All the King’s Men, page 13
His Brown Bess flintlock musket – made either at the Minories in London or bought from abroad – weighed 11 lb. 2 oz. and carried a barrel 3½ feet long. It had a .753 bore and fired a ball weighing 1⅓ oz. Cartridges consisted of the ball and 4½ drams of black powder, wrapped in paper. To load, the soldier tore the top off the cartridge with his teeth and, having sprinkled a small amount of powder into the priming pan, poured the rest down the barrel, followed by the ball and remaining paper, all rammed home with an iron rod. But it remained a clumsy weapon that could be rendered ineffective by wind and rain, either of which might prevent the ignition of the powder in the pan. Nor could it, even in the best conditions, be loaded quickly or fired accurately. Most men could manage a firing rate of no more than two or three shots a minute; and though it could kill at 300 yards, it was really effective only at much closer distances and in skilled hands. When the bayonet, more than a foot long and weighing 1lb., was fixed it became almost impossible to use the ramrod to reload, while the overbalanced barrel was harder to aim. Its true value lay in the controlled firepower of 100 or more in one discharge. ‘A regiment that stood its ground under assault,’ wrote Prebble, ‘biting the cartridge, priming the pan, ramming home the ball, firing at the beat of the drum and loading again, a regiment thus engaged could not, in theory, be overrun … Like most arguments in theory it was frequently confounded in practice.’13
The first proper opportunity since 1713 for these effective but far from unbeatable soldiers to prove themselves in battle against a major military power – once again the French – was at Dettingen on 27 June 1743. A year earlier, having won a second victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Chotusitz, Frederick II of Prussia had withdrawn from the war, with Silesia as his prize; but Austria was still being threatened by French and Bavarian armies along the Danube, and it was to relieve that pressure that the British Contingent in Flanders linked up with Hanoverian and Austrian forces on the lower Rhine. Their initial commander was the Earl of Stair, a vastly experienced general who had been present at all of Marlborough’s major victories. He was superseded, however, in mid-June 1743 when the soldier-king George II arrived to take personal command of the 44,000-strong Allied force.
Ignoring Stair’s advice, George posted his army on the north bank of the River Main at Aschaffenburg, 30 miles upstream from Frankfurt, in an attempt to intercept a retreating French army. But he was outmanoeuvred by his French opponent, the Duc de Noailles, who sent part of his army to block George’s retreat, thus trapping him in the narrow gap between the wooded Spessart Hills and the River Main. The king’s only hope of escape was to fight his way through the 28,000-strong blocking army that de Noailles had placed around the village of Dettingen.
George’s men began their march on the morning of 27 June and soon came under heavy enfilade fire from French artillery batteries south of the Main. ‘The enemy began to cannonade us very hot before we could bring our Cannons to bear,’ recalled a gunner in the Royal Artillery. ‘They play’d upon us 3 hours … [until] we at last came to a convenient ground where we fixed [several] Batteries, and play’d upon them with success, with round shott. When we had cannonaded a considerable time, our horse &foot engaged with loud huzzas.’14
On a plain to the east of Dettingen, George deployed them for battle in three lines – with the infantry in the centre and the cavalry on the wings – and was extremely fortunate that the French commander at Dettingen, Noailles’s nephew the Duc de Gramont, chose to leave his fortified position and fight in the open. De Gramont’s fatal error was to assume that the main Allied army had somehow eluded him, and that the force before him was no more than a rearguard.
