War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

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WAR, STATE, AND SOCIET Y IN MID-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN AND IREL AND

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War, State, And Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain And Ireland STEPHEN CONWAY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Stephen Conway 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–925375–7

978–0–19–925375–3

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Preface The writing of a book is a very individual labour; no two people would produce the same publication. But no author—or at least no historian—can bring his work to fruition without the help of many others. I am greatly indebted to the British Academy for providing me with research funding that enabled me to examine material in the National Library of Ireland. I am grateful to the owners of the manuscripts from which I quote for permission to use their papers: here I should note especially my thanks to Viscount Barrington; the Duke of Bedford; Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik; the Earl of Dalhousie; Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Wentworth Settlement Trustees; the Duke of Grafton; the Rt. Hon. Lady Lucas; and the Marquis of Zetland. I also thank the librarians and archivists in many repositories in Britain, Ireland, and the United States, who helped me with the material in their care, particularly those of the Montagu Estate Office, Beaulieu; Bedfordshire Record Office; Berkshire Record Office; British Library; Bodleian Library; Brotherton Library; Buckinghamshire Record Office; Cheshire Record Office; Corporation of London Record Office; Cumbria Record Office; Derbyshire Record Office; Devon Record Office; Dr Williams’s Library; Durham University Library; East Suffolk Record Office; East Sussex Record Office; Edinburgh City Archives; Glasgow City Archives; Gloucestershire Record Office; Hampshire Record Office; Herefordshire Record Office; Hull Record Office; Leicestershire Record Office; London Metropolitan Archives; National Archives: Public Record Office; National Archives of Scotland; National Army Museum; National Library of Ireland; National Library of Scotland; National Library of Wales; National Maritime Museum; North Yorkshire Record Office; Nottinghamshire Archives; Nottingham University Library; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; Sheffield Archives; Shropshire Record Office; Somerset Record Office; Staffordshire Record Office; Tyne and Wear Archives; West Suffolk Record Office; West Sussex Record Office; William L. Clements Library; William Salt Library; Wiltshire Record Office; and Yale University Library. It would not be possible to write a book of this wide-ranging kind without building upon the scholarship of a great many other historians. Considerations of space prevent my being able to list their works in the Bibliography (which is confined to primary sources), but a glance at the footnotes will reveal the extent of my debt. I have been very fortunate to work in a supportive History Department, and I should like to include in these acknowledgements my thanks to colleagues for all their help over the years it has taken to bring this book to completion. For particular pieces of information, I am indebted to Christopher Abel, Kathy Burk, David French, Julian Hoppit, Ray Jenkins, Thomas Latham, Reider Payne, In-aki Rivas, Paul Shirley, Adam Smith, and Hans van Wees.

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A number of colleagues and friends outside my department deserve particular thanks. I have benefited from discussions on various points with David Armitage, of Harvard University; Jeremy Black, of the University of Exeter; John Childs, of the University of Leeds; Julie Flavell, formerly of the University of Dundee; Agustín González Enisco, of the Universidad de Navarra; Lige Gould, of the University of New Hampshire; Richard Harding, of the University of Westminster; Ian McBride, of King’s College London; Patrick O’Brien, of the London School of Economics; Andrew O’Shaughnessy, of the University of Virginia; Nicholas Rodger, of the University of Exeter; Guy Rowlands, of the University of Durham; Hamish Scott, of the University of St Andrews; and Rafael Torres Sánchez, of the Universidad de Navarra. Colin Kidd, of the University of Glasgow, commented on the proposal that was the start of the process of writing this book, and helped to determine its shape; Huw Bowen, of the University of Leicester, who has produced an excellent overview of existing literature on war and society in eighteenth-century Britain, also commented on the book proposal and then read through my draft chapters; and Peter (P. J.) Marshall, formerly of King’s College London, a source of unfailing advice and inspiration, likewise took on the task of reading through my whole draft. It hardly needs to be said that the errors and misinterpretations that remain are entirely my responsibility. Parts of this book were first published as contributions to scholarly journals though in each case I have extended and revised (in some cases very considerably) the originals. I thank the editors and publishers of Historical Research, War in History, and the English Historical Review for permission to use material that first appeared in their journals in Chapters 3, 7, and 8, respectively. I am also very grateful to my publishers, who have provided, as always, help in many ways. My thanks are due to Ruth Parr, Anne Gelling, Kay Rogers and Charles Lauder in particular. Finally, I should like to take this opportunity to record my gratitude to my family—especially my wife, son, mother, and mother-in-law—who put up with my absorption in the mid-eighteenth century with remarkable good nature. My son Robert will no doubt see this book as confirmation of his dad’s living in the past, but my hope and prayer is that neither he nor his generation will experience war in the ways that it impinged on the lives of countless people in the period considered here. Stephen Conway University College London

Contents Preface List of Maps List of Figures List of Tables Abbreviations Introduction

v viii viii viii ix 1

1. World-Wide War and Home Defence

11

2. War and the State

33

3. The Growth of the Armed Forces

56

4. War and the Economy

83

5. War and Society

115

6. War and Politics

143

7. War and Religion

170

8. War and the Nation

193

9. War, Empire, and the Loss of America

227

10. The View from the Grassroots

253

11. Comparisons Historical and Geographical

275

Conclusions Bibliography Index

302 307 335

List of Maps 1. Global War: The Main Theatres of Conflict, 1739–63 2. War at Home: The Jacobite Advance, Nov.–Dec. 1745 3. Three Local Studies: Cork, Edinburgh, and Berkshire

12 20 254

List of Figures 1. The External trade of England and Wales, 1729–73

101

List of Tables 1. Two Snapshots of the Military and Naval Mobilization of British and Irish Males 2. Average Number of Widows Supported by Ashbury Poor-Rates 3. European Navies Compared (Measured in Thousands of Tons) 4. Armies in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Europe Compared

61 268 281 281

Abbreviations Add. MS ADM AO BL BM CO HMC NAM NAS NLI NLS NLW NMM OIOL PH PRONI RO SP T TNA: PRO

Additional Manuscript Admiralty Papers, The National Archives: Public Record Office Audit Office Papers, The National Archives: Public Record Office British Library British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings Colonial Office Papers, The National Archives: Public Record Office Historical Manuscripts Commission National Army Museum National Archives of Scotland National Library of Ireland National Library of Scotland National Library of Wales National Maritime Museum Oriental and India Office Library Parliamentary History of England, ed. William Cobbett and J. Wright (36 vols., London, 1806–20) Public Record Office of Northern Ireland Record Office State Papers, The National Archives: Public Record Office Treasury Papers, The National Archives: Public Record Office The National Archives: Public Record Office


Introduction In October 1739, the British Government declared war on Spain. This conflict had been a long time in the making. Tensions over British attempts to trade with the Spanish colonies in America had been mounting since 1713, when the Treaty of Utrecht had allowed the British South Sea Company limited access to Spanish America. There had even been brief periods of open warfare between the two countries in 1718–20 and 1727–9, and when this new war began, many Britons probably believed that it would be equally short-lived. However, the hostilities, confined to the Caribbean and Central America, and often picturesquely called the War of Jenkins’ Ear, were soon subsumed within a complex and wider European conflict, centred on a struggle between Austria and Prussia, but which also pitted Britain against France. Subsequently known as the War of the Austrian Succession, this clash of arms lasted until 1748. There were a few years of uneasy peace in Europe, although Anglo-French hostilities continued almost unabated elsewhere. War between Britain and France formally recommenced in 1756. This new conflict ended in 1763, and thereafter became known (somewhat unimaginatively) as the Seven Years War. Between 1739 and 1763, then, Britain was engaged in a quarter of a century of more-or-less continuous warfare. The contrast with the preceding quarter of a century was stark: between 1713 and 1739, apart from the brief clashes with Spain, there was peace. Britain and France, locked in enmity in the mid-century, were actually allies from 1716 to 1731. Sir Robert Walpole, the first minister through the 1720s and 1730s sought to avoid European entanglements, and successfully prevented Britain from being drawn into the War of the Polish Succession of 1733–5. But if the wars of 1739–63 mark out this period from the years of largely uninterrupted peace that came before them, they can be seen as beginning a trend towards increasing, and increasingly demanding, Anglo-French conflict. In 1775, the War of American Independence broke out. In 1778 the French entered the conflict on the side of the insurgent Americans. The war was not concluded until 1783. Ten years later, Britain declared war on revolutionary France—a struggle that ended only in 1802. A year later, Britain was at war again, this time with Napoleonic France. Not until the battle of Waterloo in June 1815 was this long contest definitively completed. This book explores, and seeks to understand, the impact of the conflicts of 1739–63 on Britain and Ireland. Earlier generations of scholars examined the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War as military events and as episodes in international politics, but they were not greatly interested in their

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Introduction

domestic repercussions.¹ Until recently, historians—taking their cue, perhaps, from Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian nineteenth-century theorist of war— considered the conflicts of the eighteenth century as ‘limited wars’, fought for limited ends and with limited means, which necessarily had a correspondingly limited impact. Only with the French Revolution, it was claimed, was war itself transformed into an event that intruded on almost every aspect of life.² This view has been modified, and in certain respects overturned, in some important work published in the past two decades.³ Studies of eighteenth-century Britain have established that the wars of the period had significant effects on the development of public finance, the economy, social relations, political culture, and national sentiment.⁴ A sure sign of the progress of this revisionism was the publication, in 1998, of a concise yet thorough overview of the existing literature on the subject.⁵ Yet, as that overview made clear, much remains to be done, not least in the form of studies of the impact on Britain and Ireland of particular wars. In this respect the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are well served,⁶ and to a lesser extent the War of American Independence.⁷ Various aspects of the impact of Britain’s mid-eighteenth-century wars have also been examined in a number of very fine works, as the footnotes in subsequent chapters indicate; however, until now the domestic repercussions of the conflicts of 1739–63 have not been accorded sustained and wide-ranging treatment.⁸ There are, it must be said, very real problems in trying to evaluate the impact of any armed conflict. War as a clash of arms, as military operations, is in many ways ¹ Notably Sir Julian Corbett, England and the Seven Years War: A Study in Combined Strategy (2 vols., London, 1907). ² See, e.g., Eric Robson, ‘Armed Forces and the Art of War’, in The New Cambridge Modern History, vii. The Old Regime, 1713–1763 (Cambridge, 1957), 163–76; and J. F. C. Fuller, The Conduct of War 1789–1961 (London, 1961), ch. 1. For Clausewitz, see On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1976), esp. 589–91. ³ See, e.g., John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789 (Manchester, 1982); M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618–1789 (London, 1989); Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1660–1815 (London, 1994); Peter Wilson, ‘Warfare in the Old Regime 1648–1789’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), European Warfare 1453–1815 (London, 1999), 69–95. ⁴ See, esp. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995); Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford, 1997), esp. 152–67. ⁵ H. V. Bowen, War and British Society, 1688–1815 (Cambridge, 1998). ⁶ See, e.g., Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793–1815 (London, 1979); H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution (London, 1989); J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997). ⁷ See H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the American Revolution (London, 1998); Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000). ⁸ Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002) and M. John Cardwell, Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years War (Manchester, 2004), are certainly wide-ranging, but they concentrate, as their titles indicate, on political culture.

Introduction

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a much easier subject to tackle. Battles, campaigns, and even war preparations generate—at least in early-modern and modern times—considerable quantities of obviously relevant records, in the form of the public reports and private accounts of participants. By bringing these various pieces of evidence together, a vivid picture can be painted. Tracing the influence or consequences of war is altogether more difficult. Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, might have seen war as the ‘father of all things’, but we need to be a little more cautious. All too easily, war’s impact can be exaggerated if one fails to recognize the part played by other (often less dramatic) contemporaneous agents of change. But no less true is the ease with which war’s role can be missed if one is not on the lookout for its imprint in less than obvious places. In the following chapters every effort is made to produce a balanced account that does not overstate the role of war. However, even when the necessary caveats and qualifications are registered, the conflicts considered here still emerge as a major shaping force in mid-eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. War also emerges as necessitating partnerships of various kinds, and the theme of partnership is a recurring one in this book. Partnership with European allies was recognized, at least by parts of the political nation, to be necessary to the conduct of both mid-century wars. Partnership with the North American colonies was also seen as imperative to military success. Within Britain and Ireland, partnerships were no less important. The peoples of the different nations of the two islands were forced into partnership, or entered into it willingly, in order to fight the conflicts of the period, and resist Bourbon invasion. At the level of ‘high’ politics, the Seven Years War saw the forming of an informal partnership between Whigs and Tories in support of the Pitt–Newcastle government’s prosecution of the war. The various Protestant denominations—established churches and Dissenters—were brought into a form of partnership based on Protestant solidarity in the face of the Catholic threat from France and Spain. And, perhaps above all, partnerships had to be forged between the British state and local and private interests in order to secure the mobilization of the necessary manpower, material, and money. Partnership, as always, had different meanings for the different individuals and groups involved, and while some of these partnerships endured, others, as we will see, could not be sustained for longer than the wars themselves.

BOUNDARIES, CONTEXTS, AND ASSUMPTIONS Certain features of this book should be highlighted from the outset. One, already stated, but not yet justified, is the examination of Britain and Ireland. More often, British historians focus on Britain alone, or even almost exclusively on England. There is, it must be said, a good case for treating Britain and Ireland separately, as they comprised two distinct, if connected, polities at this time. Ireland, as its Protestant elite repeatedly stressed, was a separate kingdom, which just happened

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Introduction

to share the same ruler with Britain. Not until the passing of the Act of Union in 1800 is it possible to think in terms of a constitutionally integrated British and Irish whole, and even then, the hostility of a significant part of Irish opinion to the Union makes the concept of a unified British and Irish history problematic, to say the least.⁹ But, in reality, the links between the two islands were so close in the eighteenth century, that to leave Ireland out of the picture would be to lop off part of the canvas. There is occasionally some awkwardness in considering them together, but this is outweighed by the advantages. It would make little sense to discuss military and naval mobilization without including Ireland, and political developments in the two islands had obvious linkages. There is even evidence that an overarching British national sentiment was beginning to find favour amongst some of the Irish; as Sean Connolly has argued, we should avoid the temptation to assume that the great Irish rebellion of 1798 is proof of persistent Irish hostility to Britain and Britishness.¹⁰ To include Ireland might be regarded as a widening of the normal horizons of a British historian (which is how I see myself ), but the area for appropriate and profitable consideration can be enlarged still further. Britain and Ireland can be seen as part of a wider British Atlantic world. This is now a common perspective of historians, who have grown accustomed in recent decades to thinking in such terms.¹¹ However, the conception of the British as a transatlantic people is not just a construct of modern scholarship. It reflects the views of many contemporaries, who regarded the British settlements in America as outposts of the extended British nation. Although the focus of this book is on the home islands and the people who inhabited them, there are periodic forays into this Greater Britain beyond. In particular, an attempt is made to understand how the stresses, strains, and outcomes of the mid-century wars, especially the Seven Years War, contributed to the breakdown of the transatlantic British community. This study also attempts to place Britain and Ireland in a somewhat different context. If they were part of an Atlantic world, they were also part of Europe. This obvious point has not escaped historians of Europe, who often regard Britain and Ireland as part of their area of competence. However, historians with an Atlantic orientation can sometimes overlook the importance of the European aspects of eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. The two islands were tied to the continent (much to the regret of many of the British and Irish) by their Hanoverian monarchs; by extensive trade (much more extensive in this period than with North America and the Caribbean); by cultural interchange, especially but not exclusively ⁹ See, e.g., Keith Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness (London, 1998), esp. 5–6, 277–84. ¹⁰ S. J. Connolly, ‘Varieties of Britishness: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the Hanoverian State’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995), 193–207. ¹¹ For a recent collection of stimulating essays, see David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London, 2002).

Introduction

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at the elite level; by religious bonds; and by the movement of peoples.¹² Connections are not, of course, the same as parallels, and it is not claimed here that Britain and Ireland were the same kind of polities as the great continental powers.¹³ But the differences, real though they were, can be overstated: the British and Irish experience of war in the mid-eighteenth century was certainly not unique in every respect, and we can better identify what was unusual and what was common by making comparisons with other European belligerents. If geographical context is important, so is historical perspective. This book does not aim to suggest that the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War were more intrusive and had more profound affects on Britain and Ireland than did the conflicts earlier and later in the eighteenth century. Some comparisons are made, mainly in Chapter 11, with the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97), the War of Spanish Succession (1702–13), the War of American Independence, and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. What emerges from this exercise is both a greater appreciation of what was unusual about the impact of the mid-century conflicts and a sense that all Britain’s major wars between 1689 and 1815 impinged to a considerable extent on the lives of many British and Irish people, and that the large-scale mobilization and intrusiveness of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars represented the culmination of a process of intensification—a grand finale, so to speak—that had been steadily gaining in momentum from the middle of the century. The wars of 1739–48 and 1756–63 are here considered as one extended conflict. There were, admittedly, obvious differences between the two struggles. The first involved a major domestic uprising—the ’Forty-five Jacobite rebellion—that threatened the continued existence of the Hanoverian regime, whereas the second witnessed an unprecedented degree of political cohesion, at least during the years of William Pitt’s ascendancy and British victories from 1758 to 1760. Britain’s principal allies in the first struggle were Austria and the United Provinces or Dutch Republic. In the Seven Years War, by contrast, Austria was allied with France, and the Dutch remained resolutely neutral. Prussia, effectively a French partner for much of the War of the Austrian Succession, became Britain’s main European ally from 1756 to 1762. The Seven Years War, as will become apparent, was also fought on a much bigger scale than the Austrian struggle—more military and naval forces were mobilized and the consequences were accordingly much more significant. Indeed, one of the reasons for looking at the two wars together is to exemplify in a single book the argument that during the eighteenth century there was a steadily mounting commitment of British and Irish manpower and resources to armed conflict, with a corresponding increase in the intrusiveness that such a rising level of commitment brought. ¹² For an introduction to some of these links, see Stephen Conway, ‘Continental Connections: Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century’, History, 90 (2005), 353–74. ¹³ For a thought-provoking attempt to do so, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985).

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Introduction

But distinct though they appear to many historians, and different though many of their features undoubtedly were, the two wars can usefully be conceived as one long-running struggle, ‘two acts, as it were, in a single drama’.¹⁴ The period as a whole is given unity by the widespread perception of a French threat, and the need to counter it. Both wars had at their heart Anglo-French conflict. Even before the commitment of British troops to the Continent in 1742, France was seen as the real enemy. When the war with Spain began in 1739, hostilities with France were assumed to be imminent: a print published in London in that year depicted The Gallick Cock and English Lyon fighting.¹⁵ In June 1740, Andrew Stone, the Duke of Newcastle’s advisor and friend, was anticipating that the French would try to prevent a British expedition going to the West Indies: ‘they cannot Suffer His Mjys Forces’, Stone told Newcastle, ‘to make any considerable Conquest, or Acquisition, upon the Span[iar]ds in America’.¹⁶ A pamphlet published in Dublin at the same time urged an immediate declaration of war to take advantage of the poor harvest and food shortages in France.¹⁷ As William Hamilton wrote from London in September 1741, ‘It is generally, nay almost universally believed that we cannot avoid a French War’.¹⁸ The Seven Years War was unambiguously, from the British point of view, an Anglo-French struggle. It started as a clash with France, in practice in the summer of 1755 rather than with the formal declaration of war in May 1756, and France remained the principal enemy for the British all the way through to the signing of the peace treaties in 1762–3. It should also be noted that the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748, though celebrated in London with a firework display and music composed for the occasion by Handel, was generally regarded as no more than a truce. While superficially Britain and France ceased to be enemies, in practice they continued to jostle for predominance both in North America and in India. In 1749 an expedition from New France tried to lay claim to the Ohio Valley, and in the same year the British began the construction of a major new fortified base at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Sporadic conflict occurred in the Ohio Valley from 1752 between British colonists and those Native Americans who inclined towards them on the one hand, and the French Canadians and their more numerous indigenous allies on the other. Warfare between the British East India Company and the French recommenced in 1751, and though it was mainly conducted through local surrogates, there were direct clashes between forces under British and French command. In a sense, then, even while the British Government sought to maintain the peace ¹⁴ The words are Sir Michael Howard’s, applied to the World Wars of the twentieth century: see his essay ‘A Thirty Years War? The Two World Wars in Historical Perspective’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 3 (1993), 172. ¹⁵ BM 2437. ¹⁶ Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 103/2. See also BM 2454, The Cardinal in the Dumps, a cartoon of 1740 that suggests Cardinal Fleury, the French minister, is the real loser by Admiral Vernon’s triumph over the Spanish at Porto Bello. ¹⁷ [Anon.,] Reasons for an Immediate War against France (Dublin, 1740), esp. 21. ¹⁸ Glasgow City Archives, Hamilton of Barnes Papers, TD 589/579.

Introduction

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with France in Europe, spending a good deal of money fruitlessly trying to prop up an ailing Austrian alliance for this express purpose, events in North America and India were making a mockery of the pretence that there was any peace to maintain.¹⁹ From 1739, then, Britain effectively embarked on nearly a quarter of a century of near-continuous warfare, in which for all but a few years France was the principal enemy.

SOURCES While researching this study, it became apparent that there are many areas of desirable enquiry about which we know very little, and, given the paucity of the sources, are never likely to know very much. Yet, despite the gaps, the total volume of material available for a study of this kind is perhaps still more of a problem. No one could hope to consult everything that might be relevant. One of two research strategies therefore suggested themselves: concentrate on a small number of types of source and explore them exhaustively, or sample a wide variety of different material. There is a case for saying that the sources accessible to significant numbers of contemporaries are the most valuable ones, for sources that were ‘public’ can be seen as influencing as well as reflecting opinion. This line of thinking would give special weight to the published word, to popular engravings and artefacts, and even to publicly displayed paintings and statues. On the other hand, such sources need to be regarded with some caution by historians precisely because they were, in part at least, attempts to create a public sentiment. All too easily one can slip into the assumption that they were successful. It follows that unpublished or private sources should not be neglected. A manuscript letter, diary, or even poem also needs to be used with sensitivity, of course; unless a viewpoint is expressed by many different individuals, we cannot be confident that it was anything but idiosyncratic. And such sources, it should be added, usually disclose the views of the literate, educated elite only. However, employed with due care, they can tell us much about what contemporaries actually thought, as opposed to what others wanted them to think. This book, therefore, is based on as wide a range of sources as could be reached within the time (and resources) available; every source has its limitations, but by deploying as many different types as possible I have sought to maximize my chances of recovering the attitudes and priorities of contemporaries. An important consequence of this approach should perhaps be highlighted at this point. As literary and artistic sources are used throughout, I decided not to devote a chapter to the impact of the mid-century wars on literature and the arts. ¹⁹ For the Duke of Newcastle’s obsession with the Austrian alliance, and the efforts to which he went to keep it alive, see H. M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990), 29–52.

8

Introduction

Their content was clearly in some cases influenced by wartime events and preoccupations. Paintings, in particular, depicted episodes and personalities of the wars, whether in the form of portraits of military and naval heroes, such as General Amherst by Joshua Reynolds and Admiral Vernon by Charles Philips, or canvases that attempted to capture victories on sea and land, such as Dominic Serres the elder’s The Battle of Quiberon Bay, and the more famous Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe; while contemporary novels, such as Henry Fielding’s The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742) and The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749), and, perhaps above all, Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), drew on the conflicts of the period for background or plot. However, as paintings, engravings, cartoons, sculptures, plays, prose, poetry, and song are used to illustrate war-related themes at various points in the text, it would be unduly repetitive to discuss them again in the context of these media themselves. There are, to be sure, other ways in which the wars had an impact on arts and literature. Uncertainty led to reluctance to make unnecessary purchases, which seems in the Austrian struggle to have caused booksellers to be ‘very cautious of engaging any new work of weight or importance’.²⁰ However, as this was essentially linked to the economic affects of the war, it can be considered as another example of the deleterious impact on commercial activity.

STRUCTURE The book opens with a brief narrative of the conflicts, emphasizing their global character, and that they both involved threats to the home territories. Such a narrative is necessary to provide background to subsequent analysis, and it also allows us to appreciate how the ebbs and flows of British and allied fortunes affected public attitudes. The second chapter looks at war and the state. It considers the strength of the British state as a war-waging force, and its working with other groups beyond its complete control. Partnerships of various kinds were forced on, or engaged in willingly, by the British state in order to raise the necessary quantities of human, material, and financial resources for war. The next chapter examines the growth of the armed forces, regular and irregular, and particularly the contribution of British and Irish males. The level of mobilization was much greater than is usually appreciated, and involved men from parts of society generally thought to have been unaffected by military service. Chapter 4 turns to the economy, and assesses the impact of the war on such areas as the loss of capital assets, the labour supply, taxation and public borrowing, overseas trade, and government spending. The repercussions for society, and for what we might somewhat anachronistically call ‘social policy’, are the subjects of the next chapter. Here we shall be looking at how the wars affected gender relations, social mobility, ²⁰ Countess of Cork and Orrery (ed.), The Orrery Papers (2 vols., London, 1903), ii. 5.

Introduction

9

social conflict, the response to the problems generated by demobilization, the wide-ranging quest for national revival in the aftermath of the Austrian war, the attempts to break the clan system after the ’Forty-five rebellion, and the extent to which the conflicts of this period militarized British and Irish society. Chapter 6 explores the impact of the two wars on ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics. The content and structure of politics was affected, with Whigs and Tories burying their differences and entering, effectively, into a political partnership at the height of the Seven Years War, and the wider public being drawn in as participants in the political process in ways that challenged oligarchic control both in Britain and in Ireland. The next chapter—the seventh—looks at war and religion. The argument here will be that the two wars played an important part in changing religious attitudes. The Jacobite uprising and the threat of French invasion in the War of the Austrian Succession led to an upsurge of hostility to ‘popery’ amongst Protestants, but in the next conflict the need for Irish Catholic manpower and the conquest of French Canada forced the British elite—if not yet the wider public—to reassess Catholicism. Protestant unity, meanwhile, fragile even during wartime, was undermined by the end of the Jacobite challenge and by imperial developments. War and the nation is the subject of Chapter 8. Linda Colley’s Britons has stimulated much debate about the emergence of a popular sense of Britishness and the role of armed conflict in this process. The ingredients for national unity were present in our wars—powerful external enemies, the threat of invasion, resentment at military operations in continental Europe that seemed to benefit foreign allies, or the King’s Hanoverian lands, more than Britain itself. But we also have much evidence of a continuing reluctance to identify with Britain and Britishness, particularly amongst the English. Indeed, English Scotophobia seems to have been heightened by the Highland invasion of 1745, and only gradually began to abate in the face of conspicuous Scottish loyalty in the Seven Years War. The Irish, who started to serve in the British army in large numbers, were also looked upon with great suspicion by many Britons, and defeats were often blamed on their unreliability. The boundaries of Britishness are explored in another sense: did this period see changes in the ways in which metropolitan Britons viewed the British colonists in North America? Empire itself, and especially empire in America, is the subject of Chapter 9. The expansion of British dominion overseas had a profound impact on the way in which empire was seen from Britain. At the end of the Austrian war, very few Britons thought in terms of a unified ‘British empire’; more usually Britain’s territories in the western hemisphere and its footholds in Asia were viewed as separate and distinct. The primary focus of interest was North America, with its growing settlements of fellow Britons. From the end of the Seven Years War, conceptions of a unified empire began to gain wider currency, and the colonies of British settlement had to compete for metropolitan attention with the vast territories, peopled by non-Britons, that had been annexed as a result of war. The effects of these changes on official and public attitudes will be explored in this chapter, particularly the ways in which the creation of this new empire made it

10

Introduction

difficult, if not impossible, to sustain the partnership between the metropolitan British and the British colonists that had been the key to success in the Seven Years War in North America. Local case studies form the tenth chapter. The places chosen are very different in type and situation, enabling us to gauge the impact of the wars on three communities—Cork, Edinburgh, and Berkshire. Parts of the final chapter take us in the opposite direction—to beyond the home islands. The aim is to put in a European context many of the issues raised earlier in the book, in order to assess the extent to which the British and Irish experience can be regarded as exceptional. The chapter also attempts to place in historical perspective the impact on Britain and Ireland of the wars of 1739–63; comparisons are made with the domestic effects of earlier and later eighteenth-century conflicts. A brief conclusion attempts to pull together the threads and underline the key issues.

1 World-Wide War and Home Defence ‘With regard to publick affairs this year has been unhappy’, James Clegg, an elderly Derbyshire Dissenting minister, wrote in his diary for the last day of 1745. ‘Our forces and those of the allies of Brittain have been worsted in Flanders in Germany in Italy and Scotland’.¹ His following of wartime events was far from unusual, judging by surviving contemporary journals and letters. War made news, and the pages of newspapers, magazines, and periodicals allowed readers to keep up with military and naval operations both close to home and at a considerable distance.² Although this book is about the impact of war on Britain and Ireland, rather than about war as battles and campaigns, we need to know about the ebbs and flows of British and allied fortunes, as these affected public attitudes and much else besides. Almost every area of enquiry covered in this study was influenced, to some degree, by the progress of hostilities—times of British defeat and setback producing very different responses to periods of British success. A brief, and broadly chronological, account of military and naval operations is therefore necessary. In the interests of manageability, this will concentrate largely on the areas of British involvement; however, as campaigns elsewhere were widely reported in the contemporary press, and seem to have excited much interest, reference is also made to the Austro-Prussian struggles in Central Europe that were at the heart of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, to the Russian intervention in both conflicts, and to the fighting in Italy in the 1740s, which mainly revolved around the competition between the Austrians and their French and Spanish enemies.³ From the British and Irish point of view, the conflicts of this period were truly global affairs (see Map 1), and the Seven Years War has even been described, with ¹ Vanessa S. Doe (ed.), The Diary of James Clegg of Chapel en le Frith 1708–55 (3 pts, Derbyshire Record Society, ii, iii, and v, Derby, 1978–81), ii. 561. ² For more on this, see Ch. 6. ³ The following account is heavily indebted to a number of excellent works on the mid-century wars, especially David French, The British Way in Warfare 1688–2000 (London, 1990); Jeremy Black, Britain as a Military Power 1688–1815 (London, 1999); N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004); Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (Oxford, 1994); Bruce Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars 1688–1783 (Harlow, 2001); Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (New York, 1993); M. S. Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession 1740–1748 (Harlow, 1995); Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000).

12

3 5

4

7

6

1. Europe 5. India

2. North America 6. The East Indies

3. Caribbean and Central America 7. The Philippines

Map 1. Global War: The Main Theatres of Conflict, 1739–63

4. West Africa

World-Wide War and Home Defence

1 2


13

some justice, as Britain’s first world war.⁴ This is not to deny that earlier struggles had taken place in extra-European theatres. The War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century (and even the War of the League of Augsburg, or Nine Years War, at the end of the seventeenth) had witnessed armed conflict in many areas of Anglo-French imperial contact, especially in North America and the Caribbean. Most of this military activity, admittedly, did not involve the allocation of military resources from Britain itself. It was the work of local agents—notably the British colonists in North America—who were often only loosely under the control of central authority, or not under such control at all. However, the Royal Navy was deployed to assist the locals, and in 1711 an expedition of more than 5,000 regular troops was conveyed across the Atlantic for an attack on Quebec in conjunction with colonial forces.⁵ The attempt came to grief in the St Lawrence estuary, yet it demonstrated, even at this stage, a willingness to deploy the British army beyond the main European theatre of operations.⁶ But if the use of British regular troops in an imperial capacity was far from unprecedented in 1739, over the next quarter of a century it was to develop massively in scale. By 1762, nearly a third of the British army was expected to be based outside Europe.⁷ Contemporaries were only too aware of the interconnectedness of the campaigns in different parts of the globe. In February 1759, British forces campaigning in the West Indies celebrated with great gusto news of the capture of Gorée in West Africa,⁸ while on 25 July 1761 the Northumberland militia fired the ‘great guns’ in the citadel at Berwick-on-Tweed after having learned ‘By the Gazette this morning’ that Pondicherry in southern India had been taken from the French.⁹ Even the importance of the victories—and defeats—of allies engaged in operations that involved no British presence were fully grasped by at least some British and Irish observers. We find the Revd William Stukeley rejoicing in his Lincolnshire vicarage in February 1742 at the ‘fresh & good news from Bavaria’, where Maria Theresa’s Austrian army was defeating her German enemies, and ⁴ Notably by Tom Pocock, in his popular work Battle for Empire: The Very First World War 1756–63 (London, 1998). Winston Churchill had already used the phrase in his History of the English Speaking Peoples (4 vols., London, 1956–8), iii. 123. ⁵ See G. S. Graham (ed.), The Walker Expedition to Quebec, 1711 (London, 1953). ⁶ Richard Harding, ‘The Expeditions to Quebec, 1690–1711: The Evolution of British TransAtlantic Amphibious Power’, in Peter Le Fevre (ed.), Guerres maritimes (1688–1713): IVe Journées Franco-britanniques d’histoire de la Marine (Vincennes, 1996), 197–212. ⁷ Calculated from the 1762 army estimates presented to the British House of Commons, and adding to them 12,000 troops on the Irish establishment. The estimates represent only a very rough guide to the numbers actually deployed, but the proportions are probably about right. See Journals of the House of Commons, xxix. 27–9. For further information on deployments, see French, British Way in Warfare, 58. ⁸ Alan J. Guy (ed.), ‘George Durant’s Journal of the Expedition to Martinique and Guadeloupe, October 1758–May 1759’, in idem (ed.), Military Miscellany, i (Army Records Society, xii, Stroud, 1997), 44. ⁹ ‘The Diary of John Dawson of Bruton’, in John Crawford Hodgson (ed.), North Country Diaries (Surtees Society, cxxiv, Durham, 1915), 277.

14


Lady Caroline Fox writing from London in September 1758 of ‘The good news of the King of Prussia beating the Russians’ at the battle of Zorndorf .¹⁰ Indeed, in the Seven Years War Frederick the Great became something of a popular hero in Britain, and his victories were relished, and his defeats lamented, with almost as much emotion as if they had been won or lost by the British army.¹¹

WAR BEGINS The hostilities against Spain that commenced in October1739 were primarily fought out in the Americas. This was wholly appropriate, as the conflict, though the product of Anglo-Spanish tension on a variety of issues, was principally about British access to trade with the Spanish colonies in the New World. The Spanish had taken a tough line on illegal commerce, notoriously lopping off the ear of Robert Jenkins, the captain of a merchant vessel. British commercial interests lobbied for protection, the parliamentary opposition pressed for the Government to take a firmer line, and public opinion became increasingly outraged. In London, particularly, the agitation for war was vociferous. Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry reluctantly accepted the need for hostilities when negotiations with the Spanish broke down.¹² The first major action was Admiral Vernon’s capture of Porto Bello, only a matter of weeks after the formal beginning of the conflict. Vernon’s victory fed absurdly optimistic expectations of easy pickings at the expense of the decaying Spanish empire, and a large expeditionary force was sent to the West Indies in 1740, employing both regular troops from Britain and soldiers raised specifically for the purpose in the North American colonies. The success at Porto Bello was not to be repeated, however. Attacks in the spring and summer of 1741 on Cartagena in modern-day Colombia and Santiago in Cuba were humiliatingly repulsed. Disease made terrible inroads into the army and navy, and arguments between the naval and military commanders made effective cooperation impossible. The British troops, after having remained inactive on Jamaica for some months, were ordered home at the end of 1742.¹³ Thereafter, only limited operations took place in this theatre while the Spanish were Britain’s only enemies. ¹⁰ The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley (Surtees Society, lxxiii, Durham, 1880), 332–3; Brian Fitzgerald (ed.), Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster (3 vols., Dublin, 1949–57), i. 182. See also Centre for Kentish Studies, Amherst MSS, U1350 C41/26, where Joseph Yorke declares himself ‘so delighted’ with Frederick the Great’s victory over the French at Rossbach ‘that I can’t Contain myself ’. ¹¹ See, e.g., NAS, Clanranald Muniments, GD 201/4/84; NLW, Nanteos MSS, L 144; Hampshire RO, Jervoise of Herriard Papers, 44M69/F7/14/12/4; Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Collection, D 3155 C2049; Somerset RO, Dickinson Papers, DD/DN 498, Ambrose Isted to Stephen Fuller, 11 Dec. 1757. ¹² See Philip Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain (Woodbridge, 1998). ¹³ See Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742 (Woodbridge, 1991).


15

Some attempts were made to foment native rebellion on the mainland from British bases on the Mosquito Shore of Nicaragua, and an attack was made by a Royal Navy squadron on Spanish ports on the Caracus coast in early 1743. By this time, the war on the North American mainland had similarly run out of steam. Georgia, the southernmost British continental colony, had been a source of irritation to the Spanish since its foundation in 1732, though from the British perspective one of the virtues of the new settlement was that it could act as a buffer to protect valuable South Carolina, and its lucrative rice trade, from Spanish incursions. Unsurprisingly, therefore, as soon as hostilities began in 1739, there was sporadic skirmishing on the frontiers of the colony. James Oglethorpe, the governor, led an expedition of troops from Georgia and South Carolina against the great Spanish fortress of San Agustín in Florida the following year. The defences were too strong for Oglethorpe’s force to make any impact, and the siege was lifted. In 1742 the Spanish attacked Georgia, only to retreat in the face of stiff resistance. Desultory raids were carried out by both sides into 1743, but effectively the war on this front had settled into a stalemate. In the Pacific Ocean, meanwhile, Capt. George Anson was engaged in his famous circumnavigation. The original intention was that Anson would sail to the Pacific coast of Central America to attack Panama while Vernon was taking Cartagena. However, his ships and crews suffered terribly in rounding Cape Horn. Anson raided Paita (now in Peru), and then decided to set out across the Pacific for home. By the time he reached Canton, the expedition had been reduced to one ship only. The captain’s fortunes then brightened: on 20 June 1743 he captured the Nuestra Señora de Covadonga, a Spanish treasure ship carrying much gold and silver to Manila from Spanish America. Anson and his tiny band of surviving sailors reached England, to a hero’s welcome, in June 1744.¹⁴ When the Spanish war began, there was some anxiety about a landing in Britain or Ireland.¹⁵ But no such attack was launched, despite the precedent in earlier Anglo-Spanish conflicts, most recently in 1719, when a small Spanish expeditionary force reached Scotland with the intention of supporting an uprising on behalf of the deposed Catholic Stuart dynasty, which had been removed from the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1689–90. Nor did the outbreak of fighting in 1739 lead to the dispatch of British troops and ships to attack the Spanish mainland, which again was at odds with the experience of previous eighteenth-century wars. In the Spanish Succession struggle, some 29,000 British or British-paid troops were serving in the Iberian peninsular by 1707, and were to remain there until near the end of the conflict. Although operations inland were difficult and ultimately unsuccessful—which might have deterred repetition—there were some spectacular ¹⁴ See Glyn Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and the Tragedy of Anson’s Voyage Round the World (London, 1999). ¹⁵ See, e.g., SP 63/403, fo. 39, where the Duke of Newcastle tells the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in February 1740 that the Spanish ‘may intend to make an attempt upon some Part of His Majesty’s Dominions, either in Great Britain, or Ireland’.

16


successes on the coastal fringes of Spain: Gibraltar and Minorca were seized in 1704 and 1708, respectively, remaining as British possessions after the war. Even in the brief Anglo-Spanish conflict of 1718–20, there had been a raid on the Atlantic coast of northern Spain, in which Vigo’s fortifications and shipping were destroyed. But if there were no landings on the Spanish coast, the port towns of which were judged to be too strongly defended to risk an attack,¹⁶ a British fleet under Adm. Nicholas Haddock was supposed to blockade Cadiz and prevent Spanish troops from being deployed in Italy. British efforts in the Mediterranean were no more effective than in the Americas: the Spanish and French fleets successfully transported a Spanish army to Italy in November 1741. Adm. Thomas Mathews, the new commander of the British naval forces in the Mediterranean, began a loose blockade of Toulon the following April, and in February 1744 there was an indecisive engagement with the Franco-Spanish fleet, which resulted in an acrimonious (and highly political) dispute between Mathews and his subordinate, Vice Adm. Richard Lestock.¹⁷

THE WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION The Spanish troops that the Royal Navy had failed to intercept in their passage to Italy were used in one theatre of a complex war that grew out of the death of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in October 1740. The emperor had no male heir, so to avoid a disputed succession, and to keep his sprawling territories intact, he had painstakingly persuaded the European powers to endorse the Pragmatic Sanction, first proclaimed in 1713, which allowed for a female Habsburg to inherit Charles’s lands and titles. In the last decade of the emperor’s life, however, Habsburg power seemed visibly to wane, and on his death it was all too tempting for some of those governments that had accepted the Pragmatic Sanction to ignore their commitments and seek to take advantage of an uncertain situation. Frederick of Prussia, seeing an opportunity to augment his own power, invaded Austrian Silesia at the end of 1740, and defeated an Austrian army at the battle of Mollwitz in April 1741. The French, keen to increase their influence in Germany at the Habsburg’s expense, encouraged the Prussians and supported the Bavarian claimant to the imperial crown; the British and the Dutch, no less keen to prevent any increase in French influence, backed the late emperor’s daughter, Maria Theresa. The Spanish, meanwhile, sought to exploit the Habsburgs’ problems by attacking the family’s territories in Italy. Some 16,000 British troops were sent to the Austrian Netherlands in 1742 as auxiliaries of Maria Theresa and to protect the strategically important Low Countries ¹⁶ I am grateful to In-aki Rivas, who is currently working on British and Spanish intelligence before and during the war of 1739–48, for information on this point. ¹⁷ See P. A. Luff, ‘Mathews v. Lestock: Parliament, Politics and the Navy in Mid-EighteenthCentury England’, Parliamentary History, x (1991), 45–62.


17

from the French. Keeping hostile powers out of this area, from which an invasion of Britain’s long and vulnerable eastern coastline could be launched, was a consistent British policy, and British troops had been deployed there in large numbers in the war of 1702–13. Flanders, indeed, was the scene of many of the Duke of Marlborough’s greatest triumphs, and was therefore familiar to British generals and politicians as the natural cockpit of operations against the French.¹⁸ The Austrians, meanwhile, had started to recover from the early blows delivered by their enemies. Prague had fallen to the French and Bavarians in December 1741, but in the course of the following year, Habsburg forces invaded Bavaria and compelled the French to retire from Bohemia. That June, the Austrians and Prussians agreed preliminary peace terms at Breslau, enabling more Habsburg troops to be directed against the French and Bavarians. In 1743 the British provided a contingent for the Pragmatic army—so called to underline the support of its members for the Pragmatic Sanction. This multinational force, comprising Hanoverian and other German troops as well as the British, advanced into southern Germany to help the Austrians. The British infantry played a key role in defeating the French at Dettingen that June, encouraging somewhat fanciful comparisons with Marlborough’s German campaign and the great victory at Blenheim nearly forty years earlier.¹⁹ This was to be the last employment of the British army in Germany during the Austrian war; from the beginning of 1744 the main area of British military commitment was back in the Low Countries. At the same time, there was considerable anxiety about an expected French invasion of southern England, though in the end bad weather prevented any such attempt.²⁰ In June, there was much optimism that the war might end soon with an allied occupation of Paris, as an Austrian army under Prince Charles of Lorraine crossed the Rhine and entered Alsace. In August, however, Austrian progress was brought to a juddering halt when Frederick the Great began to invade Bohemia. This re-entry into the war by the Prussians took the Austrians by surprise, and necessitated the withdrawal and redeployment back in the Habsburg heartlands of Prince Charles’s army. However, the Prussian invasion of Bohemia turned out to be an altogether less successful venture than Frederick’s march into Silesia nearly four years earlier. By the end of 1744, the Prussians, outmanoeuvred by their Austrian opponents, were in ignominious retreat. In Italy, the Austrians, advancing south from Rimini, defeated a combined Spanish and Neapolitian army at Velletri in August, but they were obliged to abandon their projected invasion of Naples to march northwest to assist the Piedmontese resist a Franco-Spanish attack. The formal outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1744 led to hostilities in North America. Along the frontier of New York and New England, Canadians ¹⁸ See David Chandler, ‘The Great Captain-General 1702–1714’, in David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford, 1994), 69–91. ¹⁹ Even before the battle, one British officer had written that ‘The Fame of what our ancestors did in this Country [in 1704] . . . is still talk’d of as a recent thing’: BL, Hardwicke Papers, Add. MS 35,354, fo. 30. ²⁰ For invasion fears, at this time and subsequently, see Ch. 8.

18


and Native American tribesmen attacked scattered settlements, and there was even some concern about the possibility of seaborne invasion of the northern colonies from metropolitan France.²¹ Such fears were unfounded, but French ships from Canada raided Nova Scotia in the spring of 1744. Louisbourg, the great French stronghold on Cape Breton, was seen as a threat to New England’s fishing trade, and also as the key to French Canada, as its position—and sheltered harbour and formidable fortifications—enabled it to dominate the Gulf of St Lawrence. William Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, resolved to attack Louisbourg, and in April 1745 some 3,000 New England troops, supported by financial contributions from Pennsylvania and New York and a small Royal Navy squadron that had sailed up from the West Indies under Comm. Peter Warren, began a formal siege. The New England soldiers were inexperienced in siege warfare, but they stuck to their task determinedly. Blockaded by sea and land, and with supplies running low, the garrison surrendered in June. The fall of Louisbourg was celebrated excitedly both in British North America and in Britain itself, but it was the only significant triumph for allied arms in 1745. In Italy, the Austrians and the Piedmontese were forced to concede territory to the triumphant French and Spanish forces, while in Silesia Frederick defeated the Austrians at Hohenfriedberg in June and at Soor, across the border in Bohemia, in September. The one piece of good news came in December, when the Prussians and Austrians agreed peace terms. The French finally decided that their intervention in Germany was achieving little, and concentrated their efforts instead on the Low Countries. During the spring, the Duke of Cumberland, George II’s son and now commander-in-chief of the British forces in the Austrian Netherlands, led his troops against a French army that was besieging Tournai. The two sides clashed at Fontenoy on 11 May 1745. Although the British and Hanoverian soldiers were widely praised for their fortitude, the battle was a British defeat. It initiated a period of steadily unfolding success for the French commander Maurice de Saxe, who proceeded to capture a string of towns in the Netherlands. He was aided by the withdrawal later that year of most of the British troops to counter a major domestic uprising in Britain, which had for its objective the overthrow of the Hanoverian dynasty and the restoration of the deposed house of Stuart. This Jacobite rebellion was in many ways remarkably successful. Charles Edward Stuart, the son of the Stuart claimant to the British and Irish thrones, landed in the Western Isles of Scotland in the summer of 1745 with a tiny band of followers. He then rallied support amongst the Highland clans during the following weeks, and by 17 September he had outmanoeuvred a small British regular army under Gen. Sir John Cope and taken Edinburgh. Four days later, Charles’s force routed Cope’s troops at Prestonpans. This ignominious defeat at the hands ²¹ Eugene R. Sheridan (ed.), The Papers of Lewis Morris, iii. 1738–1746 (New Jersey Historical Society, xxvi, Newark, N.J., 1993), 309.


