Sir J. W. Fortescue

CHAPTER I

Seldom has a man been confronted with such difficulties as those that beset William of Orange when the Revolution was fairly accomplished. So long as his success was still uncertain he stood in his favourite position of a military commander doing his worst against the power of France, while to the English nation he was a champion and a deliverer. Once seated on the throne he found that he had to do with a disorganised administration and a demoralised people. Forty years of revolution, interrupted by twenty-five of corrupt government, had done their work; and chaos reigned alike in the minds of private men and in all departments of the public service. Finally, as if this were not sufficient, there was a war in Ireland, a war in Flanders, and the practical certainty of an insurrection in Scotland.

His first trouble came quickly enough. Amid the general rejoicing over the overthrow of King James the English Army stood apart, surly and silent. The regiments felt that they had been fooled. They had been concentrated to resist foreign invasion, but had been withdrawn without any attempt to strike a blow. During his advance, and after his arrival in London, William had detailed the British regiments in the Dutch service for all duties which, if entrusted to foreigners, might have offended national sentiment; but his prudence could not reconcile the Army. The troops felt their disgrace keenly, and the burden of their dishonour was aggravated by the taunts of the foreigners. Moreover, the discipline of the Dutch had been so admirable that English folk had not failed to draw invidious comparisons between the well-conducted strangers and their own red-coats. Needless to say, they never reflected that Parliament, by withholding powers to enforce discipline, was chiefly responsible for the delinquencies of the English soldier. Discontent spread fast among the troops, and before the new king had been proclaimed a month, found vent in open mutiny.

1689.

On the news of William's expedition to England, France had declared war against the States-General; and England, pursuant to obligations of treaty, was called upon to furnish her contingent of troops for their defence. On the 8th of March accordingly Lieutenant-General Lord Marlborough was ordered to ship four battalions of Guards and six of the Line[227] for Holland. Among these battalions was the Royal Scots, to which regiment William, doubtless with the best intentions, had lately appointed the Duke of Schomberg to be colonel. Schomberg was by repute one of the first soldiers in Europe. He had held a marshal's bÂton in France and had sacrificed it to the cause of the Protestant religion. He had even fought by the side of the Royal Scots in more than one great action. But he was not a Scotsman, and the Scots had known no colonel yet but a Mackay, a Hepburn, or a Douglas. Moreover, the Parliament at Westminster, though not a Scottish Assembly, had, without consulting the regiment, coolly transferred its allegiance from James Stuart to William of Nassau.

With much grumbling the Scots marched as far as Ipswich on their way to their port of embarkation, and then, at a signal from some Jacobite officers, they broke into mutiny, seized four cannon, and, turning northward, advanced by forced marches towards Scotland. The alarm in London was great. "If you let this evil spread," said Colonel Birch, an old officer of Cromwell's day, "you will have an army upon you in a few days." William at once detached Ginkell, one of his best officers, with a large force in pursuit; the mutineers were overtaken near Sleaford, and, finding resistance hopeless, laid down their arms. William, selecting a few of the ringleaders only for punishment, ordered the rest of the regiment to return to its duty, and the Royal Scots sailed quietly away to the Maas. There the men deserted by scores, and even by hundreds,[228] but recruits were found, as good as they, to uphold the ancient reputation of the regiment.

Meanwhile good came out of evil, for the mutiny frightened the House of Commons not only into paying the expenses of William's expedition, but into passing the first Mutiny Act. It is true that the Act was passed for six months only, and that it provided for no more than the punishment of mutiny and desertion; but it recognised at least that military crime cannot be adequately checked by civil law, and it gave the Army more or less of a statutory right to exist. But readers should be warned once for all against the common fallacy that the existence of the Army ever depended on the passing of the annual Mutiny Act. The statute simply empowered the King to deal with certain military crimes for which the civil law made no provision. It made a great parade of the statement that the raising or keeping of a standing army in time of peace is against law, but the standing army was in existence for nearly thirty years before the Mutiny Act was passed, and continued to exist, as will be seen, for two short but distinct periods between 1689 and 1701 without the help of any Mutiny Act whatever. If, therefore, the keeping of a standing army in time of peace be against the law, it can only be said that during those periods Parliament deliberately voted money for the violation of the law, as indeed it is always prepared to do when convenient to itself. The Mutiny Act was not a protection to liberty; Parliament for the present reserved for itself no check on the military code that might be framed by the King; and the Act was therefore rather a powerful weapon placed in the hands of the sovereign. Nevertheless, the passing of the Mutiny Act remains always an incident of the first importance in the history of the Army, and the story of its origin is typical of the attitude of Parliament towards that long-suffering body. Every concession, nay, every commonest requirement, must be wrung from it by the pressure of fear.

It might have been thought that the news which came from Ireland a few days before the mutiny would have stirred the House of Commons to take some such measure in hand. Tyrconnel had already called the Irish to arms for King James, and on the 14th of March James himself, having obtained aid from the French king, had landed at Cork with some hundreds of officers to organise the Irish levies. The regular troops in the Irish establishment, already manipulated by Tyrconnel before the Revolution, were ready to join him. Some regiments went over to him entire; others split themselves up into Catholics and Protestants, and ranged themselves on opposite sides. It was evident that no less a task than the reconquest of Ireland lay before the English Government; and considering that several regiments had already been detached to Flanders, it was equally evident that the Army must be increased. Estimates were therefore prepared of the cost of six regiments of horse, two of dragoons, and twenty-five of foot, sixteen of which last were to be newly raised, for the coming campaign.

Of the new regiments a few lay ready to William's hand. The first was Lord Forbes's regiment, one of the many Irish corps brought over to England by King James in 1688, and the only one which, being made up entirely of Protestants, was not disbanded by William at his accession. It is still with us as the Eighteenth Royal Irish. The next three were corps which had been raised for the support of the Protestant cause at the Revolution. The first of them was a regiment of horse raised by the Earl of Devonshire among his tenantry in Derbyshire, which, long known by the name of the Black Horse, now bears the title of the Seventh Dragoon Guards. The second was a regiment of foot that had been formed at Exeter to join the Prince of Orange on his march from Torbay, and is still known as the Twentieth East Devon; and the third also remains with us as the Nineteenth of the Line. Three more regiments date their birth from March 1689—one raised by the Duke of Norfolk, one enlisted in the Welsh Marches, and a third which was recruited in Ireland but almost immediately brought over to England. These are now the Twenty-second, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth of the Line. Six more regiments of infantry which were raised in the same year, but disbanded at the close of the war, were Drogheda's, Lisburn's, Kingston's, Ingoldsby's, Roscommon's, and Bolton's. Of these, curiously enough, no fewer than three were dressed in blue instead of scarlet coats, possibly in flattering imitation of King William's famous Blue Guards. Thus, with ten thousand men to be enlisted, drilled, trained, and equipped, there was no lack of work for the recruiting officer, or for the Office of Ordnance, in the spring of

May 10.

It was not long before William and Schomberg made the discovery that the old regiments would require as much watching as the new. There were significant symptoms of rottenness in the whole military system; and discontented spirits were already spreading false and calumnious reports as to the treatment of the English regiments in Flanders, with the evident design of kindling a mutiny. Moreover, there were loud complaints from citizens of oppression by the soldiery, from soldiers of the fraudulent withholding of their pay, and from every honest officer, not, alas! a very numerous body, of false musters, embezzlement, fraud, and every description of abuse. The King lost no time in appointing nine commissioners, with Schomberg at their head, to make the tour of the quarters in England, to inquire into the true state of the case, and if possible to restore order and discipline.[229]

August 15 25 .

Still more disquieting news came from the Prince of Waldeck, who commanded the confederate army in Flanders. The English regiments were far below the strength assigned to them on paper, their officers were ill-paid, and many of them, even the colonels, ill-conducted; the men were sickly, listless,[230] undisciplined, and disorderly; their shoes were bad, their clothing miserable, their very arms defective. William, whose eyes always rested by preference on the eastern side of the German Ocean, lost no time in sending his best officer to Flanders; but even the Earl of Marlborough had much ado to reduce these unruly elements to order. Nevertheless he persevered; and in the one serious action wherein the British were engaged during the campaign, that against Marshal d'HumiÈres at Walcourt, Marlborough opened the eyes of Waldeck to the qualities of his men and to his own capacity. This was Marlborough's first brush with a Marshal of France; and it would seem that it was never forgotten by William. With this we may dismiss the campaign in Flanders for 1689.

Meanwhile another soldier of remarkable talent, and an old comrade of William, had rushed into rebellion in Scotland. The dragoons with which Dundee had harried the Covenanters and earned the name of "Bloody Claver'se" were still ready to his hand, and to these, by fanning the undying flame of tribal feud, he presently added an array of Highland clans. The flight of Dundee from Edinburgh on his errand of insurrection warned the city to take speedy measures for its defence. Lord Leven caused the drums to beat, and within two hours, it is said, had raised eight hundred men; but the work of these two hours has lasted for two centuries, for the regiment thus hastily enlisted is still alive as the Twenty-fifth of the Line. Shortly after, William sent up three Scotch regiments of the Dutch service under a veteran officer, Mackay; and the Highland war began in earnest. Skilful, however, as Mackay might be on the familiar battle-grounds of Flanders, he was helpless in the Highlands, where one week with George Monk would have helped him more than all the campaigns of Turenne. He crawled over the country conscientiously enough in pursuit of an enemy that he could never overtake, without further result than to exhaust the strength of both horses and men. It was not until one stage of a desultory campaign had been ended and a new one begun, that he at last met his enemy at Killiecrankie.

July 27.

There is no need for me to repeat the story told once for all by Lord Macaulay, of that romantic action; but it is worth while to glance at some few of its peculiarities. Mackay's force consisted of five battalions—the three Scottish regiments already mentioned, Hastings', now the Thirteenth Light Infantry, and the newly raised Twenty-fifth, together with two troops of horse. Of these the Scottish battalions, trained in the Dutch School by competent officers, should unquestionably have been the most efficient; yet all three of them broke before the charge of the Highlanders, threw down their arms, and would not be rallied. The two troops of horse took to their heels and disappeared; the Twenty-fifth broke like the other Scottish regiments, as was pardonable in such young soldiers, though they made some effort to rally. The only regiment that stood firm was the Thirteenth, which kept up a murderous fire to the end, and retired with perfect coolness and good order. Yet this was their first action, and Hastings, their colonel, was one of the most unscrupulous scoundrels, even in those days of universal robbery, that ever robbed a regiment.[231] Thus the troops which should have done best did worst, and those that might have been expected to do worst did best; and the moral would seem to be that inexperienced troops are sometimes safer than troops trained in civilised warfare for the rough-and-ready fighting of a savage campaign.