But even with a numerical advantage, the battle did not begin well for the Allies and, scared by the first ineffective exchange of musket fire, George’s horse bolted to the rear. He rejoined the battle on foot, but by then Stair had assumed tactical control and the superior British musketry was taking its toll. An officer of the 23rd Welsh (later Royal Welch) Fusiliers, one of the units retained after Utrecht, recalled:
We attack’d the Regiment of Navarre, one of their prime Regiments. Our people imitated their predecessors in the last War gloriously, marching in close order, as firm as a wall, and did not fire till we came within 60 paces, and still kept advancing; so that we had soon closed with the enemy, if they had not retreated: for when the smoak blew off a little, instead of being among their living, we found the dead in heaps by us: and the second fire turn’d them to the right about, and upon a long trot. We engaged two other Regiments afterwards, one after the other, who stood but one fire each: and their Blue French Foot Guards made the best of their way without firing a shot.15
The 23rd suffered ‘no more than 50 killed and wounded’, according to this officer, who put their preservation down to ‘keeping close order’ and holding fire until the last minute. He added: ‘Several that popp’d at 100 paces lost more of their men, and did less execution: for the French will stand fire at a distance, tho’ ’tis plain they cannot look men in the face.’16
The struggle continued for some hours, with the Scots Greys and the 3rd (King’s) Dragoons charging with distinction, but it was the British and Allied infantry that, after a shaky start, decided the battle in George’s favour. They were like a wall of brass, wrote de Noailles, ‘from which there issued so brisk and well sustained a fire that the oldest officers owned that they had never seen anything like it, incomparably superior to our own’.17 Outgunned, the French fled the field, losing many of their 6,000 casualties in the waters of the Main. The Allied losses were 2,500.
George II was rightly proud of his unlikely victory, as were his subjects back home. ‘The British troops and all the Allied army, who were engaged in this action,’ trumpeted the London Gazette, ‘behaved with the utmost resolution, bravery and intrepidity.’18 But in truth George had done little to influence the outcome, and his inexperienced soldiers had benefited from the enemy’s blunders. Next time they would not be so lucky.
8. James Wolfe
If the hard-fought victory at Dettingen proved anything, it was that George II was no Marlborough. Yet also present that hot summer’s day was a young officer who, but for his untimely death sixteen years later, might have stood the comparison. James Wolfe, born in Kent in 1727 into a family of professional soldiers, will forever be associated with the victory at Quebec in 1759 that cost him his life – and decided the fate of North America. Incredibly, Wolfe was just thirty-two years old when he was killed in Canada, but he had already achieved more during his short career – particularly in the fields of training and battlefield tactics – than many officers do in a lifetime.
Wolfe’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all worn the redcoat of the British soldier and there was never a doubt he would follow in their footsteps. The first unit he joined as a thirteen-year-old officer-cadet in 1740 was a new battalion of marines, technically part of the Royal Navy, which his father had raised the previous year for service in the Caribbean against the Spanish. He was too sick to board the transports, and it was just as well because the expedition, racked by sickness and inter-service rivalry, was not a success. Instead, in March 1742, Wolfe exchanged from the marines into Duroure’s (later the 12th) Regiment of Foot* with the rank of ensign. A month later his regiment was ordered to Flanders as part of the British expeditionary force sent to assist Austria.
Wolfe spent almost a year in Ghent learning the basics of his profession, and was evidently a quick learner because, shortly before the British Contingent marched south into Germany, he was appointed acting adjutant at the age of just sixteen. The adjutant was, in effect, the commanding officer’s right-hand man, with responsibility for regimental administration, discipline and training. If anything underlines Wolfe’s natural aptitude for soldiering it was this key appointment at such a young age.