19

of rebels who had been dismissed as ‘fools or madmen’,²² engaged in ‘ye most Don Quixsotish project’ ever known,²³ sent shock waves throughout England. The Jacobite forces began to march south, avoiding the buildup of British and auxiliary troops at Newcastle by taking the western route across the River Esk. Carlisle capitulated to Prince Charles’s forces on 14 November, and they advanced through Preston, Manchester, Macclesfield, Leek, and Ashbourne, before deciding to turn back to Scotland on 6 December after having reached Derby (see Map 2). Internal dissensions and lack of English support led to the retreat, but arguably the Jacobites gave up just at the wrong moment, for London was in turmoil and the French were again massing troops at Dunkirk for an intended descent on southern England.²⁴ Even so, the rebellion was far from over. While Charles’s army had been in England, a bitter civil war raged in Scotland, which the return of the prince’s troops only intensified. Charles’s forces inflicted another defeat on the British army at Falkirk on 17 January 1746 (‘about 7000 of the best troops in the world’, according to one account, ‘fled like so many children before half that number of undisciplined militia’).²⁵ The Jacobites finally succumbed to overwhelming force—and disciplined firepower—at Culloden Moor, near Inverness, on 16 April.²⁶ Cumberland himself had led the army that eventually crushed the Jacobites, and in his absence, Saxe had been making further progress in the Austrian Netherlands. Brussels fell to the French on 20 February and Antwerp at the end of May. At Rocoux an Anglo-Dutch-German force was again defeated (11 October 1746). Although the British forces fighting in the Low Countries were reinforced after Culloden, the need for a strong garrison in the Highlands and continuing fears of French invasion—in 1746, and again in 1747—prevented the deployment of larger numbers of troops on the Continent; the most that was attempted was a diversionary raid in September 1746 on the Breton port of Lorient, the main base of the French East India Company, employing the ships and soldiers ²² William Salt Library, Congreve Papers, S. MS 47/18/9, Charles Whitefoord to William Congreve, 11 Aug. 1745. ²³ Gloucestershire RO, Newton of Bitton Papers, D 1844, draft of a letter by Susanna Newton, 7 Sept. 1745. ²⁴ For opinion in London see, e.g., North Yorkshire RO, Metcalfe of Nappa Papers, ZOA, Henry Wilmot to Thomas Metcalfe, 7 Dec. 1745. For a very detailed treatment of the Jacobite military campaign in England, see Frank McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England 1745: The Final Campaign (Edinburgh, 1998). See also, for broader coverage of the rebellion and its aftermath, W. A. Speck, The Butcher: The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression of the ’45 (Oxford, 1981); Jeremy Black, Culloden and the ’45 (Stroud, 1990); Christopher Duffy, The ’45: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Untold Story of the Jacobite Rising (London, 2003). ²⁵ William Muir (ed.), Selections from the Family Papers preserved at Caldwell (2 parts in 3 vols., The Maitland Club, lxxi, 1854), pt. II, vol. i, 77. ²⁶ Lieutenant William Oman of Ligonier’s Regiment wrote of Culloden that ‘its [sic] incredible to believe the perpetual Fire our Troops made for five Minutes, which caus’d the Rebels to retreate, on which we made our Pursuite but could hardly march for dead bodies, sure never such slater ever was made in so short a time’: London Metropolitan Archives, Westminster Sessions Papers, WJ/SP/1746/06/15, Oman to Nathaniel Price, 23 April 1746.

20


Falkirk Edinburgh Dalkeith

Glasgow

Berwick Peebles

Kelso Jedburgh

Hawick Moffat

Lockerbie Ecclefechan Longtown Newcastle

Carlisle Penrith

Kendal

Preston

Manchester Macclesfield

Derby Lichfield

Map 2. War at Home: The Jacobite Advance, Nov.–Dec. 1745


21

originally intended for an expedition to North America to build on the earlier success in capturing Louisbourg.²⁷ The only real success of the year for the allies was in Italy, where the Austrians and their Peidmontese allies defeated the French and Spanish at Piacenza in June, and the retreat of the defeated Bourbon forces exposed Provence to an Austrian and Piedmontese invasion. In 1747 the attack on Provence floundered, mainly because of an uprising in Genoa, which had been taken by the Austrians the previous September, but now tied down substantial Austrian and Piedmontese forces in a long and ultimately fruitless siege. In the Low Countries, the French were again victorious against an allied army under Cumberland’s command at Laufeldt (2 July 1747), the largest battle of the Austrian war. Laufeldt, like Fontenoy before it, gave a great boost to the French, who proceeded to storm the Dutch fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom (16 September). Allied hopes in the Low Countries rested increasingly on the arrival of Russian auxiliary troops, whom the Empress Elizabeth agreed to provide in return for a British subsidy. The march of the Russians to reach the Netherlands was painfully slow even by contemporary standards, and, as it transpired, they were not to play any active role in campaigning. The French were able to besiege and eventually take Maastricht (10 May 1748) before hostilities were concluded. If triumphs on land against the French proved elusive for the British army after Dettingen, the Royal Navy was able to inflict defeats on France’s smaller fleets. After the unpromising start made at the battle of Toulon in 1744, and the failure to intercept French reinforcements to the Jacobites and a French expedition to Canada in 1746,²⁸ the navy at last met the high hopes that the public had placed in it. In 1747 two actions off Cape Finisterre—the first in May, the second in October—had the effect of confining the French navy to its ports, and exposed French overseas trade and French colonies to increased pressure. Finally, in 1748, Rear Adm. Charles Knowles engaged and bettered a Spanish squadron off Havana and, with help from troops sent from Jamaica, briefly captured Port Louis in French Saint-Domingue. In Britain, there was much enthusiasm about this success, but the seizure of Port Louis was insufficient to bring about the surrender of the largest and most populous French colony in the Caribbean. The war in India ended in a similarly inconclusive manner. Initially, the French Compagnie des Indes tried to reach agreement with the British East India Company to avoid hostilities; the European presence was confined to small fortified trading bases, and the different European companies were more in the habit of cooperating with each other than fighting. But after nothing came of these overtures, the French went on the offensive. The British base of Fort St George at Madras fell rapidly to the French in 1746. Further south, however, the East India Company’s Fort St David, at Cuddalore, held out until relieved in July 1748 by a naval squadron under Boscawen. The admiral had been appointed commander-in-chief ²⁷ See Richard Harding, ‘The Expedition to Lorient, 1746’, Age of Sail, 1 (2002), 34–54. ²⁸ On the failure of this French expedition, see James Pritchard, Anatomy of a Naval Disaster: The 1746 French Naval Expedition to North America (Montreal, 1995).

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by land and sea in the East Indies, and his instructions envisaged the capture of the French stronghold of Pondicherry. However, Boscawen’s small force—about 3,500 men, 1,000 of whom were sailors from his ships—was unable to make any headway against the well-defended French positions, and the siege was abandoned after his army was severely depleted by disease: as a naval officer wrote home to his father, it was ‘A Siege wch. few Generals wd. have undertaken had They known any Thing of the Place’.²⁹

WAR CONTINUES OUTSIDE EUROPE The formal signing of peace at Aix-la-Chapelle brought hostilities to a close in Europe; however, fighting between Britain and France resumed very quickly in extra-European areas of contact and rivalry. In India, the French governorgeneral, Joseph Dupleix, had been working assiduously to build up alliances with a series of native rulers, and the British East India Company, anxious to counter increasing French influence, and a clear threat to its own position, was drawn into the same game of sponsoring local allies. Robert Clive led Company forces in support of Muhammad Ali, one of the rival claimants to the Carnatic, whose recently installed nawab, Chanda Sahib, was a French client. In 1751 Clive with a tiny force only 500 strong captured Arcot to divert Chanda Sahib from his siege of Muhammad Ali’s army at Trichinopoly. Clive then held Arcot against a substantial investing army, which he went on to defeat at Arni once the siege had been lifted. The following year, Chanda Sahib, together with a French contingent assisting him, was compelled to surrender to Company forces led by Stringer Lawrence, and Lawrence was able to inflict a defeat on the French themselves at Bahur, near Pondicherry. Fighting continued in 1753 and 1754, when Dupleix was recalled to France. His carefully constructed system of alliances, which relied upon the appearance of French dominance, had been shattered. In the same year, the first British regular troops, in the form of an infantry regiment and an artillery contingent, set sail from Ireland to assist the East India Company. In North America, continuing Anglo-French conflict also gave the lie to any claims that Britain and France were at peace between 1748 and 1756. In the closing stages of the War of the Austrian Succession, the Royal Navy had been able to blockade the St Lawrence estuary, effectively choking Canada’s transatlantic trade. As the supply of European goods reaching the French outposts began to dry up, the attractiveness of exchanging furs with the French diminished for the Native Americans. The very basis of French power in the region was endangered, as British fur traders rushed in to seize new opportunities. This undermining of French relations with the Amerindians was to prove an important element in the manoeuvring ²⁹ Wiltshire RO, Lovell of Cole Park Papers, 161/130, Capt. John Willes to Edward Willes, 18 Oct. 1748.


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that led to the renewal of open warfare between the French Canadians and the British Americans. In 1748 the British Crown granted the Ohio Company a vast tract of land in the Ohio Valley. As local tribes began to trade more extensively with the British colonists, the French sought to reassert their control. In 1749 a French expedition entered the Ohio Valley and started to leave metal plates across the country as a means of clarifying Louis XV’s claim to sovereignty. In 1752 Indians allied to the French attacked and destroyed a British trading post at Pickawillany, symbolically killing the chief of a tribe that had started to exchange goods with the British colonists. The following year, the French began to construct a number of forts in the Valley. The British Cabinet responded by giving the governor of Virginia permission to act against these French incursions. In April 1754, however, the French compelled the surrender of the tiny garrison of the just-completed Fort Prince George, at the confluence of the Monongahela and Ohio rivers. The colonial troops were allowed to return home unmolested, and the French demolished the post and then began to replace it with a much more substantial and wellengineered structure, which they named Fort Duquesne. So far, there had been no direct clash between the British colonists and the French. The spark came in May when a Virginian expedition led by George Washington surprised and killed or captured a smaller French Canadian force. Washington himself, however, was compelled to surrender to a superior enemy in July at his unfinished supply base. During that summer, French-sponsored Indian attacks occurred along the frontiers of New York and New England. No one could be in any doubt that a new war had begun in North America, even though Britain and France were technically at peace. Colonial defeats, and the reluctance of the different colonies to work together—exemplified by the failure of the provincial assemblies to endorse the Albany Plan of Union, which would have coordinated the war effort in North America—convinced the British Government that regular troops would have to be sent to clear out the French from the Ohio Valley. Two regiments under Maj.-Gen. Edward Braddock arrived in Virginia with instructions to attack Fort Duquesne. The plans for 1755 also envisioned an advance by colonial troops in New York, north up the Lake Champlain corridor towards the Canadian heartland of the St Lawrence Valley, and the destruction by a mixed force of colonial and regular soldiers of the recently constructed French bases near Nova Scotia. Only the last of these three thrusts achieved its objective fully. Forts Beauséjour and Gaspereau were captured in June, and the Francophone Acadians of Nova Scotia were expelled.³⁰ The advance northwards in New York was less successful. The colonial forces, under the command of William Johnson, were forced to retreat to their fortified camp on the shores of Lake George. But they were at least ³⁰ For a recent account, see Geoffrey Plank, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the Peoples of Acadia (Philadelphia, 2001), ch. 7.

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able to inflict a defeat on their over-confident French pursuers, and even captured the commander-in-chief of the French forces, Baron de Dieskau, who had recently arrived in Canada with regular troops from Europe. Braddock’s march, meanwhile, ended in disaster. After having toiled through the wilderness for weeks, clearing trees and building a road to facilitate their advance, the regulars and provincials of his army reached within eight miles of Fort Duquesne in early July. Here, however, they were ambushed by French Canadians and Amerindians, who ruthlessly exploited the inexperience of the British troops in woodlands warfare. Braddock’s soldiers deployed in European order and withstood a murderous fire from largely unseen enemies, before finally breaking and running. Braddock himself was killed.³¹ This crushing defeat near the banks of the Monongahela caused consternation on the frontiers of the middle colonies in much the same way that General Cope’s defeat at Prestonpans had provoked panic in northern England ten years earlier.

THE SEVEN YEARS WAR—THE FIRST PHASE The Duke of Newcastle had hoped that the clash of arms in North America would not bring about a general war: he seems to have believed that a show of force would deter the French from their schemes in the Ohio Valley and Nova Scotia, and that Britain and France could avoid hostilities in Europe.³² But Newcastle took the precaution of entering into subsidy treaties with various German princes and with Russia to provide troops in the event of a war. In January 1756, these agreements were followed up by a defensive treaty with Prussia, designed principally to protect Hanover from French aggression. The French response to increasing tension in North America was to conclude that threatening to invade England itself would be the best way of persuading the British to back off. In 1755 a French landing was widely feared. That October Lt. Col. James Wolfe wrote of the movement of the army ‘towards the Coast of Kent, to oppose the French’.³³ The next year, invasion alarms were, if anything, still more intense. French troops massed across the Channel, and Newcastle was obliged to bring over German soldiers to help repel an expected descent. The French decided also to put pressure on the British in the Mediterranean. The fleet at Toulon began to prepare for offensive operations. There was uncertainty in London about what the French intended, but in March 1756 Newcastle ordered ten warships to Gibraltar under Adm. John Byng. The objective of the Toulon fleet was the British island base of Minorca. ³¹ See P. E. Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela (Pittsburgh, 1977); and M. C. Ward, ‘ “The European Method of Warring Is Not Practiced Here”: The Failure of British Military Policy in the Ohio Valley, 1755–1759’, War in History, 4 (1997), 247–63. ³² For Newcastle’s thinking, see T. R. Clayton, ‘The Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Halifax, and the American Origins of the Seven Years’ War’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), 571–603. ³³ West Sussex RO, Goodwood MSS, 233/3/5.


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French troops were landed in April and began a siege of the stronghold of Fort St Philip. On 17 May, the British Government finally gave up the pretence that there was still peace in Europe, and formally declared war on the French. Three days later, Byng engaged with the French fleet, but failed to make much impact. With many of his ships damaged, he withdrew to Gibraltar to refit. A month later, at the end of June 1756, after an heroic resistance, the garrison of Fort St Philip was obliged to surrender. The war in Europe had thus started disastrously for the British. Worse still for Newcastle, the French in May concluded an agreement with Austria, their traditional enemy and Britain’s traditional ally. At the end of August, Frederick the Great invaded Saxony and began a new war with the Habsburgs. On 1 October he narrowly defeated the Austrians at Lobositz in Bohemia. The AngloFrench conflict had become part of a much wider European struggle, at the heart of which lay a renewed Austro-Prussian contest. In North America, meanwhile, the war was going no better. After Braddock’s death, command of the British and colonial troops passed to Gov. William Shirley of Massachusetts, the man who had masterminded the attack on Louisbourg in the previous Anglo-French conflict. Before very long, however, he was replaced by Lord Loudoun, a regular officer who was given sweeping powers, at least in theory, to coordinate the war effort in the colonies. Loudoun busied himself making preparations at Albany, in New York, but in 1756 it was the new French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, who took to the offensive. In August, Montcalm’s troops and native allies captured the British garrison at Fort Oswego on the shore of Lake Ontario. A British relieving force under Maj.-Gen. Daniel Webb, on hearing the news of the surrender, retreated precipitously to German Flats in the Mohawk Valley. The next year continued the trend of defeat and disappointment for British arms. In Europe, the Duke of Cumberland had been dispatched to Germany to head the Hanoverian army, but he had gone without any British troops to support him. In July, Cumberland was defeated by the French at Hastenbeck, near Hameln. In early September, his army was trapped and Cumberland agreed to a sign a convention at Kloster-Zeven, which enabled the French to occupy nearly all of Hanover. Frederick of Prussia was now under direct threat from the French, as well as the Austrians, the Russians, and the Swedes. The Prussians had triumphed again over the Austrians at Prague in May, but Frederick suffered his first defeat on the battlefield at Kolin in June, when he was bettered by the Austrian Field Marshal Leopold von Daun. In the autumn, a British raid on Rochefort, on the French Atlantic coast, was intended to take the pressure off Frederick, but achieved very little. It was Frederick himself who changed allied fortunes in Europe, with his dramatic victories over the French and their German allies at Rossbach in Saxony in November, and then over the Austrians at Leuthen in Silesia the following month. But these Prussian successes, although celebrated enthusiastically in Britain and Ireland, seemed only to underscore the failures of the British and Hanoverians.

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The situation in India was somewhat brighter. In December 1756 a British military and naval force had re-captured Fort William, the East India Company’s base in Calcutta, which had been taken by Siraj-ud-duala, the nawab of Bengal, when the war formally began in Europe. Siraj decided to agree peace terms in February 1757, and Clive moved rapidly to extinguish the French presence in Bengal by attacking their trading post and fort at Chandernagore. Again, the fire from the Royal Navy squadron under Adm. Charles Watson was vital in inducing the surrender of the French on 23 March. Clive remained convinced that Siraj-ud-duala was working with the French, and conspired to overthrow him. Advancing towards the nawab’s capital of Murishidabad, Clive was confronted by Siraj’s enormous army at Plassey on 23 June. Clive’s victory was complete, though it owed as much to plotting as to military skill, for a significant part of Siraj’s 50,000 troops refused to engage after Clive took the precaution of agreeing that their commander, Mir Jafar, should become the new nawab on Siraj’s defeat. With their own client in place as ruler of Bengal, the British East India Company’s position was immeasurably strengthened. Triumphs in India, however, took a long time to be known in Britain and Ireland: bad news from North America reached home much more quickly. Loudoun, his regular troops reinforced from Ireland, planned a great expedition to take Louisbourg. He assembled an army in Nova Scotia for this purpose, only for poor weather and local French naval strength to prevent any progress. It was the French who again seized the initiative. In August, Montcalm, at the head of an army comprising his own regulars, French Canadians, and a large number of Amerindians, many from far to the west, captured Fort William Henry at the head of Lake George in New York. The massacre of some of the garrison by Montcalm’s native auxiliaries—a repeat, on a more extensive scale, of what had happened after the surrender of Oswego the year before—only added to the alarm along the exposed frontier.³⁴

THE SEVEN YEARS WAR—THE SECOND PHASE In 1758 the tide turned, in North America and elsewhere. The overwhelming manpower strength of the British colonies was harnessed effectively for the first time. Loudon had clashed with the colonists, whom he accused of selfishness and disunity. His more junior colleagues amongst the regulars generally shared his negative view of the Americans. However, now William Pitt, the British minister above all others responsible for the running of the war, agreed to reimburse the colonial assemblies for most of their expenses, and to allow provincial troops to be raised on terms that suited the colonists. The Americans responded by putting more men into the field than ever before. Some 23,000 were provided for the 1758 campaign. ³⁴ See I. K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the ‘Massacre’ (Oxford, 1990).


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These provincial troops, combined with a substantial commitment of British regulars under James Abercromby, Loudoun’s replacement as commander-in-chief, made it possible to attack New France on many fronts, which made its fall almost inevitable—so long as peace was not agreed before the noose could be tightened. The 1758 campaign in North America was not uniformly successful for the British and Americans. In July a hasty and ill-judged assault on French defences near Fort Carillon on Lake George was a costly disaster. Abercromby, who had ordered the attack without even seeing for himself the strength of the French positions, was soon after relieved of command. His successor was Jeffery Amherst, who led the forces that captured Louisbourg, the great French stronghold on Cape Breton, widely regarded as the key to Canada. The garrison of 3,000 troops and the five warships in the harbour were a loss that the French could ill afford. Worse still, from their point of view, the British now had unimpeded access to the St Lawrence Valley, the gateway to the heartland of New France. To the west, meanwhile, Brig. John Forbes, at the head of an army largely made up of American provincials, eventually in November took Fort Duquesne—Braddock’s objective three years earlier. Four months before Forbes’s troops reached their destination, Lt. Col. John Bradstreet, also commanding a predominantly American force, captured Fort Frontenac, a pivotal post for French communications between the St Lawrence Valley and the interior fur trade. In Europe, there were no successes comparable to those in North America. Frederick the Great fought an indecisive action with the Russians at Zorndorf in Prussia itself in August 1758, and was defeated by the Austrians at Hochkirch in Saxony that October. The British continued to pursue an essentially maritime strategy by raiding St Malo in June and September, and Cherbourg in August, but in the same month that Cherbourg was attacked, a British force, some 8,000 strong, disembarked at Emden to support the British-paid German army under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick that was fighting the French in Westphalia.³⁵ Ferdinand’s task was to protect the Prussian western flank, but Pitt’s decision to abandon his long-standing opposition to a continental commitment seems to have been the result of Ferdinand’s success in compelling the French first to retreat across the Ems and then his defeat of an army under the Prince de Condé at Krefeld, near Düsseldorf, in June 1758. It might also have owed something to the British public’s support for Frederick the Great, especially after his great victories at Rossbach and Leuthen.³⁶ Across the other side of the world, the war in India started badly, but ended up moving in favour of the British. In the spring, a French expeditionary force under the Comte de Lally arrived at Pondicherry. Lally’s troops proceeded to capture Fort St David in June, but the defenders of Fort St George at Madras, which had fallen so quickly in the previous war, now provided a more robust resistance. ³⁵ See Sir Reginald Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years War (Oxford, 1966), which remains the standard account. ³⁶ See Ch. 6.

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The French were obliged to engage in a long and ultimately fruitless siege, which tied up much of their manpower and effectively allowed the initiative to slip away from them. In West Africa, meanwhile, the war moved decisively to the advantage of the British in 1758. The European colonial powers had established a number of fortified trading bases in this region, mainly to secure supplies of slaves to be used in the plantations in the Americas. In May Fort St Louis de Sénégal was captured with some ease by a British naval force. Gorée, the other major French slave-trading station, fell in December. If 1758 marked the turning point in the war from a British point of view, 1759 was the annus mirabilis, the year of victories.³⁷ Frederick the Great continued to be under enormous pressure from the coalition of enemies ranged against him, and in August the Prussians were heavily defeated by the Russians at Kunersdorf near the River Oder. But for British arms, the year was remarkably successful. In India, Lally raised the siege of Fort St George in February. In the Northern Circars, a territorial bridge between the British possessions in Bengal and the south, French forces were defeated at Musilipatam in April. More seriously, in the autumn Lally’s naval support was withdrawn, leaving him to fend for himself. The Dutch East India Company became anxious about the clear drift towards British dominance, and the Company’s authorities in Batavia decided to send an expeditionary force to India to assert its rights and redress the balance. This was a local decision, reached without consulting Company officials in Amsterdam, or the Dutch Government, even though it obviously risked compromising Dutch neutrality in the wider war. The Dutch force, comprising about 350 European troops and 500 Malay auxiliaries, landed at the Dutch base at Nagapatam in August, and then sailed north to Bengal. The Dutch intention, apparently, was to negotiate from a position of strength rather than fight, but Clive decided to prevent the Dutch force threatening the British factories. In November, the Dutch ships were attacked by East India Company vessels and the Dutch troops were routed at Bedara, near Chandernagore.³⁸ The British contingent in Ferdinand of Brunswick’s army played a notable part in the victory over the French at Minden on 1 August 1759, a triumph celebrated extensively in Britain and Ireland, though Lord George Sackville, the commander of the British cavalry, was blamed for failing to follow up the success of the infantry, and subsequently court-martialed for cowardice.³⁹ In order to bring the war to a rapid conclusion, and save what remained of their overseas empire, the French planned a full-scale invasion of Britain, with about 100,000 men earmarked for coordinated landings in England and Scotland. However, these plans were undermined by the successful application of British naval power. The ³⁷ See the song, or poem, on ‘the year of fifty Nine’, in NLI, MS 3240, Notebook of Ensign Gilbert King, 1761–8. ³⁸ P. J. Marshall, ‘The Place of the Seven Years War (1756–63) in the Changing Balance between Britain and the Netherlands in Asia’, Tijdschrift voor Overdruk Zeegeschiedenis, 20 (2001), esp. 18–19. ³⁹ See Piers Mackesy, The Coward of Minden: The Affair of Lord George Sackville (London, 1979) for a thorough account of this episode.


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intended embarkation port of Le Havre was bombarded by Adm. George Rodney in July, and then blockaded. In August, Boscawen defeated the French Toulon fleet off the Portuguese coast near Lagos, as it sailed north to help cover the projected landings. Finally, in November, Admiral Hawke attacked the Brest fleet at Quiberon Bay, the new concentration point for the invasion forces. So complete were the victories at Lagos and Quiberon Bay that the French navy was largely confined to port for the rest of the war. In the West Indies, the British were less successful, but made some progress. In January 1759 an attempt was made to capture Martinique, the base from which French privateers had been inflicting significant losses on British and colonial shipping in the Caribbean. But the 6,000 British troops landed on the island met fierce and unexpected resistance from the local militia, and a day later the British withdrew. They sailed to Guadeloupe, which it was hoped would succumb more readily. Guadeloupe did eventually fall, though not until 1 May. Thereafter, further operations in the West Indies had to await the successful completion of the war in North America, where the main British effort was made. Amherst deployed his forces in the 1759 campaign with the intention of delivering the coup de grâce to New France. Fort Niagara, commanding the route between Lake Ontario and the Lake Erie, was captured in July. Amherst began a slow but methodical advance up the Lake Champlain corridor, north towards Montreal, with the French conducting an orderly withdrawal ahead of him. The main thrust, however, came down the St Lawrence, where the Royal Navy was able to convey 8,600 regulars under James Wolfe to take Quebec. Montcalm fended off Wolfe’s initial attack on his entrenchments at Beauport at the end of July. An increasingly frustrated Wolfe, fearful that he would not achieve his objective before the autumn brought operations to a close, resorted to a ruthless policy of destruction of the farms and settlements near the city, in the hope of provoking the French into a sortie. However, it was not until mid-September that the French commander made the mistake of leaving the city and its perimeter defences to attack Wolfe’s army as it deployed on the Heights of Abraham to the west. The French were defeated, and both Montcalm and Wolfe were killed. The city surrendered shortly afterwards.⁴⁰ The fall of Quebec was a crippling blow to New France, but the war in North America was not quite over. Montreal remained in French hands, and the governor-general, the Canadian-born Marquis de Vaudreuil, and the new French commander, the Chevalier de Levis, continued to offer determined resistance. Levis even attempted to retake Quebec in the spring of 1760. His troops defeated a British force under Brig. Gen. James Murray that, repeating Montcalm’s mistake, left the city to fight on the Plains of Abraham. In Britain news of Murray’s failure produced the gloomy conclusion that ‘the Next Ship will bring an acct. that we have lost Quebec’.⁴¹ But Levis was ill-equipped for a prolonged siege, ⁴⁰ See C. P. Stacey, Quebec 1759: The Siege and the Battle (Toronto, 1959). ⁴¹ Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Collection, D 3155, C 2396.

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and Murray’s garrison held out until it was relieved. In the summer another massive assault on New France began. Advancing up the St Lawrence from Quebec, up Lake Champlain, and from Lake Ontario, British and colonial troops converged on Montreal, which surrendered on 8 September. This marked the effective end of the French military presence in North America. India was also the scene of a significant British triumph, for in January 1760 Lally was beaten at Wandewash by a numerically superior army commanded by Eyre Coote. This action proved to be the decisive battle of the Seven Years War in the subcontinent, for thereafter the French posts in the Carnatic rapidly surrendered. Pondicherry itself, the formidable headquarters of the Compagnie des Indes, was laid under siege from August. Desperately short of food, and with no realistic prospect of relief, the garrison capitulated on 15 January 1761. The war in Europe continued to go well, too. In February 1760, François Thurot landed with a tiny French force in the north of Ireland and occupied Carrickfergus. Thurot’s arrival caused a ripple of alarm throughout Ireland, but given the limited number of troops at his disposal, he had no opportunity to do anything significant; as he had descended on a predominantly Protestant area, there was not even much chance of a local insurrection. When he re-embarked shortly afterwards, his squadron was intercepted and forced to surrender after an engagement off the Isle of Man in which Thurot himself was killed. Frederick, meanwhile, triumphed in August over the Austrians at Liegnitz in Silesia and in November at Torgau in Saxony. In western Germany, the Marquis of Granby, the new British commander, helped to secure allied success at Warburg on 31 July, but the French won a victory at Kloster Kamp, on the lower Rhine, in October. That month George II died, and was succeeded by his grandson, who was keen to end British involvement in the continental aspect of the war as speedily as possible. Nevertheless, by the end of the year the British contingent in Germany had been substantially reinforced to around 22,000 men. The fall of New France meant that British military resources could be reallocated to the Caribbean. Early in July 1761, troops and ships sent from New York took Dominica, and then, reinforced by more soldiers from North America, a major assault was launched on Martinique in January 1762. The island surrendered the next month, and St Lucia, Grenada, and St Vincent rapidly followed suit. Nearer home, in April 1761 a British force landed on Belle Isle, off the coast of Brittany. The island was fully occupied by early June. The aim, as in previous coastal attacks on France, was partly to divert French forces from Germany, but this time, in distinction from earlier raids, the British stayed. Belle Isle was held until the end of the war and was used to secure the return of Minorca in the peace settlement. In western Germany, the allied army was defeated by the French near Grünberg on 21 March, but Ferdinand’s forces were again triumphant, holding off a French attack at Vellinghausen on 15–16 July 1761. Prussia, however, was in a desperate state, and appeared close to collapse. It seemed as if only a miracle would save Frederick from total defeat and the partition of his territories. That miracle came in January 1762, when Elizabeth of


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Russia died. Her successor, Peter III, was warmly disposed towards Frederick, and not only concluded a peace with Prussia in May, but made part of his forces available to his new ally. This remarkable turn-around left the Austrians exposed. Frederick defeated them at Burkersdorf in July and went on to take the key Silesian fortress of Schweidnitz in October. Later that month, another Prussian army defeated the Reichsarmee, a force made up of contingents from various German states, at Frieberg in Saxony. In May 1762, in order to strengthen their hands in the peace negotiations, the French sent a small force to capture St John’s, Newfoundland. The weak British garrison was overwhelmed in June, but French success was short-lived. In September, British regulars and American provincials under the command of Amherst’s brother retook the island with some ease.⁴² Back in Germany, Ferdinand of Brunswick’s operations continued to absorb manpower and money, but showed no signs of ending in a decisive victory. The allies were successful at Gravenstein and Wilhelmstahl in June, but the French conducted an able defence of Kassel, which only fell after a long siege at the beginning of November, just as the preliminary articles of peace were being agreed. Portugal was threatened with invasion when the Spanish, somewhat quixotically, and too late to offer substantial help to the French, entered the war in January. The British responded by sending an expeditionary force to assist the Portuguese, drawn partly from troops in the garrison on Belle Isle. The failure of the demoralized and blockaded French navy to offer any resistance to the transit of soldiers from Belle Isle to Portugal was a sure sign of its almost total impotence. Operations in Portugal itself were limited by poor communications and lack of supplies, but a British force did succeed in storming an entrenched Spanish camp at Villa Velha on 5 October. The outbreak of war against Spain offered opportunities for further conquests for the British both in the Caribbean and in Asia. Havana, the great stronghold on Cuba, was attacked by 12,000 troops and twenty-two ships-of-the-line in June 1762. The key to the Spanish defences, the formidable fortress of El Moro, was finally taken by storm on 30 July. The Spanish governor surrendered the city on 13 August.⁴³ Havana was returned to Spain at the peace, but its capture symbolized the dramatic shift in the balance of power, both in the Caribbean and beyond. In the view of Sgt. Richard Humphreys, one of the soldiers involved in the expedition, the Spanish had ‘not suffered such a Sensible and humiliating loss since the defeat of their celebrated Armada’.⁴⁴ Spain’s territories in the Pacific were thought to be equally ripe for the picking. An expedition to attack the Philippines was ⁴² See John Clarence Webster (ed.), The Recapture of St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1762 as Described in the Journal of Lieut.-Colonel William Amherst, Commander of the British Expeditionary Force (n.p., 1928). ⁴³ See David Syrett, The Siege and Capture of Havana (London, 1970). ⁴⁴ BL, Blenchynden Papers, Add. MS 45,662, fo. 64. The significance of the triumph was perhaps clearer still at the moment of nemesis at the end of the next war: see, e.g., NLS, Stuart Stevenson Papers, MS 8327, fo. 93, in which the storming of El Moro is considered the acme of achievement in the Seven Years War.

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accordingly launched from Madras. The commander, Col. William Draper, set sail with a battalion of regular troops, and some sepoys and European soldiers in the East India Company’s service, escorted by eight ships-of-the-line. Draper’s little army—no more than 2,700 strong, including sailors from the ships sent ashore to help—landed at the end of September 1762 and, despite determined resistance from Filipino irregulars, captured Manila on 6 October. Draper’s victory brought no immediate advantage. The attackers were unable to make further progress in the face of continued local opposition, and the city was returned at the peace finally concluded in February 1763.⁴⁵ None the less, Manila’s seizure was of the utmost importance in psychological terms. As with the capture of Havana, it symbolized the greatly expanded reach of British military power and the seeming inability of the Bourbons to resist. The Peace of Paris ended not simply the Seven Years War, but also nearly twenty-five years of more-or-less continuous conflict between Britain and the Bourbon powers, and France in particular. The peace of 1763 also confirmed the dominance that the British had acquired in the closing stages of this long struggle. While the war in Germany had ebbed and flowed, only to end in deadlock, British arms had been remarkably successful elsewhere. The terms of the treaty did not fully reflect these triumphs, for Belle Isle, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Lucia, and Gorée were returned to France, and French fishing rights in the waters off Newfoundland were confirmed, while Spain received back Havana and Manila. However, the French were obliged to withdraw all their forces from Germany, and the British retained the West Indian islands of St Vincent, Dominica, Tobago, Grenada, and the Grenadines. In North America, Canada became a British colony, the inland wilderness in the Ohio Valley was given to the British Crown, and Florida was ceded by Spain. British dominion now stretched from Hudson’s Bay in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, and from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Mississippi River in the west. In Africa a new British territory was established as Senegambia, from which much of the slave trade could be controlled. In India, the French and Dutch were able to keep their trading posts, but the strong position established by the British East India Company was doubted by no one. This became clearer still in 1765, when the Mughal emperor granted the Company the right to collect revenues and administer justice in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. George III was thus ruler of an empire appreciably bigger and more diverse than the scattered overseas possessions that his grandfather had presided over at the time of the outbreak of the war with Spain in 1739. ⁴⁵ See Nicholas Tracy, Manila Ransomed: The British Assault on Manila in the Seven Years’ War (Exeter, 1995).

2 War and the State The nature and strength of the eighteenth-century British state have been subjects of considerable scholarly debate. Long ago, Otto Hintze, the pioneer of the theory of state formation, characterized the English historical experience as very different from that of continental Europe, and Germany in particular. He suggested that England developed a distinctive parliamentary system and amateur administration at the local level, and avoided the absolutism, strong central bureaucracy, and large standing armies that were to be found in many European polities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹ The work of John Brewer has seriously challenged Hintze’s long-accepted model. Although the distinctive position of Parliament was clearly important, and England and Britain did avoid continentalstyle absolutism—despite the obvious admiration of the later Stuart monarchs for Louis XIV—Hintze’s belief that England managed without a bureaucracy and a significant standing army now seems highly questionable. Brewer, building on Peter Dickson’s detailed study of the financial revolution,² argued that a ‘fiscalmilitary state’ developed in England/Britain between the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 and the end of the American war in 1783. A steadily expanding central bureaucracy, growing armed forces, and substantial levels of taxation and borrowing made possible by the emergence of Parliament as an entrenched institution formed the vital ingredients of this ‘fiscal-military state’. War-making efficiency, in Brewer’s view, was the vital cause of Britain’s rise from a marginal and secondrank player under the later Stuart monarchs to undisputed great power status at the beginning of the reign of George III.³ Brewer’s thesis has been widely welcomed as a major contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century Britain; within a few years of the publication of his work, a collection of essays dedicated to exploring the implications of his arguments for Britain and its empire appeared.⁴ ¹ See Thomas Ertman, ‘Explaining Variation in Early Modern State Structure: The Cases of England and the German Territorial States’, in John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (eds.), Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany (Oxford, 1999), 24–5. See also Felix Gilbert (ed.), The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York, 1975). ² P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study of the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967). ³ John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London, 1989). ⁴ Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994).

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Yet, almost simultaneously, a somewhat different impression was emerging from the studies of other historians—an impression that at least partly vindicated Hintze’s model. Paul Langford’s picture of eighteenth-century England suggested that power was widely dispersed, and that in the localities a broadly based propertied class exercised considerable quasi-independent authority.⁵ There was nothing that inherently contradicted Brewer’s thesis in Langford’s work, since their focus was not the same; however, J. E. Cookson has taken Langford’s localist perspective further, and explicitly argued that the British state, far from being strong, was weak—even in the key area of national defence. His detailed study of the mobilization of manpower in the long wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France highlights the dependence of the state on local agencies that were remote from, and often antagonistic to, central control.⁶ What does the British and Irish experience of war between 1739 and 1763 tell us about this historiographical debate? A case can certainly be made for the weakness of the British state; but a case can also be made—probably a more persuasive case—for its strength. The British state, moreover, seems to have increased in efficiency and effectiveness over the period considered here. Yet it remains undeniable that the state needed the assistance of private and local interests. Andrew Mackillop, in a study of the Highlands between 1746 and 1815 that broadly endorses Brewer’s thesis, tackles this issue by arguing that the central state established a symbiotic relationship with local elites, whose authority in the Highlands was reinforced, while at the same time the state effectively conscripted them as its agents. He warns that ‘care must be taken when artificially dividing “the state” and local interests’.⁷ This approach has much to commend it, but a different way of looking at the relationship between the state and local and private interests is as a partnership. The balance of power within that partnership varied according to circumstances, but partnership was the key to Britain’s ultimate success in mobilizing such impressive quantities of manpower, material, and money.

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH STATE Before we explore these different arguments further, we need to be clear about definitions. The state is usually used as an abstract term for a political community resident within a defined territorial area, and more concretely to denote that community’s embodiment in central or national governmental institutions. For our present purposes, what primarily interests us is the machinery of government. The King’s servants constituted the main part of this machinery. Both George II and George III were also, of course, rulers of Hanover; but although there was much ⁵ Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991). ⁶ J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997). ⁷ Andrew Mackillop, ‘The Political Culture of the Scottish Highlands from Culloden to Waterloo’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), 531.

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debate about the relationship between Britain and Hanover, and much criticism of George II’s Hanoverian orientation,⁸ the government of Hanover and the government of Britain were entirely separate entities, neither of which had any jurisdiction within the territory of the other. George II and George III ruled Hanover by virtue of their title as electors, not as kings of Great Britain. By the King’s servants, then, we mean ministers, officers in government departments, members of the regular armed forces—anyone in the pay of the Crown, whether in Britain, or in Ireland, or in the colonies. There is a case for saying that all governmental structures—local as well as national or imperial—are part of the state apparatus.⁹ There were certainly local functionaries appointed by central government, who acted as local agents of central direction. However, Justices of the Peace, the most important local officers, were in practice members of the local elite, who acquired their posts on the basis of their local reputation. They were not paid servants of the Crown, but local amateur administrators.¹⁰ They were meant to implement laws passed by Parliament, but how they chose to do that was very much their own affair.¹¹ Sometimes they cooperated fully, as during the Austrian war when Westminster magistrates met with the commissioners appointed to execute legislation to promote army recruitment and discussed a schedule of further meetings in the different parishes.¹² On other occasions, however, local justices were far from cooperative. A good and very relevant example of this would be the way in which magistrates frequently resisted the claims of naval press-gangs acting under the authority of the Privy Council: when Lt. James Ryder arrived in Hull in June 1758, he found that the mayor refused to assist him in pressing for sailors.¹³ If we accept that, at least for the present purposes, the state will be seen as central and national in its institutional form, there are still difficulties to address. Where do the Parliaments of Britain and Ireland and the assemblies of the colonies fit into the picture? Were they part of the state apparatus, or should we see them as checks on the power of the state? Consider first the British Parliament. While there were some MPs who were also government office holders, and others who were in receipt of pensions, the majority of MPs had no direct financial relationship with government. Large numbers of them, furthermore, thought of ⁸ See Chs. 6 and 8. ⁹ See, e.g., Joan R. Kent, ‘The Centre and the Localities: State Formation and Parish Government in England, circa 1640–1740’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 363–404; ‘Introduction’, in Brewer and Hellmuth (eds.), Rethinking Leviathan, 19–20; Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 1. ¹⁰ Hence the importance of the unofficial guide to their duties, compiled by an experienced practitioner, Richard Burn’s The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer (2 vols., London, 1755), which ran through numerous editions. ¹¹ For the Irish situation, see Toby Barnard, The Kingdom of Ireland 1641–1760 (London, 2004), esp. 119. ¹² London Metropolitan Archives, Westminster Sessions Papers, WJ/SP/1745/04/01. ¹³ HMC, Du Cane MSS (London, 1905), 224. See also, for resistance to pressing generally, Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), ch. 3, and Ch. 6 in this book.

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themselves primarily as tribunes for their localities; most were elected on the basis of their local standing rather than on national political platforms. As Lewis Namier wrote many years ago, ‘The Commons were . . . originally a quasi-federation of shires and boroughs; the knights of the shire in the eighteenth century were the consuls of the county republics’.¹⁴ The legislature comprised representatives of different communities, many of whom were very locally oriented and displayed little or no interest in national issues. An indication of the importance of local concerns is the volume of legislation that dealt specifically with local and personal matters, rather than national ones: between 1714 and 1760 nearly three-quarters of all of the acts of the British Parliament came in this category.¹⁵ Paul Langford has gone so far as to argue that the legislature ‘resembled nothing so much as a gigantic rubber stamp, confirming local and private enterprise, but rarely undertaking initiatives of its own’.¹⁶ But it was equally true that Parliament as a body, whatever the dispositions and predilections of individual MPs, represented the nation as a whole, and as a national institution working with government to produce laws and raise taxes it can be seen as part of the fabric of the British state. For much of the seventeenth century, the English legislature had acted as a check on executive authority rather than as part of government. However, as a result of the Revolution of 1688–9 and the long wars with Louis XIV, the Westminster Parliament was transformed from an occasional event and sometimes irritating thorn in the side of kings into an entrenched institution and a vital adjunct to government. Although in the eighteenth century the House of Commons was still thought to retain an important checking and balancing function,¹⁷ and was particularly keen to scrutinize government expenditure,¹⁸ its greater law-making and tax-raising roles made it more an instrument of the state than a focus for opposition to state power.¹⁹ The Westminster Parliament met every year from 1689, and soon flexed its muscles. In 1707 it absorbed the Edinburgh Parliament and became the British Parliament; in 1720 it claimed the right to legislate for Ireland; in 1766 it was to assert its right to do the same for the colonies, though in practice it had already been doing so for generations.²⁰ ¹⁴ Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (2nd edn., London, 1957), 5. ¹⁵ Julian Hoppit, ‘Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation, 1660–1800’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 117 (table 1). ¹⁶ Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 166. ¹⁷ See, e.g., [Anon.,] An Essay on Civil Government. In Two Parts: Part I. An Enquiry into the Ends of Government, and the Means of Attaining them. Part II. On the Government and Commerce of England; with Reflections on Liberty, and the Method of Preserving the Present Constitution (London, 1743), 256; Richard Meadowcourt, The Duty of Considering Our Ways, Explained. In a Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of Worcester, April 11, 1744. Being the Day Appointed for a General Fast (London, 1744), 13; Thomas Pownall, Principles of Polity, being the Grounds and Reasons of Civil Empire (London, 1752), 9. ¹⁸ See Julian Hoppit, ‘Checking the Leviathan, 1688–1832’, in Patrick O’Brien and Donald Winch (eds.), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience 1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002), 267–94. ¹⁹ For the increasing volume of legislation passed by the British Parliament after 1689, see Hoppit, ‘Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation’. ²⁰ See H. T. Dickinson, ‘Britain’s Imperial Sovereignty: The Ideological Case against the American Colonists’, in Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the American Revolution (London, 1998), 64–96.

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This imperial role clearly distinguished the British Parliament from the other legislatures of the empire, which we can characterize both as local bodies and as foci of resistance to the power of the central British state. True, from 1732 the Irish Parliament met in an imposing new building meant to demonstrate its importance,²¹ and in 1755 the speaker of the Irish Commons sent copies of the printed journals of his House to the British speaker, who ‘in respectfull return’ provided a set of the journals of the British Commons.²² But we should not mistake architectural pretensions and polite exchanges for equivalence between the two legislatures. In reality, the Irish Parliament was a local institution, with severely limited powers, rather than part of the machinery of the British state. The Dublin Parliament met only for a few months every two years. In theory, at least, it could not even begin to debate proposed legislation until the subject had been sanctioned in London (in practice, the device of considering ‘Heads of Bills’, rather than bills themselves, enabled the Irish Commons and Lords to initiate legislation, though it remained subject to interference and ultimate approval from London). In addition, as we have just seen, the British Parliament, from 1720, claimed the right to legislate for Ireland whenever it chose to do so. In practice that claim was exercised sparingly (and there was no attempt to tax Ireland from Westminster), but control of the army in Ireland was secured by the annual Mutiny Acts passed by the British Parliament and Irish overseas trade was regulated by British Acts of Parliament. Unsurprisingly, this subordination caused resentment. In December 1759, there was serious rioting in Dublin when it was feared that a union between Britain and Ireland was in the offing, a union that would have meant the end of the Irish Parliament.²³ The Irish people, the Archbishop of Tuam wrote with regard to the Dublin Parliament, ‘are unwilling to acknowledge the Dependency of this on the British L——sl——re, and . . . are all bred up in a settled Antipathy to the Superiority of the latter’.²⁴ Irish parliamentary ‘patriots’ regarded themselves as the articulators of this resentment, and directed much of it at the Irish administration at Dublin Castle, which was recognized to be a mere extension of government from London. This meant that Irish patriots remained particularly wedded to seventeenth-century anti-executive rhetoric; in the Irish setting the ‘country’ tradition was fortified by a strong sense of injured national pride.²⁵ Patronage, dispensed through the hands of the so-called undertakers—Irish ²¹ See Edward McParland, ‘Building the Parliament House in Dublin’, Parliamentary History, 21 (2002), 131–40. ²² NLI, Shannon Papers, MS 13299, Arthur Onslow to Henry Boyle, 6 Dec. 1755. ²³ See, for the Duke of Bedford’s view, SP 63/416, fo. 219. For a modern account of the riots, see Sean Murphy, ‘The Dublin Anti-Union Riot of 3 December 1759’, in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Irish History (Dublin, 1988), 49–68. ²⁴ Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Collection, D 3155, WH 3457, letter to Sir Robert Wilmot, 1 Jan. 1760. ²⁵ See J. L. McCracken, ‘Protestant Ascendancy and the Rise of Colonial Nationalism, 1714–1760’, in T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (eds.), A New History of Ireland, iv. EighteenthCentury Ireland 1691–1800 (Oxford, 1986), ch. 5.

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politicians of established standing and influence who ‘undertook’ to manage the Irish House of Commons for the administration at Dublin Castle—generally acted as a check on the appeal of patriotism, and ensured that the Castle usually had parliamentary majorities for its favoured measures.²⁶ But the undertakers could not always be relied upon to deliver votes for the government. In November 1761, after one such parliamentary rebuff, the Earl of Halifax, the new Lord Lieutenant, complained that if the undertakers ‘coud not preserve ye Rights of the Crown from Such indecent & ill timed Attacks, they had not ye Interest they pretended to have’. The inability of the undertakers, combined with their ‘ill judged political Craft’, as Halifax put it,²⁷ ultimately led British ministers—in the same spirit of reform that they brought to imperial issues—to review the Irish system after the Seven Years War.²⁸ From the time of Viscount Townshend’s viceroyalty (1767–72), Lords Lieutenant became resident and their chief secretaries emerged as the key figures in parliamentary management. But whether they were appointed by the chief secretary or the undertakers, even Irish placemen might ally with the patriot opposition on issues of real sensitivity. What of the colonial assemblies? There can be little doubt that they exercised considerable authority within their communities—in that they were elected on a regular basis by a significant proportion of the adult white male population, they were held in much greater regard than Dublin parliaments elected only by Ireland’s Protestant minority in very infrequent elections.²⁹ The colonial assemblies were part of the governing machinery in the sense that they passed local laws and agreed local taxes, but it would surely be inappropriate to view them as instruments of the British state. They were no more sovereign within their own jurisdictions than the Irish Parliament was within Ireland; the British Parliament legislated for the colonies and the British Privy Council had the right to disallow acts passed by the colonial assemblies. And if they were clearly meant to be subordinate in the imperial structure, they were also, at the same time, fiercely resistant to central control. They saw their role, in line with classical English constitutional theory, as acting as a check on the power of the Crown, in the form of its local representatives, the governor and his subordinate civil officers.³⁰ In America, ²⁶ See Eoin Magennis, The Irish Political System 1740–1765: The Golden Age of the Undertakers (Dublin, 2000). ²⁷ NLI, MS 8064, Halifax’s Journal, 5 and 10 Nov. [1761]. ²⁸ For the background to the changes, see Martyn J. Powell, ‘The Reform of the Undertaker System: Anglo-Irish Politics, 1750–1767’, Irish Historical Studies, 31 (1998), 19–36. ²⁹ Until 1768, the Irish Parliament was subject to general elections only on the accession of a new monarch: there was no Irish general election between 1728 and 1761. For elections and the electorate in the colonies, see Robert J. Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689–1776 (Westport, Conn., 1977). For the responsiveness of colonial assemblies to the needs of their electorates, see Alison G. Olson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Colonial Legislatures and Their Constituents’, Journal of American History, 79 (1992), 543–67. ³⁰ See Ian K. Steele, ‘The British Parliament and the Atlantic Colonies to 1760: New Approaches to Enduring Questions’, Parliamentary History, 14 (1995), 29–46, for the view that the colonial assemblies were influenced by the development of the constitutional position of the English/British Parliament, and saw themselves as following Westminster’s model.

