire over their heads. The men rushed out, we fired &killed two of them. Himself came out last with a loaded blunderbuss &it missing fire we shot him dead at his door &we got into the house … Each man received £4.12s.* for his share. The rest the officers, guides &informers got divided amongst them.58
With war looming in 1755, the 30th Foot returned to England to prepare for active service by bringing its companies up to their war establishment of five NCOs, two drummers and 70 privates. A year later, by which time the 30th was part of a brigade camp at Chatham, a deserter from the marines was ‘shot in front of the encampment, our whole line being under arms &each man marched singly by him as he lay to strike a terror in the rest’. Even more brutal was the sentence given to a drummer of Todd’s corps who had slit his wife’s throat with a razor for sleeping with a sergeant of the same company. ‘The next day he was sent to Gaol to Rochester where he was hanged and gibbeted.’ As shocking, in its own way, was the punishment in 1757 of a private who stole a silver tankard from his billet: seven years’ transportation.59
9. The Seven Years War
Despite the reversal at Monongahela in Ohio, Britain did not formally declare war on France – the start of a much wider global conflict that came to be known as the Seven Years War – until 18 May 1756. The immediate cause was France’s unprovoked assault a month earlier on Minorca, the Balearic isle captured by Britain in 1708 and since established as the Royal Navy’s key Mediterranean possession. With the vital harbour and fortress of Port Mahon under siege from the landward side, the navy sent a squadron of ships under Vice-Admiral John Byng to defeat the French support fleet and so sever the besiegers’ line of supply. But the ensuing action on 20 May was inconclusive, with neither side prepared to come to close quarters, and after it Byng made the fatal decision to withdraw to Gibraltar to refit, leaving the four battalions of the Minorca garrison to their fate. They duly surrendered on 28 June, but only after a stubborn resistance, and having gained terms that enabled them to march out of the battered fortress with drums beating and colours flying, before taking ship to Gibraltar. The loss of the island was seen as a national calamity and Byng took the blame. Court-martialled and sentenced to death, he was shot on the quarterdeck of his flagship on 14 March 1757. The reason, in Voltaire’s immortal phrase: Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres (‘In England, it is good, from time to time, to kill an admiral, to encourage the others’).
The conflict might have been confined to trade routes and colonies but for two factors: Britain’s need to protect Hanover and her government’s fear that France would prove too powerful an opponent if she was allowed to concentrate solely on the maritime and colonial struggle. The solution to both problems was an alliance with at least one other major Continental power and, with Austria still smarting from Britain’s betrayal in 1748, the only viable option was Frederick II’s Prussia. A treaty with the Prussians was signed by the Duke of Newcastle’s government in January 1756, prompting the outraged French to make a pact of their own with the Austrians, their former enemies, who were desperate to recover Silesia. This suited Britain, as it meant the Austrian Netherlands – and therefore the Low Countries in general – was safe from French attack. Less palatable was Russia’s subsequent entry into the war on the Franco-Austrian side.
Britain’s preparations for war had long preceded the actual declaration, with Chelsea Pensioners called up for garrison duty in the autumn of 1755 so that fitter troops were available for field service. In December 1755 ten new regiments of infantry were raised and the following March, after another invasion scare, a Press Act was passed for the forced conscription of the unemployed poor. That same year all cavalry regiments received an extra fifteen men per troop, and an additional light troop for reconnaissance, skirmishing and outpost duty. This was part of a general move by European armies to recruit light horsemen or hussars,* and in Britain would lead to the formation of eleven regiments of light dragoons.
Units of light infantry were also being raised across the Continent. As the tactics of the volley-firing infantry of the line became ever more rigid, there was a need for more lightly equipped, faster-moving troops to get ahead of the main line and take advantage of the terrain, delay attacks and fire accurately at individual targets. Hence the Austrians recruited light regiments from the rugged frontier provinces of Hungary and Croatia, German states formed companies of Jäger (hunters skilled in the use of rifles), and the French raised Chasseurs on foot and horse. The British had had light troops of a sort at Fontenoy in the shape of the lightly equipped and agile Highlanders of the Black Watch – and would recruit two more Highland regiments in 1757 – but the first specialist unit of light infantry was raised in Pennsylvania in 1756 as a response to the defeat of regular British troops in the wilderness of Monongahela. Composed largely of German and Swiss immigrants, it was known as the Royal American Regiment (later the 60th Rifles).
A further expansion of the British Army took place in September 1756, when fifteen regiments were authorized to raise second battalions that, two years later, became regiments in their own right as the 61st to 75th Foot.