A still more curious example of the same peculiarity was seen before the close of the war. At the end of the first stage of Mackay's campaign it was found necessary to raise fresh troops; and it was hoped that the Covenanters of Western Scotland, who of all men had most reason to detest bloody Claverhouse, might be willing to furnish recruits. But the Covenanters had scruples about joining the army of King William, wherein they might be set shoulder to shoulder with the immoral and, even worse, with the unorthodox. Even Mackay, a man of extreme piety,[232] was suspected by them. They held a tumultuous meeting, wherein the majority, little knowing probably how terribly true their words then were of the British Army, declared that military service was a sinful association. Nevertheless there was still a minority from which the Earl of Angus formed a body of infantry, twelve hundred strong, which, though now numbered Twenty-sixth of the Line, is still best known by its first name of the Cameronians. Their ideas of military organisation were peculiar. They desired that each company should furnish an elder, who with the chaplain should constitute a court for the suppression of immorality and heresy; and though the elders were never appointed, and the officers bore the usual titles of captain, lieutenant, and ensign, yet the chaplain, a noted hill-preacher, supplied in his own person fanaticism for all. So in spite of the ravings of the majority a true Puritan regiment once more donned the red coat, under the youngest colonel—for Angus was no more than eighteen—that had led such men since Henry Cromwell.

August 21.

Within four months they were engaged against four times their number of Highlanders at Dunkeld. They were still imperfectly disciplined, still somewhat of a congregation that preferred elders to officers. They would not be satisfied that their mounted officers would not gallop away, until the lieutenant-colonel and major offered to shoot their horses before their eyes. Then they braced themselves, and fought such a fight as has seldom fallen to the lot of a regiment of recruits. The battle was fought amid the roar of a burning town. Angus was not present—short though his time was to be, it was not yet come—and his place was taken by Lieutenant-Colonel Cleland. The action was hardly opened before Cleland fell dead. The major stepped forward to his place, and a minute after was pierced by three mortal wounds. The men too fell fast; the musketry crackled round them, and the flames roared behind them; but still they fought on. Ammunition failed them at last; everything conspired to make the trial too hard for a young regiment to endure; but nothing could break the spirit of these men. At last, after four long hours, the Highlanders rolled back in disorder. The Cameronians had won their first battle and ended the Highland war.

But that war brought something more to the British Army even than two famous Scottish regiments. For Mackay had noticed that at Killiecrankie his Scotsmen had not had time to fix the clumsy plug-bayonets into the muzzles of their muskets, and had consequently been unable to meet the Highland charge. He therefore ordered bayonets to be made so that they could be screwed on to the outside of the barrel, thus enabling the men to fire with bayonets fixed. So finally was accomplished the blending of pike and musket into a single weapon, a great era in the history of the art of war.[233]

But while recruiting officers were beating their drums through the market towns of England, and Mackay was toiling in pursuit of the Highlanders, Protestant Ireland was standing desperately at bay against King James at Londonderry and Enniskillen. There is no need for me to recall the triumph of the unconquerable defenders of Derry; and it would be pleasanter, were it possible, to pass over the somewhat discreditable behaviour of the Army in relation to their relief. Five days, indeed, before the city was invested two English regiments, the Ninth and Seventeenth Foot, had arrived in the bay, but had been persuaded by the treacherous governor, Lundy, to return and to leave Derry to its fate. Colonels Cunningham and Richards, who commanded these corps, were both of them superseded on their arrival in England; but no further help came until on the 15th of June General Kirke sailed into Lough Foyle with the Second, Ninth, and Eleventh Foot. Even then he would not stir for six whole weeks, when he received positive orders from home to relieve the city.

July 31.

Meanwhile all operations of the Irish Protestants that were not wholly defensive were directed from Enniskillen, which was filled with refugees from Munster and Connaught. With extraordinary energy these Protestants organised a body of horse and another of foot, with which they kept up an incessant harassing warfare against the insurgent Irish. On Kirke's arrival they applied to him for reinforcements. These he refused to give; but he sent them arms and he sent them officers, one of whom, Colonel Wolseley, equalled at Newtown Butler Dundee's feat of Killiecrankie, of beating trained soldiers with raw but enthusiastic levies. After this action the force of the Enniskilleners was reorganised into two regiments of dragoons and three of foot, which are represented among us to this day by the Fifth Royal Irish Dragoons, now Lancers, the Sixth Enniskillen Dragoons, and the Twenty-seventh Enniskillen regiment of the infantry of Line.

The time was now come when the great English expedition for the reconquest of Ireland should set sail. The untrained Irish Protestant had played his part gallantly, and it was the turn of the English soldier. For months great preparations had been going forward; the new regiments had been raised; and on paper at any rate there were not only horse, foot, and dragoons, but a respectable train of artillery and of transport. Moreover, the failure of Cunningham and Richards had led Parliament to inquire into the conduct of that expedition; and it had been discovered that the supply of transport-ships had been so insufficient that the men had not had space even to lie down, while the biscuit provided for them had been mouldy and uneatable, and the beer so foul and putrid that they preferred to drink salt water. These shortcomings had occurred in the dispatch of a couple of battalions only; it remained to be seen how the military departments could cope with the transport and maintenance of an entire army. The total force to be employed in Ireland was close on nineteen thousand men, of which about one-fourth was already on the spot.

August 13.

William had chosen Marshal Schomberg to command the expedition. Though past fourscore, the veteran was still active and fit for duty; and in reputation there was no better officer in Europe. On the 13th of August he landed with his army at Bangor and detached twelve regiments to besiege Carrickfergus. The garrison held out for a week, and was then permitted to capitulate and to march away to Newry. But that week was sufficient to open Schomberg's eyes. The new regiments proved to be mobs of undisciplined boys. Their officers were ignorant, negligent, and useless. The arms served out from the Tower were so ill-made, and the men so careless in the handling of them, that nearly every regiment required to be re-armed. The officers of artillery were not only ignorant and lazy, but even cowardly,[234] while their guns were so defective that a week of easy work had sufficed to render most of them unserviceable.[235] Senior officers were as deficient as junior: there was not one qualified to command a brigade; and the commissary, in spite of reports that he had made all needful provision, had failed to supply sufficient stores. Lastly, in spite of the warning given by the experience of Cunningham and Richards, the transport across St. George's Channel was so shamefully conducted that one regiment of horse, that now known as the Queen's Bays, lost every charger and troop-horse in the passage.[236] The result was that all was confusion, and that every detail in every department required the personal supervision of the Commander-in-Chief.

Fortunately James's Irish were so far demoralised by previous failures that his officer at Belfast thought it prudent to evacuate that town. Schomberg therefore threw a garrison into it, and marched with his whole force upon Newry. The Duke of Berwick, who was guarding the road, fell back on his approach to Drogheda, where James had collected twenty thousand men; and Schomberg, advancing through a wasted and deserted country, halted, and entrenched himself at Dundalk. James struggled forward to within a league of him to try and tempt him to an action, but Schomberg was not to be entrapped; and by the second week in September the campaign was over.

The fact was that a month's service in the field had completely broken the English Army down. By the time when it reached Dundalk it was on the brink of starvation. The Commissary-General, one Shales, was a man of experience, for he had been purveyor to King James's camp at Hounslow; and he had accumulated stores—bad stores, it is true, but nevertheless stores—at the base, Belfast. But he had made no provision for carrying any part of them with the Army. He had bought up large numbers of horses in Cheshire, but, instead of transporting them to Ireland, had let them out to the farmers of the district for the harvest, and pocketed their hire.[237] Again, the artillery could not be moved because the Ordnance Department looked to Shales to provide horses, while Shales declared the artillery to be no business of his. Moreover, had the horses been on the spot, there was not a shoe ready for their feet.[238] No measures had been taken, in spite of Schomberg's representations, to victual the troops by sea, though Cromwell had shown forty years before, in Scotland, how readily the work could be done. But indeed the expedition would have been better managed than it was by following the guidance of so old a master as King Edward the Third.[239] Never was there a more signal example of English ignorance, neglect, and sloth in respect of military administration.

By the 18th of September victuals at Dundalk were at famine price, and the men began to perish by scores and by hundreds. It was hardly surprising, for they were not only unfed but unclothed; there was not so much as a greatcoat in the whole of the English infantry; the cavalry were without cloaks, boots, and belts, and almost the entire force wanted shoes. Moreover, the English were shiftless; when ordered to build themselves huts they could not be at the pains to obey, even with the example of their Dutch and Huguenot comrades before them. Sickness spread rapidly among them, and there was no hospital; and had there been a hospital there were no medicines. Finally, the behaviour of the officers was utterly shameful. "The lions in Africa," wrote one who was on the spot, "are not more barbarous than some of our officers are to the sick."[240] "I never saw officers more wicked and more interested," wrote Schomberg almost on the same day.[241] The Commander-in-Chief did his best to interpose on behalf of the men, but his hands were already overfull. The colonels were perhaps the worst of all the officers; they understood pillage better than the payment of their men, and filled their empty ranks with worthless Irish recruits, simply because these were more easily cheated than English.[242] It cost Schomberg a week's work to ensure that the pay of the soldiers went into their own and not into their captains' pockets.

Yet on the whole it was not the military officers that were chiefly to blame. The constant complaint of Schomberg was that he could get no money; and for this the Treasurer of the Army was responsible. This functionary, William Harbord, a civilian and a member of the House of Commons, appears to have been on the whole the most shameless of all the officials in Ireland. By some jobbery he had contrived to obtain an independent troop of cavalry, for which he drew pay as though it were complete, though the troop in reality consisted of himself, two clerks whom he put down as officers, and a standard which he kept in his bedroom.[243] This was the only corps which was regularly paid. The other regiments he turned equally to his own advantage by sending home false muster-rolls[244] in order to draw the pay of the vacancies; but whenever the question of payment of the men was raised, he evaded it and went to England, pleading the necessity of attending to his duties in the House of Commons. It was Harbord again who was responsible for the failure of the hospital. He admitted, indeed, that if he had known as much about hospitals at the beginning as at the end of the campaign, he might have saved two-thirds of the men; but the truth was that he would never at any time supply a penny for it.[245] By Christmas Schomberg began to relent towards his officers, for he discovered that they were penniless, not having received a farthing of pay for four months.[246] Meanwhile civilians were growing fat. Shales was buying salt at ninepence a pound and selling it at four shillings;[247] and junior commissaries were acting as regimental agents and advancing money to the unhappy officers at exorbitant interest.[248]

Nov. 5.