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moreover, the assemblies were able to translate theory into practice more effectively than were country-minded Irish or British MPs. Patronage was not available to colonial governors on anything like the same scale as to the Irish undertakers or British ministers (though wartime mobilization did provide opportunities for skilful operators such as William Shirley of Massachusetts),³¹ and assemblymen in the North American provinces, answerable to a much larger electorate than their British and Irish counterparts, were less likely to accept compromising appointments and offer governors their uncritical support; consequently, colonial governments were not usually able to exert much influence over colonial legislatures. Indeed, in many provinces the governor found himself obliged to accept that the assembly voted his salary annually, rather than for his tenure, thus effectively surrendering to the assembly a substantial lever that could be used to ensure gubernatorial acquiescence in local resistance to unwelcome metropolitan interference and even gubernatorial approval of assembly bills that were contrary to royal instructions.³²

A WEAK STATE? If we return to the metropolitan core, it rapidly becomes apparent that, by modern standards, the eighteenth-century British state apparatus was decidedly small. Although the official armed forces expanded considerably in time of war,³³ the number of civilian employees seems tiny compared with today’s civil service. The revenue departments—especially customs and excise—were the most extensive; Brewer calculates that there were 6,765 full-time employees in the ‘fiscal bureaucracy’ in 1741 and 7,478 in 1763.³⁴ Other departments had much smaller staffs: there were just thirty-seven Admiralty officials, ranging from the first lord to the ‘necessary woman’, or toilet cleaner, in 1727, and still only sixty in 1760. The Board of Trade employed a mere twenty-three people in 1727, and no more in 1760. The staff of the Treasury, in many ways the most important branch of the administration, was only fifty-one strong at the time of the accession of George III.³⁵ Numbers are not everything, of course, and they need to be viewed in contemporary as well as historical perspective,³⁶ but the small number of staff in the various offices of state ³¹ See William Pencak, ‘Warfare and Political Change in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts’, in P. J. Marshall and Glyn Williams (eds.), The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (London, 1980), 51–73. ³² See [Thomas Pownall,] The Administration of the Colonies (London, 1764), 45–7. For the experience of one governor, see Eugene R. Sheridan (ed.), The Papers of Lewis Morris, iii. 1738–1746 (New Jersey Historical Society, xxvi, Newark, N.J., 1993), 342. For the rise of the colonial assemblies, see Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), ch. 7. ³³ See Ch. 3. ³⁴ Brewer, Sinews of Power, 66 (table 3.2). ³⁵ J. C. Sainty, Office-Holders in Modern Britain, iv. Admiralty Officials 1660–1870 (London, 1975), 101–2; idem, Office-Holders in Modern Britain, iii. Officials of the Board of Trade (London, 1974), 79; idem, Office-Holders in Modern Britain, i. Treasury Officials 1660–1870 (London, 1972), 102. ³⁶ See Ch. 11.

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is not the only striking feature to the modern eye. Overlapping and competing jurisdictions hardly suggest a strong or efficient bureaucratic apparatus. The two secretaries of state, one for the northern department and one for the southern, each had responsibility for relations with foreign powers, sometimes leading to confusion over who should be dealing with a particular issue, or even the pursuit of two different foreign policies.³⁷ Imperial administration was the responsibility of a bewildering number of different agencies—including the southern secretary of state, the Board of Trade, the Treasury, and the Privy Council, and the Cabinet— with the demarcation lines between them often difficult to determine.³⁸ Worse still, perhaps, the Board of Trade, the body with the greatest expertise on colonial matters, had very little authority, whereas those with the greatest authority, namely the secretary of state and his Cabinet colleagues, often had the least knowledge. There is certainly a case for saying that the wars of the mid-eighteenth century exposed the great limitations on the power of the British state. The recruitment of military manpower often depended upon individuals or corporate bodies remote from, or unconnected with, government. Most obviously, perhaps, the volunteer corps formed in both mid-century wars represented private initiatives, not government action. While the number of Britons and Irishmen under arms during wartime was increased considerably by the creation of bodies of volunteers, it would be wrong to see them as a force under the command of the state. Volunteer formations usually envisaged themselves as performing a purely local defence function, and we can be confident that they would have resisted any attempt by government to deploy them away from their home territory.³⁹ We should also recognize that privateering vessels were most emphatically not under state control, even though they received their letters of marque, or licences, from government. As private ships, they were free for most of the time to operate in whatever way they chose. Although they sometimes cooperated with the Royal Navy, and they could be seen as a significant extension of British sea power (there were more than 1,100 of them in the Austrian Succession struggle, and in excess of 1,600 in the Seven Years War),⁴⁰ it should be remembered that they were largely autonomous agents. The provincial regiments raised in North America, though they were placed under the command of British generals, were raised and paid for (at least initially) by the colonial assemblies, which, as we have seen, were famously resistant to control from London. The provincial troops, moreover, proved difficult to discipline; their tendency to take literally their terms and conditions of enlistment were a constant source of irritation to regular officers more accustomed to instant ³⁷ See H. M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990), esp. 12–14. ³⁸ See P. J. Marshall, ‘The British State Overseas, 1750–1850’, in Bob Moore and Henk van Nierop (eds.), Colonial Empires Compared: Britain and the Netherlands, 1750–1850 (Aldershot, 2003), esp. 173–7, for the view that the East India Company’s bureaucracy was more impressive than the British state’s. ³⁹ See Chs. 3 and 8. ⁴⁰ David J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1990), 121 (table 7) and 165 (table 13).

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obedience than negotiation and persuasion.⁴¹ But, whether they liked it or not, the British commanders needed the support of the provincials, the numerical contribution of whom to the war effort in North America was at least equal to that of the regulars. The Duke of Cumberland’s comment to Lord Loudoun in October 1756 that, ‘execrable Troops as they are’, the provincials were ‘for some time at least, necessary to you’⁴² was to hold good for much longer than he anticipated— indeed, for the whole of the war. In April 1761, Amherst was still trying to persuade the various colonies to supply ‘with all possible dispatch, two thirds of the number of men, they furnished the last campaign’, and in February 1762 he was endeavouring to secure ‘the same number’ of provincial troops as ‘last year’.⁴³ Nor should we forget that the fighting in Asia was largely conducted by the forces of the East India Company rather than the British army proper. Clive’s tiny force that defeated Siraj-ud-daula at Plassey was largely made up of sepoys—there were more than 2,000 of them, out of a total of less than 3,000 troops under Clive’s command.⁴⁴ And when Colonel Draper took Manila in October 1762, a significant proportion of his little army again comprised sepoys and European troops in the pay of what was still in our period essentially a private commercial body.⁴⁵ Even if we consider the more official armed forces, the role of individuals and groups beyond state control emerges as crucial in many instances. The noblemen’s regiments recruited at the time of the ’Forty-five rebellion are a case in point. The noblemen in question, in return for pledging to form regiments, were given the right to nominate the officers—an important surrender of patronage by the state, which had the effect of reinforcing the autonomous local power of the nobles.⁴⁶ According to the Revd William Stukeley, writing once the rebellion was safely over, ‘It appears to me very evident that it was the vast diligence of the nobility, and clergy, and gentry in raising troops, it was this only that saved us from the effects of the rebellion. . . . The King could not possibly have raised troops on a sudden, but the nobility raised ’em in a week’s time.’⁴⁷ There was, of course, a touch of hyperbole here—we know that some of the noblemen’s regiments took much longer to raise than Stukeley admitted (Lord Berkeley’s, recruited in Gloucestershire and neighbouring counties, took months to bring up to strength).⁴⁸ ⁴¹ For the ‘contractualism’ of the provincials and their resistance to command by regulars, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 167–95. ⁴² Stanley Pargellis (ed.), Military Affairs in North America 1748–1765: Selected Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (Hamden, Conn., 1969), 251. ⁴³ CO 5/60, 416–17; Nottingham University Library, Galway MSS, Ga M 84. ⁴⁴ Jeremy Black, Britain as a Military Power, 1688–1815 (London, 1999), 133. ⁴⁵ The East India Company insisted on its right to take control of the new conquest until the King’s wishes were known: see Nicholas P. Cushner (ed.), Documents Illustrating the British Conquest of Manila 1762–1763 (Royal Historical Society, Camden 4th ser., viii, London, 1971), 41. ⁴⁶ See, e.g., William Salt Library, Congreve Papers, SMS.521, for Lord Gower’s regiment. ⁴⁷ The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, ii (Surtees Society, lxxvi, Durham, 1883), 336. ⁴⁸ Gloucestershire RO, Bond of Newland Papers, D 2026/X42. For the process of recruiting the Duke of Bedford’s regiment, which also took rather longer than Stukeley suggested, see Bedfordshire RO, Russell Papers, Box 769.

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Nonetheless, Stukeley’s observation was essentially sound; at a time of dire emergency, it was the willingness of leading landowners to use their influence that secured the necessary manpower, and the state had little choice but to use this route if it wanted to recruit a large number of soldiers in a hurry. Noblemen’s regiments, though raised on somewhat different terms, were to be important again in the next war, and once more revealed the dependence of the state on the autonomous power of local elites.⁴⁹ Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Scottish Highlands. The British state began a concerted drive to break the clan system and ‘modernize’ Highland society in the aftermath of the ’Forty-five.⁵⁰ Lord Hardwicke, the chief architect of the legislative onslaught that began in 1746 and only finished in 1752, was alarmed that the new Highland regiments raised from 1757 represented a big step backwards, as they seemed to re-legitimize the old clan system. However, Hardwicke’s objections were not sufficient to prevent the regiments being raised, for the simple reason that without clan-based regiments, and the sponsorship and active participation of the Highland chiefs, there would have been no mobilization of the Highlanders. If the British state wanted to tap Highland manpower effectively, it could do so only through the traditional leaders of Highland society and military units built on clan loyalty; the British state itself had neither the power nor the prestige to attract large numbers of Highlanders into existing regular regiments.⁵¹ A similar point could be made about naval mobilization. Nicholas Rodger has demonstrated that landed officers used their territorial influence to recruit men from amongst their family employees and dependents.⁵² Nor should we forget that local authorities, and particularly borough corporations, provided extra recruitment incentives, in the form of bounties for new naval and army entrants. The governing bodies of towns even raised regiments of their own—such as the Liverpool Blues in the War of the Austrian Succession—using the opportunity, no doubt, to expand the corporation’s patronage base.⁵³ To supply the armed forces with their requirements—food, clothing, weapons, munitions, transport, and, in the case of the navy, warships—was a considerable undertaking.⁵⁴ The state did not even begin to attempt to produce all of the necessary goods itself. There were, to be sure, the royal docks that built and serviced naval vessels at Chatham, Plymouth, and Portsmouth and a number of smaller yards. However, in time of war, these government facilities were unable to cope with greatly increased demand, particularly for smaller craft. Contracts with private shipyards were therefore essential to secure the quantity of ships needed by the navy.⁵⁵ The movement of soldiers, equipment, and supplies was even more ⁴⁹ See Richard Middleton, ‘The Recruitment of the British Army, 1755–1762’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 67 (1989), 234–7; and Ch. 3 in this book. ⁵⁰ See Ch. 5. ⁵¹ See Chs. 3 and 8. ⁵² See N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1988), 155–7. ⁵³ See Chs. 3, 4, and 8. ⁵⁴ See Ch. 4. ⁵⁵ See, e.g., Beaulieu, Montagu Estate Papers, ‘Ships built for Government at Bucklers Hard from Septr. 1743 to January 1791’; and Gill Simmons, ‘Buckler’s Hard: Warship Building on the Montagu Estate at Beaulieu’, New Acadian Journal, 35 (1993), 24–45.

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dependent upon private contractors. Merchant ships were hired by the Navy, Victualling, and Ordnance Boards to carry expeditions overseas, to take armies or smaller detachments from one theatre of operations to another, and to transport supplies. To give just a small example: in January 1743 the Victualling Board hired thirteen ships to convey food stocks to the fleet operating in the Mediterranean.⁵⁶ On land, the army and militia were similarly reliant on the short-term hiring of civilian wagons and horses. There was no regular military transport system; even the Royal Artillery depended upon civilian drivers hired for each campaign to move its ‘train’ of guns, powder, and ammunition. In 1755, for instance, fifty-two drivers and 130 horses were provided by the contractors Warrington and Baldwin, for that year’s train; when the Rochefort expedition sailed in 1757 it included another contingent of civilian drivers and horses hired for the artillery, while during the Portuguese campaign at the end of the Seven Years War, more than a hundred local drivers were hired to move the guns, powder, and shot.⁵⁷ While brass-founding and gun-boring were carried out by the Ordnance Board at Woolwich, most weapons were not produced in government armouries, but by private contractors—iron and steel manufacturers made muskets, cannons, swords, and bayonets for the armed forces, and also supplied them with shot. Gunpowder was produced in government-run mills from 1759, when the Ordnance Board purchased facilities at Faversham in Kent; even so, private firms produced and supplied most of the powder that was used by the army, navy, and militia.⁵⁸ Army uniforms, though produced to official specifications—patterns were approved by the Board of General Officers from 1708—were not made in government-run mills and workshops; private manufacturers and suppliers were paid to provide the clothing that was needed. Finally, the vast quantities of foodstuffs consumed by the armed forces were also supplied on a contractual basis. The Victualling Offices in London, Portsmouth, and Plymouth, it must be said, baked and packed ships’ biscuits, and salted and pickled beef and pork.⁵⁹ However, although the navy and army established depots for meats, bread, grains and dairy products, these items were produced and provided by contractors and subcontractors. Beer was made in breweries run by the Victualling Board, but in time of war these establishments—like the royal dockyards—were unable to cope with the volume of extra demand, and so private brewers supplied the considerable shortfall.⁶⁰ The state’s reliance on private enterprise clearly enabled some contractors to exploit their position of strength. During the ’Forty-five rebellion, the Earl of Cholmondeley, Lord Lieutenant of Cheshire and governor of Chester Castle, who was empowered by the Government to secure foodstuffs, clothing, and footware for the troops moving north to engage the Jacobite forces, found himself in a very ⁵⁶ ADM 110/13, fo. 92. ⁵⁷ WO 55/2, fos. 25, 120; WO 55/3, fo. 56. ⁵⁸ Jenny West, Gunpowder, Government and War in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (London, 1991), esp. 149–66. ⁵⁹ Rodger, Wooden World, 83. ⁶⁰ Peter Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 1959), 201–4.

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vulnerable position indeed. He needed supplies desperately, and he was acutely aware of how easy it was for hard-headed farmers and tradesmen to take advantage of his situation. In November 1745, as he prepared to purchase cereals for the soldiers and forage for the army’s horses, Cholmondeley worried about the need ‘to prevent Combinations, among farmers’ designed to push up the prices of the commodities that he required. His suspicion was understandable, for at the same moment he was experiencing great difficulties with another set of producers. Shoes were usually supplied to the army at between three shillings and fourpence and three shillings and eightpence a pair; but Cholmondeley discovered that the local master shoemakers, having agreed with him verbally to provide as many pairs as possible for four shillings each, were now demanding four shillings and a penny.⁶¹ In the next conflict, John Ball, who supplied lead for the armed forces, regarded the Ordnance Board as ‘the best of Customers’, since it ‘always pay[s] 10s a Ton more than the Merchants’.⁶² The state was obliged to find the money to pay for the vast majority of warrelated costs, whether they were incurred in recruiting or maintaining the armed forces.⁶³ But even in this vital area, government was again reliant on individuals and groups beyond its control. When the state borrowed money—and borrowing, as we will see, was crucial to war finance—the terms it secured were dependent on the willingness of wealthy businessmen and investors to purchase government stock. The interest rates offered on government issue were at least partly a product of intense negotiations between ministers and private financiers. The Government, particularly at times of dire need and national emergency, could find itself obliged to accept much more generous rates than it wanted to pay, as in March 1746, when the continuing Jacobite rebellion obliged ministers ‘to raise money at a high interest’.⁶⁴ Nor was the taxation necessary to service the debt always secured easily. In March 1742, just after Walpole’s fall, the new chancellor of the exchequer, Samuel Sandys, was attacked by Tory MPs when he proposed the continuation of the four shillings in the pound land tax: they complained that they believed that Sandys had promised them that every effort would be made to reduce the burden by a shilling.⁶⁵ Two years later, Pelham found the House of Commons unwilling to accept his proposed sugar duties.⁶⁶ True, most MPs were reluctant to be seen to be hindering the effective prosecution of military and naval operations by objecting to the required taxes, but when they were asked to pay for the deployment of troops on the Continent, there could be substantial opposition. In January 1742, for instance, 160 MPs voted against a motion to continue paying the army in ⁶¹ Cheshire RO, Cholmondeley of Cholmondeley Papers, DCH/X/9, 10. See also 17, 21, 42. For a not dissimilar example of a contractor extracting additional sums for footware, apparently through failing to include shipping and freight charges in the original tender, see Centre for Kentish Studies, Amherst MSS, U1350 O36/21, 21A and 21B. ⁶² NLW, Powis Castle MSS, 1249. ⁶³ See Ch. 4. ⁶⁴ HMC, Du Cane MSS, 106. ⁶⁵ Stephen Taylor and Clyve Jones (eds.), Tory and Whig: The Parliamentary Diaries of Edward Harley, 3rd Earl of Oxford, and William Hay, M.P. for Seaford 1716–1753 (Woodbridge, 1998), 180 (Hay’s journal, 12 March 1742). ⁶⁶ PH, xiii. 652.

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Flanders.⁶⁷ Parliamentarians were even less inhibited when it came to post-war taxes, which were just as necessary if interest on the national debt was to be paid. In February 1767, the Commons refused to sanction a continuation of the land tax at four shillings in the pound, and insisted on its reduction to three shillings.⁶⁸ Some years earlier, the battle over the cider tax, introduced by Bute’s Government in March 1763, demonstrated the protracted difficulties that the state could face. Opposition within the British Parliament to this new excise was fierce, yet far from insurmountable: at no point did more than 120 MPs vote against the bill. But the popular outcry in the western apple-producing counties was picked up and stimulated by sections of the press, and Bute, disconcerted by the ferocity of the personal attacks launched on him, resigned. His successor, Grenville, was then faced with a determined campaign to repeal or at least revise the unpopular impost. Early in 1764 the Government defeated a proposal to modify the cider tax by a majority of only twenty votes. In his budget of that year, presented to the Commons in March, Grenville promoted parliamentary taxation of the American colonies; with tax resistance a major problem in post-war Britain, new sources of revenue had to be found. Anticipating difficulties in squeezing more money out of reluctant British taxpayers, Grenville had begun to prepare the ground for parliamentary taxation of the colonies soon after taking office.⁶⁹ But the recurring imperial crises that Grenville’s American taxes initiated underlined, perhaps more than anything else, the severe limitations on the power of British Governments. A STRONG STATE? There are, however, other ways of looking at the mobilization of manpower and resources, and even the exertion of British authority in the colonies, that point to very different conclusions. Consider again the expansion of the armed forces. Whatever the contribution of autonomous local agents, the state had overall control of the process and responsibility for keeping the army, navy, and militia in being. While some of the soldiers were incorporated in regiments raised by the local influence of noblemen, and their officers chosen by those noblemen to boost their local power bases, all officers received commissions from the Crown and were therefore ultimately under the command of the King and his ministers. Moreover, local elites competed with each other in offers to raise troops, especially towards the end of the Seven Years War, with the result that on some occasions the state could choose between different suitors, acceding to the request that offered the best chance of raising the stipulated number of men in the shortest possible time.⁷⁰ The militia, ⁶⁷ Ibid., xii. 940. For opposition to war in Europe, see Ch. 6. ⁶⁸ Brewer, Sinews of Power, 132. ⁶⁹ Philip Lawson, George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984), 147–9, 170, 173–4. For Grenville’s preparations for American taxation, see 190, 193–4. ⁷⁰ See, e.g., BL, Barrington Papers, Add. MS 73,628, fos. 37, 69, 79.

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originally intended by its supporters as a locally controlled check on central authority, as well as a defensive force, was reformed in 1757 in a way that effectively made it an adjunct of the army rather than an alternative to a centrally controlled professional military force. At least some of its officers resented any attempt to portray the militia as different from the army proper.⁷¹ The pay of the army, the navy, and the militia was supplied by government, acting through Parliament. Nor should we forget that the state directly involved itself in recruitment. The least important aspect of this involvement, in numerical terms, was the offering of royal pardons to convicts on condition that they served in the army or navy. More productive was compulsion in the form of the press-gang. Naval conscription was deeply unpopular; it was resisted at the local level and criticized in the British Parliament. But there was no gainsaying that without it the navy would have found it very difficult to man the King’s ships with the number and kind of men that it required.⁷² Pressing was also used to augment the army, through government-sponsored Recruiting Acts. Resistance was again considerable, so much so that this method of raising troops was dropped during the Seven Years War, and the number of men compelled to serve under the provisions of the Acts was not very substantial, considering the total number raised during the two conflicts.⁷³ On the other hand, the success of the Recruiting Acts should not be measured just by reference to the impressment clauses; they also offered inducements, and probably stimulated much larger numbers of men to join the colours voluntarily. Indeed, the state was perhaps rather better at offering carrots than it was at using sticks. The opportunity to practice a trade regardless of local guild restrictions—an instance of the state ignoring, or even trampling upon, entrenched local interests—and the prospect of land being offered in North America were incentives that encouraged men to become soldiers.⁷⁴ If we look again at the ways in which the armed forces were maintained, it similarly becomes clear that the role of the state was far from minimal. The royal dockyards were amongst the largest units of production in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland.⁷⁵ George Wansey, a Wiltshire clothier, visited Portsmouth in August 1741 and was deeply impressed by the scale of the dockyard facilities: ‘we saw the Masthouse in which were a great Number of Masts some very large & other pieces of Timber, & many Men at Work; . . . We saw the Ropehouse of a prodigious Length, the Tar Furnaces, the Mast-ponds’.⁷⁶ Portsmouth, as Wansey’s wide-eyed description suggests, was a vast industrial complex, as were Plymouth and Chatham. They covered hundreds of acres and had workforces larger than any contemporary company. At the height of the Austrian war the British yards employed 8,500 men between them.⁷⁷ While private yards built many craft in ⁷¹ See Ch. 6 for more on this subject. ⁷² Rodger, The Wooden World, 150. ⁷³ See Ch. 3. ⁷⁴ For land grants in North America, see Chs. 4 and 5. ⁷⁵ See Daniel A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), ch. 6. ⁷⁶ Wiltshire RO, Wansey Papers, 314/6, ‘A Journal of the Travels of a Week to Southampton, Isle of Wight, & Portsmouth’. ⁷⁷ R. J. B. Knight, ‘The Building and Maintenance of the British Fleet during the Anglo-French Wars, 1688–1815’, in Martine Acerra et al. (eds.), Les Marines de guerres européennes, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1985), 38.

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wartime, the larger ships were all constructed in the royal dockyards, which were also the only ones equipped to carry out major repairs. There were no other state enterprises to match the royal docks, but the state established the regulatory framework within which civilian contractors were obliged to operate. The production of cannons, for instance, was largely undertaken by private iron producers; the Board of Ordnance, however, inspected the finished products rigorously, and those that failed to meet the required standard were rejected.⁷⁸ The Victualling Board, surely the largest single purchaser of foodstuffs at the time,⁷⁹ was also able to exercise some influence over the quality of the products that it bought. A vital part of the regulatory framework was the use of export embargoes. These were ostensibly designed to prevent valuable supplies reaching the enemy, but they also had the advantage, from the Government’s point of view, of helping to build up stocks and therefore reducing the market price.⁸⁰ As Waddell Cunningham wrote from New York in May 1756, ‘There is a Prohibition from exporting Provisions which stops the shipping off of Rice. It is at present A very dull article here [and] may be bought at 12s per hundredweight.’⁸¹ If the state as purchaser might at times be exposed to individuals and groups determined to maximize their profit at public expense, we should remember that the Government and its agencies, with substantial buying power at their disposal, were often in a position to make or break smaller suppliers. John Warrington, who provided horses for the artillery, found himself having to accept appreciably less favourable terms from the Ordnance Board in the later stages of the Seven Years War: down from a shilling per horse per day in 1760, to ten and a half pence per horse per day in 1761.⁸² Contractors frequently complained of late payment,⁸³ or of the need for more orders to justify investment.⁸⁴ Their willingness, despite these complaints, to continue providing supplies suggests that they, rather than the state, were in a position of dependency. More generally, it could be argued that the extensive use of private contractors was a symptom not of the weakness of the British state, but of its strength. Contractors would have been ⁷⁸ See, e.g., correspondence and papers relating to the delivery of cannons to the Ordnance Office during the Seven Years War in Somerset RO, Dickinson Papers, DD/DN 498. ⁷⁹ In Sept. 1759, when the Victualling Board was worried that it had an inadequate supply available, there were 142,602 lbs of butter and more than 300,000 lbs of cheese in store at Plymouth and Portsmouth alone. See NMM, Victualling Papers, MS 84/057, ‘A State of the Butter & Cheese’. For the impact on the wider economy, see Ch. 4. ⁸⁰ See PRONI, Bedford Papers, T 2915/5/42, where Primate Stone warns that this is widely suspected to be the true reason for the embargo on Irish exports in 1758. ⁸¹ Thomas M. Truxes (ed.), Letterbook of Greg and Cunningham 1756–57: Merchants of New York and Belfast (Records of Social and Economic History, new series, xxviii, Oxford, 2001), 122. For the impact of embargoes at Cork, see Ch. 10 of this book. An indication of the way in which bulk purchasing could affect prices can be found in a letter of 10 Dec. 1746 (ADM 110/14, fo.266), where the Victualling Board complains that the Dutch East India Company had been buying up oxen in London, causing a shortage and inflating the price that the Board was obliged to pay. ⁸² TNA: PRO, Chancery Papers, C 103/202, Account-book of John Warrington, 1760–1. ⁸³ See, e.g., Berkshire RO, Downshire Papers, D/ED O37, Fisher and Pearce to Capt. Moses Corbett, 9 Sept. 1762; T 1/422, fos. 391–2, Petition of Henry Allnut. ⁸⁴ See, e.g., BL, Anson Papers, Add. MS 15,955, fo. 167.

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reluctant to tender for business if they had little or no faith in the reliability of their paymaster.⁸⁵ Indeed, the state’s crucial role in mobilizing resources for war is nowhere clearer than in relation to public finance. There was, as we have seen, post-war tax resistance, and rates of interest were influenced, of course, by the demands of the major moneylenders. There were also, as noted, times of acute stress and worry for treasury ministers and officials. But the general picture is much more positive. The army and navy expanded enormously, especially in the Seven Years War, and the militia was reformed and mobilized from 1757. In both mid-century conflicts Britain’s military reach was extended by paying for foreign auxiliaries and subsidy allies on a vast scale: in the Seven Years War some 30 per cent of the money appropriated by the British Parliament for the army was spent on foreign troops.⁸⁶ The war effort in the colonies was also substantially supported by parliamentary contributions. In the Austrian war, Massachusetts was reimbursed for at least some of its expenses, and in the next struggle the colonies generally were able to secure metropolitan funds to cover about half of their military costs.⁸⁷ Vast sums, in short, were found to pay for a global war effort, and this must surely be counted as a substantial achievement. The necessary taxes were raised: there was even remarkably little resistance to settling the army’s extraordinary expenses—that is, the amount that exceeded the anticipated expenditure presented in the annual estimates.⁸⁸ Borrowing was not always easy, but, even when there were difficulties, the required sums were secured in the end. Here we should note that in the negotiations with the major lenders, it was not always that state that was in a position of dependency. In 1742 the Bank of England lent the Government £1.6 million without interest, in return for a renewal of its charter. Two years later, the East India Company similarly advanced £1 million at only 3 per cent interest as part of a process designed to secure a renewal of its commercial privileges.⁸⁹ Indeed, such was the general willingness to lend, that in January 1756, when a subscription was opened for £2 million, some £800,000 was pledged on the first day.⁹⁰ The Government was usually able to secure loans at remarkably low rates of interest. The £12 million borrowed in 1762 required only 4.8 per cent interest, and the £2 million in 1756 just 3.4 per cent.⁹¹ In the previous war, the £4 million raised at ⁸⁵ See Gordon Elder Bannerman, ‘British Army Contracts and Domestic Supply, 1739–1763’, unpublished University of London Ph.D. dissertation, 2005, 66. ⁸⁶ David French, The British Way in Warfare 1688–2000 (London, 1990), 38 (table 2.2). ⁸⁷ See Ch. 4. ⁸⁸ Bannerman, ‘British Army Contracts and Domestic Supply’, esp. 32. ⁸⁹ See David Hancock, ‘ “Domestic Bubbling”: Eighteenth-Century London Merchants and Individual Investment in the Funds’, Economic History Review, 47 (1994), 684; H. V. Bowen, ‘Mobilizing Resources for Global War: The British State and the East India Company 1756–1815’, unpublished paper delivered at conference on ‘Mobilizing Money and Resources for War: European States at Work 1689–1815’, Universidad de Navarra, Sept. 2004. ⁹⁰ North Yorkshire RO, Metcalfe of Nappa Papers, ZOA, Alexander Fothergill to Thomas Metcalfe, 29 Jan. 1756. ⁹¹ Reed Browning, ‘The Duke of Newcastle and the Financing of the Seven Years’ War’, Journal of Economic History, 31 (1971), 353.

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the end of 1746 was secured by offering only 4 per cent.⁹² Though additional inducements such as free lottery tickets and extra stock were often necessary, and increased the total cost to the state, it remains the case that these rates were certainly not high by contemporary and historic standards.⁹³ It might seem that the imperial dimension points to the opposite conclusion— for here the weakness of the British state is certainly more apparent than its strength. We have already noted that substantial compromises were required to mobilize American manpower and resources effectively during the Seven Years War— compromises that suggest the very limited ability of the King’s servants to impose their will. The failure of the post-war attempts to tax the colonies, and the eventual breakaway of thirteen of the colonies to form the United States, is also strongly suggestive of the weakness of the British state apparatus. Yet there is a different story that can be told. Loudoun might have complained bitterly of the lack of cooperation from the colonial assemblies, and he certainly made less progress militarily than Amherst, who was able to benefit from Pitt’s concessions to American sensitivities, but we should not underestimate how much Loudoun achieved as commander-inchief. His triumphs were logistical, rather than on the battlefield, but none the less important in paving the way for the more obvious successes of those who followed him. His use of embargoes, as we have seen, was part of this logistical preparation, for it enabled him to impose some control over the availability and price of provisions and transport. His embargo policy could not be sustained indefinitely, and eventually collapsed under the pressure of colonial resistance, with Loudoun predictably denouncing the assemblies again for their lack of public spirit. But the system, based on his fiat as the King’s commander-in-chief in North America, lasted long enough for him to secure the supplies and transport he needed for his 1757 Louisbourg campaign. What was surprising, surely, was not that the embargoes ultimately failed, but that the different colonies abided by them for as long as they did. Perhaps we should take this as an indication that, despite Loudoun’s complaints, his authority as the King’s representative carried more weight with the colonists than he was willing to acknowledge.⁹⁴ Loath as they were to recognize the British Parliament’s claims to sovereign authority, the Americans seem to have been much more willing to accept exercises of the Crown’s prerogative. Although we might interpret the post-Seven Years War drive to tax America as a consequence of the resistance to further fiscal demands in Britain, and therefore as ⁹² William Muir (ed.), Selections from the Family Papers preserved at Caldwell (2 pts in 3 vols., The Maitland Club, lxxxi, Glasgow, 1854), pt. II vol. i. 82. ⁹³ For continental European comparisons, see Ch. 11. For favourable comments on the handling of the British public finances during the Seven Years War, see, e.g., Stephen B. Baxter, ‘The Conduct of the Seven Years War’, in idem (ed.), England’s Rise to Greatness, 1660–1763 (Berkeley, Calif., 1983), 339; Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 11. ⁹⁴ See Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), 182–3, for a somewhat more negative view of Loudoun’s performance.

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an essentially defensive move, illustrative of the limited power of the state, the project of extracting a revenue from the colonies can equally well be seen as a symptom of great confidence on the part of British Governments, the British Parliament, and the whole state machine. Nearly twenty years earlier, in the aftermath of the ’Forty-five rebellion, the power of the British state had been asserted in very confident manner. When the House of Lords debated the abolition of heritable jurisdictions in Scotland, Lord Hardwicke brushed aside the objection that these jurisdictions were protected by the terms of the Act of Union of 1707. There could be no restrictions, he argued, on the sovereign legislature.⁹⁵ The same confident logic was to be expressed during the disputes with the American colonies that followed the assertion of the British Parliament’s claims to be an imperial legislature, complete with taxing powers. After having emerged triumphant in a titanic struggle with France and Spain, British ministers were prepared to address what they saw as the flaws in the imperial system—flaws that had been recognized for many generations but had been left unremedied for fear of provoking trouble. The lax or expedient old ways were no longer considered acceptable. A ramshackle and loose-reined empire was to be transformed, by greater central control, into a more cohesive and sustainable whole. American taxation was undoubtedly linked to domestic fiscal pressures, but it was also part of a more general reforming impulse, designed to bind the empire more closely together and impose stronger direction from London. This reforming impulse explains the attempts made to tighten up and enforce the Navigation laws regulating colonial commerce, exemplified in an order in council of 1 June 1763, which sought to revitalize the customs service, and the creation of an American Board of Customs Commissioners in June 1767; it also accounts for the importance that Charles Townshend and his successors attached to ‘independent Salaries for the civil officers in North America’ as a means of reducing the power of the colonial assemblies and making the officers more effective tools of imperial government.⁹⁶

CHANGE OVER TIME By focusing on the victorious finale of Britain’s long and near continuous struggle against France, we can all too easily slip into the assumption that the British state gradually improved its efficiency, by an incremental process, until it reached its acme of achievement in the triumphs of the Seven Years War. The truth, inevitably, is more complex; a linear narrative oversimplifies the story. It could be argued, for instance, that as the demands of war increased, the state became more reliant on agents beyond its control—as in the case of the noblemen’s regiments in both midcentury struggles, and particularly the Seven Years War, when compulsion in the ⁹⁵ PH, xiv. 12. ⁹⁶ West Suffolk RO, Grafton Papers, Ac 423/445, Townshend to Grafton, [25 May 1767].

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form of the Recruiting Acts was replaced by the raising of units that depended upon the local influence of peers and gentlemen and surrendered to those local elites important patronage powers. Equally, it could be argued that the British state’s attempt radically to remodel Highland society in the aftermath of the ’Fortyfive Rebellion represented an exertion of power as ambitious as anything tried in relation to America from 1763: Bob Harris has described it as ‘the greatest episode of state-sponsored social engineering’ attempted in eighteenth-century Britain.⁹⁷ It could also be said that the legislative assault on the clan system, and Highland life generally, while less than fully successful, and somewhat undermined by the partial rehabilitation of the clan structure for military purposes in the Seven Years War, achieved more, from the British state’s perspective, than the attempted reform of the North American colonies. The first eventually allowed the Scottish Highlands to be properly incorporated into Britain and for the military potential of the Highlanders to be tapped for the British state; the second led to determined resistance, open revolt, and finally the breakaway of most of the mainland colonies. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for believing that the efficiency of the British state apparatus increased over the period covered by the two mid-century wars. This owed less, it might seem, to structural changes designed to improve performance, than to the commitment and energy of individuals. The Board of Trade, founded in 1696 to oversee colonial development, underwent no significant reform during our period (though its formal powers were enlarged in 1752).⁹⁸ However in the aftermath of the Austrian war, when the British Government became more aware of the value of the colonies, the Earl of Halifax was appointed as its new head, and his taking office meant that more than twenty years of declining influence and activity for his department was reversed in a determined drive to assert more control from the centre and to resist the erosion of the authority of the colonial governors.⁹⁹ Likewise, the secretaries of state ran an office whose responsibilities and functions remained unchanged until a third secretary—for the colonies—was created in 1768. It was not until defeat in the American war that a fundamental reform took place, abolishing the post of colonial secretary, and reallocating the northern and southern secretaries’ responsibilities to new offices under secretaries of state with responsibility for home and foreign affairs, respectively. The coordinating activity of Pitt in the Seven Years War was attributable not to any formal changes in the scope of the southern secretary’s responsibilities, but to his own determined—not to say power-hungry—personality.¹⁰⁰ However, this overlooks apparently small-scale technical improvements and bureaucratic refinements that enhanced the efficiency of many branches of the ⁹⁷ Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), 14. ⁹⁸ See Ch. 9. ⁹⁹ See Ch. 9, and Ian K. Steele, ‘The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected: Governance of the British Empire, 1689–1784’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 119–20. ¹⁰⁰ See Marie Peters, The Elder Pitt (London, 1998), esp. 103–8.

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state apparatus, and the recruitment of more officers to carry out the required work. The Treasury became more and more effective in controlling contract costs: it encouraged supply ships to sail in convoy to reduce insurance rates, and established increasingly robust auditing procedures to limit the scope for fraudulent behaviour. Contracts were also usually entered into on a short-term basis, allowing for revision of terms at renewal and providing a further check on costs.¹⁰¹ In the revenue service, upon which the whole war-waging system relied, numbers of officers not only increased, as we have seen, but the excise commissioners in 1758 asked their own juniors for suggestions on improving the administration of the malt tax in preparation for an increase in the duty. The next year the excise began a comprehensive survey of the nation’s retail outlets to ensure that duties were collected more effectively.¹⁰² The excise service, as Brewer has demonstrated, was well-trained, well-educated, and technically competent,¹⁰³ and it seems to have become still more effective as the demands of war greatly increased the need for money. The navy can be seen in a similar light. Its increase in size—in terms of both manpower and ships—was of course vital. No less importantly, perhaps, the development of the Western Squadron to control the Western Approaches and the Bay of Biscay in the Austrian war is now seen as a major advance that enabled Britain’s geographical strength to be harnessed effectively for the first time. The Western Squadron not only protected inward and outward bound British trade, but was also in a position to intercept French overseas commerce and to prevent the French navy leaving its Atlantic bases, particularly Brest in Britanny. Dominance in European waters was in due course to translate into control of more distant oceans, as the French ability to reinforce their ships in North America, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean was severely hampered.¹⁰⁴ Experience had also enabled the navy to become much more adept at working with the army in amphibious operations: the coordinated and well-organized campaigns in the Caribbean at the close of the Seven Years War suggest considerable improvements on earlier botched combined attempts such as at Cartagena in 1741 and Rochefort in 1757.¹⁰⁵ But there were also technical and procedural advances that contributed to enhanced efficiency. Perhaps the most notable amongst these advances was the gradual introduction of anti-scorbutics to combat scurvy, one of ¹⁰¹ Bannerman, ‘British Army Contracts and Domestic Supply’, ch. 3. For an example of contract monitoring, see NAM, Hawley Papers, 7411-24-17, Newcastle to Lt.-Gen. Henry Hawley, 4 Jan. 1746. ¹⁰² Brewer, Sinews of Power, 105, 112. ¹⁰³ See Brewer’s essay on ‘Servants of the Public—Servants of the Crown: Officialdom of Eighteenth-Century English Central Government’, in Brewer and Hellmuth (eds.), Rethinking Leviathan, 127–47. ¹⁰⁴ See N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004), esp. 250–6. ¹⁰⁵ See Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies 1740–1742 (Woodbridge, 1991), 83–122; W. K. Hackman, ‘The British Raid on Rochefort, 1757’, Mariner’s Mirror, 64 (1978), 263–75.

War and the State

53

the health hazards that regularly reduced the capability of the fleet. James Lind’s work, first published in 1753, though not initially responsible for change, marked the beginning of a long-drawn out process of dietary improvement.¹⁰⁶ We might also note that the Commissioners for Sick and Wounded, who were first constituted in 1653, were appointed only on a temporary wartime basis until 1748, when they became a permanent body. Furthermore, a new hospital at Haslar, in Gosport, was constructed from 1746 to 1762, and a smaller establishment at Plymouth was built between 1757 and 1760.¹⁰⁷ In the dockyards themselves, there was an improvement in facilities for building and repairing ships, and—perhaps more importantly—a new culture of inspection developed after the Austrian war, with a ‘visitation’ by the Admiralty in 1749 inaugurating a series of further inspections and producing a new standing order in 1750 designed to eliminate identified abuses.¹⁰⁸ Naval officers went into uniform for the first time in 1748, and while this was a development that they themselves suggested as a means of greater differentiation, it symbolized the way in which the navy was losing the final vestiges of its pre-professional past. The army also not only grew in size, but in professionalism, effectiveness, and cohesion. The redcoats who broke when faced with the Highland charge in the ’Forty-five, and whose shortcomings in wilderness warfare were brutally exposed by the Amerindians and French Canadians ten years later, had become a much more tactically flexible and formidable fighting force by the time they campaigned in the Caribbean in the closing stages of the Seven Years War.¹⁰⁹ This owed little or nothing to the emergence of formal officer-training; though artillery and engineer officers were schooled at Woolwich from 1741, there was no military academy in Britain or Ireland for the infantry and cavalry. However, there was a good deal of attention to improving drill and tactics, some of it inculcated in treatises written by former or serving officers, and more picked up through experience and adaptation.¹¹⁰ Rather less obvious, but important symbolically, was the change in the way the army’s regiments were identified. During the Austrian conflict, they were named after their colonels, reflecting the extent to which they were still seen in a proprietary light. A royal warrant of 1751 numbered the regiments, and at the same time colonels were forbidden to put their own coats of arms on regimental flags.¹¹¹ In the next war, although the use of colonels’ names persisted in some ¹⁰⁶ See Ch. 5. ¹⁰⁷ Michael Duffy, ‘The Foundations of British Naval Power’, in idem (ed.), The Military Revolution and the State 1500–1800 (Exeter, 1980), 72–4. See also, Stephen F. Gradish, The Manning of the British Navy during the Seven Years’ War (London, 1980), ch. 3. ¹⁰⁸ James M. Haas, ‘The Royal Dockyards: The Earliest Visitations and Reform, 1749–1778’, Historical Journal, 13 (1970), 196–8. ¹⁰⁹ See Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), chs. 6 and 7. ¹¹⁰ See J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army 1715–1795 (Oxford, 1981). ¹¹¹ Alan J. Guy, ‘The Army of the Georges 1714–1783’, in David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford, 1994), 98.

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War and the State

quarters, numbering made it clear that the regiments were regarded as part of a whole—a state-controlled whole—rather than privately run units that came together to form the army. This change reflected a long-drawn-out process whereby the scope for army officers to run their companies and regiments as semiautonomous fiefdoms, through which they could generate a private income, was gradually eroded. The end of the practice of putting fictitious names on muster rolls, and claiming non-existent men’s pay; the introduction of more effective reviewing procedures; and new methods of checking regimental accounts— reforms completed in the aftermath of the Seven Years War—had been brought in incrementally between 1716 and 1766. But the period of the mid-century wars saw an intensification of this process, with important developments occurring during the two conflicts.¹¹²

A PRODUCTIVE PARTNERSHIP If the British state was, by the standards of the time, efficient and effective in waging war, and seemingly becoming more so, that does not mean that the role of autonomous institutions, groups, and individuals beyond its control should be minimized. Rather than seeing the experience of the mid-century wars as demonstrating the strength or the weakness of the British state as an engine of war, we would do better to consider the successful mobilization of unprecedented levels of manpower, the harnessing of considerable material resources to sustain British, colonial, and allied armed forces, and the raising of the money to pay for all this effort, as the work of a highly productive partnership between Government and local and private effort. As with all partnerships, the balance of power shifted according to circumstances. When the state needed men, supplies, or money desperately, it had to offer more in return to local elites, contractors, and financiers than it might have wished to do. Pitt’s concessions to the colonial assemblies during the Seven Years War, which finally produced provincial forces large enough to make the fall of French Canada almost inevitable, can be seen in this way.¹¹³ On the other hand, members of local elites in Britain and Ireland often competed with each other for state favours, leading them to offer to raise more soldiers than their rivals in order to secure commissions for themselves or relatives or dependents. Contractors often had to work in a similarly competitive environment, and so were obliged to offer terms and conditions that were satisfactory to Government. Financiers likewise often faced low rates of interest because of a general willingness to lend to the state. ¹¹² Alan J. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army 1714–1763 (Manchester, 1984), esp. 162. ¹¹³ For more on the opportunities that Pitt’s concessions provided for building a more durable partnership, and the difficulties involved in realizing that potential, see Ch. 9.

War and the State

55

The agendas of the partners were undeniably in many senses very different, and once the mid-century wars were over, partnerships tended to break down. Regiments raised by large landowners or borough corporations in Britain and Ireland, or by the provincial assemblies in the North American colonies, were disbanded, ending, or at least reducing, the patronage opportunities that those regiments had provided. Contracts to supply the diminished armed forces were fewer in number and often smaller in value. Large new loans to fund a war machine were no longer required. But so long as the wars lasted, the different priorities of the partners were not a major impediment to the partnership’s effective functioning. Profit, advancement for individuals, and extra power for local institutions were not necessarily, or even usually, incompatible with public service. Private and local interests gained enough from the relationship for the partnership to be mutually beneficial and generally effective in producing the required quantities of human, material, and financial resources. The skill of Britain’s military and naval commanders no doubt helped to ensure victory in the Seven Years War. Luck also played a part.¹¹⁴ None the less, even the most skilled commander, blessed with a prodigious amount of luck, could not have prevailed without manpower, military and naval hardware, supplies, and the money to pay for his battles and campaigns. The peculiar character of the British economy, with its high level of commercial exchange and limited barter component, certainly helped here, for it made tax assessment and collection easier than in France and many of Britain’s other enemies or allies.¹¹⁵ The peculiarities of the British state helped too—by the standards of the time, it was efficient and effective, and apparently becoming more so by the end of our period. The state could not mobilize manpower, resources, and money on its own, however. Without the help of individuals and groups beyond its control, such a mobilization would not have been possible. Rather than seeing this as a weakness of the state, we should regard it as proof of the existence of a partnership between Government and local and private interests. That partnership deserves a place in any explanation of Britain’s success in the Seven Years War. ¹¹⁴ This point, applied more generally to Britain’s eighteenth-century wars, is the central thesis of Black, Britain as a Military Power. ¹¹⁵ Brewer, Sinews of Power, 180–2. Parts of the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh economies would qualify this point: see Ch. 4.

3 The Growth of the Armed Forces It will be apparent by now that Britain’s military effort in both the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War relied heavily on the contribution of peoples from beyond the home territories. In North America, the bulk of those employed in King George’s service during the Austrian war were British colonists, mainly New Englanders. Louisbourg, as we have seen, was captured by New England soldiers, supported by the Royal Navy. Colonial troops were even used outside North America, serving as part of the ill-fated expedition against Cartagena in 1741. In the next conflict, the British Government eventually sent a considerable army across the Atlantic to fight in North America, but again locally raised provincial regiments played an important part. There were some 23,000 provincials offered by the various colonies for the 1758 campaign, and it seems likely that over the course of the war at least double that number served at one time or another.¹ Britain’s military muscle was increased further by the assistance provided by some Native Americans, particularly once the balance had clearly shifted away from the French. In the Caribbean, slaves were even used to augment the very limited European forces and local white militias available to defend the islands, though they were usually employed to build works, carry supplies, and perform other unarmed auxiliary functions.² On the Spanish Main, the assistance of local Indian tribes was equally essential if the scattered British settlements were to defend themselves or launch any offensive operations. In India, our period saw the first effective use of native troops trained in European tactics and paid by the East India Company, as well as the forging of alliances with Indian princes who acted as military surrogates in the struggle against French influence. The European units of the Company’s armies, it should be added, though in our period mainly made up of British and Irish recruits,³ included Swiss, Germans, and many French deserters. The Company’s forces, furthermore, were not just used in India: sepoys and European soldiers in the ¹ See Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), 227, for the 1758 contribution. ² See, e.g., Nottingham University Library, Galway MSS, GaM 90 and 92; NMM, Douglas Papers, DOU/4, Capt. Sir James Douglas to the governor of Barbados, 19 Sept. 1761. ³ See Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Irish Soldier in India, 1740–1947’, in Michael Holmes and Denis Holmes (eds.), Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts (Dublin, 1997), 14 (table 2.1) for the Irish contribution during the period 1757–63.