Nor did Wolfe disappoint. At Dettingen – as he related to his father in a letter – he and the regiment’s acting commander ‘were employed in begging and ordering the men not to fire at too great a distance, but to keep it until the enemy should come near us, but to little purpose’. Wolfe added:
The whole fired when they thought they could reach them, which had like to have ruined us. We did very little execution with it. As soon as the French saw we presented they all fell down, and when we had fired they all got up, and marched close to us in tolerable good order, and gave us a brisk fire, which put us into some disorder and made us give way a little, particularly ours and two or three more regiments, who were in the hottest of it. However we soon rallied again, and attacked them with great fury, which gained us a complete victory, and forced the enemy to retire in great haste.1
Despite having a horse shot from under him, Wolfe showed remarkable composure and maturity for one so young; this was noticed by the king’s 22-year-old son, William, Duke of Cumberland, who spoke to Wolfe ‘several times’ as the battle raged. The admiration was mutual. ‘He gave his orders with a great deal of calmness,’ recalled Wolfe, ‘and seemed quite unconcerned. The soldiers were in a high delight to have him so near them.’ Though he was carried off the field with a musket-ball in the calf, Cumberland never forgot the brave young adjutant and, thereafter, Wolfe’s meteoric rise owed as much to royal patronage as it did to his undoubted talents.2
Within weeks of Dettingen, he had been confirmed as adjutant and promoted to lieutenant. A year later, still only seventeen, he transferred to Barrell’s (later the 4th) Regiment of Foot as a captain and served for a year in Flanders under the aged and ineffective Field Marshal George Wade. The replacement of Wade by the Duke of Cumberland in early 1745 augured well for Wolfe. He was fortunate, too, that his battalion was on garrison duty at Ghent when the duke rashly attacked a well-dug-in French army under Marshal Maurice de Saxe at Fontenoy, near Tournai, on 11 May. As ever the redoubtable British infantry performed well and, despite enfilade fire from a redoubt to their right, managed to storm the French entrenchments and even enter the camp behind. But the Dutch in the centre and the Austrians on the right had less success and, unsupported, the British withdrew with heavy losses and the retreat became general. Cumberland’s overconfidence had cost the Allies 10,000 men, with Wolfe’s old battalion, the 12th, particularly badly hit and sent to garrison Ostend while it recovered.
Within days, Barrell’s had reinforced the remnants of Cumberland’s army at Lessines, and thereby avoided capture when Ghent fell to the French a few weeks later. Wolfe’s good fortune continued in June, when he was promoted by Cumberland to brevet-major of brigade,* a key staff appointment he would hold for the next three years. At eighteen, he had secured three promotions in as many years – circumventing, in the process, the requirement to spend at least ten years as a lieutenant before he could be considered for promotion to captain – and was the youngest major in the British Army. His next experience of battle, however, was not against the French but his own countrymen, and the defeat at Fontenoy was partly to blame because it gave Prince Charles Edward (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’), son of the Old Pretender and grandson of James II, the courage to launch the final Jacobite rebellion known as the Forty-Five.
It was almost over before it had begun when a British warship intercepted the tiny French convoy carrying the prince and 700 Irish volunteers as they approached Scotland in early July. The ship carrying the bulk of the troops was damaged in the action and forced to turn back, leaving the prince to land on the isle of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides with only a handful of men. From there he sailed to the mainland and in mid-August, at Glenfinnan on Loch Shiel, he raised his standard and was at once joined by 1,200 men from the local clans. They came not out of any particular loyalty to the Stuarts (though they thought them preferable to the Hanoverians), nor because they were desperate to free Scotland from the English yoke; but rather because their clan chiefs told them to, and because brigandage and fighting was a way of life. Duncan Forbes, Lord President of the Scottish Court of Sessions in 1745, described the Highlands as ‘that large tract of mountainous Ground
to the Northwest of the Tay, where the natives speak the Irish language. The inhabitants stick close to their ancient and idle way of life; retain their barbarous customs and maxims; depend generally on their Chiefs as their Sovereign Lords and masters; and being accustomed to the use of Arms, and inured to hard living, are dangerous to the public peace; and must continue to be so until being deprived of Arms for some years, they forget the use of them.3
Forbes put the number of armed Highlanders at 32,000, a fighting force so formidable that in former times the crown ‘was obliged to put Sheriffships and other Jurisdictions in the hands of powerful families in the Highlands, who by their respective Clans and following could give execution to the Laws within their several territories, and frequently did so at considerable bloodshed’.4 Fortunately for George II, the clans were never united. ‘Religion, feuds, the political ambitions of chiefs, the natural jealousies of men who live remote and primitive lives,’ wrote John Prebble, ‘made common cause impossible. Each clan was enough to itself, and the world ended beyond the glen, or with the sea that locked in the islands.’5
So it was during the Forty-Five, when most of the clans stayed aloof from the rebellion and, as a result, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army never numbered more than 8,000 men. Yet these rebels were all hardy raw-boned men, clad in loose togas of woollen plaid (from which the kilt was developed), and armed with muskets, small target shields and the fearsome claymore sword. They were particularly effective at close quarters, as they proved at Prestonpans, near Edinburgh, on 21 September, when fewer than 2,500 Highlanders surprised and routed a slightly smaller government force under Sir John Cope. Unable to stand the Highlanders’ battle charge, Cope’s men broke and fled, though fewer than 200 got away. The remaining 2,000 or so were killed or taken prisoner, at a cost to the Jacobites of just 100 men.