In such a state of affairs Schomberg, rightly or wrongly, considered himself powerless. William ordered him from time to time to advance on Dublin; and Harbord, with incredible impertinence, urged him to march against the enemy.[249] Schomberg answered William by a plain statement of his condition, and Harbord by a surly and contemptuous growl. In truth his Dutch and Huguenot regiments, which alone were well clad and well looked after by their officers, were the only troops on which he could rely. The English continued to die like flies. Schomberg wisely endeavoured to distract their thoughts from their own misery by keeping them at drill. He found that not one in four had the slightest idea how to load or fire his musket, while the muskets themselves fell to pieces in the handling. Pestilence increased, and with it callousness and insubordination. The men used the corpses of their comrades to stop the draughts under their tent-walls, and robbed any man whose appearance promised hope of gain. Nor was this indiscipline confined to Dundalk. The Enniskilleners, who have generally been represented as superior to the English, were quite as fond of plunder, and robbed William Harbord himself, despite his protestations, in broad daylight.[250] Happily for Schomberg, James's forces were in as ill condition as his own, so that he was able to retire into winter quarters from Dundalk without molestation. Of fourteen thousand men in the camp, upwards of six thousand had perished.[251]

Gradually and painfully the winter wore away, but without abatement in the mortality of the troops. Meanwhile the House of Commons, awaking to the terrible state of things in Ireland, addressed the King for the arrest of Shales. William replied that he had already put him under arrest; and the name of Shales was accordingly constantly before the House in the course of the next few months, but without any result. He seems to have escaped scot-free; and indeed there was no lack of men as corrupt as he in the House of Commons and in all places of trust. William then took the extraordinary step of asking the House to appoint seven members to superintend the preparations for the next campaign; but this it very wisely declined to do. It appointed a Committee, however, to examine into the expenses of the war,[252] and finally passed a Mutiny Act with new clauses against false musters and other abuses—clauses which were as old as King Edward the Sixth, and for all practical purposes as dead. It was not legislation that was wanted, but enforcement of existing laws. William, however, appears early to have abandoned in despair the hope of finding an honest man in England.

1690.

And now, with the experience of 1689 before them, the King and Schomberg began to arrange their plans for the campaign of 1690. In the matter of troops Schomberg was vehement against further employment of regiments of miserable English and Irish boys;[253] and it was therefore decided to transport twenty-seven thousand seasoned men, seventeen thousand of them British and the remainder Dutch and Danish, from England and Holland. Artillery and small arms were imported from Holland, since the Office of Ordnance had been found wanting; and as a daring experiment, which proved to be a total failure, the King took the clothing of several regiments out of their colonels' hands into his own.[254] Finally care was taken for the proper organisation of the transport-service. The plan of campaign in its broad lines was mapped out by a civilian, Sir Robert Southwell,[255] the secretary for Ireland. The country, he said, must be attacked simultaneously from north and south, for while the ports of Munster were open France could always pour in reinforcements and supplies. While, therefore, Schomberg advanced from the north, a descent should be made on the south, and Cork should be the objective. Finally, Southwell or some other sensible man did what William should have done the year before, and drew out a succinct account of the principles followed in Ireland with such signal success by that forgotten General, Oliver Cromwell.[256]

I shall not dwell further on the Irish campaigns of 1690 and 1691. There is little of importance to the History of the Army to be found in them; and the reader will more readily follow Lord Macaulay than myself over this familiar ground. The battle of the Boyne was won without great credit to William's skill, and paid for rather dearly by the death of gallant old Schomberg. The troops learned something of active service, and something, though not nearly so much as they should have learnt, of discipline. The lesson of Cromwell was not taken to heart; and the Protestant Irish were allowed to set an example of plunder which was but too readily followed by the English. Ginkell's final campaign of 1691 was more successful, more brilliant, and more satisfactory in every respect, inasmuch as the Irish fought with distinguished gallantry. For the rest, the English showed at Aghrim and at Athlone their usual desperate valour; succeeding, even when experienced commanders, like St. Ruth, confessed with admiration that they had thought their success impossible. But in the matter of skill the quiet and unostentatious captures of Cork and Kinsale in 1690 were far the most brilliant achievements of the war; and these were the work of John, Earl of Marlborough.[257]

CHAPTER II

1690,
October.

I pass now to Flanders, which is about to become for the second time the training ground of the British Army. The judicious help sent by Lewis the Fourteenth to Ireland had practically diverted the entire strength of William to that quarter for two whole campaigns; and though, as has been seen, there were English in Flanders in 1689 and 1690, the contingents which they furnished were too small and the operations too trifling to warrant description in detail. After the battle of the Boyne the case was somewhat altered, for, though a large force was still required in Ireland for Ginkell's final pacification of 1691, William was none the less at liberty to take the field in Flanders in person. Moreover, Parliament with great good-will had voted seventy thousand men for the ensuing year, of which fully fifty thousand were British,[258] so that England was about to put forth her strength in Europe on a scale unknown since the loss of Calais.

But first a short space must be devoted to the theatre of war, where England was to meet and break down the overweening power of France. Few studies are more difficult, even to the professed student, than that of the old campaigns in Flanders, and still fewer more hopeless of simplification to the ordinary reader. Nevertheless, however desperate the task, an effort must be made once for all to give a broad idea of the scene of innumerable great actions.

Taking his stand on the northern frontier of France and looking northward, the reader will note three great rivers running through the country before him in, roughly speaking, three parallel semicircles, from south-east to north-west. These are, from east to west, the Moselle, which is merged in the Rhine at Coblentz, the Meuse, and the Scheldt, all three of which discharge themselves into the great delta whereof the southern key is Antwerp. But for the present let the reader narrow the field from the Meuse in the east to the sea in the west, and let him devote his attention first to the Meuse. He will see that, a little to the north of the French frontier, it picks up a large tributary from the south-west, the Sambre, which runs past Maubeuge and Charleroi and joins the Meuse at Namur. Thence the united rivers flow on past the fortified towns of Huy, LiÈge, and Maestricht to the sea. But let the reader's northern boundary on the Meuse for the present be Maestricht, and let him note another river which rises a little to the west of Maestricht and runs almost due west past Arschot and Mechlin to the sea at Antwerp. Let this river, the Demer, be his northern, and the Meuse from Maestricht to Namur his eastern, boundary.

Returning to the south, let him note a river rising immediately to the west of Charleroi, the Haine, which joins the Scheldt at Tournay, and let him draw a line from Tournay westward through Lille and Ypres to the sea at Dunkirk. Let this line from Dunkirk to Charleroi be carried eastward to Namur; and there is his southern boundary. His western boundary, is, of course, the sea. Within this quadrilateral, Antwerp (or more strictly speaking the mouth of the Scheldt), Dunkirk, Namur, and Maestricht, lies the most famous fighting-ground of Europe.

Glancing at it on the map, the reader will see that this quadrilateral is cut by a number of rivers running parallel to each other from south to north, and flowing into the main streams of the Demer and the Scheldt. The first of these, beginning from the east, are the Great and Little Geete, which become one before they join the main stream. It is worth while to pause for a moment over this little slip of land between the Geete and the Meuse. We shall see much of Namur, Huy, LiÈge, and Maestricht, which command the navigation of the greater river, but we shall see still more of the Geete, and of two smaller streams, the Jaar and the Mehaigne, which rise almost in the same table-land with it. On the Lower Jaar, close to Maestricht, stands the village of Lauffeld, which shall be better known to us fifty years hence. On the Little Geete, just above its junction with its greater namesake, are the villages of Neerwinden and Landen. In the small space between the heads of the Geete and the Mehaigne lies the village of Ramillies. For this network of streams is the protection against an enemy that would threaten the navigation of the Meuse from the north and west, and the barrier of Spanish Flanders against invasion from the east; and the ground is rich with the corpses and fat with the blood of men.

The next stream to westward is the Dyle, which flows past Louvain to the Demer, and gives its name, after the junction, to that river. The next in order is the Senne, which flows past Park and Hal and Brussels to the same main stream. At the head of the Senne stands the village of Steenkirk; midway between the Dyle and Senne are the forest of Soignies and the field of Waterloo.

Here the tributaries of the Demer come to an end, but the row of parallel streams is continued by the tributaries of another system, that of the Scheldt. Easternmost of these, and next in order to the Senne, is the Dender, which rises near Leuse and flows past Ath and Alost to the Scheldt at Dendermond. Next comes the Scheldt itself, with the Scarpe and the Haine, its tributaries, which it carries past Tournay and Oudenarde to Ghent, and to the sea at Antwerp. Westernmost of all, the Lys runs past St. Venant, where in Cromwell's time we saw Sir Thomas Morgan and his immortal six thousand, past Menin and Courtrai, and is merged in the Scheldt at Ghent.

The whole extent of the quadrilateral is about one hundred miles long by fifty broad, with a great waterway to the west, a second to the east, and a third, whereof the key is Ghent, roughly speaking midway between them. The earth, fruitful by nature and enriched by art, bears food for man and beast, the waterways provide transport for stores and ammunition. It was a country where men could kill each other without being starved, and hence for centuries the cockpit of Europe.

A glance at any old map of Flanders shows how thickly studded was this country with walled towns of less or greater strength, and explains why a war in Flanders should generally have been a war of sieges. Every one of these little towns, of course, had its garrison; and the manoeuvres of contending forces were governed very greatly by the effort on one side to release these garrisons for active service in the field, and on the other to keep them confined within their walls for as long as possible. Hence it is obvious that an invading army necessarily enjoyed a great advantage, since it menaced the fortresses of the enemy while its own were unthreatened. Thus ten thousand men on the Upper Lys could paralyse thrice their number in Ghent and Bruges and the adjacent towns. On the other hand, if an invading general contemplated the siege of an important town, he manoeuvred to entice the garrison into the field before he laid siege in form. Still, once set down to a great siege, an army was stationary, and the bare fact was sufficient to liberate hostile garrisons all over the country; and hence arose the necessity of a second army to cover the besieging force. The skill and subtlety manifested by great generals to compass these different ends is unfortunately only to be apprehended by closer study than can be expected of any but the military student.

A second cause contributed not a little to increase the taste for a war of sieges, namely the example of France, then the first military nation in Europe.[259] The Court of Versailles was particularly fond of a siege, since it could attend the ceremony in state and take nominal charge of the operations with much glory and little discomfort or danger. The French passion for rule and formula also found a happy outlet in the conduct of a siege, for while there is no nation more brilliant or more original, particularly in military affairs, there is also none that is more conceited or pedantic. The craving for sieges among the French was so great that the King took pains, by the grant of extra pay and rations, to render this species of warfare popular with his soldiers.[260]

Again, it must be remembered that the object of a campaign in those days was not necessarily to seek out an enemy and beat him. There were two alternatives prescribed by the best authorities, namely, to fight at an advantage or to subsist comfortably.[261] Comfortable subsistence meant at its best subsistence at an enemy's expense. A campaign wherein an army lived on the enemy's country and destroyed all that it could not consume was eminently successful, even though not a shot was fired. To force an enemy to consume his own supplies was much, to compel him to supply his opponent was more, to take up winter-quarters in his territory was very much more. Thus to enter an enemy's borders and keep him marching backwards and forwards for weeks without giving him a chance of striking a blow, was in itself no small success, and success of a kind which galled inferior generals, such as William of Orange, to desperation and so to disaster. The tendency to these negative campaigns was heightened once more by French example. The French ministry of war interfered with its generals to an extent that was always dangerous, and eventually proved calamitous. Nominally the marshal commanding-in-chief in the field was supreme; but the intendant or head of the administrative service, though he received his orders from the marshal, was instructed by the King to forward those orders at once by special messenger to Louvois, and not to execute them without the royal authority. Great commanders such as Luxemburg had the strength from time to time to kick themselves free from this bondage, but the rest, embarrassed by the surveillance of an inferior officer, preferred to live as long as possible in an enemy's country without risking a general action. It was left to Marlborough to advance triumphant in one magnificent campaign from the Meuse to the sea.