The Growth of the Armed Forces

57

Company’s pay were part of the force that captured Manila from the Spanish in 1762.⁴ Even nearer home, Britain depended upon foreign help. The campaigns in continental Europe in both wars involved British funding of coalitions to check French power, and nominally British armies contained significant numbers of units hired from various German rulers.⁵ The defence of Britain itself was even reliant on overseas assistance. In 1745–6, Dutch, Swiss, and Hessian troops were brought over to help fend off the Jacobite threat; in 1756 Hessian and Hanoverian regiments were deployed to protect the country from a feared French invasion. Indeed, it would be easy to assume that British Governments and the British people paid for others to fight and die for the defence or promotion of their interests. Yet, in the Seven Years War at least, overseas assistance merely supplemented a very considerable recruitment of domestic manpower. As the consequences of British and Irish military and naval mobilization were themselves important—for public finances, for the labour supply, for social attitudes and social policy, for national consciousness, and for much else besides—we need, as a preliminary to all further investigation, to have a sense of its scale and scope. How many men (for we are, with very few exceptions, talking about men in this context)⁶ served in the armed forces, official and unofficial, in the two wars, and from which sections of British and Irish society were they drawn? There are, of course, other matters relating to mobilization that need to be discussed—here we are concentrating on mobilization of manpower; naval mobilization also meant the construction of more ships—and estimates of the number and type of men involved must be placed in historical and contemporary context. But these issues will be dealt with in later chapters.

THE SCALE OF MOBILIZ ATION Calculating the size of armed forces is notoriously difficult. In this case, an appropriate starting point is perhaps the number of men in the army and navy for which the British Parliament voted pay. The army estimates for 1738 reckoned on 17,704 troops at home and 9,187 abroad, or a total of 26,891 soldiers. By the time the House of Commons approved the army estimates for 1748, the paper strength of the land forces had increased to 76,516 officers and men. Comparable figures for the Seven Years War suggest an expansion from 31,422 envisaged in the 1755 army estimates, to 117,633 for the campaign of 1762.⁷ The naval estimates show that the number of seaman and marines rose from 12,000 in 1739 to 35,000 ⁴ Nicholas P. Cushner (ed.), Documents Illustrating the British Conquest of Manila 1762–1763 (Royal Historical Society, Camden 4th series, viii, London, 1971). ⁵ See Peter H. Wilson, German Armies: War and German Politics, 1648–1806 (London, 1998), 267 (table 7.2). ⁶ The role of women within the armed forces is considered in Ch. 5. ⁷ Journals of the House of Commons, xxiii. 11–12, xxv. 198–200, xxvii. 25–6, xxix. 27–9.

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in 1740, and 40,000 in 1741. There was no further increase during the war, and the navy’s strength dropped back to 17,000 men in 1749, 10,000 in 1750, and as few as 8,000 in 1751. The estimates envisaged a navy with 10,000 sailors and marines in 1752–4, rising to 12,000 in 1755, the first year of renewed fighting between the British and the French. In 1756 there was a more significant increase—to 50,000—and thereafter incremental increases: 55,000 in 1757, 60,000 in 1758 and 1759, and 70,000 in 1760–2.⁸ But neither the army nor the navy estimates told the whole story. It was not unusual for the navy to be above establishment strength, despite the difficulties in recruiting mariners. The estimates for 1757, for instance, suggested that there would be 55,000 seamen and marines; yet it seems that the average strength of the navy, taken from the weekly returns, was 60,000; in 1759, when the British House of Commons budgeted for 60,000 naval personnel, more than 77,000 were mustered on average.⁹ So far as the army is concerned, the estimates submitted by the secretary at war tell us about the expected strengths of all the troops in Britain and in the overseas theatres, even down to the invalid companies that manned fortifications in places like Berwick-on-Tweed and Hull. They tell us nothing, however, about the much larger bodies of troops who were on garrison duty in Ireland and who were paid by the Dublin Parliament. Unfortunately, the Irish legislature’s own records are not very helpful in this regard either; they show that military expenses rose, but they do not always provide the detailed breakdown—listing the regiments and numbers of men to be supported—that one finds in the estimates presented to the British House of Commons. We do know, however, that from 1691 to 1769 the Irish army establishment was fixed at 12,000 troops, so we can assume that this was the paper (if not real) strength of the regular land forces deployed in Ireland.¹⁰ These additions must be set against various deductions. If the navy was able to exceed the manpower strength approved by the British House of Commons, the same cannot be said of the army. Notwithstanding the efforts put into recruiting—by regimental officers, by the Government, and by a whole host of corporate and private interests that sought to encourage enlistment¹¹—some of the army’s corps struggled even to approach their theoretical numbers, especially in wartime, when competition for men was particularly intense and regimental establishments were greater than in peacetime. John Houlding, who probably knows more than any other historian about the extent of this shortfall, has calculated that whereas in ⁸ William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present (7 vols., London, 1897–1901), iii. 5. ⁹ N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1988 edn.), 369 (Appendix xi). ¹⁰ See Alan J. Guy, ‘The Irish Military Establishment, 1660–1776’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey (eds.), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), 211–30. Occasionally, the number on the establishment exceeded 12,000 (see Eoin Magennis, The Irish Political System 1740–1765: The Golden Age of the Undertakers (Dublin, 2000), 52–3), but on rather more occasions it certainly fell short. ¹¹ See Ch. 4.


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1750–4 the actual strength of the average cavalry regiment was 95 per cent of establishment, and for the average infantry battalion, 93 per cent, in 1755–63 the comparable figures were 94 and 86 per cent—only a small increase in the size of the gap for the cavalry, but a significant one for the infantry.¹² Houlding’s figures, however, relate only to the army in Britain and Ireland. There are good reasons for believing that the shortfall was larger in the units serving abroad, especially towards the end of the wars. Four regiments under orders to go to Portugal from Belle Isle in 1762 could collectively muster only 72 per cent of their establishment total.¹³ Overall, we can probably say that the army was at not much more than 80 per cent of its paper strength. A further subtraction is required—this time for both the army and the navy. Not all of the navy’s sailors or the regular army’s soldiers were British or Irish. We know that Royal Navy ships in American waters attempted to recruit in places like Boston during the War of the Austrian Succession, but we know also that there was considerable local resistance based on the belief that the colonies had been granted legislative exemption from impressment.¹⁴ Fugitive scraps of information can take us only so far, however. There is a major difficulty in calculating the overseas contribution to the navy, as the practice of entering men’s place of origin in ship records began only after the Seven Years War. If, however, we assume that the proportion was probably about the same as in the American conflict, it was not very large—no more than about 6 per cent.¹⁵ For the army there are some reliable statistics for the overseas contribution to at least some of the corps. It seems that the regiments based in Britain had very few recruits from beyond the three kingdoms. Of 15,543 rank and file inspected in September and October 1756, a mere fifty-five (or 0.35 per cent) were described as ‘foreign’. The pressure of wartime expansion appears not to have increased the numbers of foreigners enlisted: the 12,463 rank and file in Britain inspected in August and September 1759 included only thirty-seven men from abroad (0.29 per cent).¹⁶ Regiments serving outside the British Isles were a different matter. In the German campaigns in the Seven Years War, the British contingent seems to have recruited locally as well as receiving periodic batches of new entrants from Britain or Ireland. Lord Sackville reported in November 1758 that the British regiments under his command had experienced problems with desertion, which he attributed to ‘the Commanding officers having Enlisted Swiss and other Foreigners which they believd to be ¹² J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army 1715–1795 (Oxford, 1981), 127 (table 7). ¹³ BL, Loudoun Papers, Add. MS 44,068, fo. 100. The situation was perhaps still worse in the army in North America, which Amherst said was nearly 7,000 men short of its establishment strength in Oct. 1760: Centre for Kentish Studies, Amherst MSS, U1350 O38/24. ¹⁴ B. McL. Ranft (ed.), The Vernon Papers (Navy Records Society, London, 1958), 389; Daniel A. Baugh (ed.), Naval Administration 1715–1750 (Navy Records Society, London, 1977), 130–3; Charles Harry Lincoln (ed.), Correspondence of William Shirley (2 vols., New York, 1912), i. 412–18. ¹⁵ Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), 36. ¹⁶ WO 27/4 and WO 27/6.

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Protestants’.¹⁷ During the War of the Austrian Succession, the army operating in the West Indies and the Spanish Main included Gooch’s four-battalion American Regiment, numbered sixty-first in the line, raised mainly in New England.¹⁸ In the next conflict the regular land forces campaigning in North America itself contained several regiments that had been formed in America—Shirley’s and Pepperell’s regiments (the Fiftieth and Fifty-first, respectively), the four-battalion Royal American Regiment, Gage’s Eightieth Foot, and Burton’s Ninety-fifth Foot.¹⁹ None of these corps was purely American—Shirley’s and Pepperell’s both had significant numbers of Irishmen in their ranks, and the Royal Americans relied on German and Irish recruits—but they made the British army in North America much more heterogeneous than the army at home.²⁰ The enlistment of colonists into other regiments, to bring them up to strength, added to the number of regular soldiers serving in North America who came from beyond Britain and Ireland, though it should be recognized that there was considerable resistance to recruitment into the regulars, and many of those who were enlisted appear to have been recent Irish arrivals.²¹ A sample of sixteen battalions and four independent companies inspected in North America during 1757 reveals that some 15.5 per cent of the rank and file were designated as foreigners (raised in Europe or America) or as ‘natives of America’—that is, inhabitants of the British colonies.²² In the Seven Years War, at least, we can therefore probably say that around 10 per cent of the army as a whole—this may well be an overstatement—was made up of men recruited from beyond Britain and Ireland. To summarize, then (see Table 1), in 1748 the navy probably contained about 41,000 British and Irish sailors and marines (the approved parliamentary strength of 40,000, plus about 10 per cent for additional recruitment, and minus 6 per cent for the overseas entrants). For the army, from the total establishment strength (including Ireland) of 88,516, we must take away 20 per cent for the shortfall in ¹⁷ BL, Leeds Papers, Egerton MS 3443, fos. 110–11. ¹⁸ See, e.g., Lincoln (ed.), Correspondence of William Shirley, i. 20. ¹⁹ See Houlding, Fit for Service, 345 n. For recruiting the Royal Americans in New Jersey, see BL, Haldimand Papers, Add. MS 21,680, fo. 7. ²⁰ For the Irish, see Stanley Pargellis (ed.), Military Affairs in North America 1748–1765: Selected Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (Hamden, Conn., 1969), 232; Anderson, Crucible of War, 774 n. 18. ²¹ Even at the end of the war, efforts were being made to complete the regular regiments with Americans: see Nottingham University Library, Galway MSS, GaM 84. For resistance, see Pargellis (ed.), Military Affairs, 132; Anderson, Crucible of War, 209–10. For the Irish enlistments, see, e.g., Thomas M. Truxes (ed.), Letterbook of Greg and Cunningham 1756–57: Merchants of New York and Belfast (Records of Social and Economic History, new series, xxviii, Oxford, 2001), 307; NAS, Dalhousie Muniments, GD 45/2/24, ‘A Weekly return of recruits raised by Capt. [ John] Cosnan for the 45th Regiment of Foot . . . Boston, 2nd January 1758’, and Cosnan to Brig.-Gen. John Forbes, 18 Jan. 1758. Amherst pointed out that recruitment of Americans was made more difficult by the competition from the provincial corps, which paid much higher bounty money: Centre for Kentish Studies, Amherst MSS, U1350 O38/24. ²² Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), 318 (table 5).

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The Growth of the Armed Forces Table 1. Two Snapshots of the Military and Naval Mobilization of British and Irish Males

Sailors and marines Regular army soldiers Embodied militiamen Total

1748

1762

41,000 64,000 n/a 105,000

80,000 93,000 28,000 201,000

recruiting (assuming that Houlding’s calculations can be applied to the Austrian Succession War), and then another 10 per cent from this new total for the overseas contribution (assuming again that the proportions for the Seven Years War can be applied also to the previous conflict). The revised total for the number of British and Irish males in the army in 1748 is therefore 63,732, or, rounded up, 64,000. Using the same proportions for additions and subtractions, it would seem that in 1762, the peak year of the Seven Years War, there were probably something like 80,000 British and Irish sailors and marines, and about 93,000 soldiers. In other words, in 1748 about 105,000 men from the British Isles were serving in the regular armed forces, and about 173,000 in 1762. To the figure for 1762 we need to make a further addition for the reformed and embodied militia of around 28,000 men; in the previous struggle, however, the militia was effectively defunct in 1748, and therefore should not be included. This suggests that the numbers of British and Irish males under arms for the years 1748 and 1762 were approximately 105,000 and 201,000, respectively. The total for the Seven Years War would be still higher if unofficial volunteer bodies were considered, for there is evidence that these were formed when invasion was feared and that some at least were still in existence at the closing stages of the conflict.²³ Volunteer bodies point to a fundamental problem with the static picture. There were almost certainly fewer independent volunteer companies in existence at the end of the Seven Years War—when the regular armed forces and embodied militia were at their most numerous—than at the time of the greatest perceived invasion threat in 1759–60. Equally, at the time of the 1745 uprising, volunteer corps were projected in many parts of England. That October, Henry Fielding wrote of ‘Associations, Subscriptions &c in abundance’.²⁴ Some of these existed only on paper, as pledges of loyalty and a willingness to serve if required. However, others certainly became militarily active: the Yarmouth ‘Independent Companies’ were still in existence in May 1746; indeed, they ‘fired several Vollies’ at the end of that ²³ See, e.g., Angus J. L. Winchester (ed.), The Diary of Isaac Fletcher of Underwood, Cumberland, 1756–1781 (Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, extra series, xxvii, Kendal, 1994), 78, where there is a reference to ten ‘independent companies’ exercising at Whitehaven in Feb. 1760. ²⁴ Martin C. Batterstin and Clive T. Probyn (eds.), The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding (Oxford, 1993), 51.

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month as part of the town’s celebrations of Cumberland’s victory at Culloden.²⁵ It seems unlikely, however, that any of the volunteers of 1745–6 remained under arms in 1748. These volunteers, and also the men who served briefly in the fourteen semi-regular fencible regiments formed in 1745–6 specifically to counter the Jacobite uprising, but were disbanded when the danger passed, are therefore left out of the reckoning in any end-of-war snapshot of the size of the armed forces. So, too, are those Protestant Irishmen who showed themselves willing to serve in the militia when it was arrayed, or prepared for active service, in 1745 and 1756, and the Catholic Irishmen (and to a lesser extent Scottish Highlanders) who were recruited into foreign armies, the Britons and Irishmen sent out to India to join the East India Company’s forces, not to mention all those who fought for Charles Edward Stuart—5,000 of them at Culloden, and probably at least double that number in the course of the rebellion. In short, by concentrating on peak years of regular army and navy numbers, we lose sight of the considerable quantities of men who served, even if only for brief periods and in a less official capacity, but were not carrying arms at the end of the two wars. A moving picture presents its own problems, of course. Some men served in more than one capacity: we need to avoid double or even treble counting. The Irish militia arrayed in 1756 was so numerous—nearly 149,000 men, according to returns submitted to the Irish House of Commons—that it must have represented almost all Irish Protestant males of military age.²⁶ The bulk of those arrayed—more than 106,000—were from Ulster, the province in which the vast majority of Protestants resided. Given that recruiting for the regular army was particularly heavy in the northern counties later in the Seven Years War, it seems likely that a significant proportion of those prepared to serve as militiamen in 1756 subsequently enlisted in a regular army regiment. As early as April 1757 Lord Forbes was referring to ‘the North’ as having been ‘so much drain’d by the number of men rais’d’ for the regiments on the Irish establishment, as well as by the ‘many recruiting parties that had come over from England’.²⁷ Similarly, when ²⁵ Ipswich Journal, 31 May 1746. ²⁶ Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland, xi. 204–5. Irish Protestants probably made up around 20% of the population at about this time—so maybe around 640,000 to 660,000 persons. Given that about half of these would have been women, and a significant portion of the males would have been either too old or too young to carry arms, 149,000 must represent almost every available Protestant. In 1745, when Dublin’s militia was called out, ‘every Protestant Housekeeper [was] required to provide himself with necessary Arms’ (Falkener’s Dublin Journal, 24–8 Sept. 1745). For the denominational balance in Ireland, see R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979), 155–6; and, for a calculation for an earlier period, Toby Barnard, The Kingdom of Ireland, 1641–1760 (London, 2004), 7. ²⁷ Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Papers, D 3155 C 2018. See also PRONI, Bedford Papers, T 2915/3/32. For more on recruitment in Ulster, see NLI, MS 681, Orders and Letters regarding the army in Ireland, 1756–63, orders of 1, 3 April, 3 May 1756, 8 Nov. 1757, 7 May, 21 July 1759; William Salt Library, Congreve Papers, S.MS 29/4, draft memo of William Congreve; HMC, Charlemont MSS (2 vols., London, 1891–3), i. 253; John H. Gebbie (ed.), An Introduction to the Abercorn Letters (Omagh, 1972), 66–7. For recruitment in the ‘North Part’ of Ireland in the previous war, see Penny London Post, or, The Morning Advertiser, 11–13 Nov. 1745; and SP 63/408, fos. 96 and 106.


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the fencible regiments raised in England during the ’Forty-five uprising were disbanded early in 1746, efforts were made to transfer their rank and file into the regular regiments. These efforts were not wholly successful—many of the fenciblemen were understandably unwilling to re-enlist on terms that were nowhere near as favourable.²⁸ Some, however, did so, such as Benjamin Dewhirst, who had served in the Yorkshire Blues, and then joined General Johnson’s Regiment of Foot.²⁹ Nor should we overlook the fact that amongst those men who fought in the Jacobite army that invaded England in 1745 there were more than a few who only a short time before had been part of the British army. John Maclean, an officer in Prince Charles’s Highland forces, in 1744 was a lieutenant in the Black Watch in Flanders, and when John Roy Stewart raised a regiment in Edinburgh for the Pretender’s army, he enlisted ‘a great many’ of Cope’s soldiers captured at Prestonpans.³⁰ There are many other types of multiple service that need to be recognized. During the Seven Years War, militiamen in maritime counties such as Devon could find themselves impressed into the navy, despite the legislative protection provided by the Militia Act. Less controversially, it was not uncommon for regular army non-commissioned officers to be permanently transferred to the militia to help in their training.³¹ Within the army itself, deserters from other regiments could be used to fill the corps serving abroad; in 1743, for instance, pardoned deserters were sent out as recruits to the Leeward islands, South Carolina, Gibraltar, and Minorca.³² Recycling of men could take place on a larger scale. It was not at all unusual for regiments about to embark abroad to be brought up to strength by drafting men from other regiments staying at home. Other corps were drafted abroad, and their officers, sergeants, and corporals sent home to recruit the regiment afresh. These practices meant that at any given time there were some regiments that were mere skeletons, waiting to reacquire flesh on their bare bones. Colonel Samuel Bagshawe complained in March 1762 that the Ninety-third ²⁸ ‘MSS of the Hon. Frederick Lindley Wood’, in HMC, Various Collections (8 vols., London, 1901–13), viii. 157. Even as the fencibles were being raised, Gen. John Wentworth argued that the best use that could be made of them would be to draft them to complete the regular regiments: Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 1678. For reluctance on the part of the fenciblemen and volunteers to join the regulars, see R. Garnett (ed.), ‘Correspondence of Archbishop Herring and Lord Hardwicke during the Rebellion of 1745’, English Historical Review, 19 (1904), 737; BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32,706, fo. 231. ²⁹ BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32,706, fo. 369. ³⁰ Iain Gordon Brown and Hugh Cheape (eds.), Witness to Rebellion: John Maclean’s Journal of the ’Forty-Five and the Penicuik Drawings (East Linton, 1996), 11–13; David Wemyss, Lord Elcho, A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland in the Years 1744, 1745, 1746, ed. Hon. Evan Charteris (Edinburgh, 1907), 284. ³¹ Devon RO, Bedford Papers, L 1258M/55/M, bundle 1, Sir Richard Bampfylde to the Duke of Bedford, 23 April 1759, Lt.-Col. John Mompesson to Bedford, 23 May 1759. ³² John Charles Fox (ed.), The Official Diary of Lieutenant-General Adam Williamson DeputyLieutenant of the Tower of London 1722–1747 (Royal Historical Society, Camden 3rd series, xxii, London, 1912), 115. See also Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), The Albemarle Papers (2 vols., Aberdeen, 1902), i. 18, for reference to ‘pardon’d deserters’ joining a company based at Dumbarton Castle in the summer of 1746.

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Foot, which he had been painstakingly raising in Ireland, had lost 218 men ‘culled and taken’ for other corps over the past year; and now he was to see his unit ‘incorporated with another Regt. going on foreign Service’.³³ Likewise, significant numbers of seaman transferred from one naval ship to another, especially from vessels undergoing repair to those about to sail against the enemy.³⁴ Large numbers of men, on the other hand, served just once, in one corps or ship, before dying, deserting, or being discharged as unfit. These men need to be taken into account if we are to have an accurate impression of the level of British and Irish military and naval participation in the mid-century wars. For the militia and the volunteers losses in action were not an issue, but men could still die and need to be replaced, while there were others who were discharged or who deserted.³⁵ Desertion was also a problem for the regular armed forces. In December 1760, Capt. Sir James Douglas reported that in his squadron in the West Indies ‘Desertion was grown so frequent’ that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ to execute some offenders to curb the outflow of men.³⁶ But the army and navy, as opposed to the militia, volunteers, and fencibles, faced the additional problem of casualties caused by campaigning beyond Britain and Ireland. Battles could be very bloody affairs, but disease was a much bigger killer. Operations in tropical climes were, of course, particularly dangerous. A return of the army at recently captured Havana in January 1763 reveals that of the 4,620 troops, a staggering 46 per cent were listed as sick, and that thirty-eight men had died over the past week.³⁷ However, even nearer home, diseases carried off many servicemen. The British army in Flanders in the Austrian Succession struggle suffered heavy losses through disease: ‘All the Regimts in General are so weak’, one officer wrote from Ghent in January 1744, ‘that some Extraordinary Methods must be taken to fill them up before the Opening of the next Campaigne’.³⁸ In January 1762 Augustus Keppel reported from off Ushant that the Valiant’s crew had ‘fallen down in fevers to the number of four score’, and that ‘Six or Seven’ had died ‘of the disorder’.³⁹ Some indication of the turnover of men from all causes is provided by surviving documents relating to the Royal Fusiliers at the beginning of the Seven Years War. ³³ Alan J. Guy (ed.), Colonel Samuel Bagshawe and the Army of George II 1731–1762 (Army Records Society, vi, London, 1990), 252. ³⁴ For a discussion of the problems involved in measuring the number of sailors, as opposed to the number of enlistments, see Rodger, Wooden World, esp. 148–9. For an example of a request to transfer sailors from one vessel to another, to ‘put both Ships on an equality for Service’, see NMM, Duff Papers, DUF/10, Capt. Robert Duff to John Clevland, 9 March 1760. ³⁵ See, e.g., the case of the militiaman discharged from the Nottinghamshire regiment in 1761 for persistent drunkenness, and the efforts made to replace him: Nottinghamshire Archives, Foljambe Papers, DD.FJ 11/1/2/249. For discharges from the Wiltshire militia on health grounds, see Hampshire RO, Jervoise of Herriard Papers, 44M69/G6/1/3/2/2 and 3. ³⁶ NMM, Douglas Papers, DOU/4, Douglas to John Clevland, 14 Dec. 1760. ³⁷ East Suffolk RO, Albemarle Papers, HA 67/461/121. ³⁸ Tyne and Wear Archives, Ellison Papers, A19/31. ³⁹ East Suffolk RO, Albemarle Papers, HA 67/461/236, Keppel to John Clevland, 1 Jan. 1762 (letter-book copy).


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The regiment embarked from Portsmouth for Gibraltar on 28 March 1756. Shortly afterwards it was recorded that the corps had 688 rank and file. By the end of 1758 the rank and file were recorded as 569 soldiers, or 119 fewer than in March 1756. Yet, in the intervening period, the regiment had recruited 318 men. Casualties—mainly dead, but also deserted and discharged—amounted to 437.⁴⁰ Houlding suggests that in wartime the army’s infantry regiments in the British Isles recruited some 2.1 per cent of their strength every month, and the cavalry about 1.5 per cent.⁴¹ Across the army as a whole, taking into account all theatres of operation, we are probably looking at an appreciably lower figure, perhaps about 15 per cent a year. If this is an accurate estimate, then nearly 124,000 men joined the army in the course of the Seven Years War, of whom about 112,000 were likely to have been British or Irish. If these new recruits are added to the existing strength of the army at the start of the war, we can say that a total of some 147,000 men from the British Isles served at one time or another as regular soldiers during the conflict. This suggests that the number of men who were engaged in such service in the war exceeded the number of those in place at its end (93,000, according to our earlier calculations) by 54,000, or 58 per cent. The same methods of extrapolation for the War of the Austrian Succession produce a total of some 101,000 men serving, at one time or another, in the army. Nicholas Rodger has suggested that the navy might have recruited approximately 185,000 men in the Seven Years War.⁴² If we say perhaps 6 per cent of these were from beyond Britain or Ireland, we are left with about 174,000. To reach a peak strength of perhaps 80,000 British and Irish sailors and marines therefore required not an increase of 70,000 on the 10,000 or so sailors and marines present on the eve of the conflict, but nearly 2.5 times that many. Were the same assumptions applied to the navy’s expansion in the previous war, some 87,000 men would have served between 1739 and 1748. Add the army and navy figures together, and we have totals of 188,000 men serving in the War of the Austrian Succession and 321,000 in the Seven Years War. Further additions are necessary, however. The militia and the various volunteer corps need to be taken into account, and some allowance needs to be made for the Irish and Scots who joined the French army, the Scots recruited for the Dutch Scots Brigade, and those who served in the Jacobite forces in the ’Forty-five. We also need to add in the small number of British and Irish recruits entering the East India Company’s forces. For the Austrian war we can perhaps add about 40,000 to cover the Irish émigrés joining the Irish Brigade, the much smaller number of Scotsmen in the Scots regiments in French and Dutch service,⁴³ the tiny number ⁴⁰ Berkshire RO, Downshire Papers, D/ED 037, ‘Casualties in the Royal Fuzrs from 31st March 1756’. ⁴¹ Houlding, Fit for Service, 126–7. ⁴² Rodger, Wooden World, 148. ⁴³ See Helen C. McCorry, ‘Rats, Lice and Scotchmen: Scottish Infantry Regiments in the Service of France, 1742–62’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 74 (1996), 1–38; and James Ferguson (ed.), Papers Illustrating the History of the Scots Brigade, ii. 1698–1782 (Scottish History

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of largely English recruits into the East India Company’s service, the Jacobite troops, the Irish militia arrayed in 1745, and the British volunteer bodies. This, it must be stressed, is a guestimate based on the assumption that at least some of the Irish militiamen ended up in the regular armed forces, that some of the Jacobite soldiers had previously served in King George’s army, and that a fair number of the British volunteer associations never actually became militarily active. For the Seven Years War the figure is probably greater—say 60,000 to cover the embodied English and Welsh militia, Irish militia arrayed in 1756 (and not subsequently recruited by the army), together with Catholic Irishmen recruited into the Irish Brigade, the relatively small number of British volunteer corps, and the British and Irish joining the East India Company’s service. Our grand total, then, is now 228,000 for the War of the Austrian Succession and 481,000 for the Seven Years War. These figures need to be viewed with considerable caution—there are a lot of assumptions that could prove to be false, and extrapolations that might be unreliable. But they at least give us some impression of the numbers likely to have been involved. The next step is to relate these estimates for mobilized manpower to the total number of males of military age who might have been available to serve during each of the two wars. In 1739 the combined population of Britain and Ireland probably stood at about 10.1 million (5.9 million for England and Wales, maybe 3.1 million for Ireland, and perhaps 1.1 million for Scotland). Of this 10.1 million, perhaps a quarter—or just over 2.5 million—were men aged from 16 to 50. To measure military participation fairly, however, we need to compare our moving picture of military and naval mobilization (the total number of men serving at one time or another) with a moving picture of the total number of males available for military or naval service between 1739 and 1748. This requires us to add about 2 to 3 per cent per year for the 16 year olds entering the pool of theoretically available men. If 2.5 million men were of military age in 1739, about 3.3 million men came in this category in the course of the war. The military participation ratio, on this basis, was between 1 in 14 and 1 in 15. For the Seven Years War, the same process produces a ratio of about 1 in 9.⁴⁴

THE SCOPE OF MOBILIZ ATION Many years ago, David Ogg, in a widely read and influential book on ancien régime Europe, characterized the armies of the eighteenth century as composed Society, xxxv, Edinburgh, 1899). For recruitment of Scots into the Dutch service in 1741, see NAS, Clerk of Penicuik Muniments, GD 18/5423/17. ⁴⁴ In The British Isles and the War of American Independence, 29, I tentatively suggested a somewhat lesser rate of participation for the Seven Years War and the War of the Austrian Succession (1 in 9 or 10 and 1 in 16, respectively). The rough calculations that I made at that time understated the importance of the Irish militia, and omitted completely the Britons and Irishmen recruited into foreign armies or serving in the Jacobite forces involved in the ’Forty-five Rebellion.


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primarily of ‘criminals, vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells’ in the ranks with an officer corps ‘drawn mainly from the nobility’.⁴⁵ The image of aristocratic officers commanding the lowest (and most expendable) elements—in both armies and navies—though challenged in certain respects by several specialist studies, is still reproduced, albeit usually with qualifications, in general histories.⁴⁶ It continues, moreover, to hold sway, often without any qualifications, in the popular imagination. Excluded from this picture are the ‘productive’ classes—a great swathe of people employed in agriculture, commerce, or industry, especially members of the ‘middling’ and artisan ranks. If eighteenth-century society were envisaged as a glass of beer, the armed forces would be depicted as drawing its manpower merely from the froth and the dregs, with the body of the drink left untouched. Yet this image is difficult to square with the level of mobilization suggested earlier. In the Seven Years War, in particular, far too many men served in the armed forces, loosely defined, for large sections of society to have been spared from military participation. In 1757 a pamphleteer optimistically reckoned that Britain and Ireland could support an army of 80,000 and a navy of 60,000, and even a militia of 30,000, ‘without taking any [men] from necessary Labour, or from their Employment in useful Manufactures’.⁴⁷ Yet, as we have seen, by the close of that conflict there were probably at least 200,000 British and Irish males in the armed forces, and during its course many more would have experienced, at one time or another, some period of military or naval service. This does not mean that the generally accepted view is without foundation. On the contrary, there is no shortage of evidence that would seem to support it. However, when we look in turn at the different forms of mobilized manpower, it becomes apparent that men from many different backgrounds served, in one capacity or another, in Britain’s mid-century wars. The aristocracy was certainly well represented amongst the army’s officers, particularly its generals. The British contingent sent to Flanders in 1742 was commanded by the Earl of Stair; the troops in North America in the Seven Years War were under the direction of the Earl of Loudoun, another Scottish peer, in 1756–8; and the British expeditionary forces campaigning in Germany from 1758 to 1762 were successively led by the Duke of Marlborough, Lord George Sackville (the third son of the Duke of Dorset), and the Marquis of Granby (the heir of the Duke of Rutland). There were plenty of aristocrats and gentry to be ⁴⁵ David Ogg, Europe of the Ancien Regime 1715–1783 (London, 1965), 154. ⁴⁶ See, e.g., Geoffrey Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770–1870 (London, 1982), chs. 2 and 3; M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618–1789 (London, 1988), esp. 121, 164–5, and The War of the Austrian Succession 1740–1748 (Harlow, 1995), 33; Peter Wilson, ‘Warfare in the Old Regime 1648–1789’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), European Warfare 1453–1815 (London, 1999), esp. 77–8. Perhaps the earliest revisionist work was J. W. Hayes, ‘The Social and Professional Background of the Officers of the British Army, 1714–63’, Unpublished University of London MA dissertation, 1956. See also Houlding, Fit for Service, esp. ch. 2; Rodger, Wooden World, esp. chs. 4 and 7. ⁴⁷ [Anon.], Proposals for Carrying on the War with Vigour, Raising Supplies within the Year, and forming a National Militia (London, 1757), 2, 40.

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found in the less senior officer ranks, too, who were usually working their way up to greater things. The Marquis of Lorne, heir to the dukedom of Argyll, was a second lieutenant in the Scots Fuziliers in 1739, and a lieutenant colonel by the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. James Mure Campbell, only son of the Hon. Sir James Campbell, was a cornet of dragoons in 1740 and a captain in 1748; in the next conflict he served as a captain in the Third Foot Guards and then returned to the cavalry as a lieutenant colonel, finally acquiring a colonelcy in 1762. The Hon. Henry Seymour Conway, second son of the first Lord Conway and brother of the Earl of Hertford, was a lieutenant in the dragoons when the Austrian war began and by its end he was colonel of his own infantry regiment. In the Seven Years War he rose to be a lieutenant general. We should not be surprised by the presence of such men: a career in the army was regarded as wholly appropriate by those noble and landed gentry families who still saw their status as linked to military service to the Crown. But if tradition impelled many of the peerage and gentry to obtain a commission, the expansion of the army in both the mid-century wars, and particularly the Seven Years War, meant that there were simply too many places to be filled for every officer to be from such a background. Even the peacetime army relied on officers from less elevated origins; however, that reliance increased markedly with the growth of the number of officers required in a much larger force. Noble and gentry officers served alongside men like Frederick Mackenzie, a lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fuziliers and the son of a Dublin merchant; Isaac Barré, a junior officer in General Skelton’s Regiment of Foot in the Austrian Succession War, also the son of a Dublin merchant, this time of Huguenot extraction; and Joseph Jefferys, an artillery officer who was ‘the son of a very considerable timber merchant in Birmingham’.⁴⁸ Even in the more senior officer ranks, men from non-landed backgrounds could be found. Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet, who led the force that captured Fort Frontenac in 1758, was born in Nova Scotia in 1714, the son of a lieutenant in the regular army garrison and a local Acadian. Bradstreet served as a volunteer with the Fortieth Foot in Nova Scotia before he obtained an ensign’s commission in 1735. Ten years later he was a temporary lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts provincials engaged in the attack on Louisbourg, but when fighting broke out again in North America in 1755 Bradstreet was no more than a captain in the Fifty-first. His fortunes brightened once Gov. William Shirley of Massachusetts took over from Braddock as commander-in-chief of all the forces in the American colonies. Shirley had been impressed by Bradstreet’s role in the Louisbourg expedition, and accordingly he promoted his protégé to a lieutenant colonelcy.⁴⁹ Bradstreet, though unique in many ways, represented a particular type of officer that was far from unusual. Born—quite literally—into the army, he owed his first steps into the commissioned ranks to his father’s ⁴⁸ HMC, Buccleuch and Queensbury MSS (3 vols., London, 1899–1926), i. 412. ⁴⁹ Anderson, Crucible of War, 259.


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military career, and not to any landed estate. But there were also officers with an even less auspicious start in life than Bradstreet. Some, indeed, were promoted from the ranks. This seems particularly to have been the case in the artillery, a corps in which officers required some degree of technical proficiency as well as— perhaps more than—traditional leadership qualities. James Wood served as a matross and then cadet gunner before he was promoted to lieutenant fireworker in India in August 1755. Wood’s diary suggests that his elevation was far from remarkable; he records at least three instances of sergeants in his contingent receiving promotion to lieutenancies.⁵⁰ However, officers who had seen service in the ranks were by no means confined to the artillery. The expansion of the army made experienced sergeants appear suitable candidates for subaltern commissions in new regiments. In April 1755, for example, Sgt. Maj. Thomas Barnsley of the Thirtieth Foot was made an ensign in the newly formed Royal American Regiment.⁵¹ ‘Sergeant Lieutenants’, as they were described in a contemporary letter, formed a recognized category of officer, and some of them, at least, went further and obtained companies or even became field officers.⁵² The accepted view of the army’s rank and file also requires some modification. There were, it must be confessed, many men who match the usual unflattering depiction of the ordinary soldiers. Male convicts might be pardoned on condition that they agreed to serve in the army, often in a regiment stationed overseas. In November 1760, for instance, John Baker, Jeremiah Smith, Charles Dailey, and Thomas Elliott, who had been sentenced to death for highway robbery in Kent, received royal pardons conditional upon their enlisting in the Forty-ninth Foot, which was then based in Jamaica. The following year, a further thirty-four men were similarly pardoned on the proviso that they joined the same regiment, which was still languishing in the disease-ridden West Indies.⁵³ Other men submitted to recruitment as an alternative to formal criminal proceedings: in April 1748 a Wiltshire cordwainer summoned to answer the charge of assaulting his apprentice, ‘listed himself a soldier’ rather than come before the court.⁵⁴ Men without gainful employment were also impressed into the army in Britain under the provisions of Recruiting Acts operating in 1744–6 and 1755–8, while the Vagrancy Act of 1744 allowed magistrates to seize any wandering male beggar and give him the choice of corporal punishment or entry into the army. ⁵⁰ Rex Whitworth (ed.), Gunner at Large: The Diary of James Wood R. A. 1746–1765 (London, 1988), 106, 137, 144. ⁵¹ Andrew Cormack and Alan Jones (eds.), The Journal of Corporal Todd 1745–1762 (Army Records Society, xviii, Stroud, 2001), 14. ⁵² HMC, Lonsdale MSS (London, 1893), 131. For subsequent hostility to the practice of promoting from the ranks in the Seven Years War, see the denunciation in [Anon.,] A New System for the Establishment, Clothing, Provisions, &c. &c. &c. of the Army (London, 1775), 29: ‘the experience of the late war amply proved that the good serjeant seldom made a good officer’. ⁵³ Joseph Redington (ed.), Calendar of Home Office Papers of the Reign of George III 1760–1765 (London, 1878), 13, 109–13. ⁵⁴ Elizabeth Crittall (ed.), The Justicing Notebook of William Hunt 1744–1749 (Wiltshire Record Society, xxxvii, Devizes, 1982), 71.

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British and Irish gaols undoubtedly provided a valuable source of men for certain regiments in desperate need—particularly those stationed in the distant and unhealthy outposts of empire to which it was very difficult to attract voluntary recruits. Their contribution to the army as a whole, however, was almost certainly less important than the traditional image of the rank and file would suggest. There was no wholesale transfer of the prison population into the army; indeed, the pressure to recruit convicts was less intense than in the American war, when the curtailing of transportation to the American colonies created a considerable problem of convict disposal.⁵⁵ In Hertfordshire only one man appears to have joined the army after having been convicted in our period: John Wright, a butcher from Stevenage, found guilty of assault, had been sentenced to a fine, but both the fine and Wright himself were discharged on 30 April 1757, after he ‘inlisted into Lord Robert Manners’s Regiment of Foot’.⁵⁶ Likewise, the published calendar of Shropshire’s quarter session records for the years 1741–57 hardly conveys the impression of a flood of accused men and convicted criminals joining the colours. The only mention of recruitment comes in the form of a note in April 1756 that one prisoner was discharged ‘for maiming himself whereby he was said to be disabled to serve as a soldier’—a timely reminder that not everyone was keen to take up the option of entering the army as an alternative to another form of punishment.⁵⁷ Similar comments apply to the men who were forced into the army by the Recruiting and Vagrancy Acts. Some sources suggest that they were an important component. In April 1744, the lieutenant governor of the Tower of London referred in his diary to the need ‘to make room for the Pressed Men which were sent to us in abondance’, while an indication of their significance to the army in Flanders can be found in an order of 17 April 1747, which reveals that the men pressed three years earlier were clamouring for their discharge and that the military authorities thought it necessary to offer an inducement to stay of a guinea a man at the end of ‘the Campaign they have begun’.⁵⁸ There can be no doubt that certain regiments relied heavily on compelled men. Of the 430 recruits entering Philipp’s Regiment of Foot between March 1744 and July 1745, no less than 203 (or 47 per cent) were described as impressed.⁵⁹ Returns of soldiers raised under the 1744 Act, mainly in April and May of that year, but up to the end of September, point to other regiments—Fleming’s, Harrison’s, Cholmondeley’s, Cornwallis’s—receiving about a hundred or more. However, there were other ⁵⁵ Stephen Conway, ‘The Recruitment of Criminals into the British Army, 1775–81’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57 (1985), 46–58. ⁵⁶ William Le Hardy (ed.), Calendar of the Sessions Books, Sessions Minute Books and Other Sessions Records, with Appendices, 1752 to 1799 ( Hertfordshire County Records, viii, Hertford, 1935), 44. ⁵⁷ R. G. Venables (ed.), Abstract of the Orders Made by the Court of Quarter Sessions for Shropshire, July, 1741–11th January, 1757 (Shropshire County Records, n.p., n.d.), 158. ⁵⁸ Fox (ed.), Official Diary of Lieutenant-General Adam Williamson, 117; Bodleian Library, MS Eng hist g.4, Orderly-book, Third Foot Guards, 137. ⁵⁹ Sheila Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (145 vols., Wilmington, Del., 1975), xvi. 342.


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regiments that contained very few if any impressed men,⁶⁰ and we should recognize that the total number raised in this period—2,382—was small in comparison with the strength of the army as a whole.⁶¹ If we assume a continuation of the same rate of entry of impressed men in 1745 and 1746, there would have been only about 7,500 conscripts out of an army that probably included in its ranks somewhere in the region of 100,000 men between the beginning and the end of the war.⁶² In the next conflict, the contribution of pressed men was probably no more significant, even though some sources suggest that particular regiments relied heavily on such recruits. In March 1756 the Thirty-fifth Foot received some 500 pressed men, doubling its strength, before embarking for North America. A year later, some ninety impressed recruits were reported as having joined the Thirty-fourth Foot in Essex, as compared with only thirty-eight volunteers.⁶³ The 1757 Act was still producing ‘agreat Number of Imprest men’ for the Thirtieth Foot in the spring of 1758: ‘Any Young fellow thats out of place, or has got a girl with Child, or has any Loose Chartor, is sure of being brought’, Cpl. William Todd wrote, ‘for the Constables receives one Pound for Every Man they take up, & several of them will take up any one’.⁶⁴ Scotland, it should be added, seems to have been tapped much more thoroughly than in the Austrian war. In April and May 1744 a mere thirty-eight pressed men were raised north of the Tweed, and most of them were from Glasgow. In November 1757 the north-eastern county of Moray was required to provide that number on its own, having already in the previous year been subject to a trawl by constables on the lookout for the unemployed.⁶⁵ Robert Kirk, who served in Montgomery’s Highlanders, later claimed that his regiment was ‘mostly composed of impress’d men’.⁶⁶ On the other hand, Kirk might well have been thinking of other forms of compulsion used to fill the ranks of the Highland units, particularly landlord pressure, which we shall soon see was an important factor in the enlisting of these corps and produced a rather different type of recruit.⁶⁷ More importantly, whatever the situation in certain regiments, it seems that impressed men made only a modest contribution to the army as a whole—an army, we should remember, that was to become considerably larger than in the Austrian war. In December 1756 Lord Barrington, the secretary at war, reported to the House of Commons that only 1,700 men had been raised by that year’s Recruiting Act, and he hinted strongly at considerable resistance on the part of regimental officers to receiving conscripts into their corps.⁶⁸ A few years later, Barrington was still more negative ⁶⁰ See, e.g., NLW, Powis Castle MSS, 1105. ⁶¹ WO 12/3196 and 3197. ⁶² For the estimate of 100,000 (or rather 101,000, to be precise), see above, p. 65. ⁶³ Brumwell, Redcoats, 64–5. ⁶⁴ Cormack and Jones (eds.), Journal of Corporal Todd, 38–9. ⁶⁵ WO 12/3196; HMC, Laing MSS (2 vols., London, 1914–25), ii. 418. ⁶⁶ Quoted in Brumwell, Redcoats, 273. ⁶⁷ See NAS, Maclaine of Lochbuie Muniments, GD 174/1248, for the particularly forceful activities of a recruiter in the Highlands in 1759. ⁶⁸ Berkshire RO, Neville and Aldworth Papers, D/EN O34/13, Parliamentary notebook of Richard Aldworth Neville, 22 Dec. 1756. For further evidence of the reluctance of officers to receive

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about pressing: ‘I can not advise a recruiting Bill this Session’, he wrote in a memorandum probably dating from 1759.⁶⁹ So from where did the rest of the men come? It would be foolish to deny that a significant portion of them were driven to enlist by unfavourable economic circumstances. It was a commonplace observation that hard times produced recruits more readily than prosperous times. James Wolfe looked forward in the autumn of 1756 to a rich harvest of new entrants into his regiment from the Gloucestershire textile towns, ‘for the people are so oppressed, so poor and so wretched, that they will perhaps hazard a knock on the pate for bread and clothes, and turn soldiers through sheer necessity’.⁷⁰ Likewise, William Thomas, a Glamorgan school master, recorded in his diary on 23 June 1762 that ‘The money are gone so scarce . . . that the most of men will be either soldiers or on the parishes’.⁷¹ We should also note that the larger urban centres, to which young men from the surrounding countryside flocked in search of work and opportunity, were particularly favoured locations for recruiting: scattered references in contemporary letters point to the vital importance of places such as Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Dublin, and, of course, London as the source of many enlistees.⁷² The assumption was that at least some of the young men who had made the hopeful journey into these towns would fail to obtain the employment that they sought, and would therefore be easy prey for the army. Yet it would be wrong to assume that those who at the time of their enlistment were out of work, or otherwise in desperate circumstances, had always been in such a state. Whether they volunteered or were pressed, a portion of the men who joined the army through necessity came from backgrounds that suggest a more settled previous life. Even in periods of peace, a steady trickle of former craftsmen, artisans, and tradesmen appear to have joined the army.⁷³ In wartime, the flow seems to have increased. The frequency with which apprentices ran away to enlist, despite legal prohibitions on their recruitment, is surely noteworthy.⁷⁴ The motives of those who entered the military were certainly many and varied—in the impressed men, see TNA: PRO, Chatham Papers, 30/8/75, fo. 199. See also, PRONI, Bedford Papers, T 2915/1/21.There seems also to have been some reluctance on the part of local magistrates to cooperate fully: see NAS, Campbell of Barcaldine Muniments, GD 170/1016/12. ⁶⁹ BL, Barrington Papers, Add. MS 73,628, fo. 87. ⁷⁰ Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (London, 1909), 304. ⁷¹ R. T. W. Denning (ed.), The Diary of William Thomas of Michaelstown-super-Ely, near St Fagans Glamorgan 1762–1795 (Cardiff, 1995), 36. ⁷² See, e.g., Glasgow City Archives, Hamilton of Barnes Papers, TD 589/586 and 630, Claude Hamilton to James Hamilton, 17 May 1742 and 19 Nov. 1745; NLS, Albemarle Papers, MS 3730, fo. 14; Robert Renwick et al. (eds.), Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow (11 vols., Glasgow, 1881–1916), vii. 99; HMC, Various Collections, viii. 414; HMC, Buccleuch and Queensbury MSS, i. 412; Guy (ed.), Colonel Samuel Bagshawe, 234; William Salt Library, S. MS 478B, Milo Bagot to ——, 29 Nov. 1760. ⁷³ Guy (ed.), Colonel Samuel Bagshawe, 104. ⁷⁴ See, e.g., Winchester (ed.), The Diary of Isaac Fletcher, 22; Phyllis Hembry (ed.), Calendar of Bradford-on-Avon Settlement Examinations and Removal Orders 1725–98 (Wiltshire Record Society, xlvi, Trowbridge, 1990), 24.