Despite these preparations, however, public anger at the loss of Minorca and fresh disasters in India and North America – notably the loss of Calcutta to the Indian Nawab of Bengal,* and the surrender of the important outpost of Oswego on Lake Ontario to the French – eventually forced the Duke of Newcastle’s government from office in November 1756. It was replaced by one headed by the Duke of Devonshire, but the new ministry’s real leader was William Pitt the Elder, secretary of state for the Southern Department, whose brief included North America. Arrogant and aloof, with an imposing physical presence and the powerful voice of an actor, Pitt was a consummate politician who knew by instinct that one must ‘look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under’t’.1 If he had had his way, Britain would have concentrated its war effort in the West Indies, the centre of the sugar industry. In 1775 sugar would account for more than a fifth of the value of British imports and was worth five times Britain’s tobacco trade. Pitt was well aware of its importance at the heart of the Atlantic trading system – cheap trade goods to Africa, slaves to the Americas, and sugar and tobacco back to Britain – that underpinned his nation’s prosperity, and once described the French sugar island of Guadeloupe as worth more than the whole of Canada, and the West Indies worth more than North America. He had a point. Even as late as 1773 the value of British imports from Jamaica was five times that produced by all the American colonies.
For all that, George II was never going to allow him to ignore North America’s security, let alone Hanover’s, and on taking office Pitt at once announced extra troops for both America and the Continent, with the Duke of Cumberland given command of the latter. The only ray of sunshine for the new regime, however, was in India, where Robert Clive, a young employee of the Honourable East India Company, retook Calcutta and then defeated the vastly superior army of the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey on 23 June 1757, a victory that won for the Company the right to tax the indigenous population, and thus paved the way for Britain’s Indian Empire and the army’s long association with the Subcontinent.
Elsewhere the outlook was grim. Five days before Plassey, the seemingly invincible Prussians under Frederick the Great were defeated by the Austrians at Kolin, near Prague, leaving Cumberland to fend off the marauding French alone. He failed, and defeat at Hastenbeck in late July was followed by the Convention of Klosterzeven, which allowed for the evacuation of his army – including the Hanoverian Contingent to Denmark – and left the rest of Hanover at the mercy of the French. George II was apoplectic at this ‘betrayal’ and at once recalled his second son and former favourite, replacing him as commander-in-chief with Sir John Ligonier (who was ennobled as Viscount Ligonier). The disgraced Cumberland never served again.
In America, too, there were setbacks with the loss to the French of Fort William Henry, at the head of Lake George on the route from New York to Montreal, and the failure of Lord Loudoun, the commander of British forces, to retake Louisbourg thanks to the presence of superior French naval forces. Closer to home, Sir John Mordaunt’s ambitious attempt to land an army that included Wolfe’s 20th Foot at Rochefort on the west coast of France in September 1757 – an operation designed to relieve the pressure on America and Hanover – was called off when its hesitant commander received conflicting reports of the strength of coastal defences. Corporal Todd, whose 30th Foot was also part of the expedition, recorded: ‘Our landing seems now to be quite given over, and we have a great talk of returning to England as the country here being all alarmed, &all up in arms, &we have quite demolished the Island de Aix of all its batteries, stores etc and brought off every thing that was found in it worth notice. I should be very glad orders would come for to go on board of the Thetis, man of war, again, for we are so very thick stowed here in the transport ships, &also such short allowance of provisions … that all our men is very uneasy.’ They weighed anchor the following day.2
Wolfe was furious, blaming senior officers in the army and navy alike for a collective loss of nerve. ‘If they would even blunder on and fight a little,’ he informed his uncle, ‘making some amends to their public by their courage for their want of skill; but this excessive degree of caution … leaves exceeding bad impressions among the troops, who, to do them justice, upon this occasion showed all the signs of spirit and good will.’3
Not all the troops were so forgiving. ‘We certainly cut but a poor figure on our return,’ wrote Private James Miller of the 15th Foot, ‘and were frequently insulted in our quarters by the vulgar, as if soldiers were answerable for the conduct of their superiors. I was now pretty well cured of the romantic notions imbibed in youth.’4 Mordaunt was eventually held to account when he was court-martialled for disobeying orders. He argued that his orders gave him scope for discretion and the court agreed, finding him not guilty. But George II made his displeasure at the verdict known when he snubbed Mordaunt at court and dropped him from his personal staff.
