The Years of Endurance (27 page)

They reckoned without Pitt's obstinate courage or Britain's. " It has pleased inscrutable Providence," the former told the House of Commons, " that this power of France should triumph over everything that has been opposed to it. But let us not therefore fall without making any efforts to resist it. Let us not sink without measuring its strength."
¹

Yet Britain's resources both of men and money were put to a test never visualised when she went to war. When the Prussians and Dutch gave up the fight there were only 60,000 troops in the country including Militia and Fencibles. Even this force represented a 300 per cent increase on the pre-war establishment. The Coalition Government, grasping the magnitude of the crisis, now took immediate steps to augment the Army. In a single day it sanctioned the raising of fifteen additional Fencible battalions. Despite the heavy losses of the Flemish and West Indian campaigns it planned to have nearly 300,000 men under arms by the end of 1795. Added to the 100,000 or more needed to man the Fleet the figure, though still far below the proportionate contribution demanded of France by the Jacobin exponents of total war, represented no insignificant part of the population.

These forces had to be raised by voluntary enlistment. Except for the use of press-gangs to man the fleet, legal compulsion was repugnant to the spirit and constitution of the country. The slightest attempt to apply it provoked a storm of opposition: jealousy of the Executive was strongly ingrained in all classes. The very word conscription was tainted with enemy origin.

Instead, in an age when the transmission of popular intelligence was slow and uncertain, the Government was reduced to such undignified shifts as touting at the prison gates and offering pardons to convicts and crown debtors in return for enlistment. But its chief resort was to the profit motive—the normal peace-time incentive of a free people. To any rogue capable of raising recruits ample reward was promised and no questions asked. In one case the War Office entered into a contract with a self-styled captain to supply 4000 Irish recruits at twenty guineas a head. Kidnapping became the profession of the hour. Every device from debauchery
¹

1
War Speeches,
119.

to downright trepanning was employed by the crimping houses to complete the contractors' quotas. As the poor and uneducated were the most affected the outcry against these abuses soon culminated in riots. In January, 1795, one in St. George's Fields led to the discovery of several young men in irons in a house near the Elephant and Castle, where they had been decoyed by prostitutes. A few weeks later indignation was aroused by the report that two famous pugilists, Mendoza and Ward, were employed by similar establishments in St. George's Fields. In the summer a crowd gutted a notorious house at Charing Cross and, after filling the roadway in front of Northumberland House with mattress feathers, marched to Downing Street to break Pitt's windows.

The transformation of the least military country in Europe into an armed camp was carried out with all the formless improvisation dear to the national character. There was no logic in the pattern of the new army. Regulars, Militia, Fencibles, Yeomanry, Foreign Auxiliaries and every species of Volunteer corps competed with one another in a baffling mosaic of scarlet and blue. A visitor to Birmingham found twenty recruiting parties drumming and trumpeting away against one another on behalf of their rival units. Their terms of service were as variegated as their uniforms. Many, raised privately and loosely disciplined, were of the most unmilitary appearance: John Byng, passing the Cambridgeshire Militia on the march, noted that their order was that of a flock of sheep and that most of the officers followed in post-chaises.

Many out of patriotism, or to avoid the annual Militia ballot, joined the Volunteers. For members of this force were exempted from Militia service if they could produce a certificate showing they had attended exercises punctually during the six weeks before the hearing of the Militia list appeals. They were raised locally, generally in small independent companies for use in case of invasion or in aid of the civil power. They appealed mainly to the better-to-do classes: the Rutland Volunteers began with a meeting of a hundred and fifty noblemen, gentlemen and yeomen who bound themselves to a
ttend when called upon under a £
50 penalty, and chose a uniform of French grey and buff.
¹

In the yeomanry regiments there was always a great res
ort of

¹
Times,
21st April, 1794.

farmers. The daughter of one recalled what a treat it was for the children when the day for exercise came round. " What polishing of sword and epaulette! What brushing of bearskin and broadcloth ! With what admiration we used to walk round my father when he was fully equipped, and he affecting all the time to tak
e it as a mere matter of course
'
¹

Wherever one went one saw uniforms, their bright primary colours adding a new charm to the soft half-tones of the English background. The traveller at his inn found his landlord a local Fencible, eager to show off his arms and charger, or was woken at five in the morning to the sound of trumpets. High on the lonely fells, MacRitchie, the Clunie minister, met Lord Darlington's Dragoons on their way to Penrith, mounted on bay horses and clad in scarlet cloaks with yellow facings: the Government moved its cavalry like shuttlecocks up and down the country.
²

More than
40,000
recruits were raised in the spring and summer of
1794.
The chaos produced by such rapid military expansion was indescribable. One immediate effect was an almost complete stoppage of naval recruitment. At Perth, early in
1795,
as much as
25
guineas a man was offered without producing a single seaman.
³
The Government was forced to place an embargo on all merchant shipping for six weeks until
20,000
seamen had been impressed, and later had to suspend Army recruiting altogether. Before the Fleet could be manned, no less than fifteen regiments were drafted on board.

Into this martial hodgepodge came in February,
1795,
that erstwhile apprentice of Frederick the Great, the Duke of York. His appointment to the vacant office of Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards was made solely out of deference to Royal wishes to soften his recall from Flanders. But by a happy chance the Duke was a born administrator—a hard worker with an orderly mind, a royal memory and a mastery of detail, who had acquired a firsthand knowledge of the deficiencies and needs of the Army. Without a trace of genius, he was single-hearted in his devotion to the Service and—unlike his brothers—a gentleman. The Army never had a more useful patron.