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case of apprentices we can speculate that the desire to escape an oppressive master, or a stultifying routine, the wish to assert full masculine independence by leaving the master’s household, and the quest for adventure far from the constraints of home, would all have been important for many young men in their situation. But whatever social or cultural influences operated, we should not forget that during wars there were new material considerations that might have weighed heavily in the minds of skilled and semi-skilled men in particular. Many local authorities provided enhanced bounties for new entrants, and the introduction of a shorter duration of service (three years, or five years, or until the war ended) would almost certainly have been an attraction. There was also the opportunity offered to discharged soldiers to practise their trade anywhere in the kingdom, irrespective of guild restrictions.⁷⁵ Not every artisan who joined the army found it to his liking; newspaper reports of deserters frequently include references to shoemakers, tailors, and the like.⁷⁶ Even so, enough of them stayed with their units to form a far from negligible element in the rank and file. An analysis of recruits raised, mainly in Gloucestershire and neighbouring counties, by Capt. Edmund Bond for Lord Berkeley’s Regiment in November and December 1745 shows that of the 149 men for whom an occupation is recorded, twenty-seven (18 per cent) were described as labourers, and a further twenty-nine (just under 20 per cent) as colliers. Eighteen men were said to be ‘husbandmen’, an elastic term that could equate to rural labourer or farmer, but seems in this context certainly to have meant something distinct from a yeoman, the description attached to another five of the recruits. Amongst the remainder, however, there was a bewildering array of trades, such as shoemakers, butchers, masons, clockmakers, cabinetmakers, barbers, and tailors. All in all, leaving aside the problematic ‘husbandmen’, some fifty-two (or 35 per cent) of Captain Bond’s recruits appear from their descriptions to have been skilled or semi-skilled men.⁷⁷ Berkeley’s, it should be said, was one of the so-called noblemen’s regiments raised at the time of the Jacobite uprising for home defence only (in other words, a fencible corps). The men were recruited on the understanding that they would not serve outside Britain, and that they would be discharged after six months, or as soon as the rebellion was over. These limitations probably affected the composition of the corps, by encouraging men who were not necessarily in a desperate plight to opt for a brief period of military commitment without running the risk of being sent to rot in a ⁷⁵ Joanna Innes, ‘The Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State: Government and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), 115–16. ⁷⁶ See, e.g., Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 16 Dec. 1745; Adams’s Weekly Courant, 6–13 May 1755. ⁷⁷ Gloucestershire RO, Bond of Newland Papers, D 2026 X42/2–4. For analyses of a larger sample of soldiers in the Seven Years War, see Peter Way, ‘Rebellion of the Regulars: Working Soldiers and the Mutiny of 1763–1764’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 57 (2000), 768–9 and table 1; Brumwell, Redcoats, 320 (table 8).

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distant overseas garrison.⁷⁸ In the next war it was claimed that one of the regiments raised in 1756, when a French invasion was feared, had filled up with a higher class of recruit—tenant farmers and their sons—precisely because it was assumed that the unit would not serve abroad.⁷⁹ The regiment in question, Brudenell’s Fifty-first Foot, was in fact sent across the seas, first in the unsuccessful attack on Rochefort in 1757 and then as part of the British force dispatched to Germany in 1758, where in the following year it distinguished itself at the battle of Minden. Brudenell’s was far from unique. Other corps conspicuously raised by landowner influence, and which included in their ranks significant numbers of tenants, or more usually tenant’s sons, as well as labourers and servants, were the Highland regiments. Like Brudenell’s, the Highlanders nearly all ended up serving abroad. Despite the concerted efforts of the British Government in the aftermath of the ’Forty-five to break the power of the clan chieftains, the regiments raised in the Highlands during the Seven Years War clearly reflected the continuing sway of the great lairds. Some of them, admittedly, were not in as powerful a position as they had been a dozen years before. Lord Lovat’s lands, which had been confiscated after the rebellion, were under the management of the Commissioners for the Annexed Estates, which reduced the influence of Lovat’s son, Simon Fraser, over the tenants. Nevertheless, without the leadership and commitment of Fraser, it seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that Fraser’s Highlanders would have come into being.⁸⁰ Indeed, the character of Fraser’s regiment, and many of the other Highland corps raised in its wake, is strongly suggestive of a deeply traditional mobilization—almost a feudal call-up of obligated manpower. ‘Never were levies completed with more expedition’, George Dempster wrote of the two Highland corps raised in 1757.⁸¹ A somewhat bizarre example of this kind of clan loyalty was the Eighty-ninth Highlanders, the brainchild of the Duchess of Gordon, whose second husband, the American Staats Long Morris, became the lieutenant colonel commanding. The duchess’s local influence was sufficient to complete the battalion in short order, and Morris, confident that ‘all the Highland Interest in this part is already Ingaged in my behalf ’, asked to be allowed to raise a further four companies.⁸² ⁷⁸ By comparison, we might note that the East India Company’s forces at Fort St. George at Madras were recruited to a greater extent from unskilled labourers: in 1742–3, 67 of 114 recruits were categorized in this way (59%), though in 1756, the proportion had fallen to 48 out of 97 (50%). See Records of Fort St. George: Despatches from England, xlviii. 1743–1744 (Madras, 1932), 66–9; Records of Fort St. George: Public Despatches from England, lx. 1756–1757 (Madras, 1971), 99–101. I am grateful to Huw Bowen for alerting me to this source of information on the Company’s forces. ⁷⁹ Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, R1–81, Sir George Savile to the Marquis of Rockingham, 9 Sept. 1756. ⁸⁰ Robert Clyde, From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander 1745–1830 (East Linton, 1995), 152. See also E. M. Lloyd, ‘The Raising of the Highland Regiments in 1757’, English Historical Review, xvii (1902), 468. ⁸¹ James Fergusson (ed.), Letters of George Dempster to Sir Adam Fergusson 1756–1813: With Some Account of His Life (London, 1934), 32–3. See also NLS, Fletcher of Saltoun Papers, MS 16519, fos. 25, 71. ⁸² John Malcolm Bulloch, Territorial Soldiering in the North East of Scotland during 1759–1814 (Aberdeen, 1914), 4; BL, Barrington Papers, Add. MS 73,565, fo. 70.


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Landowner influence was also important in manning the so-called noblemen’s regiments by which the army was expanded in 1759 and again in 1762 (as it had been in 1745). Raised in both Britain and Ireland, these corps were seen as a means to tap an underutilized source of manpower. The nobility, according to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Bedford, were ideally placed ‘to prevail on their tenants and dependents to enter into the army and thereby bring into it a better class and rank of people than would otherwise enlist’.⁸³ Nor were tenants, tenants’ sons, and even yeoman farmers to be found just in those regiments that were formed during the wars by great landowners. Walter Kirkham, who enlisted in 1755, reminds us that such men could join old corps—in his case the Ninth Foot—as well as newly raised regiments. Kirkham’s story, and that of his family, is worth telling, not least because it provides an interesting corrective to the received image of the army’s rank and file. A Staffordshire freeholder, Kirkham took the King’s shilling while his wife was pregnant with their second son, Samuel. Subsequently, Samuel became a plumber and glazier in Lichfield, and Kirkham’s daughter Ann married a butcher in Rugeley. The eldest son, Edward, inherited his father’s estate, but when the next war came he, like his father before him, joined the army, serving in the Third Foot Guards. A short spell in a red coat had, it seems, become something of a family tradition.⁸⁴ The Kirkhams were certainly not typical of the army’s ordinary soldiers, but we should not assume that they were so unusual as to be of negligible importance. The upper ranks of the Royal Navy were perhaps even more dominated by the aristocracy and great gentry families than the army’s, despite the fact that no one could buy a naval command—all naval officers had to begin their careers by serving on board ship for a minimum of six years and then pass an examination in seamanship before they received their lieutenant’s commission. The one qualification that needs to be added is that naval officers from aristocratic or upper gentry backgrounds, even more than their counterparts in the army, tended to be younger sons: very few were heirs apparent to their father’s lands and titles. The unfortunate Admiral Byng was the fourth son of Viscount Torrington. Edward Boscawen, made a rear admiral in 1747, was the third son of Viscount Falmouth. Henry Osborn, a vice admiral by the end of the Austrian Succession conflict, and made a full admiral in 1758, was the second son of Sir John Osborn, a Bedfordshire baronet. Below the flag officer ranks—as in the army—there were many men from similar backgrounds working their way up to greater things. Francis William Drake, a captain in the West Indies at the very end of the Austrian war, was the second son of Sir Francis Henry Drake, 4th Bart., and the brother of the MP for the Devonshire seat of Bere Alston. Augustus Keppel, made a captain in 1744 and a rear admiral in 1762, was the second son of the Earl of Albemarle. ⁸³ SP 63/416, fo. 122, quoted in Richard Middleton, ‘The Recruitment of the British Army, 1755–1762’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 67 (1989), 235. ⁸⁴ Staffordshire RO, Littleton Papers, D 260/M/T/5/52. For another example of the son of a freeholder serving in an old regular regiment, see Derrick Pratt (ed.), A Calendar of the Flintshire Quarter Sessions Rolls 1747–1752 (Hawarden, 1983), 132.

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However, as in the army again, there were many officers from less elevated families. Edward Hawke, knighted for his victory at the second battle of Cape Finisterre in October 1747, had married into a landed family in 1737, by which time he was already a captain, but his origins were more middle class than patrician; his father was a London barrister. This hardly meant that Hawke had to struggle; others, however, were less fortunate. Some officers were sons of tradesmen in the naval dockyards, or had commanded merchant vessels in peacetime. We can also be confident that men who took their lieutenant’s examination after many more than six years’ service on deck, and became commissioned officers in middle age, were less well-connected than those who obtained their lieutenancy at about nineteen or twenty, and were promoted to captain not long afterwards. Justinian Nutt, for instance, who served on Admiral Anson’s famous voyage around the world, rose to a lieutenancy after spending at least twenty years as a rating. Few could have matched Richard Hinde, who after a long career as a warrant officer, became a lieutenant in January 1744, aged sixty-one, but middle-aged lieutenants from humble origins were far from rare. At least 9 per cent of successful candidates in lieutenancy examinations between 1745 and 1757, Nicholas Rodger tells us, ‘show clear indications that they had bettered their social as well as professional condition in reaching the quarter deck’. Given the nature of the records, the true proportion, he suggests, might have been somewhat larger.⁸⁵ The marines, it should be added, attracted hardly any noble or upper gentry entrants—probably because promotion was slow and the service less fashionable than either the army or the navy proper. Of the 523 marine officers recorded as serving in 1759, a mere seven bore titles. By contrast, in sixteen of the army’s infantry regiments (the Fifteenth to the Thirtieth), with a total of about the same number of officers of all ranks, there were seventeen with titles, and whereas the titled marine officers were all ‘honourables’—that is, sons of peers—this small sample of the army’s titled officers includes six lords and three baronets.⁸⁶ Most marine officers, so far as we can tell, tended to be from struggling or impecunious lesser landed families, or from middle-class backgrounds. We know even less about the origins of the navy’s ratings than we know about the army’s rank and file, but what we do know points to a similar composition. There were—as in the army—convicted or alleged criminals of one description or another. Jeremiah Peacock, found guilty of stealing a piece of mahogany valued at two shillings and sixpence, was sentenced to seven years transportation but pardoned in December 1760 on condition that he served in the fleet. Likewise, John Tregowith, due to be transported for theft, was given the opportunity to enter a man-of-war in June 1761, while John Evans, convicted of street robbery, was the ⁸⁵ Rodger, Wooden World, 264–8. ⁸⁶ This information is extracted from the 1759 Army List, in which the marines, who were paid out of the naval budget and generally regarded as part of the navy, somewhat oddly appear. The seven honourables amongst the marine officers, it should be added, included six Scots. Given the limited financial resources available to many Scottish noble families, this is perhaps not surprising.


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following October given a royal pardon conditional upon his joining the navy.⁸⁷ There is also some evidence that justices acting on their own authority bundled men off to the navy. In July 1740 William Artis was ordered by magistrates in the North Riding of Yorkshire ‘to be sent to Whitby and from thence on board some of his Majesty’s shipps of warr for committing a riotous assembly in Yarm’.⁸⁸ Twenty years later, an apprentice accused of disobeying his master’s orders was sent by a County Durham magistrate to ‘the Regulating Captain’ commanding a local press gang.⁸⁹ Smugglers were thought to be particularly appropriate recruits, given their skill in seamanship, and at least some of them seem to have been passed over to the navy without worrying about any of the legal niceties: in September 1745 the crew of a smuggling cutter appears to have been transferred straight to a man-of-war after their vessel was captured by a customs sloop at Colchester.⁹⁰ There were also unemployed men or paupers, pressed under the provisions of the Vagrancy and Recruiting Acts, who were serving in the marines. On 18 April 1744 William Hunt, a Wiltshire magistrate, ‘Held the third sessions for enlisting soldiers upon the Pressing Act and there listed five men fit for marines.’⁹¹ The numbers of such men, and what proportion they comprised of the whole, is impossible to say. The few fugitive indications available, however, suggest that there were no more criminals sent to the navy than there were to the army, and that the marines received only a relatively small number of conscripts. It seems likely that the bulk of sailors and marines came from rather different backgrounds. Many men joined the navy as a result of the work of the press gangs. Most of these entrants were either experienced boatmen working on river barges, or, more often, seamen forcibly removed from the merchant marine. These recruits should be recognized as qualitatively different from the unemployed or paupers, and even from general labourers. They were, for the most part, skilled men, not society’s outcasts. Occasionally, they were even men of some distinction: Robert Kaye, one of the common seamen on board the Dublin in 1757, had been master of a merchant vessel before he was pressed.⁹² Skilled and semi-skilled men of other types also were to be found in the navy. Officers on the recruiting service were not always very scrupulous in their methods, and there were instances of apprentices being carried off, despite official prohibitions on their recruitment. Captain Anthony Kerly, searching for men in Exeter in January 1762, tried very hard to keep hold of three apprentices, despite the efforts of their masters to reclaim them: ‘they all Enter’d voluntarily into the Service’, Kerly complained to the admiralty.⁹³ ⁸⁷ Redington (ed.), Calendar of Home Office Papers, 13, 112, 114. ⁸⁸ J. C. Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records (North Riding Record Society, viii, London, 1890), 232. ⁸⁹ Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton (eds.), The Justicing Notebook (1750–64) of Edmund Tew, Rector of Boldon (Surtees Society, ccv, Woodbridge, 2000), 132. ⁹⁰ Ipswich Journal, 14 Sept. 1745. ⁹¹ Crittall (ed.), The Justicing Notebook of William Hunt, 27. ⁹² Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, R 1-96. ⁹³ ADM 1/2011, Kerly to Clevland, 16 Jan. 1762.

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On this occasion, the intervention of a local magistrate meant that the masters won, but at other times the navy was more successful. Peter Jones of Hammersmith, to cite just one example, was still an apprentice when he was pressed and taken on board the Essex in 1755.⁹⁴ Volunteers might also include men from a great variety of skilled or semi-skilled trades, lured by increased bounty money, often provided by local authorities keen to promote enlistment, or by tales of the great riches to be obtained in prize money. The marines, who would have been as eligible for prize money as the seamen themselves, certainly included in their ranks a fair number of men from artisan backgrounds. John Broomhill, an apprentice shoemaker, joined a marine regiment at the beginning of the Spanish war, just when expectations of profit from Spanish plunder were at their height. Similarly, we can speculate that the promise of untold wealth obtained at the expense of the Spanish would have been attractive to Richard Winter, a London distiller who had fallen on hard times and joined the marines at about the same time.⁹⁵ Also amongst the naval and marine volunteers, it seems, were dependants of some of the landed officers. Although we have no direct evidence for our period, in the American war many ships’ crews appear to have reflected the geographical origins of their officers, which suggests that landlord influence helped to fill the decks. At least some of these men, in all probability, were farm servants, or the sons of tenant farmers. As with the army, we can begin dimly to perceive a picture of the composition of the navy’s ratings and the marine rank and file far more complex and variegated than popular stereotyping acknowledges. The English and Welsh militia also included more of a cross section of society than might be imagined. The officers were supposed to be the leading landowners of their counties, and landed-property qualifications were carefully stipulated in the legislation reforming the militia in the Seven Years War. However, reforming the militia was a politically sensitive business, and in some counties the elite was deeply divided over the issue.⁹⁶ Consequently, many of those who had been expected to play a leading role refused to serve. In Gloucestershire, the Lord Lieutenant lamented that ‘In endeavouring to put the Militia Act in execution in this County, I have found the greater part of the Gentlemen resolved not to take any share in it’.⁹⁷ Besides these political considerations, there were also more prosaic reasons for reluctance to come forward. Once the militia was embodied for active service, it invariably was moved away from its home county. While Sir John Rogers, a senior officer in the Devonshire regiment, might declare himself ‘ready to go . . . wherever his Majesty Commands’,⁹⁸ by no means every landed aristocrat ⁹⁴ Tim Hitchcock and John Black (eds.), Chelsea Settlement and Bastardy Examinations, 1733–1766 (London Record Society, xxxiii, London, 1999), 98. ⁹⁵ Peter Durrant (ed.), Berkshire Overseers’ Papers 1654–1834 (Berkshire Record Society, iii, Reading, 1997), 83; Hitchcock and Black (eds.), Chelsea Settlement and Bastardy Examinations, 59. ⁹⁶ See Ch. 6. ⁹⁷ Gloucestershire RO, Ducie of Tortworth Papers, D 340a C26/6. ⁹⁸ Devon RO, Bedford Papers, L 1258/M/SS/M, bundle 1, Rogers to the Duke of Bedford, 26 June 1759.


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or gentleman was quite so keen.⁹⁹ The upshot was that many of the junior officer ranks in particular had to be filled by men from less elevated backgrounds. In the Lancashire regiment the colonel in 1760 was Lord Strange, the eldest son of the Earl of Derby and both the Lord Lieutenant and one of the MPs for the county. His lieutenant colonel and one of the captains were Townleys, members of an ancient family of Lancashire landowners, and his major was also from an established county lineage. Another captain was from a similarly old family. However, the rest of the officers were largely from obscure backgrounds, or had only acquired their landed qualifications recently.¹⁰⁰ In the Northumberland militia, some of the subalterns were described as ‘only farmers’.¹⁰¹ The rank and file of the militia were a decidedly mixed bunch. The original intention of the 1757 legislation was that every adult male of the appropriate age (with a few exceptions) would be eligible to serve, and that those men required to fulfil the county quota would be selected by ballot. In principle, then, the militia should have been a genuine cross section of the society that it was supposed to defend. In practice, however, many men avoided service by paying a fine or by hiring a substitute; those who could not afford such options might sometimes find that their employer paid instead. The proportion of men serving in person was therefore generally rather small. In the Bedfordshire militia, the February 1760 enrolments show that in three of the county’s hundreds only seventeen out of ninety balloted men actually served (just under 19 per cent); fifty-one were substitutes (nearly 57 per cent). The remainder of those balloted paid a fine, absconded, or, in one case, simply refused to serve. In one company of the regiment, mustered in March 1760, there were only eleven principals, as balloted men serving in person were called, out of fifty-three men present (just under 21 per cent).¹⁰² The usual assumption is that the substitutes, and those men who opted to serve themselves, must have been in desperate straits—the lowliest elements of society who could turn to no one to save them from such a fate. There is certainly evidence to suggest that many of them were from the bottom of the pile. Of 322 men enrolled in the Bury division of the Suffolk militia, 203 (or 63 per cent) were unable to sign their names.¹⁰³ But at least some militiamen came from a rather more elevated background. There were members of the Warwickshire militia who were able to vote in the Coventry election of 1761, which indicates that they were tradesmen who were sufficiently secure to have acquired the freedom of the ⁹⁹ See, e.g., Hampshire RO, Heathcote Papers, 63M84/422g, where Sir Thomas Heathcote explains on 5 Aug. 1759 that ‘some particular incidents have occurr’d which will render my serving as an officier in the Militia extremely inconvenient & prejudicail to me’, and therefore declines the honour. ¹⁰⁰ J. Lawson Whalley, Roll of Officers of the Old County Regiment of Lancashire Militia . . . from 1642 to 1889 (London, 1889), 137. Biographical information on those officers for whom it is available has been obtained from the standard sources, such as Burke’s Landed Gentry. ¹⁰¹ Cheshire RO, Stanley of Alderley Papers, DSA2, Isabella Carr to Margaret Owen, 1 Sept. 1760. ¹⁰² Nigel Hutt (ed.), Bedfordshire Muster Lists 1539–1831 (Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, lxxi, Bedford, 1992), 96–101. ¹⁰³ East Suffolk RO, Quarter Sessions Records, B 505/1/1.

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borough.¹⁰⁴ The ranks of the Hertfordshire militia, meanwhile, included William Smith, a tailor, William Welch, a grocer, Thomas Clark, the son of a farmer, and Robert Ward, who was himself a farmer.¹⁰⁵ In Lord Bruce’s company of the Wiltshire militia, there were Gilbert Hayes, a gamekeeper, Edward Park, a tailor, Levi Goodman, a miller, and two ‘husbandmen’ (in this instance, almost certainly farmers)—John Walter of Stanton St. Bernard and Edward Piper of Collingbourne Kingston.¹⁰⁶ Also in the Wiltshire Regiment were George Abree, a tailor of Great Wishford, and Thomas Fitz, a farmer of Dinton.¹⁰⁷ What would have induced such men to serve? Leaving aside patriotism or local loyalty, we should note that militia service was for a finite period—three years, unless the militiaman decided to hire himself out as a substitute for a further term—that the militia, though it was deployed away from its home territory for much of the time, did not serve abroad, and that militiamen’s families—unlike the dependents of serving soldiers or sailors—were paid an allowance while the militiamen were on duty.¹⁰⁸ There were sound reasons, in other words, for even well-established artisans, tradesmen, and farmers to believe that a spell in the militia need not be disastrous. The unreformed Irish militia, arrayed in 1745 and again in 1756, contained many more such men. Indeed, we have already seen that the Irish militia included a true cross section of Protestant society, since nearly every Protestant male of military age would have been required to make himself available for service. Given the occupational and denominational structure of contemporary Irish society, this meant that the militia was essentially a force in which the officers were drawn from the Anglican landed elite and the rank and file comprised tenant farmers and artisans who were either Anglicans also, or, in Ulster, largely Presbyterians. When the County Tyrone militia was arrayed in the autumn of 1745, it was envisaged that the absentee Earl of Abercorn, the leading landowner in and around Strabane, would return to lead his Protestant tenants.¹⁰⁹ In eastern Ulster, where the Presbyterians of Scots origin were particularly numerous and Anglicans thin on the ground, it seems that some of the commissioned officer posts—probably mainly the junior ones—were filled by Dissenters too, despite the provisions of the Irish Test Act, which debarred non-Anglicans from holding public office.¹¹⁰ This suggests that these corps were still more middle class in character. Most of the ¹⁰⁴ [Anon.,] An Alphabetical List of the Poll for Members of Parliament, to Represent the City of Coventry. Taken on Wednesday the 25th and Thursday the 26th Days of March 1761 (Coventry, [1761]). This publication also shows that several serving soldiers voted in the election. ¹⁰⁵ Hertfordshire Family and Population History Society, Hertfordshire Militia Lists: Harpenden (Militia Series, no. 12, 1989), 53; Braughing (Militia Series, no. 29, 1992), 52, 57, 60; Much Hadham (Militia Series, no 72, 1997), 14. ¹⁰⁶ Wiltshire RO, Ailesbury of Savernake Papers, 9/34/107, ‘A list of the Rt. Honable Thos. Ld. Bruce’s Company of the Wiltshire Militia From the Time of its being Embodied on the 22nd. June 1759’. ¹⁰⁷ Hampshire RO, Jervoise of Herriard Papers, 44M69/G6/1/3/3/8. ¹⁰⁸ For more on this, see Ch. 4. ¹⁰⁹ Gebbie (ed.), Introduction to the Abercorn Letters, 12. ¹¹⁰ Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland, vii. 650.


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poor and marginal would have been excluded from involvement in the Irish militia, for the simple reason that the vast majority of men who fell in this category were Catholics. Volunteer corps appear to have been no less well-stocked with the ‘middling sort’. Their leading officers were generally drawn from local elites—the gentry in rural areas and the gentry again, or prominent merchants and professionals, in the urban centres. Junior officer posts, however, might be taken by lesser merchants and tradesmen in the towns, and by farmers in the countryside. The rank and file of the volunteers was often mixed; in some instances, local subscriptions or gentry largesse provided enough money to equip and even pay ordinary volunteers— during the ’Forty-five rebellion, William Thornton, a Yorkshire gentleman, was said to have commanded a company of seventy volunteers, ‘arm’d, cloth’d, and paid at his own expence’¹¹¹—which meant that men of no means could join volunteer corps. However, generally speaking, the poor seem to have served alongside those who were able to pay their own way. In Hampshire, the volunteer association projected at Havant envisaged involving ‘Such of the Lower Sort of the People’ that could be trusted, but these specially selected men would merely be augmenting a body drawn from the town’s ‘Principal People’.¹¹² In Exeter, ‘about Eighty young Tradesmen’, ‘persons of Property’, formed a company that served alongside the volunteers who were supported by Devon’s subscription.¹¹³ Other corps were exclusively drawn from the middling ranks. Edinburgh’s volunteers, formed before the city was taken by the Jacobites in September 1745, was composed of local ‘tradesmen’, while a volunteer cavalry troop in County Cork, led by Viscount Perceval, was made up of his tenant farmers, and those on the Earl of Egmont’s estate.¹¹⁴ In London there was even a corps of lawyers.¹¹⁵ The volunteers attracted middle-class recruits in large numbers for a variety of reasons. The corps were not under formal military discipline, and so were not exposed to the rigorous corporal punishments inflicted on regular troops and the reformed militia. Volunteer associations made clear their local scope; they were intended for the defence of their own communities, and not for deployment elsewhere. This made part-time service, with training in arms in the evenings or weekends, compatible with the continued pursuit of a trade or profession. It also meant that volunteer service could be conspicuous where it mattered—in the very community in which the volunteer was already well known and respected or in which he wanted to become so. This survey suggests that a great many British and Irish males, from a great variety of backgrounds, experienced some form of military or naval service between 1739 ¹¹¹ Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 1672. ¹¹² BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32,705, fo. 223. ¹¹³ [Anon.,] The Disbanded Volunteers Appeal to their Fellow-Citizens (Exeter, 1746), 4, 9. ¹¹⁴ Penny London Post, or, The Morning Advertiser, 20–3 Sept., 4–7 Oct. 1745. For Perceval’s troopers see also Faulkener’s Dublin Journal, 9–12 Aug. 1746. ¹¹⁵ HMC, Lothian MSS (London, 1905), 154–5.

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and 1763. The numbers involved were much larger in the Seven Years War than in the War of the Austrian Succession, but in both conflicts the level and scope of mobilization sits uneasily with the received image of an age of limited warfare, in which armed forces were drawn from the unproductive and expendable sections of society. There were, of course, plenty of men to be found in the army and navy who were indisputably at the bottom of the pile, such as convicted criminals, paupers, vagrants, and unemployed labourers. But if we consider the armed forces as a whole—official and unofficial—then it must be said that skilled and semi-skilled craftsmen and retailers were present in much greater numbers than is usually appreciated. The ‘middling’ and artisan contribution was most apparent beyond the regular armed forces, in those corps where service was for a limited duration, or confined to the locality, or at least the country—that is, the English and Welsh militia and the volunteers. The volunteers, in particular, were for the most part middle class in character. The Irish militia, for reasons of religious exclusiveness more than anything else, was also dominated by the middling ranks. But even in the army and navy there were more soldiers and sailors from skilled and semiskilled backgrounds than might be imagined. This should not really surprise us. After all, the war years brought considerable economic turmoil, some of the victims of which were hitherto secure men, who saw a short period of military or naval service as a temporary refuge in a time of trouble. Recruitment was not usually for life in wartime, and the financial inducements increased with the augmentation of bounty money and the promise of prize money, especially in the navy and marines. The opportunity to practise a trade without restriction after the war also acted as an incentive for craftsmen to opt for a spell in the armed services, and a good many farmer’s sons, and, less frequently, even farmers themselves, appear to have joined the army or the navy to oblige their landlords. By the end of the Seven Years War in particular, when the regular armed forces had reached their peak, and the demand for manpower was too great to be met by the unemployed and economically marginal, recruits from these backgrounds were making an important contribution.

4 War and the Economy In November 1739, at the start of the conflict with Spain, the British House of Commons addressed the King, urging him not to make peace ‘till the Right of British Ships to navigate in the American Seas is acknowledged by the Spaniards’.¹ If this Anglo-Spanish war was very obviously and explicitly fought for economic advantage, the other struggles of the mid-eighteenth century were also viewed by contemporaries as contests for economic dominance. France was depicted as a rival that threatened British trade and British prosperity as much as British territories, the British royal family, British liberties, and the Protestant religion. In December 1743, Glasgow’s burgh council congratulated the King on his recent victory at Dettingen, which was seen as vital to both ‘the Brittish constitution and commerce’.² Likewise, at the beginning of the Seven Years War, an anonymous pamphleteer argued that increased taxes would be worth paying to defeat the French, for ‘should our Enemy prevail, will not our Manufactures be destroyed[?]’. Victory, on the other hand, according to another author, promised ‘The Destruction of the French Trade and Shipping’. Such a happy outcome, it was confidently asserted, would inevitably be followed by ‘the Rise of our own’.³ However, if many Britons seemed to believe that war against the Bourbons would bring benefits in the form of the protection and enlargement of commerce, the impact of armed conflict on the economy of mid-eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland was in reality much more complex. The aim of this chapter is to explore that multifarious impact. There are many difficulties involved in such an undertaking, and before setting out it might be wise to enter a few caveats and qualifications. There is no consensus amongst historians about the economic effects of war on Britain in the ‘long’ eighteenth century. T. S. Ashton argued many years ago that without the frequent and lengthy armed conflicts of the period ‘the Industrial Revolution might have come earlier’.⁴ In complete opposition to this view, A. H. John believed that the ¹ PH, xi. 213. ² Robert Renwick et al. (eds.), Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow (11 vols., Glasgow, 1882–1916), vi. 155. ³ [Anon.], The Man’s Mistaken Who Thinks the Taxes So Grievous as to Render the Nation Unable to Maintain a War (London, 1755), 11; [Anon.], The State of the Nation Consider’d, in a Letter to a Member of Parliament (London, [1746]), 4. ⁴ T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1959), 83. For similarly negative assessments, see J. G. Williamson, ‘Why was British Economic Growth so Slow during the Industrial

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wars of the first half of the century ‘exerted, on the whole, a beneficial influence on the economy’, whereas Larry Neal has gone so far as to claim that the Industrial Revolution ‘occurred precisely during and because of the Napoleonic wars’.⁵ Other historians offer balanced accounts of costs and benefits, but avoid coming down in favour of either side.⁶ Such caution is understandable. Information is obtainable on certain individuals, companies, and sectors of the economy, but rather less exists to provide guidance on general trends. The few national statistics that we have must be used with considerable care: even figures for imports and exports, and government expenditure, can be misleading.⁷ This deficiency points to a further difficulty. Contemporaries used the language of the national interest, especially during and in the run-up to the mid-century wars, implying that there was a single national economy, but in truth there were many regional economies, which responded largely to local stimuli. The demands generated by London’s growing population were undoubtedly helping to create an integrated national economy, but its tentacles did not yet embrace all parts of Britain, let alone all parts of Ireland. Indeed, Ireland’s place in this chapter is perhaps more problematic than in any of the others. Though its economic development was clearly linked to Britain’s—Britain was a significant consumer of Irish exports, as were the British colonies in the Caribbean—Ireland was subject to trading restrictions much greater than those that operated in Britain, and the objective of those restrictions was to protect British manufacturing and trading interests from Irish competition. It follows that Ireland’s economy was not always moving in parallel with Britain’s. Even the different climate produced different economic conditions; while the harvests of 1759 and 1760 were good in England, and grain prices were accordingly low, in Ireland these years saw poor harvests, high prices, and large grain imports.⁸ As in other areas of enquiry, however, the case for including Ireland is, on balance, stronger than the case for excluding it. After all, during both mid-century wars (as in the previous War of the Spanish Succession and the subsequent American and French Revolutionary Revolution?’, Journal of Economic History, 46 (1984), 687–712; R. A. Black and C. G. Gilmore, ‘Interest Rates and Crowding Out during Britain’s Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 50 (1990), 109–31. ⁵ A. H. John, ‘War and the English Economy, 1700–1763’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 7 (1955), 343; Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1990), 218. See also J. L. Anderson, ‘Aspects of the Effect on the British Economy of the Wars against France, 1793–1815’, Australian Economic History Review, 12 (1972), 1–20; and Phyllis Deane, ‘War and Industrialisation’, in J. M. Winter (ed.), War and Economic Development: Essays in Memory of David Joslin (London, 1975), esp. 100–1. ⁶ See, e.g., Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1914 (London, 1969), 43–8; Francois Crouzet, ‘The Impact of the French Wars on the British Economy’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution (London, 1989), 189–209; H. V. Bowen, War and British Society, 1688–1815 (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 5. ⁷ See, e.g., R. V. Jackson, ‘Government Expenditure and British Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century: Some Problems of Measurement’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 43 (1990), 217–35. ⁸ L. M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland since 1660 (London, 1972), 74.

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Wars) proposals for union between Britain and Ireland were advanced, partly for security reasons, but also on the grounds that a proper incorporating union would allow Irish resources to be more effectively tapped for the war effort.⁹ Irish merchants, it should be added, looked to the Royal Navy for protection for their trading vessels, and both merchants and farmers in Ireland benefited from the British Government’s increased spending on the armed forces. We need also to take account of certain conceptual difficulties. Isolating, for analytical purposes, economic themes is remarkably tricky. We enter a world where everything seems to be connected with everything else. Disaggregation, while necessary if we are to begin to understand what was happening, always runs the risk of oversimplifying or artificially compartmentalizing. Then there is the still more fundamental problem of distinguishing the impact of war from the impact of other contemporaneous events or developments. In truth, such a separation is neither possible nor wholly desirable. British and Irish people living at the time appear to have seen war as merely part of a larger picture—a view heavily influenced by providential religion.¹⁰ Harvest failures and cattle plagues had nothing to do with armed conflict as such (except to the extent that the increased movement of troops around the country in time of hostilities could help to spread disease and increased pressure on already limited food supplies),¹¹ but when these disasters struck in wartime, they tended to seem so much worse. If to contemporaries war’s impact was best understood alongside and in connection with other economic variables, we, too, should recognize that armed conflict often made its deepest impression when it exacerbated or intensified the effects of other events. A further issue is the difference between the macro and micro. The impression created by the few national statistics compiled at the time, or that have been calculated by modern economic historians, is often at odds with the evidence at the level of individuals, companies, and even sectors of the economy. The aim here is to consider both the macro and the micro, generally by calling on micro examples to illuminate, qualify, or even challenge the macro picture.

DESTRUCTION AND LOSS Richard Davenport, a young officer in the Horse Guards, was horrified by the suffering he witnessed amongst the civilian population of the Austrian Netherlands while he was serving with the allied army in the autumn of 1745: ‘whoever has seen the misery of a country, which is the seat of war’, he told his brother, would do anything in their power to avoid such a ‘public calamity’ befalling their own ⁹ See, e.g., [Anon.,] An Essay on the Inequality of our Present Taxes, Particularly the Land-Tax; and On the Means to Raise, by an Equal, Easy Taxation, the Necessary Supplies Within the Year (London, 1746), 50–1; Malachy Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved; In a Series of Dissertations (2 vols., London, 1757), i. 268–400. ¹⁰ See Ch. 7. ¹¹ See, e.g., BL, Egmont Papers, Add. MS 47001A, fos. 63–4.

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people.¹² For most of the eighteenth century the British and the Irish did indeed avoid such a fate. Not until the great rebellion in Ireland in 1798 were significant areas of territory to experience at close quarters war’s destructive face. Before the 1790s, invasion was feared, but did not come. It should be remembered, however, that Britain and Ireland were the scene of military operations during the midcentury wars. We need not concern ourselves overly much with the brief French landing in Ireland in February 1760, which was on a par with other small-scale incursions in other eighteenth-century conflicts: Thurot’s force of some 600 troops burnt and plundered much of Carrickfergus,¹³ but made no forays into the surrounding area. The Jacobite uprising of 1745–6, on the other hand, merits fuller consideration. It was the threat of a Jacobite invasion of England that inspired Davenport’s observations, and other contemporaries also imagined that property within reach of the marauding Highlanders was bound to be exposed to seizure or destruction. So long as the Pretender’s forces continued to occupy Carlisle, Viscount Lonsdale wrote in December 1745, ‘the countys of Cumberland and Westmorland must be subject to contributions and pillaging’.¹⁴ The worst fears of many people were not realized, but the losses experienced should not be ignored. As with all conflicts, some of the destruction and waste was self-inflicted. To prevent, or at least slow down, the advance of the victorious Highlanders, orders were issued in November 1745 to demolish, or make unuseable, key bridges in Cheshire.¹⁵ More damaging for many individuals was the authorized seizure of property and its application to military purposes, together with the unsanctioned plundering routinely carried out by soldiers outside their home territories. Even before the Young Pretender’s army marched south into England, large numbers of horses were impressed from landed estates in the vicinity of Edinburgh, and reports circulated of ‘great robberies committed upon the gentlemen and farmers’ houses all round the city’, and seizures of money, arms, and horses ‘thro’ south of Scotland’.¹⁶ In England itself, the Jacobite forces appear to have plundered widely, especially on their retreat from Derby in December 1745. Some Highland officers claimed that the indiscipline was the work of people who had attached themselves to the Jacobite troops but ‘did not at all belong to the Army’.¹⁷ For our current purposes, the important point is that losses were incurred and damage was done. At Leek in Staffordshire, the houses of the principal inhabitants were said to have ¹² C. W. Frearson (ed.), ‘To Mr. Davenport’, being Letters of Major Richard Davenport (1719–1760) to his Brother (Society for Army Historical Research, Special Publication, no. 9, London, 1968), 57. ¹³ See, e.g., NMM, Elliot Papers, ELL/400, Isaac Haddock to John Elliot, 19 Mar. 1760. ¹⁴ HMC, Lonsdale MSS (London, 1893), 126. ¹⁵ Cheshire RO, Cholmondeley of Cholmondeley Papers, DCH/X/9a/5, 18–20. ¹⁶ HMC, Various Collections (8 vols., London, 1901–13), viii. 111, 115. See also NLS, Spottiswoode Papers, MS 2933, fo. 173. ¹⁷ David Wemyss, Lord Elcho, A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland in the Years 1744, 1745, 1746, ed. Evan Charteris (Edinburgh, 1907), 281; Robert Fitzroy Bell (ed.), Memorials of John Murray of Broughton (Scottish History Society, xxvii, Ednburgh, 1898), 224.

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been ‘totally stripped and plundered’ or ‘ransacked and disfigured’. The ‘linen, wearing apparel and everything valuable’ was taken. At Penrith in Cumberland, the Jacobite army was similarly reported to have ‘behaved extremely ill and plundered several houses and shops’.¹⁸ Back in Scotland, the Highlanders continued to seize property; indeed, according to one government supporter, ‘The Rebells commit horrid ravages wherever they come, and are much more cruell, as well as covetous, than when they march’d southward.’¹⁹ The Earl of Findlater’s house and estate were occupied by the Jacobite forces for several weeks in early 1746, during which time they helped themselves to his hay and corn; subsequently, another body of troops under Lord John Drummond gutted the house, ‘scarce leaving so much as a pair of tongs or a pot or a pan’. Findlater’s losses were estimated at about £8,000.²⁰ It was not, of course, just the Jacobites who seized, stole, and destroyed. British troops campaigning in the Highlands, especially when they were dealing with residual resistance after Culloden, deprived still more inhabitants of their properties. Although there was no realization in full of the vengeful desires of the more bitter officers, such as the Earl of Albemarle, who wanted to lay ‘the whole Country waste and in ashes’, there was considerable resort to fire, sword, and seizure. One of the officers employed on these punitive expeditions reported the removal of ‘above two thousand head of Catle’ from the lands of Cameron of Lochiel, while another wrote of detachments sent out from Fort Augustus ‘burning & destroying every thing Wee meet’.²¹ British property-owners experienced further and more serious losses beyond the home islands. If we take the broad view of the British nation that many contemporaries did, then we should no doubt take account of the British-Americans living on the frontier of the North American colonies who were subjected to destructive raids by the French and their Native American allies. Settlers in the backcountry saw their property destroyed or seized in both of the mid-century wars.²² More strictly defined British- or Irish-owned possessions were also exposed to attack in North America and in other arenas of imperial conflict. As in Britain during the ’Forty-five rebellion, capital assets were destroyed to prevent their being used by the enemy. Lewis and Benjamin Way, to give just a single ¹⁸ HMC, Various Collections, viii. 139, 151. See also SP 54/26, fo. 163; BL, Anson Papers, Add. MS 15,955, fo. 45. ¹⁹ H. D. Macwilliam (ed.), Letters of Patrick Grant, Lord Elchies (Aberdeen, 1927), 132. ²⁰ Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 1615. ²¹ Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), The Albemarle Papers (2 vols., Aberdeen, 1902), i. 214; West Sussex RO, Goodwood MS 111, fos. 200, 259–60. See also HMC, Rutland MSS (5 vols., London, 1888–1905), ii. 196–7. Shortly after the battle, Cumberland had promised ‘to pursue these vermin amongst their lurking holes’ (SP 54/30, fo. 30A). For more on the punitive raids on Highland communities, see W. A. Speck, The Butcher: The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression of the ’45 (Oxford, 1981), esp. 164–70; Jeremy Black, Culloden and the ’45 (Stroud, 1990), 177–8; Christopher Duffy, The ’45: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Untold Story of the Jacobite Rising (London, 2003), 528–34. ²² See, e.g., H. S. L. Dewar (ed.), The Thomas Rackett Papers (Dorset Record Society, iii, Dorchester, 1965), 14.

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example, learned at the end of the Seven Years War that a vessel they part-owned had been burnt at Benkulen in Sumatra on the orders of local East India Company officials. The Ways had to wait nearly twenty years for compensation.²³ More often, however, it was the enemy themselves who caused the problem. In the same French attack on the East India Company settlements on the west coast of Sumatra, Stokeham Donston, a young company official recently arrived from England, had his house ‘plundered and robbed of everything they thought worth taking, and the rest destroy’d’; ‘most of us have lost our all’, he wrote despairingly.²⁴ Losses at sea—either to enemy privateers or to naval ships—were a particularly important feature of the War of the Austrian Succession, when well over 3,000 merchant vessels were captured or destroyed. French privateers, based mainly in Breton and Norman ports, were especially active in the waters to the south and south-west of England and to the south of Ireland. At the beginning of February 1746, French vessels were said to have taken 100 British merchant ships in the preceding month.²⁵ But the Spanish, though often obliged to sail longer distances to reach their prey, were also able to make significant inroads. In June 1740, Nathaniel Alloway, the captain of a vessel seized by a Spanish privateer, reported from San Sebastian that the town’s harbour contained ‘a great Many Prizes’.²⁶ William Stout, a Lancaster tradesman, noted that his town suffered badly in 1741; three merchant vessels had been captured by the Spanish ‘and one lost by avoid[ing] being taken’. Stout valued these losses at £10,000, though he conceded that insurance would soften the blow.²⁷ There are no figures for total losses in the Seven Years War, but we know that French privateers were again a great menace. In August 1757 Admiral Hawke was reporting that they were causing considerable distress on the Sussex coast, and had driven two vessels ashore at Arundel. Even after November 1759, when the Royal Navy effectively confined the French fleet to port, privateers continued to attack British merchant ships; indeed, at this time, with their navy rendered hors de combat, the French seemed to give commerce raiding still more emphasis. As late as April 1762, Capt. Richard Knight was reporting to the Admiralty from Bearhaven, in Bantry Bay, that ‘many Privateers of the Enemy have frequented Cape Clear & taken several Ships’.²⁸ In many cases, the inroads of the privateers were made good once peace returned. However, Bristol’s losses seem to have contributed to secular decline. In ²³ Buckinghamshire RO, Way of Denham Place MSS, D 192/18. ²⁴ Nottinghamshire Archives, Nevile of Thornley Papers, DD. N 223c/22. There were, of course, fraudulent or exaggerated claims of losses, which were difficult to confirm or disprove, especially at a distance. See, e.g., Berkshire RO, Benyon Family Papers, D/EBy B5, John Starke to Richard Benyon, 8 Nov. 1752. ²⁵ Alan Saville (ed.), Secret Comment: The Diaries of Gertrude Savile 1721–1757 (Thoroton Society, Record Series, xl, Nottingham, 1997), 267. ²⁶ Somerset RO, Dickinson Papers, DD/DN 200, letter to Graffin Prankard, 30 June 1740. ²⁷ J. D. Marshall (ed.), The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster 1665–1752 (Manchester, 1967), 231. ²⁸ Ruddock F. Mackay (ed.), The Hawke Papers: A Selection 1743–1771 (Navy Records Society, Aldershot, 1990), 160; ADM 1/2011, Knight to John Clevland, 17 April 1762.

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the years 1739–41 alone, seventeen Bristol ships were taken, valued at more than £59,000.²⁹ Bristol’s shipping was particularly exposed to enemy attack as its vessels engaged in the transatlantic trade tended to use sea-lanes to the south of Ireland, which were the hunting grounds of both French and Spanish privateers. The other great western ports of Liverpool and Glasgow, by contrast, suffered much less because most of their inward and outward bound transatlantic shipping sailed around the north of Ireland, and their re-exports to continental Europe went around the coast of northern Scotland and into the North Sea. These waters were not free from the menace of privateers,³⁰ but they attracted the attention of fewer enemy predators than either the Atlantic approaches to the south of Ireland or the western end of the English Channel. Over time, Bristol’s strategically vulnerable position meant that it lost ground to Liverpool so far as the slave trade was concerned, and to Glasgow in the Chesapeake tobacco trade.³¹

L ABOUR SUPPLY We have seen that in both mid-century conflicts the army and the navy were greatly expanded, and in the Seven Years War the militia was called out for active service. In economic terms, this meant that many thousands of men were temporarily removed from the labour market. It could be argued that mobilization had a minimal impact in this regard, because soldiers were overwhelmingly drawn from the least productive and most expendable sections of society. However, as we have seen, this view, expressed by some contemporaries, and repeated by many historians, needs to be significantly qualified.³² The old image of the composition of the rank and file can be deceiving. In the Austrian war it might be fair to say that, for the most part, military recruitment soaked up the unemployed or the underemployed; even so, there is some evidence of wage inflation that might, in part at least, reflect recruiting pressures. In Belfast and Armagh, Protestant towns where enlistment into the army was permitted during the conflict, wages increased for both craftsmen and general labourers, while in overwhelmingly Catholic Kilkenny, where recruiting was not allowed, pay rates remained unchanged.³³ In the Seven Years War the extent of mobilization was such that skilled and semi-skilled men were taken into the army in large numbers. The Irish ²⁹ W. E. Minchinton (ed.), The Trade of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century (Bristol Record Society, xx, Bristol, 1957), 152. ³⁰ See, e.g., Durham University Library, Baker Baker Papers, 1/76 and 80, for the capture of merchant vessels by French privateers operating in the North Sea in 1760. ³¹ Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 11–32, 220–1. ³² See Ch. 3. ³³ Liam Kennedy and Martin W. Dowling, ‘Prices and Wages in Ireland, 1700–1850’, Irish Economic and Social History, 24 (1997), 88, 93, 94. The difference might, of course, be explained simply by reference to the general state of the economy in the two areas: Ulster seems to have benefited from a general mid-century upturn rather earlier than the rest of Ireland.