Next, a glance must be thrown at the contending parties. The defenders of the Spanish Netherlands, for they cannot be called the assailants of France, were confederate allies from a number of independent states—England, Holland, Spain, the Empire, sundry states of Germany, and Denmark, all somewhat selfish, few very efficient, and none, except the first, very punctual. From such a heterogeneous collection swift, secret, and united action was not to be expected. King William held the command-in-chief, and, from his position as the soul of the alliance, was undoubtedly the fittest for the post. But though he had carefully studied the art of war, and though his phlegmatic temperament found its only genuine pleasure in the excitement of the battlefield, he was not a great general. He could form good plans, and up to a certain point could execute them, but up to a certain point only. It would seem that his physical weakness debarred him from steady and sustained effort. He was strangely incapable of conducting a campaign with equal ability throughout; he would manoeuvre admirably for weeks, and forfeit all the advantage that he had gained by the carelessness of a single day. In a general action, of which he was fonder than most commanders of his day, he never shone except in virtue of conspicuous personal bravery. He lacked tactical instinct, and above all he lacked patience; in a word, to use a modern phrase, he was a very clever amateur.

France, on the other hand, possessed the finest and strongest army in Europe,—well equipped, well trained, well organised, and inured to work by countless campaigns. She had a single man in supreme control of affairs, King Lewis the Fourteenth; a great war-minister, Louvois; one really great general, Luxemburg; and one with flashes of genius, Boufflers. Moreover she possessed a line of posts in Spanish Flanders extending from Dunkirk to the Meuse. On the Lys she had Aire and Menin; on the Scarpe, Douay; on the Upper Scheldt, Cambray, Bouchain, Valenciennes, and CondÉ; on the Sambre, Maubeuge; between Sambre and Meuse, Philippeville and Marienburg; and on the Meuse, Dinant. Further, in the one space where the frontier was not covered by a friendly river, between the sea and the Scheldt, the French had constructed fortified lines from the sea to Menin and from thence to the Scheldt at Espierre. Thus with their frontier covered, with a place of arms on every river, with secrecy and with unity of purpose, the French enjoyed the approximate certainty of being able to take the field in every campaign before the Allies could be collected to oppose them.

1691.

The campaign of 1691 happily typifies the relative positions of the combatants in almost every respect. The French concentrated ten thousand men on the Lys. This was sufficient to paralyse all the garrisons of the Allies on and about the river. They posted another corps on the Moselle, which threatened the territory of Cleves. Now Cleves was the property of the Elector of Brandenburg, and it was not to be expected that he should allow his contingent of troops to join King William at the general rendezvous at Brussels, and suffer the French to play havoc among his possessions. Thus the Prussian contingent likewise was paralysed. So while William was still ordering his troops to concentrate at Brussels, Boufflers, who had been making preparations all the winter, suddenly marched up from Maubeuge and, before William was aware that he was in motion, had besieged Mons. The fortress presently surrendered after a feeble resistance, and the line of the Allies' frontier between the Scheldt and Sambre was broken. William moved down from Brussels across the Sambre in the hope of recovering the lost town, outmanoeuvred Luxemburg, who was opposed to him, and for three days held the recapture of Mons in the hollow of his hand. He wasted those three days in an aimless halt; Luxemburg recovered himself by an extraordinary march; and William, finding that there was no alternative before him but to retire to Brussels and remain inactive, handed over the command to an incompetent officer and returned to England. Luxemburg then closed the campaign by a brilliant action of cavalry, which scattered the horse of the Allies to the four winds. As no British troops except the Life Guards were present, and as they at any rate did not disgrace themselves, it is unnecessary to say more of the combat of Leuse. It, had however, one remarkable effect: it increased William's dread of the French cavalry, already morbidly strong, to such a pitch as to lead him subsequently to a disastrous military blunder.

The campaign of 1691 was therefore decidedly unfavourable to the Allies, but there was ground for hope that all might be set right in 1692. The Treasurer, Godolphin, was nervously apprehensive that Parliament might be unwilling to vote money for an English army in Flanders; but the Commons cheerfully voted a total of sixty-six thousand men, British and foreign; which, after deduction of garrisons for the safety of the British Isles, left forty thousand free to cross the German Ocean.

1692.

Of these, twenty-three thousand were British, the most important force that England had sent to the Continent since the days of King Henry the Eighth. The organisation was remarkably like that of the New Model. William was, of course, commander-in-chief, and under him a general of horse and a general of foot, with a due allowance of lieutenant-generals, major-generals, and brigadiers. There is, however, no sign of an officer in command of artillery or engineers, nor any of a commissary in charge of the transport.[262] The one strangely conspicuous functionary is the Secretary-at-War, who in this and the following campaigns for the last time accompanied the Commander-in-Chief on active service. But the most significant feature in the list of the staff is the omission of the name of Marlborough. Originally included among the generals for Flanders, he had been struck off the roll, and dismissed from all public employment, in disgrace, before the opening of the campaign. Though this dismissal did not want justification, it was perhaps of all William's blunders the greatest.

May.
May 10 20 .
May 13 23 .
May 16 26 .

As usual, the French were beforehand with the Allies in opening the campaign. They had already broken the line of the defending fortresses by the capture of Mons; they now designed to make the breach still wider. All through the winter a vast siege-train was collecting on the Scheldt and Meuse, with Vauban, first of living engineers, in charge of it. In May all was ready. Marshal Joyeuse, with one corps, was on the Moselle, as in the previous year, to hold the Brandenburgers in check. Boufflers, with eighteen thousand men, lay on the right bank of the Meuse, near Dinant; Luxemburg, with one hundred and fifteen thousand more, stood in rear of the river Haine. On the 20th of May, King Lewis in person reviewed the grand army; on the 23rd it marched for Namur; and on the 26th it had wound itself round two sides of the town, while Boufflers, moving up from Dinant, completed the circuit on the third side. Thus Namur was completely invested; unless William could save it, the line of the Sambre and one of the most important fortresses on the Meuse were lost to the Allies.

May 26
June 5.

William, to do him justice, had strained every nerve to spur his indolent allies to be first in the field. The contingents, awaked by the sudden stroke at Namur, came in fast to Brussels; but it was too late. The French had destroyed all forage and supplies on the direct route to Namur, and William's only way to the city lay across the Mehaigne. Behind the Mehaigne lay Luxemburg, the ablest of the French generals. The best of luck was essential to William's success, and instead of the best came the worst. Heavy rain swelled the narrow stream into a broad flood, and the building of bridges became impossible. There was beautiful fencing, skilful feint, and more skilful parry, between the two generals, but William could not get under Luxemburg's guard. On the 5th of June, after a discreditably short defence, Namur fell, almost before William's eyes, into the hands of the French.

July 23
August 2.

Then Luxemburg thought it time to draw the enemy away from the vicinity of the captured city; so recrossing the Sambre, and keeping Boufflers always between himself and that river, he marched for the Senne as if to threaten Brussels. William followed, as in duty bound; and French and Allies pursued a parallel course to the Senne, William on the north and Luxemburg on the south. The 2nd of August found both armies across the Senne, William at Hal, facing west with the river in his rear, and Luxemburg some five miles south of him with his right at Steenkirk, and his centre between Hoves and Enghien, while Boufflers lay at Manny St. Jean, seven miles in his rear.

The terrible state of the roads owing to heavy rain had induced Luxemburg to leave most of his artillery at Mons, and as he had designed merely to tempt the Allies away from Namur, the principal object left to him was to take up a strong position wherein his worn and harassed army could watch the enemy without fear of attack. Such a position he thought that he had found at Steenkirk.[263] The country at this point is more broken and rugged than is usual in Belgium. The camp lay on high ground, with its right resting on the river Sennette and its right front covered by a ravine, which gradually fades away northward into a high plateau of about a mile in extent. Beyond the ravine was a network of wooded defiles, through which Luxemburg seems to have hoped that no enemy could fall upon him in force unawares. It so happened, however, that one of his most useful spies was detected, in his true character, in William's camp at Hal; and this was an opportunity not to be lost. A pistol was held at the spy's head, and he was ordered to write a letter to Luxemburg, announcing that large bodies of the enemy would be in motion next morning, but that nothing more serious was contemplated than a foraging expedition. This done, William laid his plans to surprise his enemy on the morrow.

July 23
August 3.

An hour before daybreak the advanced guard of William's army fell silently into its ranks, together with a strong force of pioneers to clear the way for a march through the woods. This force consisted of the First Guards, the Royal Scots, the Twenty-first, Fitzpatrick's regiment of Fusiliers, and two Danish regiments of great reputation, the whole under the command of the Duke of WÜrtemberg. Presently they moved away, and as the sun rose the whole army followed them in two columns, without sound of drum or trumpet, towards Steenkirk. French patrols scouring the country in the direction of Tubise saw the two long lines of scarlet and white and blue wind away into the woods, and reported what they had seen at headquarters; but Luxemburg, sickly of constitution, and, in spite of his occasional energy, indolent of temperament, rejoiced to think that, as his spy had told him, it was no more than a foraging party. Another patrol presently sent in another message that a large force of cavalry was advancing towards the Sennette. Once more Luxemburg lulled himself into security with the same comfort.

Meanwhile the allied army was trailing through narrow defiles and cramped close ground, till at last it emerged from the stifling woods into an open space. Here it halted, as the straitness of the ground demanded, in dense, heavy masses. But the advanced guard moved on steadily till it reached the woods over against Steenkirk, where WÜrtemberg disposed it for the coming attack. On his left the Bois de Feuilly covered a spur of the same plateau as that occupied by the French right, and there he stationed the English Guards and the two battalions of Danes. To the right of these, but separated from them by a ravine, he placed the three remaining British battalions in the Bois de Zoulmont. His guns he posted, some between the two woods, and the remainder on the right of his division. These dispositions complete, the advanced party awaited orders to open the attack.

It was now eleven o'clock. Luxemburg had left his bed and had ridden out to a commanding height on his extreme right, when a third message was brought to him that the Allies were certainly advancing in force. He read it, and looking to his front, saw the red coats of the Guards moving through the wood before him, while beyond them he caught a glimpse of the dense masses of the main body. Instantly he saw the danger, and divined that William's attack was designed against his right. His own camp was formed, according to rule, with the cavalry on the wings; and there was nothing in position to check the Allies but a single brigade of infantry, famous under the name of Bourbonnois, which was quartered in advance of the cavalry's camp on his extreme right. Moreover, nothing was ready, not a horse was bridled, not a man standing to his arms. He despatched a messenger to summon Boufflers to his aid, and in a few minutes was flying through the camp with his staff, energetic but perfectly self-possessed, to set his force in order of battle. The two battalions of Bourbonnois fell in hastily before their camp, with a battery of six guns before them. The dragoons of the right wing dismounted and hastened to seal up the space between Bourbonnois and the Sennette. The horse of the right was collected, and some of it sent off in hot speed to the left to bring the infantry up behind them on their horses' croups. All along the line the alarm was given, drums were beating, men snatching hastily at their arms and falling into their ranks ready to file away to the right. Such was the haste, that there was no time to think of regimental precedence, a very serious matter in the French army, and each successive brigade hurried into the place where it was most needed as it happened to come up.