¹
Ham,
MS.

²
Torrington,
IV, 59 ;
MacRitchie,
19, 21.

³
MacRitchie,
1.

It needed one. Beyond native courage and tenacity and a great regimental tradition the Army of 1795 possessed few assets. Its discipline was defective, its equipment inferior and inadequate, and its methods of supply and recruitment were anarchical. The Duke's work was to give it organisation: to do for Britain on a smaller and more leisurely scale what Carnot had done for France. During the next decade he forged the weapon which Moore and Wellington were to use. In the direction of the armies in the field he had no part: it was not his
metier.
That remained the business of the politicians, who,
with
Dundas in
the
Secretary of State's office, Windham in the old War Department and Huskisson as Under-Secretary-of-State, maintained a kind of all-party, and sometimes mutually contradictory, direction of military operations. The Duke had merely to put the forces they misused into the field: to officer, train and equip them.

He wasted no time. Early in March, 1795, he issued a circular letter demanding a return of all captains under 12 and lieutenant-colonels under 20. The first need was to restore the vanished prestige and discipline of the commissioned ranks by ending the scandal of juvenile command which improvising statesmen had introduced to raise cheap recruits. Promotion by purchase
the
Duke could n
ot abolish, for
it was a long-established national institution—almost as muc
h part of an Englishman's birth
right
as the devolution of landed property. But what he could and did do was to insist on fitness for command in the field. He initiated a system of returns and confidential reports that enabled his adviser, the Adjutant-General, to test the history and capacity of every officer in the Service. And by being readily
accessible and appointing a Mili
tary Secretary as the official channel of communication between himself and all ranks, he put a check on the fatal habit of political interference in matters of discipline and promotion.

In the sphere of training his germinating work was equally valuable. Detailed orders were issued for the exercise of troops in camp: Mondays and Fridays were allocated to battalion drill, Tuesdays and Thursdays to brigade training, Wednesdays to field-days. The Army was given system and direction. Time was necessary to attain results: conservatism was strong and the anomalies of the English administrative system were too many to be modified or removed quickly. The artillery still continued to be directed by the Ordnance Board—an independent body which, despite the removal of the Duke of Richmond and the substitution of the formidable Lord Cornwallis
, remained a by-word for unpunc
tuality and inefficiency. But the Duke's steady hand brought a slow but solid improvement of method into every department of the Service. Without it the new Army would have been still-born.

All this strengthening of the armed forces—essential now if Britain was to survive—made ever greater demands on the country's purse. By the modest standards of the eighteenth century the cost of the war was terrific. A ship of the line cost nearly £100,000 to build, and Britain had to keep at sea a force of more than a hundred of them as well as several thousand small craft. The yards were always full of vessels under construction, and shipwrights' wages under the stress of demand rose to more than twice those of agricultural labourers. With something approaching half a million men to pay, feed and equip in every part of the world, Pitt's capacity as a financier was sternly taxed.

The Prime Minister, educated in the new and, to an eighteenth-century mind, enthralling principles of Adam Smith, and given supreme office while almost a boy to save a war-racked country from financial ruin, remained unshakably convinced that the defeat of France would be achieved through the economic strength of Britain. In the short run he was tragically wrong: ultimately, in the course of a long war of attrition, he was proved right. He therefore husbanded the country's resources and placed the burden, whenever possible, not on the backs of his own over-strained generation but on those of a more peaceful posterity, believing that the foundations of the commercial wealth he had laid would ultimately make it seem light. In this also he was wrong in the short run, right in the long. His vast borrowings crippled the post-war generation and poisoned British social life for three decades with a sense of bitterness and frustration. Yet the nightmare of debt presently paled in the dawn of Victorian industrial expansion, and was forgotten.

At the time the taxes imposed to balance Pitt's war-budgets seemed to our ancestors heavy enough. For they fell on almost every article of purchase or hire from playing cards to stage coaches. Imports, both of raw materials a
nd manufactures, paid duties up
to 30 or 40 per cent, and the price of foreign foods, some of them now common necessities, rose to almost prohibitive levels. A budget day cartoon portrayed John Bull giving up his breeches to save his bacon, while a peering Pitt cried, " More money! John: more money to defend you from the bloody and cannibal French! They're a-coming! Why they'll strip you to the very skin! " Yet the basis of taxation remained indirect: the freeman's right of choice to be taxed as he pleased survived. Even in the hour of national danger the individual was encouraged to earn as much as he could, spend the money in his own way and, if possible, grow rich. For it was Adam Smith's and therefore Pitt's belief
that
a nation of many rich men was a rich nation.

The price of passing on the burden was made heavier than it need have been. The science of raising money on public credit, though far ahead of that prevailing on the Continent, was still only partially developed: the money market a close one and in a few hands. The big bankers and loan-mongers exacted a grossly unfair toll on the nation for their services. Pitt's intention—a sound one—had been to float loans at par. But the bankers and their new rivals, the Jewish stock-jobbers, at first refused to touch anything but three per cents. These they absorbed at a huge discount which posterity was compelled to make good. In the
opening year of war for every £100 borrowed, £138 of
stoc
k was created. In 1796, though the rate of interest had
risen to 4 per cent, bonds of
£100 had to be given to the money monopolists for every
£60
advanced. Borrowing as no Minister in any country had ever borrowed before, Pitt in a few years doubled the national debt.