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Lord Lieutenant noted as early as August 1756 that recruiting was receiving very little encouragement from ‘the Gentlemen of the Country, who I am inform’d begin to be apprehensive that their Manufactures will suffer by losing so many Men’.³⁴ In England, employers regularly complained of the loss to the military of valued workers or apprentices. By the last years of the struggle, George Wansey was lamenting that in the Wiltshire textile district, which had experienced heavy recruiting, there was a shortage of ‘workfolk’ and rising wages.³⁵ Likewise, in October 1760 George Bubb Dodington was writing of the high ‘price of labour’ that only peace would reduce.³⁶ The Earl of Breadalbane was similarly hoping for a peace in July 1761, as industry in Scotland was ‘almost at a Stand for want of hands’. Those who remained were able to command enhanced wages by threatening to leave their masters and join the army. ‘This epidemical distemper’, he continued, ‘has extended itself to the Highlands, where the Tenants . . . are obliged to give above 50 p.ct. more than usual for labourers, & have very great difficulty in finding them’.³⁷ So far as the navy is concerned, the press-gangs were looking for trained seamen, and in both wars they forcibly removed a great many of them from the maritime labour force, with predictable consequences for wage rates. In peacetime able seamen on London merchant ships were paid about twenty-five shillings a month. During the Seven Years War, this rose to sixty or seventy shillings a month. Nicholas Rodger cites an example of a cooper’s mate at Cork being offered seventy shillings a month for a West India voyage, and sixty shillings a month to go to Quebec.³⁸ Nor was it just mariners who were affected by the expansion of the navy. Workers employed in private shipyards repairing or building vessels received additional pay in wartime to induce them not to move to royal docks. As early as September 1740 the Navy Board was informing the Admiralty of shipwrights flocking to the royal yards, and a consequent rise in wages for shipwrights in the private yards from twenty shillings a week to twenty-six shillings.³⁹ This whole process went into reverse, of course, at the end of the wars, when large numbers of men were demobilized and the price of labour was driven down.⁴⁰ ³⁴ BL, Holland House Papers, Add. MS 51,382, fo. 69. ³⁵ Julia De L. Mann (ed.), Documents Illustrating the Wiltshire Textile Trades in the Eighteenth Century (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, Records Branch, xix, Devizes, 1964), 41. For the recruitment of apprentices, see Angus J. L. Winchester (ed.), The Diary of Isaac Fletcher of Underwood, Cumberland, 1756–1781 (Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, extra series, xxvii, Kendal, 1994), 22. ³⁶ John Carswell and Lewis Arnold Dralle (eds.), The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington (Oxford, 1965), 393. Dodington, it should be added, was a consistent opponent of the German war. See also London Evening Post, 24 April 1762, letter from ‘Civis’; and James Grieg (ed.), The Diaries of a Duchess: Extracts from the Diaries of the First Duchess of Northumberland (1716–1776) (London, 1926), 10, for the employment in 1759 of the Norfolk militia in harvest work near Portsmouth. ³⁷ Bedfordshire RO, Lucas of Wrest Park Papers, L30/9/17/40. For another indication of a shortage of manpower by the last years of the war, see NLS, Mure of Caldwell Papers, MS 4942, fo. 117. ³⁸ N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1986), 126. ³⁹ Daniel A. Baugh (ed.), Naval Administration 1715–1750 (Navy Records Society, London, 1977), 217–18. ⁴⁰ For the steps taken to alleviate the problems associated with demobilization, see Ch. 5.

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There were longer-term implications for the labour market, however. Debilitating injuries or recurring health problems caused by military or naval service meant that some men could never return to their pre-war occupations. Thomas Roades, for instance, ‘Contracted an inveterate Scurvy’ while in the army, and even after his discharge was afflicted with such illness that he was often ‘incapable of following his trade as a Journeyman Carpenter’.⁴¹ Other soldiers or sailors did not come home at all. Desertion was an endemic problem, and although a fair number of those who fled the services wanted to return to their families, this was not always either possible or desired. Sailors who jumped ship in an overseas port would often become crew members on board a foreign merchant vessel. William Spavens left his ship in the East Indies in the summer of 1762, hoping to go to Calcutta, ‘engage in country ships’, and make his fortune. He reached no farther than Batavia, where he joined the service of the Dutch East India Company.⁴² Soldiers who absconded abroad often attempted to merge into the civilian population, especially in the English-speaking colonies, and some enlisted in other armies. We have seen that direct recruitment into foreign forces also occurred: in the War of the Austrian Succession there was active enlistment of Scots into regiments in French and Dutch service, and throughout our period there were thousands of Irish Catholics who left their country to join the Irish brigade of the French army. For obvious reasons, such foreign enlistment often meant permanent exile.⁴³ Other men, who might have wanted to return home, died on service.⁴⁴ Battles could cost the lives of a significant proportion of those engaged. Of the 5,000 or so Jacobite troops who fought for the Stuarts at Culloden, about 2,000 were killed during or just after the battle. Highland troops, this time in George II’s service, were also slaughtered in large numbers in July 1758 during the disastrous assault on the heavily fortified French positions near Ticonderoga; a Scottish historian has written of the Forty-second Regiment, or Black Watch, being ‘massacred’ in General Abercromby’s hasty and ill-considered attack.⁴⁵ In most campaigns, however, death in action was numerically much less important than death by disease. Operations in the West Indies were particularly likely to thin the ranks. In October 1762, General Albemarle, writing from Havana, complained that ‘Martinique was an ice house to this Cursed place . . . we have all been Sick, have buried a good many’.⁴⁶ Problems could occur in much cooler climes, however. ⁴¹ Corporation of London RO, Miscellaneous MSS, box 206, Sir John Langham’s Charity. ⁴² N. A. M. Rodger (ed.), The Narrative of William Spavens, a Chatham Pensioner, Written by Himself (London, 1998), 43–4. Spavens, it should be added, did eventually return home. ⁴³ See Ch. 3. ⁴⁴ See Ch. 3, for more on this subject. ⁴⁵ Black, Culloden and the ’45, 168, 174; Bruce Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars 1688–1783 (London, 2001), 144. See also Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflict: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1618–1991 (2 vols., Jefferson, N.C., 1992), i. 174. ⁴⁶ Nottingham University Library, Galway MSS, GaM 98. See also, for the situation in the equally disease-ridden West African outposts, Wiltshire RO, Money-Kyrle of Whetham Papers, 1720/1011, ‘Return of the Men that died of 5 Comps. of the 86th. Regiment of Foot since their Arrival at Goree’, 24 Aug. 1760.

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The garrison of newly captured Quebec was ravaged by scurvy; by the spring of 1760 nearly 700 men had died since the occupation of the city.⁴⁷ Disease was not confined, of course, to soldiers or sailors. Civilians who came into contact with the navy or the army were likely to suffer too. In October 1746 a fever was raging in Durham that was attributed to the Dutch troops who had been quartered in the city the previous winter.⁴⁸ The Dutch were also blamed by the Archbishop of York for spreading ‘very mortal distempers’ in other towns in which they left their sick, particularly Leeds. Given the pronounced hostility to the Dutch at the time, which the Archbishop clearly shared, it might be tempting to dismiss such a claim as another aspect of anti-Dutch prejudice.⁴⁹ But the burial records of Leeds parish church suggest that the accusation was credible: in 1746 there were 525 burials, compared with 280 in 1745, 225 in 1744, and 271 in 1743.⁵⁰ War also facilitated overseas migration, which had a more profound effect on the labour supply of Britain and Ireland than all the casualties associated with hostilities. Service in the British army was viewed by many of those who were recruited as a means of migration. This applied particularly to the Scots who joined Highland regiments raised for American service in the Seven Years War; it seems that there was a widespread expectation that, at the end of the war, when the men were discharged, they would be able to settle in the colonies. This line of thinking received much encouragement at the conclusion of the Austrian Succession conflict. Proposals for the peopling of Nova Scotia with demobilized soldiers appeared in 1748 and were put into practice in 1749. At the end of the next war, the Government again offered former soldiers land grants in North America in the Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763.⁵¹ However, demobilized soldiers were merely part of a much larger transatlantic migration that can be connected with the successful outcome of the Seven Years War. The conquest of Canada and the expulsion of the French from North America convinced many British and Irish people that the colonial frontier was a less dangerous place. In 1762 Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes wrote of the sailing for America of large numbers of Ulster Protestants, ‘most of them ⁴⁷ R. O. Alexander (ed.), ‘The Capture of Quebec: A Manuscript Journal’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 18 (1939), 162. ⁴⁸ Edward Hughes (ed.), Letters of Spencer Cowper, Dean of Durham, 1746–74 (Surtees Society, clxv, Durham and London, 1956), 71. ⁴⁹ R. Garnett (ed.), ‘Correspondence of Archbishop Herring and Lord Hardwicke during the Rebellion of 1745’, English Historical Review, 19 (1904), 739. For Herring’s hostility to the Dutch, see, e.g., 733. For general disapproval of these and other allies, see Ch. 8. ⁵⁰ George Denison Lumb (ed.), The Registers of the Parish Church of Leeds from 1722 to 1757 (Thoresby Society, xx, Leeds, 1914), 444–66. ⁵¹ See Otis Little, The State of Trade in the Northern Colonies Considered (London, 1748); and for examples of ex-servicemen residing in North America after the Seven Years War, AO 12/21, fos. 194–5, AO 12/32, fos. 29, 72–4. For the view that for the Scots army service was seen as an opportunity to settle in America, see P. J. Marshall, ‘A Nation Defined by Empire, 1755–1776’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995), 210.

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manufacturers’.⁵² Between 1760 and 1775 around 55,000 Irish Protestants made this journey, a figure that represents something like 2.3 per cent of the total Irish population. In Scotland enthusiasm for America was, if anything, even greater. Over the same period about 40,000 Scots, roughly 3 per cent of the entire population of the country, crossed the Atlantic to settle in the colonies. The British state, which had actively encouraged the peopling of the new North American colonies in 1763, took fright at the scale of the movement. Indeed, so sizeable was this post-war migration, that by 1773 the spectre of depopulation was causing concern in government circles.⁵³ These fears, as we now know, were exaggerated, at least at a national level. Population continued to grow, despite wartime casualties and a large-scale migration encouraged by victory in the Seven Years War. England’s population has recently been estimated at 5,537,000 in 1739 and 5,669,000 in 1748. Between 1755 and 1763 it is thought to have risen from 5,943,000 to 6,162,000. The same demographic statistics show one period of population decline in the mid-century wars, and one of very limited growth. However these two instances—the first in 1742–3, and the second in 1757–8—appear to have been connected with the lagged effect on birth rates of poor harvests, and owed very little, so far as we can tell, to wartime conditions. In Ireland we can see a similar pattern, though on a much more dramatic scale. Estimates suggest a sharp fall in the size of Ireland’s population in the early stages of the War of the Austrian Succession, but this demographic disaster—perhaps an eighth of the Irish people perished—was a direct result of the subsistence crisis of 1740–1, not of the conflict itself.⁵⁴ From this comparative perspective, war’s impact again appears minimal, but we should recognize that the contemporary perception was often very different. Worries about depopulation in the aftermath of the Seven Years War followed on from the concern in the 1740s about the size of the British population, a concern at least partly influenced by the demands and casualties of war—especially war against France, with its population about double the size of Britain and Ireland’s, and its enormous (and at this time largely successful) army. It was no coincidence that during and just after the War of the Austrian Succession various schemes were canvassed to promote demographic growth and husband manpower—from hospitals and orphanages, to the naturalization of foreign Protestants.⁵⁵ ⁵² James Kelly (ed.), The Letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick 1757–62 (Aberystwyth, 1990), 106–7. ⁵³ Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve of the Revolution (London, 1987), 26, 36–42, 57–66. ⁵⁴ See David Dickson, Arctic Ireland: The Extraordinary Story of the Great Frost and Forgotten Famine of 1740–41 (Dundonald, 1997). ⁵⁵ See Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark, Del., and London, 1995), 209–10. Worries about population, it should be added, should also be seen as an aspect of the wider concern about the need for national revival in the face of a continuing French threat. See Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), esp. ch. 3, and Ch. 5 in this book.

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To pay, equip, supply, and maintain a greatly expanded army and navy, to repair and build ships and fortifications, to meet the costs of the reformed militia in the Seven Years War, and to pay subsidies to foreign auxiliaries and allies required enormous sums of money. Nor should we forget that a sizeable portion of the war expenditure of the North American colonies was ultimately borne by the British exchequer. Massachusetts was reimbursed £180,000 for its efforts in the War of the Austrian Succession, and after the next conflict the British Parliament covered the cost of everything except the raising and paying of the provincial troops themselves—a bill that amounted to about half of all colonial war expenses.⁵⁶ Even so, the mid-century wars could have been still more costly for the British state. Some military spending was covered by private individuals, by voluntary subscriptions, or by local government. The King himself contributed from his own personal revenues. He allocated his portion of prize money to the Treasury, and in 1758 he paid for 5,000 Hanoverian troops to be taken into British service.⁵⁷ Recruiting costs were subsidized by county elites: in October 1745 a subscription was launched in Suffolk that succeeded in raising sufficient money to offer new army entrants four guineas on top of the normal bounty, while in March 1756 the Gloucestershire gentry agreed to ‘procure what Men they can inlist, and give them an additional Guinea a Man’.⁵⁸ A good number of boroughs, not to be outdone by the gentry, made public funds available to encourage recruiting into the army and navy. In October 1745, the corporation of Liverpool subscribed £1,000 to the raising of a regiment in the town; in the next war it offered bounties to encourage naval recruitment and entry into regiments enlisting in the locality. Leicester’s corporation pledged to pay bounties to townsmen joining either the army or navy, and in November 1758 contributed £100 to a subscription to encourage recruitment into the army for three years or the duration of the war. In Ireland, the corporation of Dublin committed resources to the encouragement of naval enlistment. ⁵⁹ In both peace and war, parishes in England and Wales were obliged to support the widows or necessitous wives and children left behind ⁵⁶ Ian K. Steele, ‘The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected: Governance of the British Empire, 1689–1784’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 120–1. ⁵⁷ Reed Browning, ‘The Duke of Newcastle and the Financing of the Seven Years’ War’, Journal of Economic History, 31 (1971), 371. ⁵⁸ [Anon.,] A List of the Subscribers of the County of Suffolk for the Support of His Majesty’s Person and Government, and the Peace and Security of the Said County in Particular, on the Occasion of the Rebellion (Ipswich, 1746), 3, 28; Gloucestershire RO, Ducie of Tortworth Papers, D 340a C26/2. ⁵⁹ Sir James A. Picton (ed.), City of Liverpool Municipal Archives and Records (Liverpool, 1907), 107, 115, 118, 119–20; Mary Bateson, Helen Stocks, and G. A. Chinnery (eds.), Records of the Borough of Leicester (7 vols., London, Cambridge, and Leicester, 1899–1974), v. 184–5, 191–4; J. H. Gilbert and R. M. Gilbert (eds.), Calender of the Ancient Records of Dublin (19 vols., Dublin, 1889–1944), x. 167.

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by soldiers and sailors on active service, but that burden inevitably increased when during wars many more men were mobilized into the armed forces. In the Seven Years War a new responsibility was placed on English and Welsh local authorities: parochial poor rates and county rates experienced upward pressure as the wives and children of militiamen on service were given weekly allowances from the public purse. On 14 January 1762 Buckinghamshire’s county treasurer paid out nearly £589 for this purpose to compensate overseers of the poor in different parishes, while between January 1760 and January 1763 Cheshire’s treasurers similarly dispersed an average of more than £1,314 a year.⁶⁰ There were also additional miscellaneous items of local expenditure, resulting from war, that were met from local resources. In Bristol, the local authorities had to foot the bill for the maintenance of disbanded Irish soldiers waiting for a passage across St George’s Channel.⁶¹ In Cheshire, the county authorities were in January 1746 obliged to meet half the cost of building a new bridge at Warrington to replace the one destroyed to block the advance of the Highland army in the previous November, while in nervous anticipation of the arrival of the Highlanders, Chester’s corporation paid for the strengthening of the city’s defences, particularly the repair of the various gates.⁶² Many war-related local charges seem to have been deeply resented—the counties pressed (unsuccessfully) for central funds to be employed to meet the costs of militiamen’s families, and even local initiatives, such as Chester’s fortification repairs, were often followed up by requests for compensation from the Treasury.⁶³ Indeed, the vast majority of the costs associated with the mid-century wars had to be carried by the legislatures of the British Isles. In the case of the Dublin Parliament, the extra burden was relatively small: Ireland’s military establishment was estimated to require about £750,000 for 1753–5; to cover the costs for 1761–3 the estimates went up, but only to a little over £1 million.⁶⁴ For the Westminster Parliament, however, the costs rose exponentially rather than incrementally. In 1748 the armed forces were costing £8.1 million, or more than four-and-a-half ⁶⁰ Buckinghamshire RO, Quarter Sessions Papers, Q/FBm 13, 118–32 and Q/FBm 14, 133–8; Cheshire RO, Quarter Sessions Records, QAAS/1 and 2. ⁶¹ E. E. Butcher (ed.), Bristol Corporation of the Poor 1696–1834 (Bristol Record Society, iii, Bristol, 1932), 110. ⁶² J. H. E. Bennett and J. C. Dewhurst (eds.), Quarter Sessions Records with other Records of the Justices of the Peace for the County Palatine of Chester 1559–1760 (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, xciv, n.p., 1940), 218–19; Cheshire RO, Chester City Records, Assembly Book 1725–85, A/B/4, fo. 115. ⁶³ J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue 1660–1802 (London, 1965), 168–73; Cheshire RO, Chester City Records, Assembly Book 1725–85, A/B/4, fo. 119. ⁶⁴ Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland, ix. 311, xiii. 169. The estimates for 1755–7 (x. 124) were actually slightly lower than those for 1753–5. See also William Henry, The Advantages of Peace, and the Means to Perpetuate the Present Peace. A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of Urney, on the 25th Day of Apr. 1749, Being the Publick Thanksgiving for the Peace (London, 1749), 20–1, where Ireland’s limited fiscal burden in the Austrian war is acknowledged. For an earlier claim that Ireland was paying as much as it could manage, see NLI, MS 694, ‘Some observations on the Taxes Pay’d by Ireland to Support the Government’, n.d., but probably 1720s.

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times as much as in 1738. The next conflict saw an even larger increase. In 1761 spending on the army, militia, navy, and ordnance—in excess of £16 million—was nearly seven-and-a-half times more than before the outbreak of hostilities.⁶⁵ Increased tax rates, and new taxes of various kinds, covered part of the bill. In both mid-century wars, the land tax rose to four shillings in the pound. This crude property tax on the landed classes produced a reliable but inadequate yield, and it was supplemented by a host of other expedients, mostly in the form of excises and other indirect imposts. In the Austrian war, new charges were introduced on wines, spirits, vinegar, and glass, and customs duties on imports were increased across the board (though the duty on tea was reduced in 1745). During the Seven Years War, customs duties were again increased, and taxes or duties on malt, beer and spirits, cards and dice, newspapers, houses and windows, soap, and coal all increased, and there was a new tax on offices in government pay. In 1754 and 1755 serious consideration was even given to levying parliamentary taxes in the North American colonies—which were at that time the principal arena of AngloFrench conflict—but Newcastle shied away from this option on the grounds that it would almost certainly provoke popular resistance.⁶⁶ Tax increases, considerable though they seemed to many contemporaries, could not cover anything like the full costs of the two wars. The gap between annual tax income and expenditure was often very large—£2.8 million in 1744; £3.5 million in 1746; £5.2 million in 1758; and a staggering £11.5 million in 1760 (much more, in other words, than total expenditure on the armed forces in the most expensive year of the Austrian war). To say that this gap was bridged by borrowing would be misleading, for borrowing was much more central to war finance than such a statement suggests, as a significant portion of tax revenue was used to service the interest payments. In late 1744 Henry Pelham was lamenting the need to ‘increase the debt above three millions more’,⁶⁷ and in the course of the whole of that war some £29 million was added. The next conflict saw a further and still more dramatic ratcheting-up of the National Debt. A loan of £5 million was secured in 1758; in 1760 Newcastle was obliged to negotiate for a further £8 million, in 1761 for £12 million more, and in 1762 for the same sum again. By the close of the war, the National Debt stood at a colossal £132.6 million, an increase of £60.4 million since 1754. It was not always easy to raise money through taxes or borrowing. Parts of Ireland and Scotland were so poor that their contribution to the yield from excises was always small, and during the War of the Austrian Succession there were gloomy reports from both countries describing a noticeable decline in this part of the revenue.⁶⁸ More importantly, the course of military operations affected public ⁶⁵ B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988), 579. Figures that appear without attribution in this chapter are taken (or calculated) from Mitchell’s invaluable compendium. ⁶⁶ Browning, ‘Newcastle and the Funding of the Seven Years’ War’, 347, 359–60. ⁶⁷ HMC, Buckinghamshire MSS (London, 1895), 109. ⁶⁸ Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 1610 and 1611.

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confidence, and when this was low, problems could ensue. Fears of a French invasion in early 1744 led to a reluctance to buy anything: ‘Every Body desires to keep as much Money by them as they can’.⁶⁹ This had an inevitable consequence on government revenue, much of which was raised by taxes on production and consumption. It also affected government stock, with nervousness leading to increasing liquidation and a fall in value, which in turn made it more difficult for the Government to raise new loans. The Jacobite rebellion exacerbated the situation. Before the battle of Prestonpans set alarm bells ringing, a Gloucestershire woman was wondering how, in such troubled times, ‘even ye Land Tax can be paid’.⁷⁰ As the victorious Highlanders prepared to advance into England, Pelham lamented that ‘what ready money there is in the Kingdom is pretty much hoarded up, and of consequence the raising our supplies difficult’. Even when the rebels had retreated to Scotland, confidence remained fragile. At the end of December 1745 Sampson Gideon, a financier and subscriber to government loans, wrote that no money could be raised ‘at any rate and if it continues I cannot point out which way the Publick will be furnished with the vast sums they must require’. The poor showing of the army at Falkirk in January 1746, it was feared, would be enough to ‘hurt the public Credit and retard the business of the Supplies’.⁷¹ Conversely, victories could have the opposite effect, even when the victories were achieved by Britain’s allies rather than the British armed forces themselves. The success of the Austrians and Piedmontese against the French and Spanish at Piacenza in June 1746 encouraged one stockholder to purchase another thousand three-percents.⁷² Despite the ups and downs, the system of war finance enabled British Governments to fund not only substantial armed forces raised at home and in the North American colonies, but also to pay for additional military muscle, especially from the German states. These subsidies greatly increased Britain’s war-waging potential, and were an important part of the effort to contain French power. In this sense, the system produced impressive results. Indeed, it can be said to have been a vital ingredient in Britain’s rise to great power status.⁷³ Historians now tend to downplay the less positive aspects of wartime taxation and public borrowing. Although the high tax burden is acknowledged, the British economy is generally seen as well able to bear such a burden. E. A. Wrigley notes that Adam Smith believed high taxation had undermined the Dutch economy but that he was apparently ⁶⁹ Countess of Cork and Orrery (ed.), The Orrery Papers (2 vols., London, 1903), ii. 185. ⁷⁰ Gloucestershire RO, Newton of Bitton Papers, D 1844, draft of a letter from Susanna Newton, 7 Sept. 1745. ⁷¹ HMC, Buckinghamshire MSS, 133; HMC, Lothian MSS (London, 1905), 156; Hughes (ed.), Letters of Spencer Cowper, 56. ⁷² Buckinghamshire RO, Way of Denham Place MSS, D/W 77/14, Nathaniel Newnham to Lewis Way, 15 Aug. 1746. See also, for the enthusiasm of investors at the end of 1746, William Muir (ed.), Selections from the Family Papers Preserved at Caldwell (2 parts in 3 vols., Maitland Club, lxxi, Edinburgh, 1854), pt. ii, vol. i. 82. ⁷³ The classic exposition of this argument is John Brewer,The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989).

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unconcerned about the effects of similarly high levels of taxation in Britain.⁷⁴ The impact of public borrowing on private investment is also seen as less dramatic than might be imagined. In part this is ascribed to the heavy foreign, and particularly Dutch, subscription to the National Debt. P. G. M. Dickson puts the Dutch stake at about 15 per cent in the middle of the eighteenth century.⁷⁵ More important is the belief that those who invested in government securities were not likely, in different circumstances, to have invested in more risky private ventures. In effect, it is argued, there were two distinct and discreet capital markets, one dealing in investment in the debts of governments—British and others—and the other concerned with investment in private projects in agriculture, industry, and commerce. The very separateness of these capital markets, in Huw Bowen’s words, ‘helped to ensure that there was no acute shortage of funds for either government borrowing or private investment’.⁷⁶ But notwithstanding the soundness of these judgements in general terms, they need to be qualified by evidence at the micro level that leaves a rather different impression. Contemporary sources send mixed messages about the burden of war-related taxation. Sometimes they suggest that the extra taxes could be absorbed without undue difficulty. A pamphlet published in 1757 calculated that a manufacturer who spent ten shillings a week would pay in excises only about eighteen shillings a year. At the beginning of the Seven Years War, Joseph Massie produced elaborate calculations of the tax burden for various income groups, which suggested that, in proportionate terms, the largest burden fell on lesser to middling landowners.⁷⁷ But Massie’s estimates, though intended to counter the argument that taxes were insupportably heavy, might well have overstated the burden on landowners, by failing to take account of income from sources other than land. Middling people in the urban areas appear, in some instances at least, to have been placed under remarkably little pressure. The surviving papers of Bryant Barrett, a laceman of the Strand, suggest that he was far from overstretched. His annual window taxes went up from £1. 8s. in 1754 to £3. 8s. in 1755 and £5. 2s. in 1759; however, his contribution to Lambeth’s poor rate remained unchanged throughout the Seven Years War at £3. 18s. per annum.⁷⁸ Other evidence, however, either asserts or implies hardship. We can dismiss John Shebbeare’s extravagant claims that ‘all ye Eat, Drink, or Wear; Health, ⁷⁴ E. A. Wrigley, ‘Society and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), 74–5. ⁷⁵ P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1658–1756 (London, 1967), 322. See also Jan De Vries and Ad Van Der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverence of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, 1997), 143; and J. F. Wright, ‘The Contribution of Overseas Savings to the Funded National Debt of Great Britain, 1750–1815’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 50 (1997), 657–74. ⁷⁶ Bowen, War and British Society, 65. ⁷⁷ [Anon.,] Proposals for Carrying on the War with Vigour, Raising the Supplies Within the Year, and Forming a National Militia (London, 1757), 49; [Joseph Massie,] Calculations of Taxes for a Family of Each Rank, Degree or Class: for One Year (London, 1756), appendices. ⁷⁸ Berkshire RO, Barrett and Belson Family Papers, D/EBt A20, Servants’ Wages receipt Book, 1749–92. Despite its title, this book contains much else besides records of payments to servants.

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Cleanliness, and Warmth; your Dwellings, and even the chearing Light of the Sun, which Heaven has given to all, are taxed to enrich Germans and exhaust you’—Shebbeare, after all, was one of the most virulent anti-Hanoverians of his day.⁷⁹ But other testimony is less easy to discount. William Stout argued in 1740 that increases in the local poor rate, combined with a rise in the land tax to four shillings in the pound, ‘very much affects trades men, and husband men, and farmers in the country’.⁸⁰ In March 1745 the likelihood that taxes would ‘continue high’ so long as the war lasted was advanced as an argument for renewing a lease on more favourable terms for the tenant.⁸¹ In 1757 the heritors (or freeholders) of Ross-shire, in a fit of pique at the window tax, even went so far as to decide not to pay this particular impost, though it seems that their resolution rapidly incurred the wrath of the barons of the exchequer.⁸² Whether the burden was as onerous as was implied is less important than the belief that it was excessive. A number of pamphleteers maintained that, while the country could in theory bear a high level of tax to support a war, the tax burden fell very unevenly, or injured trade and industry by increasing costs and therefore diminishing demand.⁸³ The perception that certain goods were now more expensive, we can surmise, would in at least some instances have induced more caution in individual spending decisions, to the detriment of both producers and retailers. It seems logical to expect such a general dampening effect, and also to anticipate some reduction in spending on particular items of popular consumption that were taxed more heavily during the wars, such as tobacco and beer.⁸⁴ Increased public borrowing also had a deleterious impact. Government stocks were viewed positively by investors because the rate of return was not restricted by the usury laws, which limited interest on private transactions to 5 per cent. Even ⁷⁹ [John Shebbeare,] A Third Letter to the People of England, On Liberty, Taxes, and the Application of Public Money (4th edn., London, 1756), 19. For anti-Hanoverian sentiment, see Chs. 6 and 8. ⁸⁰ Marshall (ed.), Autobiography of Stout, 229. ⁸¹ Nottinghamshire Archives, Foljambe Papers, DD. FJ 11/1/2/222. ⁸² Glasgow City Archives, Stirling of Keir Papers, T-Sk 11/3/97. ⁸³ See, e.g., the following works published during the Austrian Succession war: [Anon.,] Serious Considerations on the Several High Duties which the Nation in General, (as well as it’s Trade in Particular) Labours Under. With A Proposal for Preventing the Running of Goods, Discharging the Trader from any Search, and Raising the Publick Supplies by One Single Tax (4th edn., London, 1744); [Anon.,] An Essay on the Inequality of Our Present Taxes, esp. 24, 38–9; [Anon.,] An Enquiry into the Nature, Foundation, and Present State of Publick Credit. Wherein the National Wealth is Justly Calculated; the Present Inequality of Our Publick Taxes demonstrated; and the Consequences that May Naturally be Expected from a Dishonourable Peace, or the Continuance of an Unsuccessful War, Plainly Pointed Out (London, n.d. [but prob. 1747]), esp. 20–1, 23–4. ⁸⁴ J. V. Beckett and M. Turner, ‘Taxation and Economic Growth in Eighteenth-Century England’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 43 (1990), 377–403. The statistics produced in Peter Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 1959), 542–3, relate to production; determining whether there was a fall in consumption is very difficult. However, consumption was unlikely to have been significantly lessened by relatively modest increases in price: as Robert Bonell explained to Pelham in Sept. 1747, in the course of recommending an extension of duties on wines and spirits, ‘the people who have Addicted themselves to drink those Liquors, will have them let them Cost what they will’ (Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 305/2).

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though interest on government stock did not actually exceed the 5 per cent level in either the Austrian War or the Seven Years War, in both conflicts London bankers saw their deposits fall as savers transferred into public funds. Deposits in Hoare’s bank fell from £601,000 in June 1745 to £349,000 twelve months later; in the next war they plummeted from £763,000 in June 1758 to £515,000 in June 1759. As a result, those wishing to borrow money had to contend with a rate of interest that reached the legal maximum of 5 per cent on several occasions, whereas at other times the banks simply refused to offer any new loans.⁸⁵

OVERSEAS TRADE Any assessment of changes in the pattern of overseas trade must begin with an important caveat. The official figures tell only part of the story; beyond them lies an immeasurable quantity of illegal commerce. But if the extent of eighteenthcentury smuggling can only be guessed, all the indications point to illicit importations of tea, spirits, and tobacco on a considerable scale, and the sending out of substantial quantities of wool. We know that large gangs were employed in running goods ashore and transporting them to inland distribution centres.⁸⁶ It seems likely that smuggling, like legal trade, was subject to fluctuations; yet whether it increased or decreased in wartime remains uncertain. The incentive to smuggle undoubtedly increased during the conflicts of our period: customs duties rose in both wars in an attempt to expand government revenues, making it more worthwhile to bring in goods without paying the tax.⁸⁷ The concentration of troops to operate against an invading force might also have increased opportunities for smuggling, for in peacetime it was usual for a large portion of the army, particularly the cavalry, to be dispersed in small detachments on anti-smuggling duties.⁸⁸ On the other hand, naval vessels were more actively employed in the ⁸⁵ D. M. Joslin, ‘London Bankers in Wartime 1739–84’, in L. S. Pressnell (ed.), Studies in the Industrial Revolution Presented to T. S. Ashton (London, 1960), esp. 162–71. ⁸⁶ For discussion of the problems associated with estimating the extent of smuggling, see W. A. Cole, ‘Trends in 18th-Century Smuggling’, in W. E. Minchinton (ed.), The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1969), 121–43; and Hoh-Cheung and L. H. Mui, ‘Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling Reconsidered’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 28 (1975), 28–43. See also Robert C. Nash, ‘The English and Scottish Tobacco Trades in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Legal and Illegal Trade’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 35 (1982), 354–72. ⁸⁷ See, e.g., Berkshire RO, Neville and Aldworth Papers, D/EN O34/5, Parliamentary Diary of Richard Neville Aldworth, ‘1748’, where Aldworth notes the speech of an unnamed MP on the danger of import duties—‘Encourage Smuggling Nature of those Duties’. ⁸⁸ J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army 1715–1795 (Oxford, 1981), esp. 75–90. See also Paul Musket, ‘Military Operations against Smugglers in Kent and Sussex, 1698–1750’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 52 (1974), 89–110. It should be added, however, that significant numbers of troops were still deployed against smugglers during wartime, despite the concentrations in camps: see, e.g., West Sussex RO, Goodwood MS 107, Henry Pelham to [the Duke of Richmond], 20 Oct. 1744.

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Imports Exports

15000

10000

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0 1729

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Figure 1. The external trade of England and Wales, 1729–73 (official values in £000). Source: Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 448–9. Note: Exports include re-exports.

Channel during wartime, especially when invasion was feared. Smugglers themselves were also regarded as more of a threat at such times, as it was thought that they could be employed by the enemy as pilots. Vigilance and activity on the part of the revenue services and the troops available to assist them might therefore have increased. Also we should not forget that many smugglers were forcibly recruited into the army or navy, breaking up at least some of the established gangs and illicit distribution networks.⁸⁹ If we confine our attention to legal commercial activity, the picture seems less hazy. Figure 1 would seem to indicate that the overseas trade of England and Wales was not very badly affected by either of the wars of our period. The general trajectory is upward so far as the official value of both imports and exports is concerned, and the fluctuations in wartime appear no more dramatic than those in peacetime. We should note, however, that exports fell in the early years of conflicts—in 1739–40, at the start of the Spanish war; in 1744–5, when France formally became an enemy; again in 1755, as conflict with France began in earnest in North America; and finally in 1762, when war was declared on Spain. After these initial falls, however, exports recovered. There is a clear pattern of periods of turmoil and contracting trade, followed by adjustment to changed circumstances. To understand more fully this process, we need to look at both the negative and the positive influences on overseas commerce during the wars. The course of the fighting could itself be a significant negative factor, for defeats and uncertainty had a depressive impact. Uncertainty was probably at its height at ⁸⁹ For the recruitment of smugglers, see Ch. 3. For concern at the treasonable character of some smugglers, and the disruption of their ‘trade’ during wartime, see Cal Winslow, ‘Sussex Smugglers’, in Douglas Hay et al. (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975), esp. 130 and 134. Winslow’s essay, however, is more notable for its detailed coverage of the considerable extent of smuggling during the Austrian Succession conflict.

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the start of conflicts, when anticipation of difficulties, or even fear of invasion, led to an understandable reluctance to engage in overseas trade. But internal crises, particularly the Jacobite uprising, were still more unsettling, not least because they interrupted the productive activity upon which overseas trade depended. The military operations in Scotland during the ’Forty-five rebellion had a generally dampening effect on Scottish trade, and hit the Scottish linen industry badly. The British Linen Company found communications cut with the main area of coarse linen manufacture; unsurprisingly, sales of Scottish linen slipped in 1745 and 1746.⁹⁰ The success of the Jacobite forces also undermined consumer confidence in Ireland and England, creating a credit crisis and reducing the appetite for commercial transactions. The importance of military fortunes is underlined in a letter to the Earl of Abercorn from Ireland, dated 14 March 1746, which explains that ‘Our linen trade revived verry considerably on the retreat of the rebels from England, and now appears to be at a stand again, which must be oweing to their continueing in sutch large bodys in the Highlands’.⁹¹ At the beginning of both conflicts embargoes were laid on the export of provisions from Britain, Ireland, and the British colonies, to prevent supplies reaching the enemy. These prohibitions caused much concern, especially in ports such as Cork, which relied heavily on providing provisions for ships and for the plantations in the Caribbean islands.⁹² In 1746 one Limerick merchant was worrying that the embargo then in force was not only hindering outbound trade, but also deterring foreign vessels from coming to his port.⁹³ But it was not just the temporary loss of trade that caused anxiety; there were perceived to be long-term illeffects as former customers developed connections with new suppliers. In November 1740, William Pulteney told the British House of Commons that ‘if those nations who have hitherto been supplied with corn from Great Britain, should find a method of purchasing it from Denmark, or any other of the Northern regions, we may hereafter see our grain rotting in our storehouses’.⁹⁴ Even without formal embargoes, trading relations with some countries and regions could be badly affected. An Anglo-Spanish war not only interrupted trade with Spain itself, but with the whole Mediterranean basin. Exports from England to southern Europe fell noticeably during the Austrian war. In 1738 exports to this region were officially valued at £4.2 million. The following year this dropped to £2.8 million and in 1740 to just over £2 million. There was no recovery to over £3 million until 1749. The next war saw a repeat of the same process, albeit over a shorter period. Exports from Britain to southern Europe stood at £3.5 million in ⁹⁰ See, e.g., SP 54/26, fo. 141, for the general stagnation of Scottish trade; for the linen industry, see Alastair J. Durie (ed.), The British Linen Company 1745–1775 (Scottish History Society, 5th series, ix, Edinburgh, 1996), 23. ⁹¹ John H. Gebbie (ed.), An Introduction to the Abercorn Letters (Omagh, 1972), 15. See also, for continuing anxiety in Ireland, NLI, Fownes Papers, MS 3889/1. ⁹² See Ch. 10, for more on Cork’s provisioning trade. ⁹³ NLI, MS 827, Letter-book of a Limerick merchant, to John Archdeacon, 11 Feb. 1746. ⁹⁴ PH, xi. 849.

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1761. They were more than cut in half in 1762 (down to £1.6 million), only to bounce back to nearly £3.3 million with the coming of the peace in 1763. Contemporary business records leave little room to doubt that the war itself was the cause of this contraction. In February 1762, Stannard and Taylor, Norwich textile manufacturers, recognized the impossibility of shipping their products to Spain, ‘upon account of the late repture’.⁹⁵ Enemy naval vessels and privateers, as noted earlier, captured significant numbers of British merchant ships, especially in the War of the Austrian Succession. However, the impact of French and Spanish activity at sea went well beyond the loss of the ships taken. The fear that privateers were waiting to prey on merchant vessels was sometimes sufficient to confine ships to port. In June 1748 Spanish privateers operating off the Delaware Capes ‘intirly blockt up’ Philadelphia’s overseas trade.⁹⁶ As a direct consequence of the increased risk to shipping in general, insurance premiums soared. In September 1744, for instance, Daniel Goizen, a Bristol merchant, was lamenting the large increase in the premiums demanded by the underwriters to ensure ships and cargoes employed in the Levant trade. However, Goizen recognized that such a rise was inevitable; after all, the risk was considerable, as a vessel bound for Smyrna (now Izmir) had to avoid the French fleet at Brest, French and Spanish privateers in the Bay of Biscay and off the Iberian Peninsula, not to mention the Bourbon fleets and privateers in the Mediterranean.⁹⁷ Trade in commodities that ordinarily yielded only marginal returns suffered particularly. In 1746 George Udney, a London merchant, told a South Carolinian correspondent that ‘in war time your hitherto staple of rice will ill afford the charge of transportation’.⁹⁸ Further vessels were taken out of circulation by the need for shipping to carry soldiers, equipment, and provisions to the overseas theatres of operation. The Navy Board, the Victualling Board, and the Ordnance Board all hired merchant ships for their transportation requirements.⁹⁹ The troops sent to attack Rochefort in the Seven Years War were conveyed in forty-four transports, while the force destined for St Malo was carried in thirty-three vessels.¹⁰⁰ Larger expeditions naturally required still more transport: the regiments sent to North America from Ireland in the spring of 1757 left the Cove of Cork in a great convoy of eighty transports.¹⁰¹ Privateers distracted by the lure of prizes from the carriage of goods ⁹⁵ Ursula Priestly (ed.), The Letters of Philip Stannard (Norfolk Record Society, lvii, Cambridge, 1994), 102. ⁹⁶ Philip L. White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers 1746–1799 (3 vols., New York Historical Society, New York, 1956), i. 48. ⁹⁷ Somerset RO, Dickinson Papers, DD/DN 456, Goizen to Stephen Peter Godin, 15 Sept. 1744 (draft). ⁹⁸ East Suffolk RO, Saumarez Papers, HA 93/9/354. ⁹⁹ See David Syrett, ‘The Navy Board and Transports for Cartagena, 1740’, War in History, 9 (2002), 127–41, for the first large-scale use of hired civilian shipping of this period. ¹⁰⁰ [Anon.,] A Genuine Account of the Late Grand Expedition to the Coast of France (2nd edn., London, 1757), 11; A. W. H. Pearsall (ed.), ‘Naval Aspects of the Landings on the French Coast, 1758’, in N. A. M. Rodger (ed.), The Naval Miscellany, v (Navy Records Society, cxxv, London, 1984), 231–2. ¹⁰¹ BL, Blenchynden Papers, Add. MS 45,662, fo. 2.

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for part or even most of the time during the wars also represented a negative so far as overseas trade was concerned. If many British and Irish ships were unavailable for overseas trade, so were many British and Irish mariners. The crews of vessels in government service, those on board privateers dedicated to attacking enemy shipping, and, of course, the many thousands more who joined the Royal Navy severely depleted the labour force left for merchant ships. We know, too, that many mariners fled abroad to avoid the press gangs; in 1747 Adm. James Steuart described Lisbon as ‘the common asylum for Seamen, especially Irish’.¹⁰²The early stages of the Seven Years War seem to have seen a sharp fall in the number of mariners employed on merchant vessels. The net result, as we have seen, was a significant rise in maritime wages that added to the costs of trade. As if all this were not enough, wartime increases in customs duties—designed to raise more money to help the hard-pressed national finances—further discouraged legitimate (but not, as we have seen, illegal) overseas commerce by increasing the purchase price of the dutiable items. Fears about ‘the Ill Consequences that would attend the Laying any New Duty on Sugar’ were expressed in the Austrian Succession struggle, and in February 1759 a Bristol merchant wrote of the limited number of ships going to Virginia, partly on account of the ‘bad Crop’ there, but also due to alarms about ‘a farther duty or excise on Tobacco, Snuff, or on both, wch renders the present Cause of the Tobacco trade precarious’.¹⁰³ However, not all of these negative features were as disastrous as they appear, and there were also more positive aspects to war’s impact. If defeat and uncertainty diminished trading activity, by the same token British and allied victories boosted confidence and encouraged new ventures. The surge in exports in 1759–60 owed something, in all probability, to a mood of optimism created by triumphs in Europe and North America that seemed to bring ultimate victory—and peace— so much nearer. The naval triumphs at Lagos and Quiberon Bay in 1759 also had the benefit not only of reducing the risk of invasion, but also of effectively confining the French fleets to port for the remainder of the war: the increased sense of security no doubt helped to promote trade expansion. Similarly, the upward trend of exports in 1763, following on from a marked fall in 1762, can be attributed in part to confidence engendered by the capture of Havana and the seeming collapse of Spanish power in the Caribbean: as Admiral Keppel told his brother, ‘your Conquest makes the City & mercantile folk, talk high’.¹⁰⁴ Trade embargoes were deeply unpopular with merchants, but they were usually short-lived. The general embargo imposed in February 1740, so fearfully anticipated by many Irish provision merchants, was in force only until the following April. Other embargoes lasted longer, but were relaxed in certain respects some ¹⁰² Baugh (ed.), Naval Administration, 155. ¹⁰³ Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 11 Jan. 1748; Glasgow City Archives, George Kippen and John Glassford Papers, TD 132/64. ¹⁰⁴ East Suffolk RO, Albemarle Papers, HA 67/461/24, Keppel to Albemarle, 2 Dec. 1762.

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time before they were lifted. There was nothing to compare in length to the provisions embargo imposed in early 1776, which lasted for three years. On that occasion, there was a great deal of agitation amongst Irish merchants, but still more amongst opposition politicians who sought to exploit discontent to drive home their message about the subordination of Ireland’s interests to British political and economic priorities.¹⁰⁵ Many of the complaints voiced in the mid-century wars were also politically motivated. William Pulteney’s parliamentary speech of November 1740, quoted earlier, while no doubt reflecting contemporary concerns, should be seen in this light. Pulteney had been a bitter critic of Walpole’s Government since his own dismissal from office in 1725; the provisions embargo of October 1740 furnished him with another opportunity to attack his enemy. Markets were lost, or access to them was restricted, but other markets expanded. The trade in bread grains to the Dutch republic, which had been declining in the 1720s and 1730s, increased markedly during the Austrian war, partly in response to the demands of the allied armies operating in the Low Countries.¹⁰⁶ New markets were also opened up to British products, or existing markets were made more safe. In the closing stages of the Seven Years War, Wyndham Beawes, a writer on commercial matters, while waxing lyrical on the advantages of the capture of Canada, reminded his readers of the ‘near 100,000’ French inhabitants, who ‘with the Demand of Goods for the Indian Trade, will occasion a very considerable Consumption of British Commodities, and consequently greatly encrease the Exports to America’.¹⁰⁷ Beawes overstated the commercial value of Canada, but its acquisition certainly gave greater security to the older British North American colonies, and this helped to encourage the growth of their population—as we have seen—and the associated consumption of a greater quantity of British manufactures.¹⁰⁸ The French sugar islands seized during the Seven Years War provided a more important new market than Canada—in this case primarily for British slavers, who, having established themselves as efficient suppliers, continued to be involved in meeting local labour requirements even when most of the islands were restored to the French Crown at the peace.¹⁰⁹ In this instance, new sources of supply were perhaps almost as important as new markets. The British slave trade was boosted by the capture of French slave-trade outposts in West Africa. The seizure of the same French possessions also gave British merchants a dominant position in the trading of gum arabic, which was used in textile dyeing. Prior to the capture of Saint-Louis du Sénégal in May 1758, ¹⁰⁵ David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (2nd edn., Dublin, 2000), 162–3; Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), 208. ¹⁰⁶ David Ormrod, English Grain Exports and the Structure of Agrarian Capitalism 1700–1760 (Hull, 1985), 27. ¹⁰⁷ Lex Mercatoria Rediviva: Or, the Merchant’s Directory (2nd edn., London, 1761), 649. ¹⁰⁸ See Ch. 9, for colonial anxieties about the impact of a rising tide of British luxury goods entering North America once the post-war depression was over. ¹⁰⁹ See David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 216.

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British textile manufacturers had been reliant on French gum arabic, purchased through Dutch middlemen; now their needs could be met more cheaply.¹¹⁰ Losses to enemy naval vessels and privateers were more than counterbalanced by the captures made by British and British-American privateers and the Royal Navy. Between March 1744 and April 1746 alone, nearly 1,300 prizes were taken, with a total value of nearly £9.5 million, and in December 1756 New York privateers were reported to be taking so many ships that the port was ‘A good Market to purchase all sorts of Prize goods &Vessels at’.¹¹¹ It must be remembered, of course, that those who captured prizes were usually not the same people who lost vessels to enemy privateers. The Royal Navy was responsible for a large portion of the successes—some 52 per cent of the captures dealt with by the London Prize Court between 1739 and 1748 had been taken by naval vessels. But even if the micro picture is sometimes less positive than the macro, there were still individuals, communities, and regions that benefited. The Channel Islands gained heavily in both mid-century wars, with ships from Jersey and Guernsey taking a high percentage of the captures made by privateers.¹¹² The threat posed by French and Spanish naval vessels or privateers was reduced when merchant ships sailed in convoy, and to diminish both the risk and the costs, elaborate convoy arrangements were put in place. Indeed, even before the formal outbreak of war between the British and the French in May 1756, the Royal Navy was offering protection to merchant shipping.¹¹³ Hull was no doubt one of many ports that established a committee for convoys to facilitate the assembly of shipping and the securing of naval protection.¹¹⁴ There were, to be sure, disadvantages to the convoy system. The time wasted in waiting for sufficient vessels to be assembled could result in cash-flow problems or lost business, and when large numbers of merchantmen arrived in a foreign port all at once, the price of the commodities they were carrying naturally was depressed.¹¹⁵ However, the benefits of naval protection cannot be gainsaid, and the reduced risk was reflected in lower insurance premiums—ships sailing in convoy usually enjoyed a 5 to 10 per cent discount on their insurance.¹¹⁶ It would be easy to exaggerate the impact on the availability of ships for overseas trade of the Government’s hiring of British vessels to transport men, food, and ¹¹⁰ James L. A. Webb, Jnr., ‘The Mid-Eighteenth Century Gum Arabic Trade and the British Conquest of Saint-Louis du Sénégal, 1758’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 25 (1997), 37–58. ¹¹¹ Bodleian Library, MS Firth b. 4, fo. 17; Thomas M. Truxes (ed.), Letterbook of Greg and Cunningham 1756–57 Merchants of New York and Belfast (Records of Social and Economic History, new series, xxviii, Oxford, 2001), 289. ¹¹² David J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1990), 137, 141, 181 (tables 10, 12, and 18). ¹¹³ See, e.g., Somerset RO, Dickinson Papers, DD/DN 211, William Elworthy to Caleb Dickinson, 26 Nov., 12 Dec. 1755. ¹¹⁴ Hull RO, Borough Records, WM/3, Committee for Convoys Minute-book, 1757–82. ¹¹⁵ Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962), 328–9. ¹¹⁶ Patrick Crowhurst, The Defence of British Trade 1689–1815 (Folkestone, 1977), 58.