Meanwhile WÜrtemberg's batteries had opened fire, and a cunning officer of the Royal Scots was laying his guns with admirable precision. French batteries hastened into position to reply to them with as deadly an aim, and for an hour and a half the rival guns thundered against each other unceasingly. All this time the French battalions kept massing themselves thicker and thicker on Luxemburg's right, and the front line was working with desperate haste, felling trees, making breastworks, and lining the hedges and copses while yet they might. But still WÜrtemberg's division remained unsupported, and the precious minutes flew fast. William, or his staff for him, had made a serious blunder. Intent though he was on fighting a battle with his infantry only, he had put all the cavalry of one wing of his army before them on the march, so that there was no room for the infantry to pass. Fortunately six battalions had been intermixed with the squadrons of this wing, and these were now with some difficulty disentangled and sent forward. Cutts's, Mackay's, Lauder's, and the Twenty-sixth formed up on WÜrtemberg's right, with the Sixth and Twenty-fifth in support; and at last, at half-past twelve, WÜrtemberg gave the order to attack.

His little force shook itself up and pressed forward with eagerness. The Guards and Danes on the extreme left, being on the same ridge with the enemy, were the first that came into action. Pushing on under a terrible fire at point-blank range from the French batteries, they fell upon Bourbonnois and the dragoons, beat them back, captured their guns, and turned them against themselves. On their right the Royal Scots, Twenty-first, and Fitzpatrick's plunged down into the ravine into closer and more difficult ground, past copses and hedges and thickets, until a single thick fence alone divided them from the enemy. Through this they fired at each other furiously for a time, till the Scots burst through the fence with their Colonel at their head and swept the French before them. Still further to the right, the remaining regiments came also into action; muzzle met muzzle among the branches, and the slaughter was terrible. Young Angus, still not yet of age, dropped dead at the head of the Cameronians, and the veteran Mackay found the death which he had missed at Killiecrankie. He had before the attack sent word to General Count Solmes, that the contemplated assault could lead only to waste of life, and had been answered with the order to advance. "God's will be done," he said calmly, and he was among the first that fell.

Still the British, in spite of all losses, pressed furiously on; and famous French regiments, spoiled children of victory, wavered and gave way before them. Bourbonnois, unable to face the Guards and Danes, doubled its left battalion in rear of its right; Chartres, which stood next to them, also gave way and doubled itself in rear of its neighbour Orleans. A wide gap was thus torn in the first French line, but not a regiment of the second line would step into it. The colonel of the brigade in rear of it ordered, entreated, implored his men to come forward, but they would not follow him into that terrible fire. Suddenly the wild voice ceased, and the gesticulating figure fell in a heap to the ground: the colonel had been shot dead, and the gap was still unfilled.

The first French line was broken; the second and third were dismayed and paralysed: a little more and the British would carry the French camp. Luxemburg perceived that this was a moment when only his best troops could save him. In the fourth line stood the flower of his infantry, the seven battalions of French and Swiss Guards. These were now ordered forward to the gap; the princes of the blood placed themselves at their head, and without firing a shot they charged down the slope upon the British and Danes. The English Guards, thinned to half their numbers, faced the huge columns of the Swiss and stood up to them undaunted, till by sheer weight they were slowly rolled back. On their right the Royal Scots also were forced back, fighting desperately from hedge to hedge and contesting every inch of ground. Once, the French made a dash through a fence and carried off one of their colours. The Colonel, Sir Robert Douglas, instantly turned back alone through the fence, recaptured the colour, and was returning with it when he was struck by a bullet. He flung the flag over to his men and fell to the ground dead.

Slowly the twelve battalions retired, still fighting furiously at every step. So fierce had been their onslaught that five lines of infantry backed by two more of cavalry[264] had hardly sufficed to stop them, and with but a little support they might have won the day. But that support was not forthcoming. Message after message had been sent to the Dutch general, Count Solmes, for reinforcements, but there came not a man. The main body, as has been told, was all clubbed together a mile and a half from the scene of action, with the infantry in the rear; and Solmes, with almost criminal folly, instead of endeavouring to extricate the foot, had ordered forward the horse. William rectified the error as soon as he could, but the correction led to further delay and to the increased confusion which is the inevitable result of contradictory orders. The English infantry in rear, mad with impatience to rescue their comrades, ran forward in disorder, probably with loud curses on the Dutchman who had kept them back so long; and some time was lost before they could be re-formed. Discipline was evidently a little at fault. Solmes lost both his head and his temper. "Damn the English," he growled; "if they are so fond of fighting, let them have a bellyful"; and he sent forward not a man. Fortunately junior officers took matters into their own hands; and it was time, for Boufflers had now arrived on the field to throw additional weight into the French scale. The English Horse-grenadiers, the Fourth Dragoons, and a regiment of Dutch dragoons rode forward and, dismounting, covered the retreat of the Guards and Danes by a brilliant counter-attack. The Buffs and Tenth advanced farther to the right, and holding their fire till within point-blank range, poured in a volley which gave time for the rest of WÜrtemberg's division to withdraw. A demonstration against the French left made a further diversion, and the shattered fragments of the attacking force, grimed with sweat and smoke, fell back to the open ground in rear of the woods, repulsed but unbeaten, and furious with rage.

William, it is said, could not repress a cry of anguish when he saw them; but there was no time for emotion. Some Dutch and Danish infantry was sent forward to check further advance of the enemy, and preparations were made for immediate retreat. Once again the hardest of the work was entrusted to the British; and when the columns were formed, the grenadiers of the British regiments brought up the rear, halting and turning about continually, until failing light put an end to what was at worst but a half-hearted pursuit. The retreat was conducted with admirable order; but it was not until the chill, dead hour that precedes the dawn that the Allies regained their camp, worn out with the fatigue of four-and-twenty hours.

To face page 366

STEENKIRK
July 23^rd Aug. 3^rd 1692

The action was set down at the time as the severest ever fought by infantry, and the losses on both sides were very heavy. The Allies lost about three thousand killed and the same number wounded, besides thirteen hundred prisoners, nearly all of whom were wounded. Ten guns were abandoned, the horses being too weary to draw them; the English battalions lost two colours, and the foreign three or four more. The British, having borne the brunt of the action, suffered most heavily of all, the Guards, Cutts's, and the Sixth being terribly punished. The total French loss was about equal to that of the Allies, but the list of the officers that fell tells a more significant tale. On the side of the Allies four hundred and fifty officers were killed and wounded, no fewer than seventy lieutenants in the ten battalions of Churchill's British brigade being killed outright. The French on their side lost no less than six hundred and twenty officers killed and wounded, a noble testimony to their self-sacrifice, but sad evidence of their difficulty in making their men stand. In truth, with proper management William must have won a brilliant victory; but he was a general by book and not by instinct. WÜrtemberg's advanced guard could almost have done the work by itself but for the mistake of a long preliminary cannonade; his attack could have been supported earlier but for the pedantry that gave the horse precedence of the foot in the march to the field; the foot could have pierced the French position in a dozen different columns but for the pedantry which caused it to be first deployed. Finally, William's knowledge of the ground was imperfect, and Solmes, his general of foot, was incompetent. The plan was admirably designed and abominably executed. Nevertheless, British troops have never fought a finer action than Steenkirk. Luxemburg thought himself lucky to have escaped destruction; his troops were much shaken; and he crossed the Scheldt and marched away to his winter-quarters as quietly as possible. So ended the campaign of 1692.

CHAPTER III

In November the English Parliament met, heartened indeed by the naval victory of La Hogue, but not a little grieved over the failure of Steenkirk. Again, the financial aspect was extremely discouraging; and Sir Stephen Fox announced that there was not another day's subsistence for the Army in the treasury. The prevailing discontent found vent in furious denunciations of Count Solmes, and a cry that English soldiers ought to be commanded by English officers. The debate rose high. The hardest of hard words were used about the Dutch generals, and a vast deal of nonsense was talked about military matters. There were, however, a great number of officers in the House of Commons, many of whom had been present at the action. With great modesty and good sense they refused to join in the outcry against the Dutch, and contrived so to compose matters that the House committed itself to no very foolish resolution. The votes for the Army were passed; and no difficulty was made over the preparations for the next campaign. Finally, two new regiments of cavalry were raised—Lord Macclesfield's Horse, which was disbanded twenty years later; and Conyngham's Irish Dragoons, which still abides with us as the Eighth (King's Royal Irish) Hussars.

Meanwhile the French military system had suffered an irreparable loss in the death of Louvois, the source of woes unnumbered to France in the years that were soon to come. Nevertheless, the traditions of his rule were strong, and the French once more were first in the field, with, as usual, a vast siege-train massed on the Meuse and on the Scheldt. But a late spring and incessant rain delayed the beginning of operations till the beginning of May, when Luxemburg assembled seventy thousand men in rear of the Haine by Mons, and Boufflers forty-eight thousand more on the Scheldt at Tournay. The French king was with the troops in person; and the original design was, as usual, to carry on a war of sieges on the Meuse, Boufflers reducing the fortresses while Luxemburg shielded him with a covering army. Lewis, however, finding that the towns which he had intended to invest were likely to make an inconveniently stubborn defence, presently returned home, and after detaching thirty thousand men to the war in Germany, left Luxemburg to do as he would. It had been better for William if the Grand Monarch had remained in Flanders.

The English king, on his side, assembled sixty thousand men at Brussels as soon as the French began to move, and led them with desperate haste to the Senne, where he took up an impregnable position at Park. Luxemburg marched up to a position over against him, and then came one of those deadlocks which were so common in those old campaigns. The two armies stood looking at each other for a whole month, neither venturing to move, neither daring to attack, both ill-supplied, both discontented, and as a natural consequence both losing scores, hundreds, and even thousands of men through desertion.

At last the position became insupportable, and on the 6th of July Luxemburg moved eastward as if to resume the original plan of operations on the Meuse. William thereupon resolved to create a diversion by detaching a force to attack the French lines of the Scheldt and Lys, a project which was brilliantly executed by WÜrtemberg, thanks not a little to three British regiments, the Tenth, Argyll's, and Castleton's, which formed part of his division. But meanwhile Luxemburg, quite ignorant of the diversion, advanced to the Meuse and laid siege to Huy, in the hope of forcing William to come to its relief. He judged rightly. William left his impregnable camp at Park and hurried to the rescue. But he came too late, and Huy fell after a trifling resistance. Luxemburg then made great seeming preparations for the siege of LiÈge, and William, trembling for the safety of that city and of Maestricht, detached eight thousand men to reinforce those garrisons, and then withdrew to the line of the Geete. Luxemburg watched the whole proceeding with grim delight. WÜrtemberg's success was no doubt annoying, but William had weakened his army by detaching this force to the Lys, and had been beguiled into weakening it still further by reinforcing the garrisons on the Meuse, which was exactly what he wanted. If he could bring the Allies to action forthwith he could reasonably hope for success.