Though Wolfe gave evidence at the trial, he reserved his most acerbic comments for his private correspondence, describing Mordaunt and the naval leaders as ‘dilatory, ignorant, irresolute’. He was, however, not sorry to have accompanied the expedition, noting that ‘one may always pick up something useful from amongst the most fatal errors.’ In particular that an admiral ‘should anchor the transport ships and frigates as close as he can to land; that he should reconnoitre and observe it as quick as possible, and lose no time in getting the troops on shore’; and, above all, that ‘pushing on smartly is the road to success.’5 It was a tactic prescribed by all the great captains of war – from Alexander the Great onwards – but not one that Wolfe would practise in the lead-up to the operation that sealed his fame. Yet, in the short term, his involvement with the Rochefort operation did nothing to harm his career, as shown by his promotion soon after to colonel of the newly raised 2nd Battalion of the 20th Foot (2/20th).
Amidst the military disasters of the year, the reshuffled Pitt–Newcastle government passed the Militia Act in June, after much fierce debate. An attempt to ease the burden on regular troops by putting local defence on a more stable footing, it abolished the system that had been in place since the Restoration – whereby property-owners supplied men, equipment and horses at a rate equivalent to their wealth – and replaced it with one based on local taxation. Each county was to select a fixed quota of men by compulsory ballot and pay for them out of the rates. Command was given to the lord-lieutenant, a royal appointment, but was balanced by deputy lieutenants or colonels appointed from local landowners with incomes of £444 a year, or heirs of men worth double; the remaining officers owned smaller estates. Foot soldiers were aged between fifteen and fifty, but substitutes were allowed if those balloted could afford to pay them. It was this compromise of the principle of universal personal obligation that caused a wave of anti-Militia Act riots in the summer of 1757, tying down regular troops desperately needed elsewhere.
In serious danger of losing the war, Britain was rejuvenated by two of the greatest battlefield victories of the era: Rossbach and Leuthen. The architect of both was Frederick the Great, who, since his defeat at Kolin in June, had withdrawn his troops into Prussia proper, pursued by armies from Austria, France and Russia. His demise seemed certain, particularly after Austro-Hungarian troops raided his capital of Berlin in mid-October, plundering the prosperous homes on the Unter den Linden and forcing his court to flee to nearby Spandau. Yet a narrow victory over the Russians in East Prussia by one of his subordinates had given him a little breathing space, and he took full advantage. Force-marching his 21,000 men a distance of 170 miles in two weeks, he met a Franco-Imperial army of 40,000 near the village of Rossbach in Thuringia on 5 November. The overconfident French commander, the Prince of Soubise, assumed he had only to outflank Frederick to force him to withdraw. That, too, was Frederick’s first instinct as the French advanced in dense columns, with no advanced guard, round the left, or southern, flank of the Prussian position. Yet instead of outflanking the Prussians, the French simply exposed their own flanks to attack, an invitation that Frederick’s cavalry commander, General Friedrich von Seydlitz, was not about to refuse. As the rest of the Prussian army changed front, he charged the leading Franco-Imperial columns, stopping them in their tracks. Soon after Frederick brought the Prussian artillery and infantry into action, their combined fire shattering the enemy columns. A final charge by von Seydlitz’s horse completed the rout, with at least three Franconian regiments throwing away their arms as they ran. The survivors were scattered over 40 miles of country. At a cost of just 500 casualties, Frederick had killed and wounded 5,000 of the enemy, and taken prisoner a similar number.
He had, moreover, saved Germany from French domination, and Voltaire, no less, would describe Rossbach as ‘the most unimaginable and most complete rout in history … The defeats of Agincourt, Crécy and Poitiers were not as humiliating.’6 When the news reached Britain, Pitt’s government at once voted more subsidies for Prussia and authorized Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, a former Prussian general who had had some success against the French, to take command of the Hanoverian army.
Frederick the Great, meanwhile, was still faced with the Austrians, who, since their victory at Kolin, had overrun half of Silesia and captured Breslau. Pausing for a week to refit, he set out from Leipzig with 13,000 men on 13 November and, with his army again displaying superhuman traits of endurance and organization, marched a further 170 miles in two weeks, with just one day’s rest. His eve-of-battle address to his officers at Parchwitz in Silesia was reminiscent of Cumberland’s at Culloden. ‘We must beat the enemy,’ he told them, ‘or bury ourselves before his guns … If there is one or other of you who is frightened to share these dangers with me, he can take his leave without suffering the slightest reproach.’7
Frederick’s rapid advance caught the Austrians by surprise: they had assumed that after Rossbach he would go into winter quarters. Instead, reinforced by local troops to a total strength of 39,000 men, he made straight for the Austrian position near the village of Leuthen, where 66,000 men were drawn up in a defensive formation that stretched for 5½ miles. It was the perfect opportunity for him to use his ‘oblique order’ of attack. He explained: ‘You refuse one wing to the enemy and strengthen the one that is to attack. With the latter you do your utmost against one wing of the enemy, which you take in the flank. An Army of 100,000 men taken in flank may be beaten by 30,000 in a very short time.’8