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equipment. The troops operating in North America might have needed British shipping to take them across the Atlantic, but in North America itself local vessels were hired for the army’s seaborne transport. In 1758, for instance, when General Monckton was sent with a detachment to attack St John’s River, the Bay of Fundy, and Cape Sable, his troops and their supplies were carried in transports ‘taken up at New York, Boston & Philadelphia’.¹¹⁷ Equally, the number of vessels taken out of normal mercantile service by privateering was not as large as it might seem. Many ships acquired letters of marque to enable them to capture any enemy trader that they should happen upon, not with the intention of actively seeking out enemy shipping. Armed with this authority to seize or attack an enemy should the opportunity arise, these so-called privateers continued to devote most of their energies to legitimate carriage of goods.¹¹⁸ Such shortages of merchant shipping as occurred were generally made good by neutral carriers. Indeed, neutral vessels were sometimes sought out because they could secure still lower insurance rates than British ships sailing in convoy. In 1762 Henry Hindley, a Wiltshire clothier, specifically asked that flax shipped from Rotterdam should be sent in a Dutch or other neutral vessel, which would bear an insurance rate of only 11⁄2 per cent, compared with 6 per cent for a British ship.¹¹⁹ It seems likely that as each of the two mid-century wars progressed, a growing portion of British and Irish wartime overseas trade was handled by foreigners, such as the ‘Neopolitan Merchant ship from Falmouth Bound to Leghorn’ that Cap. Mathew Buckle of HMS Russell recorded as having ‘spoke with’ while cruising in the Mediterranean in September 1747.¹²⁰ Many years ago, C. E. Fayle produced figures suggesting a modest but important shift to foreign carriers in the early stages of the Austrian Succession conflict.¹²¹ The foreign contribution almost certainly became greater as the war continued; at any rate, this was what happened during the next struggle. In Hull, peacetime trade was overwhelmingly conducted in British ships, but in 1759 only 59 per cent of vessels entering the port were British-owned.¹²² If foreign ships helped to compensate for the vessels taken out of overseas trade by the demands of Government and privateering, at the same time foreign mariners helped to fill the gap left by impressed seamen and full-time privateers. As maritime wages rose in response to the manpower shortage, Dutch and ¹¹⁷ Nottingham University Library, Galway MSS, GaM 37. See also BL, Haldimand Papers, Add. MS 21,666, fo. 28, for contracting for transports at Philadelphia. ¹¹⁸ See, e.g., Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, 132. ¹¹⁹ Mann (ed.), Documents Illustrating the Wiltshire Textile Trades, 53. ¹²⁰ West Sussex RO, Buckle MS 98, Logbook of the Russell, 13 Sept. 1747. ¹²¹ C. Ernest Fayle, ‘Economic Pressure in the War of 1739–48’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 68 (1923), 437. ¹²² Gordon Jackson, Hull in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Economic and Social History (Oxford, 1972), 133. See also Alexander J. Wall (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, v, 1755–1760 (New York Historical Society Collections for 1921, New York, 1923), 93, for the situation in London in 1756.

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Scandinavian sailors began to flock in, followed thereafter by mariners from further afield. By 1761 the number of merchant seamen working on British vessels seems to have been nearly as great as in 1755; yet by this stage in the war there were over 80,000 sailors in the navy (compared with about 12,000 in 1755).¹²³ British and Irish landmen no doubt contributed to this vastly increased total number of men employed at sea; they were certainly present as volunteers on naval vessels and privateers, and it seems logical to assume that they would have been attracted by the high wages available to merchant crews. However, foreign seamen, already trained and experienced in shipboard life, were unsurprisingly more valued by most merchant captains. A recent work on late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sailors suggests that about 75 per cent of the crews of London’s wartime merchant fleet were foreigners.¹²⁴

GOVERNMENT SPENDING Most of the money taken out of the economy in taxes, or transferred into the National Debt, found its way back in the form of government expenditure to recruit, pay, clothe, feed, and equip the armed forces, and to build ships for the navy. This war-related expenditure offered considerable opportunities for farmers, manufacturers, and traders throughout Britain and Ireland—at least during wartime itself; the scaling down of government spending once hostilities were concluded inevitably contributed to the economic downturns at the end of armed conflicts.¹²⁵ But before we explore these wartime opportunities in more detail, consideration should be given to the less favourable aspects of large-scale government spending. First of all, it must be emphasized that some of the money extracted from the economy was not simply recycled. Dutch investors in the National Debt might have used part of their dividends to buy more stock, but that was not necessarily and invariably British Government issue. Other states, committed to borrowing to support their war efforts, often offered more attractive rates of return. Moreover, that portion of the interest payments to the Dutch stockholders that was not reinvested, but spent, would probably have helped to stimulate the Dutch rather than the British economy. Subsidies to allies, which amounted to some £17.5 million between 1739 and 1763, can be seen in the same way. They were frequently ¹²³ Larry D. Neal, ‘Interpreting Power and Profit in Economic History: A Case Study of the Seven Years War’, Journal of Economic History, 37 (1977), 22 (table 1). It should be noted, however, that Neal’s conclusions have been questioned in Rodger, Wooden World, 419, and his total number of sailors aboard privateers is very different from the figures produced in Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, Appendix 2. ¹²⁴ Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650–1775 (London, 1998), 203. ¹²⁵ The bigger the wartime stimulus, the bigger the post-war downturn: for the political implications of the depression in Britain and the North American colonies after the Seven Years War, see Ch. 9.

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regarded as a drain on national wealth; John Shebbeare, in characteristically colourful language, asserted that the money used to pay foreign troops crossed ‘the English Channel, like Ghosts over the Stygian Ferry, never more to revisit this Isle’.¹²⁶ Similarly, British troops operating abroad drew most of their needs from local or proximate sources—the settled regions of the North American colonies in the case of the armies fighting against the French in Canada in the Seven Years War; Germany and the Low Countries in the case of the forces deployed in continental Europe in both mid-century conflicts. Even when more distant sources of supply had to be employed, they were not necessarily British or Irish. We know, for instance, that the army campaigning in Westphalia in the summer of 1762 fed its horses on oats purchased in Riga on the Baltic coast.¹²⁷ Even that part of the extra government spending that benefited producers and traders in the home territories might have been less helpful to British and Irish consumers. Increased government purchases probably had an inflationary effect. We have already seen that war could push up prices in a variety of ways—by increasing wages in certain sectors of the economy, by increasing shipping costs, and by tax rises on items of popular consumption. However, increased government expenditure on the armed forces might well have made a contribution also, especially as much of the spending was conducted through the medium of Exchequer, Navy, and Victualling bills that acted as a form of paper currency and therefore appreciably added to the quantity of money in circulation.¹²⁸ But these negative features must be placed in the proper context. Dutch and other foreign investors in the National Debt composed an important but far from dominant element amongst the stockholders. Most of the interest payments were to Britons—or, to be more precise, to Englishmen living in London or the southeast—and were used either to purchase additional stock or for general spending, much of which would have benefited the British economy. Foreign subsidies should not be wholly written off as lost money—at least some of it was repatriated in the form of orders for British goods and services. Piedmont-Sardinia, which received a subsidy of £200,000 a year from 1743, was said in 1747 to have doubled its consumption of British manufactures ‘within a few years’.¹²⁹ The British armies fighting in continental Europe drew more supplies from Britain and Ireland than might be imagined. We have seen that English bread grain exports to the Dutch republic increased during the War of the Austrian Succession, a ¹²⁶ [John Shebbeare,] A Second Letter to the People of England. On Foreign Subsidies, Subsidiary Armies, and their Consequences to this Nation (4th edn., London, 1756), 45. See also Shebbeare’s Third Letter to the People of England, 57; [Anon.,] Proposals for Carrying on the War with Vigour, 4; Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 311, Christopher Perry to Pelham, 22 Oct. 1747. ¹²⁷ Buckinghamshire RO, Howard-Vyse Papers, D/HV/B/5/7. ¹²⁸ Brewer, Sinews of Power, 193. ¹²⁹ Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 220, Thomas Wentworth to Pelham (from Turin), 8 Jul. 1747. We might also note that some contemporary commentators were relaxed about money expended in the colonies, as they assumed that it would help fund demand for British exports (see, e.g., [Anon.,] Proposals for Carrying on the War with Vigour, 3).

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development that can be linked to the demands of the allied armies operating in the Low Countries at the time. We might note, too, that British wheat and wheaten flour exports increased during the next conflict.¹³⁰ At least part of the explanation for this probably lies with the shipments of cereals destined to feed the British and allied armies campaigning in Germany. A report on the state of the magazine at Bremen, undated but probably compiled in October 1762, refers to wheat ‘received at Sundry times from England’. Other papers of about the same date suggest that the army was sustained not only by oats and barley shipped from East Anglian ports, but also by Irish butter, Carolina rice, and even coffee from newly conquered Martinique.¹³¹ We also know that the forces operating in Portugal at the end of the Seven Years War were provided with barley and oats from Britain.¹³² The British troops who had conquered Canada were supplied with Irish pork, which had the effect of greatly (if temporarily) increasing Irish pork exports to North America: these stood at 42,632 barrels in 1761–2, but had dwindled to a mere 7,207 by 1768–9. The army sent to the Caribbean after the fall of Montreal was likewise to have its pork shipped across the Atlantic.¹³³ As for the inflationary consequences of extra government spending, we need to be cautious. The extra money in circulation does not seem to have had a dramatic impact on prices generally. A cost-of-living index constructed for North Staffordshire suggests that in real terms prices actually fell in the last years of the Seven Years War, just at the time when the largest quantity of Exchequer, Navy, and Victualling bills were in circulation.¹³⁴ To understand this apparent paradox, we need to look at agricultural prices, which were by far the most significant variable in the cost of living for most people at this time. It was lucky, from an inflationary perspective, that the worst years of poor harvests and high cereal prices—that is, 1740–1 and 1756–7—coincided with the early stages of the two mid-century wars, when the unfunded debt was still small. At the end of the two conflicts, and especially at the end of the Seven Years War, when Exchequer, Navy, and Victualling bills were circulating in sufficiently large quantities to have an inflationary effect, it was equally fortunate that agricultural prices were low as a result of a series of good harvests.¹³⁵ However, if the increased money supply did not have the general inflationary impact that might be expected, we should acknowledge that government spending undoubtedly exerted an upward pressure ¹³⁰ M. J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995), 44 (figure 2.4). ¹³¹ Buckinghamshire RO, Howard-Vyse Papers, D/HV/B/5/13, 21A and B, D/HV/B/8/22. ¹³² BL, Loudoun Papers, Add. MS 44,068, fo. 218. ¹³³ Thomas M. Truxes, Irish–American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, 1988), 164; Nottingham University Library, Galway MSS, GaM 85. ¹³⁴ F. W. Botham and E. H. Hunt, ‘Wages in Britain during the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 40 (1987), 388–9 (table 2 and figure 1). ¹³⁵ See, ibid., 388 (table 2); and for London prices, East Suffolk RO, Kerrison-Bateman Collection, HA 85/3116/608, ‘The average price of wheat P Qr at Mark Lane from Dec. 1756 to Dec. 1763 monthly’.

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on the price of certain commodities. The large-scale purchase of Irish foodstuffs for the use of the navy and army seems to have more than compensated for the loss of traditional foreign markets, and had the effect of pushing up the cost of meat and dairy products in the hinterlands of the great provisioning ports of Cork, Waterford, and Limerick.¹³⁶ Consumers often complained at the inflationary effects of bulk foodstuff purchases, but almost everyone involved in producing or selling both food and drink must have welcomed the opportunities for enhanced profits. To give just one example to indicate the scale of the demands of the armed forces, in 1760 the Victualling Board’s purchases for the navy included 33,600 quarters of wheat, 34,100 hundredweight of flour, 41,400 hundredweight of biscuit, 96,700 hundredweight of beef oxen, 32,400 hundredweight of hogs, and 22,200 hundredweight of cheese.¹³⁷ The principal beneficiaries, of course, were the provisioning merchants who secured the government contracts, but there were a whole host of lesser winners—from farmers, millers, maltsters, and brewers to shopkeepers and sutlers. If the mobilized navy had more mouths to feed than most towns in Britain or Ireland, army camps also represented concentrated points of demand. Retailers in the vicinity of the encampments established in 1756 at Coxheath and Chatham benefited not only from the increased custom generated by the military on their doorsteps, but perhaps more importantly from the large numbers of visitors who flocked to see the troops. As Gertrude Savile noted after viewing the two camps, they provided ‘a fine Harvest’ for the local inns.¹³⁸ A similarly long and complex line of producers and retailers were advantaged in the textile and clothing industries. Clothing manufacturers and textile merchants secured lucrative contracts for supplying uniforms for the army and militia. Naval officers were also in uniform by the end of the Austrian war, and although the ratings were not, their clothing requirements were still met by the bulk purchase of particular items of attire, unflatteringly described as ‘slops’. As the army expanded at the beginning of the Seven Years War, the British Linen Company offered to provide shirts for various regiments, and some years later the Company secured a contract to supply the navy with ‘30,000 yds of best Osnaburghs’.¹³⁹ The money to be made from such contracts could be considerable. William Wilson, a London clothier, received nearly £4,000 for supplying Bragg’s Regiment of Foot in 1743–5.¹⁴⁰ In the two years 1760–2 alone, Fullagar and Todd delivered about 71,000 clothing items for the Royal Navy, worth £14,500, while Charles James, the navy’s principal clothing contractor, was paid nearly £45,000 in the same period for the shirts, ¹³⁶ See, e.g., Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland, 56. ¹³⁷ Rodger, Wooden World, 84. For the impact on the economy of purchases by the Victualling Board, see Christian Buchet, Marine, économie et société: un exemple d’interaction: l’avitaillment de la Royal Navy durant la guerre de sept ans (Paris, 1999). ¹³⁸ Saville (ed.), Secret Comment, 319. ¹³⁹ Durie (ed.), British Linen Company, 67, 105. See also 112. ¹⁴⁰ Sheila Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (145 vols., Wilmington, Del., 1975), xvi. 320–2.

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drawers, and trousers that he provided.¹⁴¹ These were the big winners, but behind them was a whole host of lesser beneficiaries—the textile manufacturers who provided James and his like with the necessary raw materials; suppliers of lace and buttons for uniforms, cockades for tricorne hats; shoe makers; and so on. Anthony and George Wagner, London hat-makers, to give an example, were paid £133 for the tricornes and grenadier caps that they supplied to the newly embodied Wiltshire militia in 1760.¹⁴² For his part, John Brearley, a Wakefield cloth producer, recorded in his memorandum books a great deal of profitable trade with Sir Samuel and Thomas Fludyer, London merchants and suppliers of clothing for the army.¹⁴³ The iron and steel industry was boosted by the increased demand for arms and munitions—cannons and cannon balls, muskets, pistols and shot, swords and bayonets. In the Austrian conflict, John Fuller found his Wealden ironworks so stretched that he was unable to produce all the Ordnance Board’s requirements as promptly as he had hoped; in June 1740 he was obliged to ask which cannons were the most urgent. Five years later, he was able to step up production to make 136 cannons, ranging from nine to thirty-two pounders.¹⁴⁴ In the next conflict, Stephen Fuller, John Fuller’s son, was again dispatching considerable quantities of cannons to London.¹⁴⁵ Indeed, the Seven Years War, when the armed forces reached record strengths and government contracts offered opportunities for considerable profit, seems to have acted as a particularly powerful stimulus. In 1759 the great Carron works in Scotland were first planned, and the Dowlais furnace in South Wales was built by Lewis and Company. By the end of the war, according to T. S. Ashton, eleven new smelting works had been opened.¹⁴⁶ Shipbuilding was likewise helped. In peacetime, the royal dockyards handled most of the work involved in building or repairing vessels for the navy. But during hostilities the demand for new ships outstripped the productive capacity of the yards, and rather than invest in large-scale expansion of facilities, and a very substantially increased labour force, the Government contracted with private shipbuilders to carry out its requirements. More than 130 warships were built in private yards from the beginning of the Austrian Succession war to October 1746.¹⁴⁷ Most ¹⁴¹ Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800 (London, 1997), 20. See also D. J. Smith, ‘Army Clothing Contractors and the Textile Industries in the 18th Century’, Textile History, 14 (1983),153–64. ¹⁴² Wiltshire RO, Ailesbury of Savernake Papers, 9/34/128, receipt of 2 Dec. 1760. ¹⁴³ John Smail (ed.), Woollen Manufacturing in Yorkshire: The Memorandum Books of John Brearley Cloth Frizzer at Wakefield 1758–1762 (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, clv, Woodbridge, 2001), 121. See also 54, 107, 127. ¹⁴⁴ David Crossley and Richard Saville (eds.), The Fuller Letters 1728–1755: Guns, Slaves and Finance (Sussex Record Society, lxxvi, Lewes, 1991), 130, 211. ¹⁴⁵ Somerset RO, Dickinson Papers, DD/DN 498, esp. John Ward to James Cooper, 2 Nov., 9 Dec. 1757, William Sanson to Cooper, 21 Nov., 6 Dec. 1757, and Fuller to Ordnance Board, 9 Dec. 1757 (draft). ¹⁴⁶ T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (2nd edn., Manchester, 1951), 128–33. ¹⁴⁷ Bernard Pool, Navy Board Contracts 1660–1832: Contract Administration under the Navy Board (London, 1966), 83–5.

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of the ships constructed in the private yards were small by the navy’s standards: the ten vessels produced in Hull between 1739 and 1747 comprised the fifty-gun Tavistock, and the sixteen-gun Raven, and between these two extremes, four ships of twenty guns and four of forty.¹⁴⁸ However, we can be confident that most shipbuilders—and the myriad of tradesmen who provided them with their materials— welcomed government business. A number of general points can be made about the economic impact of the midcentury wars. The first is that the two conflicts had rather different effects on the British Isles. In the Austrian Succession struggle, a lower level of mobilization of manpower meant a lesser mobilization of financial resources and therefore fewer repercussions for the economy in general; yet we should recognize that the early stages of the war coincided with a time when Scotland and Ireland, in particular, were grappling with crises caused by harvest failure and cattle disease; that enemy activity on the oceans led to pressure on overseas trade; and that in 1745–6, as a direct consequence of the Jacobite uprising, there was a severe credit crisis. In the Seven Years War, British overseas commerce was less badly hit—indeed, it experienced a great surge of growth in 1759–60, but the unprecedented expansion of the army and navy, and the embodying of the reformed militia, brought greater taxation and borrowing, wage inflation in certain occupations and in some locations, and a considerable stimulus to production in various sectors of the economy. But behind the differences is a unifying theme. In both wars economic growth seems to have been maintained. Estimates of British national income suggest that it rose only slowly in the War of the Austrian Succession—from £72.74 million in 1741 to £74.46 million in 1744—and more spectacularly in the later stages of the Seven Years War—from £82.43 million in 1759 to £89.86 million in 1762—but the crucial point is that it increased despite all the problems associated with the two conflicts.¹⁴⁹ Ireland seems to have experienced a similar upward trajectory. Exports of beef in 1749–52 were 49 per cent above the level of 1717–20, while butter exports were 76 per cent higher in 1765–8 than in 1737–40. As a leading Irish historian has written, from the middle of the century there was ‘a general upswing . . . of unprecedented strength’ that affected ‘nearly all sectors of the economy’.¹⁵⁰ At the macroeconomic level, therefore, it would be easy to conclude that the midcentury conflicts had a limited—or even minimal—impact. However, this conclusion would surely be misleading. Figures demonstrating continuing growth reveal nothing of the great changes and movements within the economy caused by war; in this sense, the macroeconomic perspective obscures as much as it illuminates. ¹⁴⁸ James Joseph Sheahan, History of the Town and Port of Kingston-upon-Hull (2nd edn., Beverley, [1866]), 367–8. ¹⁴⁹ P. K. O’Brien and P. A. Hunt, ‘The Rise of a Fiscal State in England, 1485–1815’, Historical Research, 66 (1993), 175 (table 4). ¹⁵⁰ Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland, 53; Dickson, New Foundations, 116.

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The micro view can point to rather more dramatic lurches, emphasizing, as it does, the often turbulent experiences of individuals, families, companies, sectors, and localities. What emerges at this level is a richly variegated picture of winners and losers. While contractors and suppliers to the armed forces such as the Fludyers in London and the Fullers in Sussex might have seen war as a blessing, it was no doubt less welcome to the owners of the sloop taken off the coast of north-east England at the beginning of February 1760, then ransomed for £335;¹⁵¹ to the Limerick merchant who lamented the deleterious effect on overseas trade of ‘these Cursed Warrs’;¹⁵² and to the innkeepers of Canterbury who gave up their licences because they were unable to bear the costs of quartering such large numbers of troops.¹⁵³ To the families whose homes were burnt down and cattle seized in the ‘pacification’ of the Highlands after Culloden, war must have seemed nothing less than an economic calamity. ¹⁵¹ Durham University Library, Baker Baker Papers, 1/76. ¹⁵² NLI, MS 827, Letter-book of a Limerick merchant, to Jonathan Gurnell, 22 Sept. 1745. ¹⁵³ TNA: PRO, Chatham Papers, 30/8/45, fo. 121.

5 War and Society In view of the scale of military and naval mobilization, and the economic turbulence just described, nearly twenty-five years of more-or-less continuous hostilities were almost bound to have an impact on British and Irish society. Sometimes this impact was only limited, in that it confirmed existing situations, or intensified developments already underway. War might have provided some new opportunities for women, but its more obvious result was to reinforce traditional views of the different roles of the two sexes. It accelerated, rather than caused, movement both up and down the social hierarchy. Similarly, it deepened, rather than created, social tensions based on wealth, power, birth, and upbringing. But in other areas, war emerges as a major shaping force in its own right. The problems associated with war preparation, war itself, mobilization, and demobilization encouraged a climate of social reform, in which philanthropic bodies, parliaments, and even the Government, sought to remedy perceived faults and flaws that had been brought into sharp relief. And while the Jacobite uprising of 1745–6 led to a concerted legislative effort by British ministers to destroy the feudal-style clan system in the Scottish Highlands, the wars of this period played an important part in the process by which British and Irish society became more militarized—a development perhaps exemplified by changing attitudes to the army, which in 1739 was still widely feared and suspected, but by 1763 was regarded much more benignly.

WOMEN, MEN, AND WAR The armed struggles of this time—like those earlier and later in the eighteenth century—tended to widen rather than narrow the gender division. There is, to be sure, a case for saying that war allowed women greater access to areas hitherto exclusively, or predominantly, male, and that it provided women with more opportunities. Women from aristocratic or gentry families recorded military and naval events in their diaries as frequently as did men from the same backgrounds, and often added their own analysis of their meaning and importance. The emphasis was sometimes different—the waste and costs of war were perhaps stressed

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more often in female writings.¹ But women felt free to comment on wartime developments, including the politics of the wars. Gertrude Savile, for instance, expressed her impatience at the lack of progress in the war against Spain in June 1740: ‘Admiralls Haddock and Ogle still at or near Port Mahon and Gibraltar. A vast Fleet (the greatest that ever was known) lye at home in our ports, but all do nothing’.² Similarly, in the next war, Lady Anson was dismissive of the impact of the raid on St Malo in June 1758: it would be difficult ‘to persuade the World’, she told her husband, ‘that being landed one Monday, & all embarked again by the next, Monday, without having seen a French Soldier, is making a Diversion of the Force of France’.³ Less privileged women might find that war presented opportunities of a very different kind. As more and more men were recruited into the armed forces, women were probably employed more extensively, or in other capacities, than in peacetime. The evidence for this development is scrappy, but in some localities women almost certainly played a different part in the agricultural labour force with so many men away in the army, navy, or militia.⁴ The movement of the armed forces around the country also meant that in certain places the marriage market was opened up in a way that might have benefited women. More men in the vicinity increased choice. It was surely no coincidence that in Falmouth there were 177 marriages in 1730–9, only eight of which (or 4.5 per cent) involved a member of the armed forces, whereas in 1740–8, the number of marriages increased to 219, in twenty-five of which (11.4 per cent) the man was a soldier or sailor. In the peace that followed, a mere three military or naval marriages took place out of a reduced total of 153 (2 per cent), but in the Seven Years War both the number of marriages generally and the proportion of military or naval marriages went up again—to 275 and seventeen (or 6.2 per cent), respectively.⁵ But these apparent advantages need to be set against some clear negatives so far as women were concerned. In places where servicemen were not concentrated— most places, in other words—the marriage market would have become more restricted rather than wider. With a significant number of men removed from their communities, choice was more limited for the women remaining in those communities. Wartime crises, furthermore, probably had the effect of delaying marriages, in much the same manner as poor harvests and high food costs did in ¹ See, e.g. Brian Fitzgerald (ed.),Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster (3 vols., Dublin, 1949–57), i. 179, 182; Cheshire RO, Stanley of Alderley Papers, DSA2, Isabella Carr to Margaret Owen, 23 Aug. 1760. ² Alan Saville (ed.), Secret Comment: The Diaries of Gertrude Savile 1721–1757 (Thoroton Society, Record Series, xl, Nottingham, 1997), 240. ³ Staffordshire RO, Anson Papers, D 615/P(S)1/1/4A. ⁴ For women’s employment in agriculture, see Bridget Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1994), esp. chs. 3–5. ⁵ Susan Elizabeth Gay and Mrs Howard Fox (eds.), The Register of the Baptisms, Marriages and Burials of the Parish of Falmouth in the County of Cornwall 1663–1812, pt. i, Marriages, Baptisms (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, Exeter, 1914), 23–46.

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peacetime. In Wimbledon, in Surrey, it was noticeable that the number of marriages in 1744, when French invasion threatened, and 1745, the year when the Jacobite rebellion was spreading alarm and despondency, were low compared with later in the Austrian war, and that the annual average number of marriages in 1739–48 (2.6) was somewhat lower than in the surrounding periods of peace (4.3 for 1729–38 and three for 1749–55).⁶ The arrival of a body of troops in an area was not necessarily good news for local womenfolk. Soldiers were not always looking for marriage partners, but as predominantly young men freed from the constraints of home, they were often looking for sexual gratification without personal commitment. The army and navy had reputations for lax morals, and contemporaries had no hesitation in assuming that any community with soldiers or sailors in its midst would see ‘more Whores and Bastards’.⁷ ‘Our Militia’, an outraged Welsh schoolmaster wrote in his diary in the closing months of the Seven Years War, ‘have made the City of Bristol, as they did Exeter, a Brothel.’⁸ Assumption and reality, as so often, were not entirely in accord, but there were certainly cases of illegitimate pregnancies or childbirths after soldiers or militiamen had been stationed in an area. In October 1745, for example, Cpl. Andrew Anderson of Bragg’s Regiment of Foot was called before Leicester magistrates to ‘answer charges re the bastard child of Sarah Hickling, widow’, whereas in May 1760 Isobel Robinson, of Monk Wearmouth in County Durham, confessed that she was ‘with child by John Jones of Captain Blomburgh’s Company Yorkshire Militia now at Durham’.⁹ Nor should we forget that rape and assault were assumed to be the fate of women unlucky enough to be in the path of an invading enemy. A print published at the very beginning of 1746, entitled The Highland Visitors and designed, presumably, to excite hostility to the Jacobites, depicts the invaders of Northern England not only plundering property, but also raping women.¹⁰ During the invasion itself, Lord Elcho, a senior officer in the Pretender’s army, noted that English people fled precipitously on the approach of the Jacobite forces: ‘When any of them was gott & ask’d why they run away so, they said they had been told that the army murder’d all the ⁶ The annual average for the Seven Years War (6.4) was markedly higher than for 1749–55, but only marginally higher than for the next six years of peace (6.2). See A. W. Hughes Clarke (ed.), The Parish Register of Wimbledon, Co. Surrey (Surrey Record Society, viii, London, 1924), 106–14. ⁷ Levi Fox (ed.), Correspondence of the Reverend Joseph Greene (Dugdale Society, xxiii, London, 1965), 44. ⁸ R. T. W. Denning (ed.), The Diary of William Thomas of Michaelston-super-Ely, near St Fagans Glamorgan 1762–1795 (Cardiff, 1995), 49. For similar expressions of horror at the immorality of army officers, see ‘The Diary of Thomas Gyll’, in John Crawford Hodgson (ed.), North Country Diaries (Surtees Society, cxviii, Durham, 1910), 202–3. ⁹ G. A. Chinnery (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, vii, Judicial and Allied Records 1689–1835 (Leicester, 1974), 91; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton (eds.), The Justicing Notebook (1750–64) of Edmund Tew, Rector of Boldon (Surtees Society, ccv, Woodbridge, 2000), 120. ¹⁰ BM 2671. See also Theophilus Cibber, The Association: Or, Liberty and Loyalty. Verses Occasion’d by the Present Unnatural Rebellion (London, 1745), 7, where reference is made to the ‘Lustful’ Highlanders.

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men & children & ravish’d the women’.¹¹ Again, assumptions and reality were not necessarily one and the same, but even nominally friendly soldiers could commit such offences—in March 1761 a cavalryman in a regiment recently arrived in Cheshire from Ireland was reported to have been charged with sexual assault.¹² For many women, as we have seen, war was characterized not by the arrival of soldiers, sailors, or militiamen in their communities, but rather by the departure of menfolk to serve in the armed forces.¹³ Separation was a common, and often painful, experience. The Duchess of Marlborough was greatly agitated by her husband’s imminent involvement in the first raid on St Malo in 1758: ‘If you love me as you say, you will take care of your Dr. Self when you reflect how absolutely necessary you are to my happyness’.¹⁴ Early in 1760, Ann Carnac told her son that she had been approached by two women in Dublin who had not seen their soldier husbands since their regiment went to India in 1754: ‘if you can give them any tiding of them it will be a great charity’, Mrs Carnac explained, ‘for they seemed to be in great grief ’.¹⁵ When John Seaford recruited some men into the Duke of Bedford’s new regiment in October 1745, he urged that they be sent out of the area quickly, as ‘Several of their Mothers & Sisters are overwhelmed in Tears and use all yr endeavours thay can to diswade ym from going’.¹⁶ We can only imagine the feelings of Mary Carter, left in Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire with her two children, when her husband enlisted as a soldier in 1758: in April 1764 he had still not returned home.¹⁷ What became of John Carter is unclear, but it seems that some men joined the armed services as a means of leaving their wives and families permanently. Others intended to return, but died before they could do so. Mary Willson, of East Grinstead in Sussex, lost her husband, a soldier in the Foot Guards, at Cartagena,¹⁸ whereas Martha Vandan, of Chelsea, was left to look after four young children after her husband, a trumpeter in the Horse Guards, was killed at the battle of Dettingen.¹⁹ Deserted wives and widows often became a charge on their local parishes, or the recipients of charitable relief—amongst those who received free care in Dublin’s Hospital for Poor Lying-in Women were the wives of soldiers and sailors on active ¹¹ David Wemyss, Lord Elcho, A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland in the Years 1744, 1745, 1746, ed. Hon. Evan Charteris (Edinburgh, 1907), 310. ¹² Adams’s Weekly Courant, 3 March 1761. ¹³ The two could come together, of course, as when men were recruited into the navy by press gangs: there are numerous examples of women, apparently trying to intervene to save their menfolk from being taken away, suffering physical attack from press-gang members. See, e.g., Morgan and Rushton (eds.), The Justicing Notebook (1750–64) of Edmund Tew, 105, 122, 129. ¹⁴ BL, Blenheim Papers, Add. MS 61, 667, fo. 1. ¹⁵ OIOL, Sutton Court Collection, Carnac Papers, MSS Eur. F. 128/23, 14 Feb. 1760. ¹⁶ Bedfordshire RO, Russell Papers, Box 769, Seaford to ——, 12 Oct. 1745. ¹⁷ Phyllis Hembry (ed.), Calendar of Bradford-on-Avon Settlement Examinations and Removal Orders 1725–98 (Wiltshire Record Society, xlvi, Trowbridge, 1990), 23. ¹⁸ Norma Pilbeam and Ian Nelson (eds.), Poor Law Records of Mid-Sussex 1601–1835 (Sussex Record Society, lxxxiii, Lewes, 2001), 153. ¹⁹ Tim Hitchcock and John Black (eds.), Chelsea Settlement and Bastardy Examinations, 1733–1766 (London Record Society, xxxiii, London, 1999), 44–5.

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service and the widows of men who had died in the army or navy.²⁰ The wives of militiamen on service in the later stages of the Seven Years War, as we have seen, were paid a weekly allowance, a development anticipated in the previous struggle, when the families of the men in Lord Gower’s fencible regiment were provided with maintenance from a local subscription.²¹ While this largesse was no doubt welcome to the beneficiaries—and in the case of Gower’s regiment, probably helped to quell a mutiny amongst their menfolk in the ranks—it nonetheless reinforced the impression of helpless and dependant womanhood, which was surely the dominant image of women during the mid-eighteenth-century conflicts. There were, admittedly, women who accompanied their soldier or even (more rarely) sailor husbands on service, experiencing military operations at close quarters. When six British regiments were despatched to the West Indies in the autumn of 1758 for the first attack on Martinique, they were accompanied by some 540 women. Soldiers’ wives and female camp followers, however, were generally expected to play a supporting role to the men—as nurses, as washers and repairers of clothes, as cooks, and, in the case of some of the camp followers, as prostitutes.²² Very few women bore arms, though there are occasional references to women who disguised themselves as men and served, apparently undetected for some time, such as a marine called William Pritchard, ‘who proved to be a Woman about 18 years old from Wales who had followed her lover’.²³ These curiosities might excite comment, but usually only to make a point about the unnaturalness of women acting as warriors, or to chide men for failing to demonstrate the necessary manly virtues. Periods of military defeat or setback tended to inspire this kind of moralizing. Thus after the battle of Falkirk, in which the army was again humiliated by the Jacobites, a poem appeared in a provincial newspaper, delivered as if by a woman in volunteer dress. The first verse begins with a thinly disguised sexual allusion (‘Well if ’tis so, and that our Men can’t stand, ’Tis Time we Women take the Thing in Hand’) and concludes ‘For if in valour real Manhood lies, All Cowards are but Women in Disguise’.²⁴ Far from presenting a positive image of women, the intention here seems to have been to provoke men into remedying their own inadequacies, which had brought such misfortune on their country. ²⁰ See, e.g., Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 5–8 July 1746. ²¹ William Salt Library, Congreve Papers, S.MSS 522, 523, Gower to Capt. William Congreve, 19 Nov. 1745 and 6 Feb. 1746, and S.MS 47/18/9, Congreve to Gower, 31 Jan. 1746. For militiamen’s family allowances, see Ch. 4. ²² Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), 123–7. See also Paul E. Kopperman, ‘The British Command and Soldiers’ Wives in America, 1755–83’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 60 (1982), 14–34. ²³ J. C. Dickinson (ed.), ‘A Naval Diary of the Seven Years’ War’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, new series, 38 (1938), 241; ADM 1/2011, Capt. Basil Keith to [John Clevland], 19, 23 April 1761. See also Scots Magazine, 21 (1759), 328; Edinburgh Evening Courant, 29 Dec. 1759; Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–1760: A Social History (London, 1994), 251–2. ²⁴ Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 10 March 1746.

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Those inadequacies, needless to say, were generally summed up as ‘effeminacy’. Men were losing their masculine qualities, and becoming like women. As a censorious James Wolfe remarked in January 1757, ‘gaming, eating, & the pox, are the Vices of the effeminate . . . & have loosen’d the morals, & ruined the constitutions of half our Country-men’.²⁵ Effeminacy and the associated vice of luxury, it should be added, were often depicted as a peculiarly French disease that had begun fatally to infect British manhood. Oh! The Roast Beef of Old England, a popular song of the 1740s that provided the title for one of Hogarth’s most wellknown pictures,²⁶ was essentially a lament on national decline since the days of Queen Elizabeth, which was explicitly linked to French influence (‘Since we have learnt from all conquering France, To eat their Ragouts, as well as to dance’).²⁷ In 1756 an anonymous pamphleteer asserted ‘that the Inundation of French Luxuries which has of late Years poured in so rapidly upon us, has done us more Hurt than French Arms or French Politicks’.²⁸ Even the previously hard-working and sober ‘middling sort’, some commentators feared, were fast succumbing to the temptations of luxury and losing their sturdy manliness.²⁹ Anxieties about a slide into effeminacy, and the loss of manly virtue, were less prominent, of course, when victories started to replace defeats, as they did in the Seven Years War from 1758. Even in triumph, however, the sexual metaphor was not lost; victory, after all, could readily be seen as proof of restored potency and vigour. There can be little doubt, in short, that the overall effect of war was to buttress rather than undermine gender distinctions. Women were nearly always portrayed in time-honoured roles—as in need of protection from libidinous enemy invaders,³⁰ as loyal wives looking after the children, as supporters of men who were doing their duty, and finally, and least flatteringly, as diseased prostitutes who could prevent men from carrying out their martial functions. Men, by contrast, were depicted either as brave and fearless warriors, offering protection to weak and feeble womanhood, or as effeminates who had succumbed to the temptations of luxury and had lost the manly valour required to defend their families and communities. As Lt. Col. Joseph Yorke wrote proudly from Macclesfield in December 1745, while serving with Cumberland’s army as it pursued the Jacobite forces ²⁵ West Sussex RO, Goodwood MSS, 223/3/13. ²⁶ BM 3050. ²⁷ Brotherton Library, MS Lt. 53, Commonplace-book of Benjamin Coles, 1741, songs section, 50. ²⁸ [Anon.,] An Address to the Great Recommending Better Ways and Means of Raising the Necessary Supplies than Lotteries or Taxes with a Word or Two concerning an Invasion (London, [1756]), 5. See also, more generally for the linking of the French with effeminacy, Michèle Cohen, ‘Manliness, Effeminacy and the French: Gender and the Construction of National Character in EighteenthCentury England’, in Michèle Cohen and Tim Hitchcock (eds.), English Masculinities 1600–1800 (London, 1999), 44–61. ²⁹ See, e.g., letter from ‘Philander’, in Universal Spectator, and Weekly Journal, 16 Nov. 1745; [James Burgh,] Britain’s Remembrancer; or the Danger Not Over (4th edn., London, 1747), 15. ³⁰ See, e.g., Samuel Hayward, A Letter to the Inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland. Attempting to Impress them with a Suitable Sense of the Invaluable Worth of their Civil and Religious Liberties, to give them a Just Idea of Popery, and to Stir them up to Meet a Perfidious Enemy, who Threatens to Invade our Land (2nd edn. London, 1756), 20.

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back to Scotland, ‘the women all declare in this Country that they will never marry for the future but in the Army, for they are the only People that have shew’d their Heads & offer’d to Protect them in this time of distress’.³¹ We can perhaps exemplify the way in which war reinforced traditional attitudes by leaving this subject with a passage from a letter to an officer serving in Germany in 1743. The letter was written by his wife from their home in Buckinghamshire. Her deep anxiety about his safety, she explained, demonstrated the ‘difference born in the very nature of Men & Women tho: they may have an equal share of reason’. This line of thinking, inspired by the war in Germany, led her to reflect on the difference between their son and daughter, Jack and Molly. Jack ‘laughs at being hurt, ventures all dangers, come in his way & fears nothing, not as not knowing the danger, but imagining himself equal to it’. Molly, by contrast, ‘trembles at going down a Molehill & starts at the sight of a Flee’. ‘I do my endeavour to moderate these Passions in them’, the wife and mother concludes, ‘but know ’tis impossible wholly to get the better of nature’.³²

SOCIAL MOBILIT Y The mid-eighteenth-century wars brought greater fluidity into the contemporary social system. There is always movement in even the most rigid social order, but the armed struggles of our period increased the number of people involved. The misfortunes associated with war added to the slippage down the social scale, and the opportunities pushed more men and women up. Downward social mobility was increased by the bankruptcies caused by wartime disruptions—although bankruptcies are a feature of all periods, there can be little doubt that at various points in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War the environment for business was very unfavourable and the number of failures therefore rose.³³ To appear in the lists of bankrupts printed in newspapers and periodicals was a very public confirmation of loss of status.³⁴ Less conspicuous, perhaps, yet no less clearly on the way down, were those unfortunates who became recipients of parochial relief or charitable alms. Pauperism, it hardly needs to be said, was often unrelated to the misfortunes of war, but the injuries or deaths of servicemen undoubtedly increased the number of disabled men unable to work and the number of widows and fatherless children in need of financial assistance—in the Seven Years War one charitable society spent more than £1,000 to support the widows and children of soldiers who had died in Germany and North ³¹ BL, Hardwicke Papers, Add. MS 35,354, fo. 150. ³² Ibid., Dropmore Papers, Add. MS 69,382, fo. 135. ³³ Julian Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 1987), 123 and 190–3 (Appendix 4). ³⁴ See, e.g., the list of bankrupts that appeared at the end of nearly every month’s issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine.

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America.³⁵ And, as we have just seen, soldiers and sailors who refused to return home often left families reliant on poor relief or charity. Conversely, the mid-century wars offered some British and Irish people opportunities for social advancement. Perhaps the most unpopular beneficiaries were the government contractors who grew rich on public money and then used their new wealth to buy their way into landed property, enhanced social status, and political influence. In truth, their numbers were exaggerated by contemporary critics. Many of those who secured contracts were already well-established; they needed to be, for one of the qualifications for such a position was possession of enough capital and credit to be able to perform the functions required.³⁶ The money they obtained as contractors usually merely reinforced an already strong position. Samuel Touchet, for instance, came from a wealthy Manchester merchant family. The contracts that he acquired in the Seven Years War made him richer rather than rich. Some contractors, far from using their new money to move into the landed classes, already came from landowning and titled backgrounds. Peregrine Cust was the fourth son of a baronet and an opulent merchant before he became a government contractor at the end of the Seven Years War, while Thomas Walpole, who, with others, won the contract to remit money to the army in Germany during the same conflict, was the son of Baron Walpole of Wolterton and the grandson of Sir Robert Walpole. Nevertheless, there were some contractors who approximated to the parvenu image, or who at least saw their social standing improve as a result of the money they made from supplying the armed forces. Chauncy Townsend, the son of a London brewer, started his business career as a linen-draper, then became a general merchant, and from 1744 acquired the contract to provision the troops in Nova Scotia. He entered the House of Commons in 1748 as MP for Westbury, where his wife’s family had some influence and Townsend himself had bought large amounts of property. George Amyand, a London merchant engaged in German trade, acquired contracts in the Seven Years War to supply the army in Germany with money and grain, and subsequently to provision the troops sent to Portugal. In August 1764 he was made a baronet. He died two years later, leaving a fortune of at least £160,000. Lawrence Dundas was born into a branch of a landowning family that had fallen on hard times; his father ran a draper’s shop. His own business career only took off when he was given a contract to supply the army in Scotland in 1746, and in Flanders the following year. He became an MP and in the next conflict won further contracts, before being created a baronet in 1762.³⁷ Henry Hulton, who was one of those involved in an inquiry into the activities of the ³⁵ [Jonas Hanway], An Account of the Society for the Encouragement of the British Troops, in Germany and North America (London, 1760), 64–5. ³⁶ See Gordon Elder Bannerman, ‘British Army Contracts and Domestic Supply, 1739–1763’, unpublished University of London Ph.D. dissertation, 2005, esp. ch. 3. ³⁷ See Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790 (3 vols., London, 1964), ii. 20–1, 291–3, 357–61; iii. 533–7, 598–602.

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commissariat in Germany, wrote of Dundas that ‘since his return to England’, he had been living ‘with a princely magnificence’.³⁸ Dundas, for his part, thought that there was no contradiction between ‘being usefull to the Publick and also doing myself some Materiall service’.³⁹ Perhaps the best example of all, however, was Richard Oswald, a London merchant who made about £112,000 from his army bread contracts alone during the Seven Years War and became a major landowner in the peace that followed. By 1782 he held more than 100,000 acres in his native Scotland.⁴⁰ Less spectacular advances were made by some of those who served with the armed forces. If contracts provided opportunities for enrichment, so, to a lesser extent, did posts in the army’s auxiliary departments. In Tobias Smollett’s novel Humphrey Clinker (1771), there is a reference to ‘commissaries, and contractors, who have fattened, in two successive wars, on the blood of the nation’.⁴¹ Samuel Foote’s comic drama The Commissary (1765) is similarly unflattering. The central character is Zachary Fungus, who had been ‘a paltry mechanic’, and whose brother is still a tallow-chandler. Fungus, thanks to his time as a commissary, is now ‘as rich as an Indian governor’. At the end of the play he is denounced in no uncertain terms: ‘the fangs of you, and your tribe, A whole people have felt, and for ages will feel’.⁴² Popular depictions, while no doubt exaggerated, seem not to have been too wide of the mark. Michael Hatton, a commissary in Germany, was suspected of all manner of misconduct by the Duke of Newcastle, and Peter Taylor, a deputy paymaster, was accused of deducting, as a personal commission, from 6 to 7 per cent of all the money he disbursed.⁴³ Newcastle had been sufficiently perturbed by stories of profiteering to order an enquiry in May 1761, and a study of the Treasury’s correspondence with the commissariat in Germany, delivered to Lord Bute in June 1762, suggested considerable abuses and frauds.⁴⁴ The squandering of public money was highlighted at this time, it must be said, because it suited the agenda of those politicians who wanted to end the war in Germany, but there can be little doubt that frauds were taking place, and that those involved became richer as a consequence. Taylor was the son of a grocer, who had been a silversmith before he became deputy paymaster. He resented the accusations levelled against him, attributing them to prejudice: ‘tis a Crime amongst my Contrymen for a man by his Industry to raise in the world’.⁴⁵ But he returned to ³⁸ Yale University Library, Hulton MSS, ‘Matters, relative to the conduct of the Commissariat which attended the Allied Army in Germany, 1760. 61, 62’, 10. ³⁹ North Yorkshire RO, Dundas (Zetland) Papers, ZNK XI/2/3, letter to his wife, 25 March 1759. See also, in the same papers, ZNK XI/1/48, draft letter to [George] Ross, 26 April 1759. ⁴⁰ David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 59–69, 226–37, 289. ⁴¹ Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, 1967), 65. ⁴² Richard W. Bevis (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Drama: Afterpieces (Oxford, 1970), 251, 259, 263, 286. ⁴³ HMC, Rutland MSS (5 vols., London, 1888–1905), ii. 208, 209, 213, 214, 216, 270. ⁴⁴ Bodleian Library, MS North c.2, fos. 280–320. ⁴⁵ BL, Letter-book of Taylor, 1760–1761, Add. MS 54,485, fo. 14.