The ground occupied by William was a triangular space enclosed between the Little Geete and a stream called the Landen Beck, which joins it at Leuw. The position was not without features of strength. The camp, which faced almost due south, was pitched on a gentle ridge rising out of a vast plain.[265] This ridge runs parallel to the Little Geete and has that river in its rear. The left flank was protected by marshy ground and by the Landen Beck itself, while the villages of Neerlanden and Rumsdorp, one on either side of the beck and the latter well forward on the plain, offered the further security of advanced posts. The right rested on a little stream which runs at right angles to the Geete and joins it at Elixheim, and on the villages of Laer and Neerwinden, which stand on its banks. From Neerlanden on the left to Neerwinden on the right the position measured close on four miles; and to guard this front, to say nothing of strong garrisons for the villages, William had little more than fifty thousand men. Here then was one signal defect: the front was too long to permit troops to be readily moved from flank to flank, or to be withdrawn, without serious risk, from the centre. But this was not all. The depth of the position was less than half of its frontage, and thus allowed no space for the action of cavalry. This William ignored: he was afraid of the French horse, and was anxious that the action should be fought by infantry only. Finally, retreat was barred by the Geete, which was unfordable and insufficiently bridged, and therefore the forcing of the allied right must inevitably drive the whole army into a pinfold, as Leslie's had been driven at the battle of Dunbar.

Luxemburg, who knew every inch of the ground, was now anxious only lest William should retire before he could catch him. On the 28th of July, by a great effort and a magnificent march, he brought the whole of his army, eighty thousand strong, before William's position. He was now sure of his game, but he need not have been anxious, for William, charmed with the notion of excluding the French cavalry from all share in the action, was resolved to stand his ground. Many officers urged him to cross the Geete while yet he might, but he would not listen. Fifteen hundred men were told off to entrench the open ground between Neerwinden and Neerlanden. The hedges, mud-walls, and natural defences of Neerwinden and Laer were improved to the uttermost, and the ditches surrounding them were enlarged. Till late into the night the King rode backward and forward, ordering matters under his own eyes, and after a few hours' rest began very early in the morning to make his dispositions.

The key of the position was the village of Neerwinden with the adjoining hamlet of Laer, and here accordingly he stationed the best of his troops. The defence of Laer was entrusted to Brigadier Ramsey with the Scots Brigade, namely, the Twenty-first, Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, Mackay's and Lauder's regiments, reinforced by the Buffs and the Fourth Foot. Between Laer and Neerwinden stood six battalions of Brandenburgers, troops already of great and deserved reputation, of whom we shall see more in the years before us. Neerwinden itself was committed to the Hanoverians, the Dutch Guards, a battalion of the First and a battalion of the Scots Guards. Immediately to the north or left of the village the entrenchment was lined by the two remaining battalions of the First and Scots Guards, the Coldstream Guards, a battalion of the Royal Scots, and the Seventh Fusiliers. On the extreme left of the position Neerlanden was held by the other battalion of the Royal Scots, the Second Queen's, and two Danish regiments, while Rumsdorp was occupied by the Fourteenth, Sixteenth, Nineteenth, and Collingwood's regiments. In a word, every important post was committed to the British. The remainder of the infantry, with one hundred guns, was ranged along the entrenchment, and in rear of them stood the cavalry, powerless to act outside the trench, and too much cramped for space to manoeuvre within it.

Luxemburg also was early astir, and was amazed to find how far the front of the position had been strengthened during the night. His centre he formed in eight lines over against the Allies' entrenchments between Oberwinden and Landen, every line except the second and fourth being composed of cavalry. For the attack on Neerlanden and Rumsdorp he detailed fifteen thousand foot and two thousand five hundred dismounted dragoons. For the principal assault on Neerwinden he told off eighteen thousand foot supported by a reserve of two thousand more and by eight thousand cavalry; while seventy guns were brought into position to answer the artillery of the Allies.

Shortly after sunrise William's cannon opened fire against the heavy masses of the French centre; and at eight o'clock Luxemburg moved the whole of his left to the attack of Neerwinden. Six battalions, backed by dragoons and cavalry, were directed against Laer, and three columns, counting in all seven brigades, were launched against Neerwinden. The centre column, under the Duke of Berwick, was the first to come into action. Withholding their fire till they reached the village, the French carried the outer defences with a rush, and then meeting the Hanoverians and the First Guards, they began the fight in earnest. It was hedge-fighting, as at Steenkirk, muzzle to muzzle and hand to hand. Every step was contested; the combat swayed backwards and forwards within the village; and the carnage was frightful. The remaining French columns came up, met with the like resistance, and made little way. Fresh regiments were poured by the French into the fight, and at last the First Guards, completely broken by its losses, gave way. But it was only for a moment. They rallied on the Scots Guards; the Dutch and Hanoverians rallied behind them, and though the French had been again reinforced, they resumed the unequal fight, nine battalions against twenty-six, with unshaken tenacity. At Laer, on the extreme right, the fight was equally sharp. Ramsey for a time was driven out of the village, and the French cavalry actually forced its way into the Allies' position. There, however, it was charged in flank by the Elector of Bavaria, and driven out with great slaughter. Ramsey seized the moment to rally his brigade. The French columns, despite their success, still remained isolated and detached, and presented no united front. The King placed himself at the head of the Guards and Hanoverians, and with one charge British, Dutch, and Germans fell upon the Frenchmen and swept them out of both villages.

The first attack on Neerwinden had failed, and a similar attack on the allied left had been little more successful. At Neerlanden the First and Second Foot had successfully held their own against four French battalions until reinforcements enabled them to drive them back. At Rumsdorp the British, being but three thousand against thirteen thousand, were pushed out of the village, but being reinforced, recovered a part of it and stood successfully at bay. Luxemburg, however, was not easily discouraged. The broken troops in the left were rallied, fresh regiments were brought forward, and a second effort was made to carry Neerwinden. Again French impetuosity bore all before it, and again the British and Germans, weakened and weary though they were, rallied when all seemed lost, and hurled the enemy back not merely repulsed but in confused and disorderly retreat.

On the failure of the second attack the majority of the French officers urged Luxemburg to retire; but the marshal was not to be turned from his purpose. The fourteen thousand men of the Allies in Laer and Neerwinden had lost more than a third of their numbers, while he himself had still a considerable force of infantry interlined with the cavalry in the centre. Twelve thousand of them, including the French and Swiss Guards, were now drawn off to the left for a third attack. When they were clear of the cavalry, the whole six lines of horse, which had stood heroically for hours motionless under a heavy fire, moved forward at a trot to the edge of the entrenchments;[266] but the demonstration, for such it seems to have been, cost them dear, for they were very roughly handled and compelled to retire. But now the French reinforcements supported by the defeated battalions drew near, and a third attack was delivered on Neerwinden. British and Dutch still made a gallant fight, but the odds against their weakened battalions were too great, and ammunition began to fail. They fought on indomitably till the last cartridge was expended before they gave way, but they were forced back, and Neerwinden was lost. Five French brigades then assailed the central entrenchment at its junction with Neerwinden, where stood the Coldstream Guards and the Seventh Fusiliers. Wholly unmoved by the overwhelming numbers in their front and the fire from Neerwinden on their flank, the two regiments stood firm and drove their assailants back over the breastwork. Even when the French Household Cavalry came spurring through Neerwinden and fell upon their flank they fought on undismayed, and the Coldstreamers not only repelled the charge but captured a colour.

Such fighting, however, could not continue for long. William, on observing Luxemburg's preparations for the final assault, had ordered nine battalions from his left to reinforce his right. These never reached their destination. The Marquis of FeuquiÈres, an officer even more celebrated for his acuteness as a military critic than for skill in the field, watched them as they moved and suddenly led his cavalry forward to the weakest point of the entrenchment. The battalions hesitated, halted, and then turned about to meet this new danger, but too late to save the forcing of the entrenchment. The battle was now virtually over. Neerwinden was carried, Ramsey after a superb defence had been driven out of Laer, the Brandenburgers had perforce retreated with him, the infantry that lined the centre of the entrenchment had forsaken it, and the French cavalry was pouring in and cutting down the fugitives by scores. William, who had galloped away in desperation to the left, now returned at headlong speed with six regiments of English cavalry,[267] which delivered charge after charge with splendid gallantry, to cover the retreat of the foot. On the left Tolmach and Bellasys by great exertion brought off their infantry in good order, but on the right the confusion was terrible. The rout was complete, the few bridges were choked by a heaving mass of guns, waggons, pack-animals, and men, and thousands of fugitives were cut down, drowned, or trampled to death. William did all that a gallant man could do to save the day, but in vain. His troops had done heroic things to redeem his bad generalship; and against any living man but Marlborough or Luxemburg they would probably have held their own. It was the general not the soldiers that failed.

The losses on both sides were very severe. That of the French was about eight thousand men; that of the Allies about twelve thousand, killed, wounded, and prisoners, and among the dead was Count Solmes, the hated Solmes of Steenkirk. The nineteen British battalions present lost one hundred and thirty-five officers killed, wounded, and taken. The French captured eighty guns and a vast quantity of colours, but the Allies, although beaten, could also show fifty-six French flags. And, indeed, though Luxemburg won, and deserved to win, a great victory, yet the action was not such as to make the allied troops afraid to meet the French. They had stood up, fifty thousand against eighty thousand, and if they were beaten they had at any rate dismayed every Frenchman on the field but Luxemburg. In another ten years their turn was to come, and they were to take a part of their revenge on the very ground over which many of them had fled.

The campaign closed with the surrender of Charleroi, and the gain by the French of the whole line of the Sambre. William came home to meet the House of Commons and recommend an augmentation of the Army by eight regiments of horse, four of dragoons, and twenty-five of foot. The House reduced this list by the whole of the regiments of horse, and fifteen of foot, but even so it brought the total establishment up to eighty-three thousand men. There is, however, but one new regiment of which note need be taken in the campaign of 1694, namely the Seventh Dragoons, now known as the Seventh Hussars, which, raised in 1689-90 in Scotland, now for the first time took its place on the English establishment and its turn of service in the war of Flanders.

