The civilian who attempts to write a military history is of necessity guilty of an act of presumption; and I am not blind to my own temerity in venturing to grapple with such a task as the History of the British Army. But England has waited long for a soldier to do the work; and so far no sign has been given of the willingness of any officer to undertake it beyond the publication, a few years since, of Colonel Walton's History of the British Standing Army from 1660 to 1700. Nor is this altogether surprising, for the leisure of officers is limited, the subject is a large one, and the number of those who have already toiled in the field and left the fruit of their labour to others is sadly small. A civilian may therefore, I hope, be pardoned for trying at any rate to make some beginning, however conscious of his own shortcomings and of the inevitable disadvantage from which he suffers through inexperience of military life in peace and, still more fatally, in war. His efforts may at least stimulate some one better qualified than himself to treat the subject in a manner better befitting its dignity and its worth.

My design is to write the history of the Army down to the year 1870, the two present volumes carrying the story down to the Peace of Paris in 1763, and two future volumes bringing it forward to the great reforms which virtually closed the life of our old Army and opened that of a new. It would have been easy to have filled a score of volumes with matters germane to the subject and of genuine interest to at least some groups of military students; nor would such treatment have been foreign to the methods of one school of British historians. There is indeed much to be said for it from the writer's standpoint, for it simplifies his task beyond belief. To me, however, rightly or wrongly, it seemed better to gather the story if possible into a smaller compass, even at the cost of omitting many instructive statistics and picturesque details. Accordingly I have compressed the six hundred years of our military history from Hastings to Naseby into one-third that number of pages, endeavouring only to set down such points and incidents as were essential to a coherent sketch of the growth of our military system. Even after Naseby and up to the reign of Queen Anne I have dealt with the history in a like arbitrary spirit, thus passing over, not I confess without regret, the Irish campaigns of Cromwell and King William, though entering with some detail into that of Schomberg. All could not be written down, as any one can bear me witness who has attempted to go below the surface of the Great Civil War alone. The reader must decide whether I have judged well or ill in that which I have left unwritten.

I must plead guilty also to deliberate omission of sundry small details which are rather of antiquarian than of true military interest, minute particulars of dress, armament and equipment and the like, the real place for which is rather in a military dictionary than in a military history. These I have sacrificed, not because I felt them to be trivial, but because I thought that the space which they demanded would be more profitably occupied by a sketch of the political relations between the Army and the country. I cannot, however, claim completeness for this sketch: and I am conscious that many questions of great constitutional importance are left unresolved, as I must frankly acknowledge, through my inability to cope with them. I have sought our acknowledged authorities on constitutional questions in vain; not one is of help. I confess that I have been amazed when reading our innumerable political histories to see how unconcernedly Army, Navy, and the whole question of National Defence are left out of account.

It is this, the political not less than the military aspect of the Army's history that I have endeavoured, however slightly and however unsuccessfully, to elucidate, at the sacrifice sometimes of purely military matters; and it is this which makes the subject so vast as to be almost unmanageable. The difficulties of tracing military operations are frequently trying enough, but they are insignificant compared to those presented by the civil administration of the Army, and by the intolerable complication of the finance. Here again the reader must judge whether or not I have chosen aright; and I would ask him only not to attribute to neglect omissions which have been made after mature deliberation.

My authorities from the reign of Queen Anne onward, and occasionally before, are quoted at the foot of the page; but in the earlier portion of the first volume I have been content to group them in a brief note at the close of each chapter or section;[1] and I have followed the same plan with some modification throughout. I must, however, mention that these notes rarely comprise the whole of the authorities that I have consulted, much less all that lie open to consultation. It would be a simple matter, for instance, to cover a page with works consulted on the subject of the Civil War alone; but while I have, as I trust, taken pains to make my work thorough, I have been content frequently to refer the reader to such authorities as will guide him to further sources of information, should he desire to pursue them. I have spared no pains to glean all that may be gleaned from the original papers preserved at the Record Office in reference to the military administration and to the various campaigns, and I have waded through many thousands of old newspapers, with and without profit. What unknown treasures I may have overlooked among the archives preserved by individual regiments, I know not, since with an army so widely dispersed as our own it seemed to me hopeless to attempt to search for them; but such regimental histories as exist in print I have been careful to study, sometimes with advantage but not always with profound respect for their accuracy.

Maps and plans have been a matter of extreme difficulty, owing to the inaccuracy of the old surveys and the disappearance of such fugitive features as marsh and forest. I have followed contemporary plans wherever I could in fixing the dispositions of troops, but in many cases I should have preferred to have presented the reader with a map of the ground only, and left him to fill in the troops for himself from the description in the text. Blocks of red and blue are pleasing indeed to the eye, but it is always a question whether their facility for misleading does not exceed their utility for guidance. Actual visits to many of the battlefields of the Low Countries, with the maps of so recent a writer as Coxe in my hand, did not encourage me in my belief in the system, although, in deference to the vast majority of my advisers I have pursued it.