News of the defeat caused panic in London, and the government’s immediate response was to recall eight battalions from Flanders and send them by ship to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Among the reinforcement officers was Major James Wolfe, who reached the north-east in early November. Assigned to the staff of his old chief, 72-year-old Field Marshal George Wade, Wolfe was optimistic that the Jacobites would soon be crushed, informing his mother on 14 November that it was the ‘opinion of most men that these rebels won’t stand the King’s troops’.6
Wolfe, however, had not bargained on Wade’s caution; nor on the intrepidity of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his 6,000 men, who, having invaded England by the western route, captured Carlisle on 16 November. That same day Wade marched his troops through snow to Carlisle’s assistance; but when he received word on the 17th that the town had fallen, he ‘turned round in his tracks back to Newcastle, leaving the insurgents to do as they please’. An early Wolfe biographer commented: ‘How sick the Brigade-major of nineteen must have been at Marshal Wade’s method of waging war! – a capital illustration of how not to do it.’7
The prince continued his march south, entering Preston on 26 November. By now Wade had set off in pursuit, while the Duke of Cumberland, just back from Flanders with yet more reinforcements, had gathered a force of 8,000 in the Midlands. The duke’s plan was to crush the Jacobites between his hammer and Wade’s anvil; but he was outwitted by Lord George Murray, the prince’s military commander, who used a feint towards Wales to disguise his real target: London. The duke took the bait, leaving the road open to Derby, where the Jacobites arrived on 4 December. The only troops that now lay between the fast-marching Highlanders and London was a scratch force, consisting chiefly of militia, that was being assembled north of the city at Finchley.
If Bonnie Prince Charlie had continued his march he might – just might – have regained the throne for his father. He himself was keen to advance. But his advisers were depressed by the lack of visible support for the Jacobite cause and urged him to retreat, saying he might defeat one of the three English armies that were hunting for him – Cumberland’s, Wade’s and the Finchley force – but not all three. With extreme reluctance, and after a long day of argument, the prince bowed to his council’s advice and the retreat began on 6 December.
It was a knife-edge decision. ‘When the Highlanders, by a most incredible march,’ wrote the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding, ‘got between the Duke’s army and the metropolis, they struck a terror into it scarce to be credited.’ So severe was the run on the Bank of England that it was reduced to paying out sixpences to stave off bankruptcy. Only when the news reached London of the Scots’ withdrawal did the panic subside.8
True to form, Wade failed to intercept the retreating Jacobites, who, having fought a successful rearguard action against Cumberland’s cavalry near Penrith (the last skirmish on English soil), crossed back into Scotland in late December. With Wade plainly unequal to the task, and Cumberland required down south to meet a possible French invasion, the general sent in pursuit of the Jacobites was Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley, a hard-drinking martinet who, according to one observer, ‘if not a good soldier, studies to be thought so, by his severity of manners, and strictness of discipline’.9 Wolfe and Barrell’s Regiment were part of Hawley’s force of 8,000.
By the time Hawley reached Edinburgh in early January 1746, the Jacobites had invested Stirling Castle, the gateway to the Highlands. Hawley at once set off to relieve it – as King Edward II, the commander of another English army, had tried to do more than four centuries earlier, and with a similar outcome. Having contributed to the collapse of the Jacobite left wing at Sheriffmuir in 1715, Hawley was convinced he could counteract the Highlanders’ dreaded charge with disciplined, close-range musketry. He ordered his men, therefore, to hold their fire until the Jacobites were within ten or twelve paces. But timing was everything. ‘If the fire is given at a distance,’ he warned, ‘you probably will be broke for you never get time to load a second cartridge, and if you give way you may give your foot for dead, for they [the Highlanders] being without a firelock or any load, no man with his arms, accoutrements etc can escape them, and they give no quarters.’10