I shall not dwell on the campaign of 1694, which is memorable only for a marvellous march by which Luxemburg upset William's entire plan of campaign. Nor shall I speak at length of the abortive descent on Brest, which is remembered mainly for the indelible stain which it has left on the memory of Marlborough. It is only necessary to say that the French, by Marlborough's information, though not on Marlborough's information only, had full warning of an expedition which had been planned as a surprise, and that Tolmach,[268] who was in command, unfortunately though most pardonably lacked the moral courage to abandon an attack which, unless executed as a surprise, was hopeless of success. He was repulsed with heavy loss, and died of wounds received in the action, a hard fate for a good soldier and a gallant man. But it is unjust to lay his death at Marlborough's door. For the failure of the expedition Marlborough was undoubtedly responsible, and that is quite bad enough; but Tolmach alone was to blame for attempting an enterprise which he knew to be hopeless. Marlborough cannot have calculated that he would deliberately essay to do impossibilities and perish in the effort, so cannot be held guilty of poor Tolmach's blunders.

Before the new campaign could be opened there had come changes of vital importance to France. The vast expense of the war had told heavily on the country, and the King's ministers were at their wit's end to raise money. Moreover, the War Department had deteriorated rapidly since the death of Louvois; and to this misfortune was now added the death of Luxemburg, a loss which was absolutely irreparable. Lastly, with the object of maintaining the position which they had won on the Sambre, the French had extended their system of fortified lines from Namur to the sea. Works so important could not be left unguarded, so that a considerable force was locked up behind these entrenchments, and was for all offensive purposes useless. We shall see before long how a really great commander could laugh at these lines, and how in consequence it became an open question whether they were not rather an encumbrance than an advantage. The subject is one which is still of interest; and it is remarkable that the French still seem to cling to their old principles in the works which they have constructed for defence against a German invasion.

His enemy being practically restricted to the defensive, William did not neglect the opportunity of initiating aggressive operations. Masking his design by a series of feints, he marched swiftly to the Meuse and invested Namur. This fortress, more famous through its connection with the immortal Uncle Toby even than as the masterpiece of Cohorn carried to yet higher perfection by Vauban, stands at the junction of the Sambre and the Meuse, the citadel lying in the angle between the two rivers, and the town with its defences on the left bank of the Meuse. To the northward of the town outworks had been thrown up on the heights of Bouge by both of these famous engineers; and it was against these outworks that William directed his first attack.

Ground was broken on the 3rd of July, and three days later an assault was delivered on the lines of Bouge. As usual, the hardest of the work was given to the British, and the post of greatest danger was made over, as their high reputation demanded, to the Brigade of Guards. On this occasion the Guards surpassed themselves alike by the coolness of their valour and by the fire of their attack. They marched under a heavy fire up to the French palisades, thrust their muskets between them, poured in one terrible volley, the first shot that they had yet fired, and charged forthwith. In spite of a stout resistance, they swept the French out of the first work, pursued them to the second, swept them out of that, and gathering impetus with success, drove them from stronghold to stronghold, far beyond the original design of the engineers, and actually to the gates of the town. In another quarter the Royal Scots and the Seventh Fusiliers gained not less brilliant success; and in fact it was the most creditable action that William had fought during the whole war. It cost the Allies two thousand men killed and wounded, the three battalions of Guards alone losing thirty-two officers. The British were to fight many such bloody combats during the next twenty years—combats forgotten since they were merely incidents in the history of a siege, and so frequent that they were hardly chronicled and are not to be restored to memory now. I mention this, the first of such actions, only as a type of many more to come.

The outworks captured, the trenches were opened against the town itself, and the next assault was directed against the counterguard of St. Nicholas gate. This again was carried by the British, with a loss of eight hundred men. Then came the famous attack on the counterscarp before the gate itself, where Captain Shandy received his memorable wound. This gave William the possession of the town. Then came the siege of the citadel, wherein the British had the honour of marching to the assault over half a mile of open ground, a trial which proved too much even for them. Nevertheless, it was they who eventually stormed a breach from which another of the assaulting columns had been repulsed, and ensured the surrender of the citadel a few days later. For their service on this occasion the Eighteenth Foot were made the Royal Irish; and a Latin inscription on their colours still records that this was the reward of their valour at Namur.

Thus William on his return to England could for the first time show his Parliament a solid success due to the British red-coats; and the House of Commons gladly voted once more a total force of eighty-seven thousand men. But the war need be followed no further. The campaign of 1696 was interrupted by a futile attempt of the French to invade England, and in 1697 France, reduced to utter exhaustion, gladly concluded the Peace of Ryswick. So ended, not without honour, the first stage of the great conflict with King Lewis the Fourteenth. The position of the two protagonists, England and France, was not wholly unlike that which they occupied a century later at the Peace of Amiens. The British, though they had not reaped great victories, had made their presence felt, and terribly felt, on the battlefield; and as the French in the Peninsula remembered that the British had fought them with a tenacity which they had not found in other nations, not only in Egypt but even earlier at Tournay and Lincelles, so, too, after Blenheim and Ramillies they looked back to the furious attack at Steenkirk and the indomitable defence of Neerwinden. "Without the concurrence of the valour and power of England," said William to the Parliament at the close of 1695, "it were impossible to put a stop to the ambition and greatness of France." So it was then, so it was a century later, and so it will be again, for though none know better the superlative qualities of the French as a fighting people, yet the English are the one nation that has never been afraid to meet them. With the Peace of Ryswick the 'prentice years of the standing Army are ended, and within five years the old spirit, which has carried it through the bitter schooling under King William, will break forth with overwhelming power under the guiding genius of Marlborough.

CHAPTER IV

Peace having been signed, there arose the momentous question, what should be done with the Army. To understand aright the attitude of Parliament towards it, a brief sketch must be given of its relations therewith apart from the mere question of voting supplies. It has been seen that the scandals of Schomberg's first campaign had opened the eyes of Parliament to the iniquities that were then going forward; but, though a scape-goat had been made of the Commissary-General, the matter had not been sifted to the bottom.

The primary and principal difficulty was, of course, lack of money. In the case of the Irish war this had been overcome by grants of the Irish estates which had been forfeited after the conquest, the mere expectation and hope of which had sufficed to set the minds of many creditors at rest. For the war in Flanders, however, there was no such resource. The treasury was empty, and the funds voted by Parliament were so remote that they could only be assigned to creditors in security for payment at some future time. Many of these creditors, however, were tradesmen who could not afford to wait until tallies should be issued in course of payment, and were therefore compelled to dispose of these securities at a ruinous discount. The mischief naturally did not end there. Capitalists soon discovered that to buy tallies at huge discount was a much more profitable business than to lend money direct to the State at the rate of seven per cent, and accordingly devoted all their money to it. Thus the "tally-traffic," as it was called, grew so formidable that the Lord Treasurer, Godolphin, was obliged secretly to offer larger interest for loans than was authorised by Parliament.[269]

The result of this financial confusion was that the close of every campaign found the Army in Flanders in a miserable state, owing to the exhaustion of its money and its credit. When it is remembered that a large proportion of the pay of officers and men was kept on principle one year in arrear, that they had to pay discount for anticipation of its payment at the best of times, and that to this charge was now added the further discount on the tallies of the State, it will be seen that their loss became very serious. The incessant difficulties of all ranks from want of their pay and arrears gave rise to much discontent and frequently hampered active operations. Officers were obliged to sell the horses, which they had bought for purposes of transport, before the campaign opened, and were very often driven to supply not only themselves but their men out of their own pockets.

Of all this it is probable that the House of Commons knew little, and as in 1691 it had appointed Commissioners to inquire into the public accounts, it doubtless awaited their report before taking any active step. In 1694, however, the House was rudely surprised by certain revelations respecting a notorious crimp of London, named Tooley, who went so far in his zeal to procure recruits that he not only forced the King's shilling on them when they were drunk—a practice which was common in France and has not long been extinct in England—but resorted to kidnapping pure and simple.[270] Here was one gross infringement of the liberty of the subject; and this scandal was quickly followed by another. At the end of 1694 there came a petition from the inhabitants of Royston, complaining that the troops quartered there were exacting subsistence from the townsfolk on a fixed scale. Inquiry proved the truth of the allegation: the troops were unpaid, and had taken their own measures to save themselves from starvation. Almost simultaneously the Commissioners of Public Accounts reported that their inquiries had been baffled by the refusal of several regimental agents to show their books; and they gave at the same time an unvarnished relation of the shameful extortion practised by agents towards officers and men, and of one case of glaring misconduct on the part of a colonel. The House brought the recalcitrant agents to their senses by committing them to custody, and addressed the King with an earnest prayer that he would put a stop to these iniquities.[271] The King accordingly cashiered the colonel[272] and promised amendment, which promise was discharged so far as orders could fulfil it. But the case demanded not new orders but execution of existing regulations.

There, however, the matter rested for the time, the Commons being occupied with the task of purging corruption from their own body, which was very inadequately performed by the expulsion of the Speaker. Nevertheless, to the end of the war fresh petitions continued to come in from towns, from widows of officers, and from private soldiers, all complaining of the dishonesty of officers and of agents; and the House thus established itself as in some sort a mediator between officers and men. Such a mediator, it must be confessed, was but too sadly needed, but in the interests of discipline it was a misfortune that the House should ever have accepted the position. The immediate result was to overwhelm the Commons with a vast amount of business which they were incompetent to transact, and to suggest an easy remedy for soldiers' grievances in the abolition of all soldiers.

William was not unaware of the danger, and had taken measures to meet it. Before meeting Parliament in December 1697, he had already disbanded ten regiments, and having thrown this sop to English prejudice, he delivered it as his opinion in his speech from the throne that England could not be safe without a land-force. But agitators and pamphleteers had been before him. The old howl of "No Standing Army" had been raised, and reams of puerile and pedantic nonsense had been written to prove that the militia was amply sufficient for England's needs. The arguments on the other side were stated with consummate ability by Lord Somers; but the old cry was far too pleasant in the ears of the House to be easily silenced. Another reason which may well have swayed the House was that, though his English soldiers had fought for William as no other troops in the world, he had never succeeded in winning a victory. Be that as it may, within eight days the House, on the motion of Robert Harley, resolved that all forces raised since September 1680 should be disbanded.

The resolution, in the existing condition of European affairs, was a piece of malignant folly; but the accounts submitted two days later by the Paymaster-General probably did much to confirm it. The arrears of pay due to the Army since April 1692 amounted to twelve hundred thousand pounds, and the arrears of subsistence to a million more, while yet another hundred thousand was due to regiments on their transfer from the Irish to the English establishment.[273] To meet this debt there was eighty thousand pounds in tallies which no one would discount at any price, while to make matters worse, taxation voted by the House to produce three millions and a half had brought no more than two millions into the treasury. Attempts were made in January 1698 to rescind the resolution, but in vain. The Government yielded, and after struggling hard to obtain four hundred thousand pounds, was fain to accept fifty thousand pounds less than that sum for the service of the Army in the ensuing year.