It remains to say a few words on some minor matters, and first as to the question of choosing between Old Style and New Style in the matter of dates. Herein Lord Stanhope's rule seemed to be a good one, namely to use the Old Style in recording events that occurred in England, and the New for events abroad. But I have supplemented it by giving both styles in the margin against the dates of events abroad; lest the reader, with some other account in his mind, should (like the editor of Marlborough's Despatches) be bewildered by the arrival in England of news of an action some days before it appears to have been fought in the Low Countries. One difficulty I have found insuperable, which is to discover when the New Style was accepted in India; but finding that the dates given by French writers differ by eleven days from those of Orme I have been driven to the conclusion that the Old Style endured at any rate until 1753, and have written down the dates accordingly.

Another difficulty, more formidable than might be imagined, has been the choice of orthography for names of places abroad. Before the war of 1870 the French form might have been selected without hesitation; but with the rise of the German Empire, the decay of French influence in Europe and the ever increasing importance of German writings in every branch of literature, science and art, this rule no longer holds good. Finding consistency absolutely impossible, I have endeavoured to choose the form most familiar to English readers, and least likely to call down upon me the charge of pedantry. Even so, however, the choice has not been easy. Take for instance the three ecclesiastical electorates of the Empire. Shall they be Mainz, KÖln and Trier, or Mayence, Cologne and TrÈves? The form Cologne is decided for us by the influence of Jean Maria Farina; TrÈves is, I think, for the present better known than Trier; but Mainz, a large station familiar to thousands of British travellers, seemed to me preferable to the French corruption Mayence, as reminding the reader of its situation on the Main. For German names of minor importance I have taken the German form, since, their French dress being equally unfamiliar to English readers, there seemed to be no reason why they should not be written down correctly; but the French form is adopted so exclusively in contemporary histories that possibly not a few instances of it may have escaped my vigilance. In Flanders again it is frequently necessary to choose between the French and the Flemish spelling of a name; and, where it has been possible without pedantry, I have preferred the Flemish as nearer akin to the English. Thus I have always written Overkirk rather than Auverquerque, Dunkirk rather than Dunquerque, Steenkirk rather than Estinquerque (the form preferred for some reason by Colonel Clifford Walton), since the French forms are obviously only corruptions of honest Flemish which is very nearly honest English. Actual English corruptions I have employed without scruple, though here again consistency is impossible. It is justifiable to write Leghorn for Livorno; but The Groyne, a familiar form at the beginning of this century, is no longer legitimate for Corunna, any more than The Buss for Bois-le-duc (Hertogenbosch) or Hollock for Hohenlohe. Then there is the eternal stumbling-block of spelling Indian names. Here I have not hesitated to follow the old orthography which is still preserved in the colours of our regiments. Ugly and base though the corruptions may be they are at any rate familiar, and that is sufficient; while they probably convey at least as good an idea of the actual pronunciation as the new forms introduced by Sir William Hunter. Here once more it would be confusing to write Ally for Ali or Caubool for Cabul, though possibly less so than to confront the reader with MachhlÍpatan or MachlÍpatan (two forms used indifferently by Colonel Malleson) for Masulipatam, and Maisur for Mysore. We are an arbitrary nation in such matters and very far from consistent. Even in such simple things as the names of West Indian Islands we have dropped the old form Martinico in favour of Martinique, though we still affect Dominica in lieu of Dominique. All that a writer can do is to study the prejudices of his readers without attempt either to justify or to offend them.

Lastly, I must give the reader warning that I have spoken of our regiments throughout by the old numbers instead of by their territorial titles. As I do not propose to carry the history beyond 1870 I may plead so much technically in justification; but apart from that I would advance with all humility that life is short, and that it is too much to ask a man to set down such a legend as "The First Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment" (in itself probably only an ephemeral title), when he can convey the same idea at least as intelligibly by writing the words Sixty-fifth. I have also called regiments by their modern appellations (so far as the numbers may be reckoned modern) throughout, ignoring the anachronism of denominating what were really regiments of Horse by the term Dragoon Guards, for the sake of brevity and convenience. An Appendix gives the present designation of each regiment against its old number, so that the reader may find no difficulty in identifying it. I may add that I have written the numbers of regiments at full length in the text in all cases where such regiments have survived up to the present day, so that the reader need be in no doubt as to their identity; and I have carefully avoided the designation of disbanded regiments by the numbers which they once bore, in order to avoid confusion.

In conclusion, I have to express my deepest thanks to Mr. G. K. Fortescue at the British Museum and to Mr. Hubert Hall at the Record Office for their unwearied and inexhaustible courtesy in disinterring every book or document which could be of service to me.

J. W. F.

June, 1899.