The effect of the vote was immediate. The enemies of the Army were exultant, and heaped abuse and insult on the soldiers who for five years had spent their blood and their strength for a people that had not paid them so much as their just wages. All William's firmness was needed to restrain the exasperated officers from wreaking summary vengeance on the most malignant of these slanderers. It was the old story. Men who had grown fat on the "tally-traffic" could find nothing better than bad words for the poor broken lieutenant who borrowed eighteenpence from a comrade to buy a new scabbard for his sword, being ashamed to own that he wanted a dinner.[274] The distress in the Army soon became acute. Petitions poured in from the disbanded men for arrears, arrears, arrears. Bad soldiers tried to wreak a grudge against good officers, good soldiers to obtain justice from bad officers; all military men of whatever rank complained loudly of the agents.[275] Then came unpleasant reminders that the expenses of the Irish war were not yet paid. Colonel Mitchelburne, the heroic defender of Londonderry, claimed, and justly claimed, fifteen hundred pounds which had been owing to him since 1690.[276] The House strove vainly to stem the torrent by voting a gratuity of a fortnight's subsistence to every man, and half-pay as a retaining fee to every officer, until he should be paid in full. The claims of men and officers continued to flow in, and at last the Commons addressed the King to appoint persons unconnected with the Army to examine and redress just grievances, and to punish men who complained without cause.

On the 7th of July the House was delivered from further importunities by a dissolution; and William returned to his native Holland. Before his departure he left certain instructions with his ministers concerning the Army. The actual number of soldiers to be maintained was not mentioned in the Act of Parliament, but was assumed, from the proportion of money granted, to be ten thousand men. William's orders were to keep sixteen thousand men, for he still had hopes that Parliament might reconsider the hasty votes of the previous session.[277] These expectations were not realised. The clamour against the Army had been strengthened by a revival of the old outcry against the Dutch, and against the grant of crown-lands in general, and to Dutchmen in particular. Moreover, the House had no longer the pressure of the war to unite it in useful and patriotic work. The inevitable reaction of peace after long hostilities was in full vigour. All the selfishness, the prejudice, and the conceit that had been restrained in the face of great national peril was now let loose; and the House, with a vague idea that there were many things to be done, but with no clear perception what these things might be, was ripe for any description of mischief.

William's speech was tactful enough. Expressing it as his opinion that, if England was to hold her place in Europe, she must be secure from attack, he left the House to decide what land-force should be maintained, and only begged that, for its own honour, it would provide for payment of the debts incurred during the war. The speech was not ill-received; and William, despite the warnings of his ministers, was sanguine that all was well. Five days later a return of the troops was presented to the House, showing thirty thousand men divided equally between the English and Irish establishments. Then Harley, the mover of the foolish resolution of the previous year, proposed that the English establishment should be fixed at seven thousand men, all of them to be British subjects. This was confirmed by the House on the following day, together with an Irish establishment of twelve thousand men to be maintained at the expense of the sister island. The words of the Act that embodied this decision were peremptory; it declared that on the 26th March 1699 all regiments, saving certain to be excepted by proclamation, were actually disbanded. Finally, the Mutiny Act, which had expired in April 1698, was not renewed by the House, so that even in this pittance of an Army the officers had no powers of enforcing discipline.

There is no need to dilate further on this resolution, which for three years placed England practically at the mercy of France. It was an act of criminal imbecility, the most mischievous work of the most mischievous Parliament that has ever sat at Westminster. William was so deeply chagrined that he was only with difficulty dissuaded from abdication of the throne. Apart from the madness of such wholesale reduction of the Army, the clause restricting the nationality of the seven thousand was directly aimed at the King's favourite regiment, the Dutch Blue Guards. He submitted, however, with dignity enough, merely warning the House that he disclaimed all responsibility for any disaster that might follow. Just at that moment came a rare opportunity for undoing in part the evil work of the Commons. The death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria brought the question of the succession to the Spanish throne to an acute stage; and the occasion was utilised to ask Parliament for the grant of a larger force. William, however, with an unwisdom which even his loyalty to his faithful troops cannot excuse, pleaded as a personal favour for the retention of his Dutch Guards. The request preferred on such grounds was refused, and a great opportunity was lost.

Nothing, therefore, remained but to make the most of the slender force that was authorised by the Act of Disbandment. The ministers with great adroitness contrived to extort from the Commons an additional three thousand men under the name of marines, for the collective wisdom of the nation will often give under one name what it refuses under another; but as regards the Army proper, the only expedient was to preserve the skeleton of a larger force. Thus finally was established the wasteful and extravagant system which has been followed even to the present day. The seven thousand troops for England were distributed into nineteen, and the twelve thousand for Ireland into twenty-six, distinct corps, with an average proportion of one officer to ten men.[278] In addition to these, three corps of cavalry and seven of infantry were maintained in Scotland, while the Seventh Fusiliers were retained apparently in the Dutch service, or at any rate in Holland. The Artillery was specially reserved on a new footing by the name of the regimental train, first germ of the Royal Regiment that was to come, and contained four companies, each of thirty men, with the usual proportion of an officer to every ten men. To these were added ten officers of engineers.[279] Within the next two years the principle of a skeleton army was pushed still further, and in each of the regiments of dragoons thirty-three officers and thirty sergeants and corporals looked minutely to the training of two hundred and sixteen men. Large numbers of officers, who were retained for emergencies by the allowance of half-pay, also drew heavily on the niggardly funds granted by the Commons; and it was a current jest of the time that the English Army was an army of officers.[280]

The sins of Parliament soon found it out. Before it had sat a month petitions from officers and men began to pour in, as during the previous sessions, with claims for arrears and with complaints of all kinds. As the Commons were the fountain of pay, it was natural and right that the clamour for wages should be directed at them; but the fashion had been set for soldiers to resort to them for redress of all grievances, and it would seem that men used the petition to Parliament as a means of openly threatening their officers.[281] Moreover, by some extraordinary blunder the grant of half-pay had been limited to such officers only as at the time of disbandment were serving in English regiments. This regulation naturally caused loud outcry from officers who, after long service in English regiments, had been transferred to Scottish corps on promotion. A prorogation at the end of April brought relief to the Commons for a time; but no sooner was it reassembled than the petitions streamed in with redoubled volume. The House thus found itself converted almost into a military tribunal. Appeal was made to it on sundry points that were purely of military discipline, and private soldiers sought to further their complaints by alleging that their officers had spoken disrespectfully and disdainfully of the House itself.[282]

To do them justice, the Commons were woefully embarrassed by these multitudinous petitions. Once they interfered actively by taking up the cause of an officer, whom they knew, or should have known, to be a bad character,[283] and threatened his colonel with their vengeance unless the wrongs of the supposed sufferer were redressed. The reply of the colonel was so disconcerting as effectually to discourage further meddling of this kind. Nevertheless the grievances urged by the men must many of them have been just, while some of the allegations brought forward were most scandalous. In one of the disbanded regiments, Colonel Leigh's, it was roundly asserted that the officers had made all the men drunk, and then caused them to sign receipts in full for pay which had not been delivered to them.[284] Finally, in despair, a bill was introduced to erect a Court of Judicature to decide between officers and men. This measure, however, was speedily dropped, and the more prudent course was adopted of appointing Commissioners to inquire into the debt due to the Army.

But meanwhile another question had been raised, which brought matters into still greater confusion. A parliamentary inquiry as to the disposition of the Irish forfeited estates had revealed the fact that William had granted large shares of the same, not only in reward and compensation to deserving officers, which was just and right, but also to his discarded mistress, Elizabeth Villiers, and to his Dutch favourites, Portland and Albemarle. The King's conduct herein was the less defensible, inasmuch as the Irish government had counted upon these estates to defray the expenses, still unpaid, of the Irish war, and had thrown up its hands in despair when it found that this resource was to be withheld.[285] The House of Commons took up the question viciously, passed a sweeping and shameful bill resuming all property that had belonged to the Crown at the accession of James the Second, tacked it to a money-bill, and sent it up to the Lords. The Upper House, to save a revolution, yielded, after much protest, and passed the bill; and then none too soon William sent this most mischievous House of Commons about its business.

It was not until early in the following year that the King met the Parliament, more distinctly even than the last a Tory Parliament, which had been elected in the autumn. Once more he was obliged to remind it that, amid the all-important questions of the English succession and the Spanish succession, provision should be made for paying the debts incurred through the war. There could be no doubt about these debts, for the petitions which had formerly dropped in by scores, now, in consequence of the interference with the Irish grants, flowed in by hundreds. The Commons had flattered themselves that they had disposed of this disagreeable business by their appointment of commissioners, but they found that, owing to their own faulty instructions, the commissioners were powerless to deal with many of the cases presented to them. The complaints of officers against the Government became almost as numerous as those of men against officers, and every day came fresh evidence of confusion of military business worse confounded by the imbecility and mismanagement of the House.[286]

Where the matter would have ended, and whether it might not have led ultimately to a dangerous military riot, it is difficult to say. All, however, was cut short by the despatch of English troops to the Low Countries, and the evident approach of war; for the prospect of employment for every disbanded soldier and reduced officer sufficed in itself to quiet a movement which might easily have become formidable. Two more sessions such as those of 1698 and 1699 might have brought about a repetition of Cromwell's famous scene with the Long Parliament.

It is, however, impossible to leave these few stormy years of peace without taking notice of the apparent helplessness of the military administration. The War Office was in truth in a state of transition. The Secretary-at-War was still so exclusively the secretary to the Commander-in-Chief that he accompanied him on his campaigns; and it is difficult to say with whom, except with the Commander-in-Chief, rested the responsibility for the government of the Army. No ordinary standard should be used in judging of a man who was confronted with so many difficulties as King William the Third. His weak frame, the vast burden of his work in the department of foreign affairs, his failure to understand and his inability to sympathise with the English character, all these causes conspired to make the task of governing England and of commanding her Army too heavy for him. Still, making all possible allowance, and accepting as true Sterne's pictures of his popularity among the soldiers, it is difficult wholly to acquit him of blame for the misconduct of the military administration. His mind in truth was hardly well-suited for administrative detail. He could handle a great diplomatic combination with consummate skill and address, even as he could sketch the broad features of a movement or of a campaign; but he was a statesman rather than an administrator, a strategist rather than a general. In war his impatience guided him to a succession of crushing defeats, in peace his contempt for detail made his period of the command-in-chief one of the worst in our history. That, amid the corruption which he found in England, he should have despaired of finding an honest man is pardonable enough, but he took no pains to cure that corruption, preferring rather to conduct his business through his Dutch favourites than through the English official channels. Finally, his behaviour in the matter of the Irish forfeitures suggests that he was not averse to jobbery himself, nor over-severe towards the same weakness in others; and in truth the Dutch have no good reputation in the matter of corruption. Stern, hard, and cold, he had little feeling for England and Englishmen except as ministers to that hostility for France which was his ruling passion. Probably he felt more kindly towards the English soldier than towards any other Englishman; the iron nature melted at the sight of the shattered battalions at Steenkirk, and, if we are to believe Burnet, the cold heart warmed sufficiently towards the red-coat to prompt him to relieve the starving men, so shamefully neglected by Parliament, out of his own pocket. On the whole, it may be said that no commander was ever so well served by British troops, nor requited that service, whatever his good intent, so unworthily and so ill.