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England at the end of the war with a fortune large enough to enable him to buy two landed estates and then to secure a seat in Parliament. Several officers employed as commissaries and quartermasters, who had been struggling before they were given such posts, were also able to do very well thereafter. James Robertson appears to have started his military career as a common soldier; he was commissioned as a lieutenant in a marine regiment in the Austrian war and rose to a captaincy in the Thirtieth Foot, Lord Loudoun’s regiment, in the peace. When the Royal Americans were formed in 1756, Robertson became a major in the new corps (again commanded at this time by Loudoun), and in that capacity he was appointed deputy quartermaster general in North America.⁴⁶ This was the turning point in Robertson’s fortunes, not least because such posts were well known to provide opportunities for personal enrichment.⁴⁷ He acquired a lieutenant colonelcy in the Royal Americans before the Seven Years War was over, held his position in the reductions of 1763, and rose rapidly during the next conflict, ending it as a lieutenant general. While public attention was directed to the rise of commissaries and the like, in practice many other servicemen saw their fortunes improve as a result of the wars of our period. Armed conflict accelerated promotion in the officer ranks, enabling unconnected and struggling army subalterns or junior naval officers to move upwards much more quickly than was possible in peacetime. Entrance into the officer ranks by non-traditional recruits was also facilitated by war. We have seen that the expansion of the army and navy, and casualties from death, injury, or disease, meant that in both conflicts men from humble backgrounds obtained commissioned rank.⁴⁸ A soldier who had been enlisted as a private, rose to a sergeant, and then acquired an ensigncy in a new regiment left the army with a much higher social status than a demobilized member of the rank and file. There was a general assumption that officers, whatever their origins, were gentlemen. Those who were not gentlemen when they acquired their commissions could find themselves ‘gentrified’ by the experience of military service. Isabella Carr commented in September 1760 that some of the subalterns of the Northumberland militia, although only farmers, ‘are now downright polite gentlemen, and seem as well accustomed to a sword and bag as if they had always been used to them. Tis astonishing what a change and improvement a military life makes.’⁴⁹ Even those who remained common soldiers and sailors could find their material circumstances were improved by their wartime service. The pay of naval ratings and the army’s rank and file was not likely to enrich anyone: able seamen received nine pence a day, after deductions, and common soldiers just six pence a day, ⁴⁶ Stanley Pargellis (ed.), Military Affairs in North America 1748–1765: Selected Documents from the Cumberland Papers (Hamden, Conn., 1969), 234, 318, 333 demonstrates the importance to Robertson of Loudoun’s patronage. ⁴⁷ For money in Robertson’s hands, see, e.g., Journals of the Hon. William Hervey, in North America and Europe, from 1755 to 1814 (Bury St Edmunds, 1906), 74, 128. ⁴⁸ See Ch. 3. ⁴⁹ Cheshire RO, Stanley of Alderley Papers, DSA2, Carr to Margaret Owen, 1 Sept. 1760.

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which was subject to further deductions for a variety of purposes. On the other hand, the basic level of remuneration could sometimes be increased by additional money for specific tasks, and bounty money paid on enlistment could be considerable.⁵⁰ The spoils of war could also provide a welcome windfall. Soldiers might profit from the division of legitimate booty, or from their own unsanctioned plundering. Sailors, however, were rather more likely to be gainers. It should be said that prize money, obtained from the sale of captured ships and their cargoes, was allocated strictly according to rank, with the senior officers obtaining the largest reward: when in December 1746 Capt. Augustus Hervey’s ship captured a French privateer from Cherbourg, he received £149 as his share of the proceeds, while the common seamen gained only a guinea each.⁵¹ There were also cases of long delay in the payment of prize money, and even of sailors seeing their shares sent to the treasurer of Greenwich Hospital, the institution that acted as a home for a select number of disabled or elderly mariners.⁵² But this did not stop some ratings accumulating healthy sums on particularly successful voyages. In February 1763 Thomas John, a Welsh sailor who had been serving under Admiral Pocock and was involved in the taking of Havana, ‘brought home above £80’—the equivalent of more than five years’ wages for a merchant seaman before the conflict began.⁵³ The biggest gainers amongst the ordinary servicemen, however, were probably those demobilized soldiers who took up the offer of land grants held out to encourage settlement in the colonies at the end of the two wars. Again, officers did rather better than the rank and file. The Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763 laid down the acreage to be granted strictly according to status—5,000 for field officers, 3,000 for captains, 2,000 for subalterns, 200 for non-commissioned officers, and 50 for privates. Even so, 50 acres turned a common soldier into a yeoman freeholder, and significant numbers of soldiers took up the offer. Many were still there when the American war broke out twelve years later, and some of them show up in the papers of the loyalist claims commission, established to determine compensation for property lost or destroyed as a result of that struggle. We know, for instance, that Andrew Coutter, who served in the Forty-sixth Foot from 1757, received a land grant under the terms of the Proclamation and became a farmer at Fort George, New York, in 1764. Similarly, John Smith, a soldier in the Forty-fourth Foot during the Seven Years War, farmed land at Skenesborough, New York, after he was discharged.⁵⁴ For men such as these, the Seven Years War had brought a real change in their circumstances, even if for some of them the next conflict was to bring a stark reversal in fortunes. ⁵⁰ See, e.g., the supplementary payments promised to soldiers who acted as labourers or artificers on the works being constructed at Albany, New York, in September 1756: S. K. Stevens et al. (eds.), The Papers of Henry Bouquet (6 vols., Harrisburg, Penn., 1972–94), i. 91. ⁵¹ David Erskine (ed.), Augustus Hervey’s Journal (London, 1953), 46–7. ⁵² London Magazine, 32 (1763), 424. ⁵³ Denning (ed.), Diary of William Thomas, 63. For seamen’s wages see Ch. 4. ⁵⁴ See AO 12/27, fos. 58–9 and AO 12/32, fo. 29.

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We have already seen that demobilized soldiers formed just part of the new population that settled in North America after both of the mid-century wars.⁵⁵ After 1763, in particular, opportunities beckoned for many people from Britain and Ireland. The prospect of becoming an owner of land was an especially strong attraction for the thousands of British and Irish who made the journey across the Atlantic once French power had been destroyed and the frontier (apparently) pacified. This great migration—over 100,000 persons between 1760 and 1775, according to a recent calculation⁵⁶—provided opportunities also for some of those who remained behind: land speculation enriched investors at home as well as in the colonies themselves.⁵⁷

SOCIAL CONFLICT The wars of 1739–63, while in certain respects promoting unity and cohesion, were also responsible—directly or indirectly—for what can only be described as social antagonism. We can glimpse an aspect of this, perhaps, in a debate in the British House of Commons in March 1741. Sir Robert Walpole, who had been pushed reluctantly into hostilities with Spain at least partly by the clamour of the mercantile community, chose to criticize merchants who were reluctant to make the sacrifices for the common good that were required if the war were to be pursued with vigour. In particular, Walpole resented the way in which merchants were trying to avoid a rise in seamen’s wages by concealing mariners who were eligible for naval service; they were endeavouring to secure ‘their own private affairs’, Walpole complained, ‘at the hazard of the public’.⁵⁸ But this rebuke was not developed into a fully fledged attack on the commercial classes. More significant, from our current perspective, was discontent lower down the social scale. A mild instance of criticism of landed government came in the form of a pamphlet published at the end of the Austrian war. After extolling the virtue of merchants ‘who are fill’d with the good Sense of Men of Business’, and regretting the continued existence of ‘the pernicious Distinction between our Landed and Trading Interests’, the anonymous author went on to decry the ‘National Misfortune that our Gentry, who have the making those Laws by which our Trade ⁵⁵ See Ch. 4. ⁵⁶ James Horn, ‘The British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain 1660–1815’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 32. ⁵⁷ See P. J. Marshall, ‘Empire and Opportunity in Britain, 1763–1775’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 5 (1995), 111–28. It should be said, however, that many of those who did well out of the land purchases were already wealthy and even titled—the biggest gainers were Lord Fairfax in Virginia and Lord Granville in North Carolina. For opportunities to purchase land in the newly acquired Caribbean islands, see D. H. Murdoch, ‘Land Policy in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire: The Sale of Crown Lands in the Ceded Islands, 1763–1783’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 549–74. ⁵⁸ PH, xii. 58.

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is to be directed, know not how it may be eas’d, promoted, or protected’.⁵⁹ More trenchant observations were made by the Revd John Brown of Newcastle during the early (and unsuccessful) stages of the next conflict. Brown’s well-known Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times lambasted the lack of manly virtue amongst the ruling classes as the root cause of the nation’s poor performance against the French.⁶⁰ The work of Gerald Newman and Kathleen Wilson, in particular, has highlighted the emergence of such criticisms of the landed classes and aristocratic government. To a considerable extent, this criticism was based on the assumption—sometimes implicit, at other times only too explicit— that the upper classes were effeminate, ineffectual, and frenchified. In short, the political and social elite were attacked as inadequate defenders of the national interest.⁶¹ But discontent with the performance of aristocratic government, and with the existing social and economic dispensation, extended well beyond the ‘middling sort’ engaged in overseas trade and their spokespersons. In the closing stages of the Seven Years War and its immediate aftermath there were two significant outbreaks of rural unrest in Ireland. The objectives of the two sets of protesters were different, but they had in common hostility to those defined as oppressors, who in both cases included the local landowning gentry. The war influenced the nature of the disturbances and the reaction to them. In Munster, an anti-enclosure movement was sparked off in 1761 by denial of access to grazing land. The new enthusiasm for enclosure stemmed from a rise in land values that can be traced to the high price of dairy products brought on by heavy government purchasing for the armed forces. As the hostility to enclosure gathered momentum, further grievances were voiced, mainly relating to the collection of tithes by the established Anglican Church. Within a short time, bands of roving ‘Whiteboys’—they wore coarse linen clothing as a kind of uniform—were using violence, and much intimidation, to press their case for redress. Landlord anxiety was increased by fears that the agitation was fuelled by Catholic priests: the war, with its recurring threats of a French invasion supported by a Catholic uprising, made the Protestant elite even more than usually receptive to conspiracy theories.⁶² The deployment against the Whiteboys from the spring of 1762 of recently raised regiments recruited amongst the Protestants of Ulster no doubt added to the sectarian tensions. A few Whiteboys were caught and sentenced to death, but after only a brief interlude ⁵⁹ [Anon.], The Natural Interest of Great Britain, in its Present Circumstances, Demonstrated; in a Discourse in Two Parts (London, 1748), pt. ii, 55–6. ⁶⁰ John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (2 vols., London, 1757–8). Even critics of Browne’s work tended to accept the general tenor of his argument, if not his conclusions: see, e.g., [Robert Wallace], Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain (London, 1758). ⁶¹ Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (revised edn., London, 1997), ch. 4; Kathleen Wilson, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Politics of Identity in Georgian England’, in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds.), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London, 1995), 237–62. ⁶² See, e.g., Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse MSS, R1-237.

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the movement reconstituted itself, this time concentrating almost exclusively on the tithe grievance. Opposition to the Whiteboys continued to be predicated on the assumption that they were agents of a gigantic new popish plot to cut Protestant throats, and the disturbances did not fade until March 1766, when five alleged ringleaders, including Nicholas Sheehy, a Catholic priest, were executed at Clonmel. Whiteboyism did not die with Sheehy and his unfortunate companions—it was to re-emerge in the 1770s—but the phase of Whiteboy agitation that we can connect with the Seven Years War and its legacy was over.⁶³ The same conflict influenced, though in a very different way, the other great Irish agrarian disturbances of the 1760s. In Ulster, the Hearts of Oak movement demonstrated in the summer of 1763 against the tithe and excessive ‘cess’ rates levied by the county magistrates. The Oakboys were mainly Protestant tenants, whose anti-landlord and anti-established church sentiments might well have been coloured by the fundamentalist Seceders and other extreme Presbyterians who looked with deep suspicion on both the Anglican clergy and the Anglican gentry. The protest was short-lived; the army was used to confront the demonstrators, and in a series of bloody clashes about a score of Oakboys were killed. The connection with the war might seem remote, but it can be seen on two levels. First, the successful outcome of the conflict reduced the need for Protestant unity in an area where Protestants of the various denominations were numerically strong, and so created the climate for forthright criticism of the Church of Ireland.⁶⁴ Secondly, the war provided the Presbyterian protestors with a model of organization. The militia array of 1756, and the more recent calling out of the militia to counter Thurot’s descent on Carrickfergus in 1760, it has been persuasively argued, formed precedents for the mass marches of discontented Protestant tenants that characterized Oakboy activity.⁶⁵ The military style of the Oakboys and their parochial structure were certainly noted at the time. As a contemporary report put it, ‘They march by parishes: each parish has a leader, with a standard and colours, drums, horns, fidles, and bagpipes’.⁶⁶ It was not just in Ireland that the post-war years saw sharp social tensions. At the end of both of the mid-century conflicts, as we shall see, considerable efforts were made to tackle the problems associated with demobilization in Britain. These efforts were inspired, at root, by a fear that large bodies of unemployed and disaffected men might cause a threat to social order. Disaffection stemmed not simply from the lack of opportunities open to discharged soldiers, sailors, and militiamen in a now overstocked labour market, but also to a feeling that after the hardships of wartime, ex-servicemen deserved better. Resentment at poor ⁶³ For the Whiteboys see J. S. Donnelly, Jr., ‘The Whiteboy Movement, 1761–5’, Irish Historical Studies, 21 (1978–9), 20–54. See also Thomas P. Power, Land, Politics and Society in EighteenthCentury Tipperary (Oxford, 1993), ch. 5. ⁶⁴ See Ch. 7. ⁶⁵ See Eoin F. Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian Insurrection”? Reconsidering the Hearts of Oak Disturbances of July 1763’, Irish Historical Studies, 31 (1998–9), 165–87. ⁶⁶ Gentleman’s Magazine, 33 (1763), 361.

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treatment from those who had remained at home, and avoided the dangers and inconveniences of life in the armed forces, was illustrated in a broadside produced in 1762 by the Lancashire caricaturist John Collier. His Pluralist and Old Soldier contrasts the sacrifices of a disabled soldier, who lost his leg at Guadeloupe and is now reduced to begging for his livelihood, with the easy life of a plump and meanspirited clergyman. The contrast could be interpreted as an attack on the Church, or as a bitter reflection on the disparity of rewards for public service and selfish parasitism. But if it were meant to inspire these thoughts, Collier’s work probably had a more generalized message for those who saw it. His criticism was of the wealthy and powerful who showed no regard for the sufferings of those humble men who had fought for their country.⁶⁷ Poor treatment of common soldiers at the end of the Seven Years War led to a major mutiny amongst the troops still in North America. With the British Government keen to save money at the close of a very expensive conflict, Amherst issued orders for further stoppages from his soldiers’ paltry pay to help cover the cost of provisioning the army. At the same time, and for the same purpose, he announced that, henceforth, only soldiers whose pay was liable to the new deductions were entitled to rations; their wives and other dependants were therefore no longer eligible. Resentment at the new charges and exclusions bubbled over into an insurrection so serious that it elicited, within a matter of weeks, a concession from Amherst in the form of a reduction in the size of the new deduction.⁶⁸ However, a recent account of the mutinies argues that the stoppages were only part of the problem; Peter Way maintains that many of the British troops were in a combustible state because they remained deeply dissatisfied with the unequal division of the prize money paid out to those involved in the capture of Havana, where the ordinary soldiers received just £4 each while the Earl of Albemarle, the military commander, pocketed £122,697. Way cites the view of James Miller, at that time a private in the Fifteenth Foot, who subsequently questioned whether it was ‘consistent with equity’ that ‘after the most extraordinary fatigues, in such a climate, the blood of britons should be lavish’d to agrandize individuals[?]’ Again, resentment at an apparent disregard for the sufferings and hardships endured by the common soldiers seems to have produced a more generally applicable dissatisfaction with the inequality to be found both in the army and in society generally.⁶⁹ The social tensions apparent at the end of the Seven Years War had been anticipated in its first—and distinctly unsuccessful—phase. In 1756 and 1757 political, ⁶⁷ The print is reproduced in Brumwell, Redcoats, 291. ⁶⁸ BL, Bouquet Papers, Add. MS 21,635, fos. 6–8. There had been a similar mutiny at the end of the previous war when an attempt was made to introduce deductions at Louisbourg: see NAS, Hamilton-Dalrymple of North Berwick Muniments, GD 110/919/12, Lt John Suttie to Sir Hew Dalrymple, 30 June 1747. ⁶⁹ Peter Way, ‘Rebellion of the Regulars: Working Soldiers and the Mutiny of 1763–1764’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 57 (2000), 776.

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military, and social discontents merged to produce a general crisis that seemed to threaten social stability.⁷⁰ Popular resistance to naval impressment, which began as soon as the practice was authorized in February 1755, contributed to the crisis by exemplifying a widespread willingness to defy authority and by pointing to the uneven burdens of military service—those with money and influence could escape the press-gangs, or knew how to secure their release if they were pressed.⁷¹ But this was perhaps the least important ingredient, as press-gangs had aroused great hostility previously and continued to meet popular opposition long after 1757. Two years later, to give just one instance, a press-gang in Liverpool had enormous difficulty in taking off seventeen sailors: ‘several hundreds of old men, women, and boys’, one member of the gang recalled, ‘flocked after us, well provided with stones and brickbats, and commenced a general attack’.⁷² The real start of this period of great turmoil came with Byng’s failure to protect Minorca in May 1756, and its subsequent surrender to the French. Byng was vilified by the public in an amazing outburst of popular frenzy. The unfortunate admiral was hanged and burnt in effigy, and his alleged shortcomings loudly decried: ‘To publick execution must thou go’, pronounced a poem addressed to Byng.⁷³ The parliamentary opposition, seeing an opportunity to damage Newcastle’s Government, undoubtedly contributed to the feverish atmosphere— Earl Waldegrave was surely not far wrong when he wrote of the summer of 1756 as witnessing ‘the triumph of Faction and of Party Violence’⁷⁴—but the Government itself, far from trying to stop the torrent, helped to bring it on by attempting to deflect criticism from the ministers onto the man they had entrusted to carry out their instructions. The loss of Minorca struck a powerful chord partly because it followed on from Braddock’s defeat in North America the previous summer. Nor should we forget that this was a time when invasion was threatened, and national expectations of the navy were perhaps at their height; disappointment and fear no doubt lay behind much of the anger.⁷⁵ The economic dislocations caused by the onset of war were also beginning to be felt, and Byng’s failure seemed to put trade with southern Europe in particular jeopardy. But whatever the explanations for the remarkable public response to the loss of Minorca, what made this an explosive episode for the Government, and for people in authority generally, was the way in which Byng’s case was used as an emblem for the alleged lack of commitment of those in power to the effective prosecution of the war. While there was no shortage of elite ⁷⁰ See Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), ch. 2, on which I have drawn heavily in the following account. ⁷¹ On this subject generally, see ibid., ch. 3. ⁷² N. A. M. Rodger (ed.), The Narrative of William Spavens a Chatham Pensioner Written by Himself (London, 1998), 21. ⁷³ ‘On a Modern Character, and recent Transaction’, London Magazine, 25 (1756), 446. ⁷⁴ J. C. D. Clark (ed.), The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, 1742–1763 (Cambridge, 1988), 175. ⁷⁵ See, e.g., the comments of Lady Margaret Heathcote, 4 Aug. 1756, in Bedfordshire RO, Lucas of Wrest Park Papers, L30/9/56/22.

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criticism of Byng,⁷⁶ there was a class dimension to some of the hostility directed at the unfortunate admiral. Byng had grown rich from prize money, and he had spent lavishly, notably on a new country house at Wrotham Park, in Hertfordshire. Anger at his alleged pusillanimity seems to have been increased by his conspicuous wealth, with the result that in July 1756 Wrotham Park was attacked and nearly destroyed.⁷⁷ This episode, and a good deal of the rhetoric voiced in the course of the Byng affair, must have been highly disturbing for the aristocracy and gentry. Byng’s supposed sins—cowardice, selfishness, and lack of patriotism—were in the minds of some more humble Britons transposed onto the ruling elite as a whole. Joseph Reed, a rope-maker, versified that the British fleet could not succeed until it ‘Is freed from the right honourable Thrall / Of Cowards, petty Tyrants, Fops, and Fools: / Till unbefriended Merit wins the Prize / from suppliant Int’rest’.⁷⁸ The poor harvest of 1756 added fuel to the flames of popular disaffection. High food prices were widely attributed to the selfishness of millers and corn merchants, who through hoarding and profiteering were thought to be artificially inflating prices. In many counties riots were directed against those who were seen as violating the ‘moral economy’, with its generally accepted idea of what constituted fair trading.⁷⁹ On one level, this crowd action had little to do with the war. It represented the time-honoured way in which the common people tried to impose their sense of justice on those who were disregarding accepted norms and seeking personal enrichment at the expense of their community. But the war undoubtedly conditioned these public protests. The economic problems caused in the early stages of the conflict meant that in many areas wages were depressed, unemployment had increased, and families were already struggling. High food prices made a difficult situation intolerable. The demands of the armed forces, and the foreign troops fed by the British Government, helped to push prices up, and the requisitioning of wagons and horses to move the army and its baggage around the country reduced the transport available to send food to where it was most urgently needed.⁸⁰ But perhaps more important than these war-related contributions was the way in which the issue of selfishness versus the common good had already been brought into sharp relief by the Byng affair. In an atmosphere of moral questioning, fortified by a rabid chauvinism born of fear of invasion, it was not surprising that some of the targets of public criticism were accused of sending food to the French.⁸¹ ⁷⁶ See, e.g., NLW, Bute MSS, L92/26, Lord Windsor to Edward Lloyd, 24 Feb. 1757. ⁷⁷ Brian Tunstall, Admiral Byng and the Loss of Minorca (London, 1928), 165. ⁷⁸ Quoted in M. John Cardwell, Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years War (Manchester, 2004), 60. ⁷⁹ For the classical exposition, see E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 50 (1971), 76–136, reprinted in Thompson’s Customs in Common (London, 1991), ch. 4. ⁸⁰ As Edward Clive wrote on 24 April 1757, ‘Warr creates scarscity’ (OIOL, Clive Papers, MSS Eur. G. 37, Box 22). ⁸¹ Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics, 71. For an instance of a farmer experiencing ill-treatment on account of his Catholicism and his apparent pro-French sympathies, see NLW, Letters of John Williams of Llanrwst, Add. MS 478E/16, D. W. Linden to Williams, 10 Dec. 1756.

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The final and perhaps most dangerous ingredient in this potent cocktail was the passing of the Militia Act in 1757. The politics of this will be considered later, but at this juncture we need only to recognize that the militia legislation sparked a fresh wave of unrest that affected many counties across England, the first disturbances coming in Bedfordshire that August.⁸² The grievances of the militia rioters were many and varied. There was concern about how much the militiamen would be paid; about whether militiamen would be forced to serve abroad; and about the method of selecting militiamen by ballot—the exemptions, and the ability of the well-off to hire substitutes, or pay a fine to release themselves from any obligation, highlighted the lack of choice open to those who had no opportunity to avoid personal service. At root, however, the anti-militia riots drew strength from the same perception that informed the outcry against Byng and influenced the crowd actions against food profiteers—the poor and powerless were expected to run the risks and shoulder the burdens, while their social superiors failed to do their duty.⁸³ In the short term, the crisis of 1756–7 was defused by the deployment of a significant part of the regular army to put down disorder: two cavalry regiments and twelve infantry battalions in 1756; eight cavalry regiments and twelve battalions of Foot in 1757.⁸⁴ Legal coercion was employed, too; there were a number of exemplary executions. However, timely concessions were also important: as William Pitt observed in October 1757, ‘no good is to be expected from a militia forced on the People, while under their present unhappy delusion’.⁸⁵ At the local level, some landowners instructed their tenant farmers to sell cereals at below the market rate, and some justices used centuries-old legislation against engrossing and forestalling to prosecute the worst excesses of profiteering.⁸⁶ Government suspended the export of corn in response to the food riots, and amended the militia laws in reaction to the militia disturbances (family allowances for embodied militiamen were perhaps the most notable concession).⁸⁷ A reoccurrence of the tensions of these years was avoided above all, however, by the change in economic conditions and the change in British fortunes in the Seven Years War. The harvest was better in 1757 than in 1756, and not long after, as we have seen, overseas trade boomed.⁸⁸ As early as June 1758 John Fothergill, a Quaker doctor, was writing that ‘Domestic concord [is] restored, plenty is promised and trade flourishes; a change within little more than a year, scarce to be credited’.⁸⁹ The conflict itself, as ⁸² Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (London, 1978), 98. ⁸³ Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics, 77–80. ⁸⁴ Hayter, Army and the Crowd, 92 and 113 (tables 7.2 and 8.3). ⁸⁵ Centre for Kentish Studies, Stanhope MSS, U1590 S5/C1, letter to Lord Stanhope, 3 Oct. 1757. ⁸⁶ For the Earl of Breadalbane’s approval of such prosecutions, see Bedfordshire RO, Lucas of Wrest Park Papers, L30/9/17/13. For local collections to purchase cereals and sell them to the poor at below the market rate, see, e.g., Wiltshire RO, Wansey Papers, 314/16, entry for early 1757; Hampshire RO, Heathcote Papers, 63M84/420, Diary of Sir Thomas Heathcote, Aug. 1757. ⁸⁷ J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue (London, 1965), 142. ⁸⁸ See above, Ch. 4. ⁸⁹ Betsy C. Corner and Christopher C. Booth (eds.), Chain of Friendship: Selected Letters of Dr. John Fothergill of London, 1735–1780 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 196–7.

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already indicated, was both a background and contributor to the disturbances of 1756 and 1757, and once defeats and setbacks started to be superseded by victories—effectively from 1758—the rhetorical appeal of inequality of sacrifice and upper-class selfishness, incompetence, and cowardice began to lose much of its force. But it did not disappear altogether: as we have seen, grievances were to resurface when peace and demobilization brought a new period of volatility.

WAR, PEACE, AND SOCIAL POLICY Contemporary property owners, as noted earlier, regarded the periods of demobilization at the end of the mid-century wars with great alarm; the common assumption was that crime and disorder were bound to increase with so many men without work but trained in the use of arms. As an Anglican clergyman told his Oxford congregation in 1749, disbanded soldiers ‘are too far gone in Idleness and debauchery to think of procuring a Livelihood by any honest and industrious Means. . . . The many horrid Acts of Violence and Murder We hear of being daily committed do, I fear, but too sufficiently manifest the Truth of this Observation’.⁹⁰ Detailed work on the legal records of Surrey, Staffordshire, and Essex points to a pattern of decreasing numbers of indictments during hostilities, followed by a surge in the immediately following years of peace.⁹¹ It would be wrong to assume that the wars necessarily saw a significant fall in the level of crime—then, as now, we know very little about the true rate of crime; we know only about reported offences and prosecutions. Crime continued to be a problem during wartime, even though the court records suggest an improvement. Many potential malefactors were no doubt swept up into the armed forces; however, if as soldiers and militiamen they were removed from their communities, they were not necessarily sent abroad—indeed, much of the army, and all of the militia, remained in Britain and Ireland to resist invasion. Offences committed by soldiers and militiamen against civilians—and there were plenty of them⁹²—would not all have been tried before justices at quarter sessions or assize court judges; at least some were dealt with by courts martial.⁹³ The records of the civilian courts, in other words, may well understate the level of crime in wartime. What occurred, in all probability, was a geographical redistribution of ⁹⁰ Thomas Fothergill, The Desirableness of Peace, and the Duty of a Nation upon the Recovery of it. A Sermon Preach’d before the University of Oxford, at St. Mary’s, on Tuesday, April 25, 1749. Being the Day Appointed to be Kept as a General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the Peace (Oxford, 1749), 16. ⁹¹ Douglas Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts’, Past and Present, no. 95 (1982), 117–60; John Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Princeton, 1986), ch. 5; Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2003), 153–61. ⁹² See, e.g., West Sussex RO, Goodwood MSS, 110/11, for the case of six guardsmen ‘taken up for Street Roberys’ in London in 1744. ⁹³ See, e.g., Wiltshire RO, Ailesbury of Savernake Papers, 9/34/124, ‘A Regimental Court Martial held at ye Angell Inn at Marlboro the 20th Febry 1760’.

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crime—from those areas drained by military and naval recruitment to those areas where soldiers and sailors were concentrated. The fall in the number of indictments recorded in counties like Staffordshire indicates a greater sense of security amongst property owners in those areas where recruitment had taken away many men but there was no significant military or naval presence: as crime itself probably declined in such localities, the propensity to prosecute declined also, even if the overall national level of crime itself perhaps remained the same. By the same token, the general perception was that the end of a war would inevitably bring a crime wave, and those who were conditioned to think in this way had little difficulty in finding evidence to justify their nervousness. In October 1748 one contemporary claimed that he had heard ‘of many robberies, Murder, and other cruelties, that have happened’, wheareas Elizabeth Gurdon of Suffolk told a relative two years later that ‘we are much Alarm’d with Rogues in this Neighbourhood’.⁹⁴ ‘I make no Doubt, but that the streets of this Town, and the Roads leading to it’, Henry Fielding wrote of London in his famous Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), ‘will shortly be impassable without the utmost Hazard; nor are we threatened with seeing less dangerous Gangs of Rogues among us, than those which the Italians call the Banditi.’⁹⁵ At the end of the next conflict, newspapers and periodicals again carried lurid stories of a crime wave: an elderly woman was reported to have been murdered and robbed by a demobilized soldier in Devon, while in Northamptonshire a thirtystrong gang was said to be engaged in robbery and plunder by ‘day and night’ and to have become ‘a terror to the whole county’. ‘People of property’, readers were informed, ‘have provided themselves with firearms, and keep lights in their houses when they are in bed.’⁹⁶ In the post-war years, crime itself doubtless increased in communities that had been relatively untroubled during hostilities, but the propensity to prosecute probably increased still more. In anxious times, all manner of remedies were canvassed. The instinctive reaction of worried property owners was to support tighter regulation and harsher punishments. After the Austrian war there were calls for more stringent licensing of drinking and gambling establishments and more effective laws against the handling of stolen goods (‘if there were no receivers, there could be no thieves’, one MP commented in March 1748).⁹⁷ We should not be surprised that it was in 1752 that the Murder Act introduced an aggravated death penalty—convicted killers were to have their bodies handed over to the surgeons for dissection and their corpses were to be exposed to public view and denied a Christian burial.⁹⁸ There were also ⁹⁴ Mary Siraut (ed.), The Trevelyan Letters to 1840 (Somerset Record Society, lxxx, Taunton, 1990), 158; East Suffolk RO, Cranworth Papers, HA 54/1/3/65. ⁹⁵ Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford, 1988), 75. ⁹⁶ Gentleman’s Magazine, 33 (1763), 410–11. ⁹⁷ PH, xiv. 249. ⁹⁸ Nicholas Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave: The Debate over Social Reform and Regulation, 1749–1753’, in Lee Davison et al. (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992), 77–98.

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efforts to improve rates of detection and arrest of malefactors, at least in London. At the close of the Austrian Succession struggle, Fielding, a city magistrate, was given state funds to maintain a kind of police force at his Bow Street office (the Bow Street Runners), and at the end of the Seven Years War a highway patrol was established in the metropolis with financial support from the Government.⁹⁹ Worries about demobilization influenced many other public or private initiatives. Besides the land grants in North America offered to ex-soldiers after both midcentury wars (in Nova Scotia alone in 1749, and in the colonies generally in 1763), the British Herring Fishery was established in 1750 to provide employment for discharged sailors, and the Duke of Cumberland himself paid recently demobilized soldiers to excavate the great lake at Virginia Water on the crown estates near Windsor. At the end of the next war, various schemes were canvassed for giving former soldiers and sailors—and even dockyard workers—plots of heath, forest, or common land to farm.¹⁰⁰ The Marquis of Rockingham and Sir George Savile paid £5 to every man discharged from the Fifty-first Foot, a regiment raised in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The payment was partly a reward for their conspicuous service, but mainly to enable the demobilized men to adjust to civilian life.¹⁰¹ Similarly, Wiltshire’s disembodied militiamen were able to claim money from a fund created for the purpose from donations.¹⁰² At the same time, and partly for the same reason, the Commissioners for the Annexed Estates—that is, the administrators of the lands confiscated from Jacobite chieftains after the ’Forty-five—tried to encourage discharged servicemen to settle on the territories in their care by offering bounties.¹⁰³ But if a desire to tackle the problems associated with large-scale demobilization informed all of these various measures, there was another war-related consideration encouraging reform in many areas. The Austrian struggle had been inconclusive from the British point of view; successes at sea and in the colonies were counterbalanced by Marshal Saxe’s triumphs in the Low Countries. Fear of France seems to have intensified rather than abated in the post-war period, as France’s superiority on land appeared to be in danger of being matched by a growth in French naval power that, if unchecked, could enable the French to dominate everywhere. Concern about Britain’s ability to resist France in the future lay behind a range of measures designed to promote national revival. The fisheries project, while intended partly to provide employment, was also envisioned as strengthening the national economy and increasing the number of trained mariners on whom the navy could call in time of hostilities.¹⁰⁴ Various endeavours to preserve and prolong life can likewise be seen as linked to the wish to ⁹⁹ Joanna Innes, ‘The Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State: Government and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), 112. ¹⁰⁰ Gentleman’s Magazine, 33 (1763), 16–17, 119–20. ¹⁰¹ Brumwell, Redcoats, 293. ¹⁰² London Magazine, 32 (1763), 30–1. ¹⁰³ Innes, ‘Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State’, 116. ¹⁰⁴ Bob Harris, ‘Patriotic Commerce and National Revival: The Free British Fishery Society and British Politics, c.1749–58’, English Historical Review, 114 (1999), 285–313.

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increase naval and military capability. Schemes for hospitals and orphanages have been mentioned already;¹⁰⁵ we should note in addition attempts to develop dietary antidotes to scurvy—notably naval physician James Lind’s A Treatise of the Scurvy of 1753—together with works on disease pathology, such as Sir John Pringle’s Observations on the Diseases of the Army, which was first published in 1757 but was based on the author’s experiences as physician-general during and immediately after the Austrian war.¹⁰⁶ Even revision of the calendar in 1752, to bring it in line with most of continental Europe, was influenced by a desire to improve Britain’s position in a fiercely competitive world and can be viewed as part of a programme of national revival; a major inconvenience for overseas traders had to be removed, the Earl of Macclesfield told the House of Lords, for it was upon their success that ‘the opulence and strength of the [nation] do so greatly depend’. No one, we can be confident, had much doubt about the chief source of the competition, and against whom national strength would need to be exerted in the future. Fear of French power similarly lurked behind the attempt to bring in an official population census in 1753. As George Grenville remarked, not the least of the advantages of knowing how many people there were would be the help this would give in mobilizing the population effectively for war.¹⁰⁷ Again, those MPs listening to Grenville needed no explanation of whom the enemy was likely to be in the next conflict. The various efforts to deal with crime can also be seen as an aspect of this wish to revive the nation and prepare it for the renewal of hostilities. The drive to improve the manners of the people—an aim that connects projects to reform the criminal law with poor law proposals and the liquor controls of the 1751 Gin Act—was based on fear of degeneration, an assumption that luxury (and effeminacy) had infected even the common people and made them too soft and selfish to be militarily useful. If Britain were to fare better in the next round of fighting with France, moral reform was urgently needed.¹⁰⁸ THE RECONSTITUTION OF HIGHL AND SOCIET Y The largely unhindered progress of the Jacobite army through the northern and midland counties of England in 1745 provided clear evidence for many thoughtful ¹⁰⁵ See Ch. 4. ¹⁰⁶ We should note that there were also publications inspired by wartime experience that appeared after the next conflict, e.g., Richard Brocklesby, Oeconomical and Medical Observations from the Year 1758 to 1763 (London, 1764) and Donald Monro, An Account of the Diseases which were most Frequent in the British Hospitals in Germany from January 1761 to . . . March 1763 (London, 1764). ¹⁰⁷ PH, xiv. 983, 1351. The census bill was unsuccessful, we might note, largely because it was thought to be a threat to liberty and a preparation for further taxes, but the opposition in their arguments laid much emphasis on the census as a French-style measure, thus illustrating further the influence of fear of France at this time. ¹⁰⁸ On this general theme see Harris, ‘Patriotic Commerce and National Revival’, 298–9, 304; and Richard Connors, ‘ “The Grand Inquest of the Nation”: Parliamentary Committees and Social Policy in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England’, Parliamentary History, 14 (1995), esp. 307.

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contemporaries of national decline.¹⁰⁹ The answer, however, lay not simply in reinvigorating all those who had proved so feeble in resisting the Highlanders, but also in reforming the Highlanders themselves. Indeed, the most ambitious of all the projects of this period was surely the attempt to destroy the old Highland way of life and replace it by a more recognizably ‘modern’ social and economic system— or, to put it in the idiom of the day, to ‘civilize’ the barbarous people of the mountainous north. The reconstruction of the Highlands began not at the end of the Austrian war, but at the end of the Jacobite rebellion that was part of that war. Unsurprisingly, the immediate priority after Culloden, in Cumberland’s view, was to crush residual military resistance. A strong garrison remained in the Highlands for some time, and in 1748 work commenced on the construction of Fort George, near Inverness, an imposing physical reminder of the continuing importance of military force as the antidote to further insurrection. It was recognized, however, that the military option would be ruinously expensive as a long-term solution—the Highlands could not be permanently pacified by arms alone. Yet, as one observer noted, reductions (and therefore savings) could only be made in the Scottish garrison if Highland society had first undergone appropriate ‘regulation’.¹¹⁰ Even as he was engaged in the ruthless suppression of the last vestiges of the rebellion, Cumberland was turning his mind to how ‘the whole of the laws of this ancient Kingdom must be new modelled’.¹¹¹ The ministers readily agreed that the primary aim now was to restructure Highland society to prevent any reoccurrence of insurrection. Reconstruction, however, was not just an English device to control the Highlands more effectively. It was favoured and encouraged by many Lowland and even some Highland Scots, notably by Duncan Forbes of Culloden, the lord president of the Court of Session and an enthusiastic, if pragmatic, advocate of the ‘civilizing’ project.¹¹² Many different ideas were put forward; it was even suggested that all those involved in the ’Forty-five should be transported to the West Indies, and foreign Protestants imported in their place.¹¹³ In the end, the approach adopted was less extreme, but nonetheless radical. In 1746 restrictions were placed on the Scottish Episcopalian Church, to which significant numbers of Jacobites adhered, and a general Disarming Act attempted to demilitarize the clans. More fundamentally, the next year saw the abolition of heritable jurisdictions—the judicial rights ¹⁰⁹ See [Burgh], Britain’s Remembrancer, 15, 20; and, for testimony from private letters, West Sussex RO, Goodwood MSS, 106/571; Cheshire RO, Cholmondeley of Cholmondeley Papers, DCH/X/9a/28. ¹¹⁰ Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 86/2. ¹¹¹ BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32,707, fo. 13. ¹¹² Robert Clyde, From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander 1745–1830 (East Linton, 1998), 7–9; Duncan Warrand (ed.), More Culloden Papers (5 vols., Inverness, 1923–30), v. 178. See also, NLS, MS 5201, ‘Some Considerations by way of Essay upon The means of civilizing the Highlands & extinguishing Jacobitism in Scotland’, written in 1748 by William Crosse, professor of law at Glasgow. ¹¹³ Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 1534/2.See also Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), The Albemarle Papers (2 vols., Aberdeen, 1902), i. 214.

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attached to landownership and passed on by inheritance, regarded as the cornerstone of the power of the clan chieftains over their dependants—the outlawing of the kilt for all but Highland soldiers in the King’s service, and the official forfeiture of the estates of the leaders of the rebellion. The Annexing Act of 1752 established a Board of Commissioners for the forfeited (or annexed) estates, which were to be developed along modern commercial lines, with every encouragement given to industry, mining, and fishing as well as agriculture. In 1763 the Board also took on responsibilities for the development of the linen industry.¹¹⁴ The success of these initiatives remains open to question. In November 1750, Capt. James Molesworth of Guise’s Regiment reported from Fort William on the ‘Obstinate Adherence’ of the Highlanders to ‘their ancient Customs’, and the widespread difficulties in enforcing the legislation against the wearing of Highland dress. The region, Molesworth wrote gloomily, was still as lawless as ever.¹¹⁵ Ewan McPherson of Cluny, one of the leading Jacobites in Badenoch, who had played an important role in the rebellion, remained hidden in his ancestral lands for nearly a decade before he was secreted to France: British troops were still looking for him in 1756.¹¹⁶ Unsurprisingly, then, when new Highland regiments were raised in the early stages of the Seven Years War, the Earl of Hardwicke, a central figure in the legislative onslaught of 1746–7, was deeply hostile to what he saw as a dangerous volte-face. By seeking to exploit clan loyalty and reviving the military functions of the chiefs, Hardwicke argued, the Government was undermining all that he and his colleagues had been trying to achieve over the past decade.¹¹⁷ But the raising of the Highland corps, as noted earlier, would not have been possible without the cooperation of the clan chiefs, whose influence and power, though diminished since the rebellion, remained sufficiently strong to make them indispensable to the mobilization of Highland manpower. Hardwicke’s objections were accordingly overruled. It might be added that the reforming legislation itself only remained in force for a relatively short time. In the aftermath of the American war, when the Highlanders again demonstrated their willingness to fight in large numbers for the British state (albeit usually still under their own clan leadership), the annexed estates were returned to their former owners, the wearing of the kilt was made legal again, and, finally, the restrictions on the Scottish Episcopalians were repealed.¹¹⁸ Even so, what was attempted in ¹¹⁴ For more detailed coverage see A. J. Youngson, After the ’45: The Economic Impact on the Scottish Highlands(Edinburgh, 1973); Annette Smith, Jacobite Estates of the Forty-Five (Edinburgh, 1982); Clyde, From Rebel to Hero, esp. chs. 2–3; Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), ch. 4. ¹¹⁵ BL, Holland House Papers, Add. MS 51,378, fos. 87–96. ¹¹⁶ Ibid., Barrington Papers, Add. MS 73,635, fos. 5 and 27. ¹¹⁷ E. M. Lloyd, ‘The Raising of the Highland Regiments in 1757’, English Historical Review, 17 (1902), 469. ¹¹⁸ Conway, British Isles and the War of American Independence, 181–2; F. C. Mather, ‘Church, Parliament and Penal Laws: Some Anglo-Scottish Interactions in the Eighteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 92 (1977), 540–72.

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1746–52 is worthy of note. It went far beyond earlier efforts to promote economic development in the Highlands and it represented the first real endeavour to transform the region’s social system. Clan leaders still exercised power and influence, but that increasingly rested more on their ownership of estates than on feudal obligation and traditional loyalties. While the process whereby the old Highland chiefs gradually became much like large landowners in the rest of the Britain and Ireland can be said to have started before the ’Forty-five, the post-rebellion legislation certainly seems to have accelerated the change. Even the raising of Highland regiments, as Andrew McKillop has demonstrated, however much of an oldfashioned feudal levy it appeared from the outside, increasingly became a business venture.¹¹⁹

A MILITARY SOCIET Y? The erosion of the quasi-feudal basis of the clan system represented a demilitarization of part of Britain; yet the overall picture was arguably very different. Indeed, it could be said that the mid-century wars had the general effect of militarizing British and Irish society. On his return from a tour of the Continent in 1756, George Dempster wrote from London, ‘All my way up I found England dyed with red. Three coats of four were of that colour.’¹²⁰ Given the large numbers of men serving in the armed forces (official and unofficial) at one time or another in this period, and the concern about the need to counter a slide into effeminacy, it seems reasonable to suppose that military values, and an interest in all things military, became more widely diffused. Perhaps representative of this trend was the decision of Francis Drake Delaval, a Northumberland landowner and MP for Andover in Hampshire, to wear military accoutrements and carry a musket with fixed bayonet when Joshua Reynolds painted him in 1759. Delaval was not a regular soldier, but the previous year he had served as a volunteer in the raids on the Normandy coast.¹²¹ None of this is meant to imply that either Britain or Ireland became as militarized as Prussia, or, as a contemporary observer feared, that ‘the military Turn of our Nobility’ pointed to the imminent adoption of French-style government.¹²² Civilian control of the regular armed forces remained an important constitutional principle. The Royal Navy was directed by the Admiralty, the first lord of which ¹¹⁹ Andrew McKillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands 1715–1815 (East Linton, 2000). ¹²⁰ James Fergusson (ed.), Letters of George Dempster to Sir Adam Fergussin 1756–1813: With Some Account of His Life (London, 1934), 12. ¹²¹ Namier and Brooke (eds.), History of Parliament: The Commons 1754–1790, ii. 309. ¹²² [Anon.], A Letter Addressed to Two Great Men, on the Prospect of Peace; and the Terms Necessary to be Insisted Upon in the Negociation (2nd edn., Dublin, 1760), 35. See also, for similar worries, Centre for Kentish Studies, Amherst MSS, U1350 C41/35, Joseph Yorke to Amherst, 17 Sept. 1759.

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was answerable to the British Parliament. The army in Britain was under the day-to-day supervision of the secretary at war, who was also responsible to the legislature at Westminster. In Ireland, the army was controlled by the Lord Lieutenant, or his deputies. The British House of Commons voted funds for regiments and corps on the British establishment, and gave legal sanction to the discipline of the army in Britain, Ireland, and abroad through annual Mutiny Acts, while the Irish Commons provided financial support for the separate Irish military establishment. In England and Wales, the militia was under the control of the Lord Lieutenants of the counties, and in Ireland of the county governors. It must be conceded that both Government and the legislatures were not immune from military and naval influence. In wartime, Cabinet meetings often included the commander-in-chief as well as the first lord of the admiralty, who for much of the Seven Years War was a serving naval officer, Lord Anson.¹²³ The number of army and navy officers in the British House of Commons, we might note, rose from sixty-five elected in 1754 to seventy-eight in 1761. There were yet more in 1768—eighty-seven—and still eighty in 1774. At no time in this twentyyear period, however, did officers compose more than 16 per cent of MPs. Nor did these military and naval parliamentarians act in concert. The Duke of Cumberland, as effective head of the army, was able to count on the loyalty of a group of army officers in the British legislature, but after his disgrace in 1757 the members of his following went their separate ways. Thereafter, army and navy officers sitting in the British House of Commons did so as individuals, or as members of political factions, rather than as a professional bloc.¹²⁴ We need also to acknowledge that there was a good deal of popular hostility both to service in the armed forces, and, for much of our period, to the army as an institution. Mention has already been made of the difficulty of securing landed officers for the militia.¹²⁵ It should be added that those who actually served could be distinctly unhappy with their lot. As Capt. John Dawson of the Northumberland regiment wrote in his diary while at Berwick in March 1761, ‘I am heartily tired of a soldier’s life.’¹²⁶ We have also seen that the introduction of the reformed militia provoked widespread rioting amongst those who feared that they would be balloted, and that there was considerable opposition to naval pressgangs and some resistance to the forcible recruitment of the unemployed into the army. None of this suggests that the military captured the hearts and minds of the public at large. Nor does the persistent sniping at the very existence of the army in the early part of our period sit easily with the militarization of society. There was, as we will see later, a deeply ingrained constitutional distrust of ‘standing armies’, ¹²³ See, e.g., TNA: PRO, Egremont Papers, 30/47/21, minutes of Cabinet meetings of 13 Nov. 1760, 3 Dec. 1761, 6 Jan. 1762. ¹²⁴ Namier and Brooke (eds.), History of Parliament: The Commons 1754–1790, i. 138–45. ¹²⁵ See Ch. 3. ¹²⁶ ‘The Diary of John Dawson of Brunton’, in John Crawford Hodgson (ed.), North Country Diaries (Surtees Society, cxxiv, Durham, 1915), 254.

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and this distrust almost certainly helped to inform more general hostility to the redcoats.¹²⁷ We have seen already that the army was frequently depicted as morally subversive, as a body capable of corrupting many of those with whom it came into contact. As an opposition newspaper commented in 1739, troops quartered in inns were guilty of ‘Insolence, Outrages, and leud Examples of Debauchery and Idleness, which they spread thro’ the whole Nation’.¹²⁸ Hogarth’s well-known picture of The March of the Guards to Finchley (1750), with its vivid images of a drunken, womanizing soldiery, conveyed much the same message. By the end of our period, however, there are grounds for believing that attitudes had changed, or at least were beginning to change. The victories of the Seven Years War probably played a part in habituating the public to seeing the army in a more positive light.¹²⁹ The navy, which was viewed as constitutionally unthreatening, had never been criticized in the same way as the army—indeed, admirals like Vernon easily acquired hero status. As Henry Seymour Conway, an army officer, wrote towards the end of the Austrian Succession conflict, ‘a water-hero in the eyes of true Britons is superior to a land one’.¹³⁰ But in the Seven Years War successful generals were treated in the same manner as victorious admirals. Wolfe and Granby, in particular, became the focus of much affection, and even adulation. Perhaps the clearest indication of the public’s new willingness to embrace the army as well as the navy is the way in which military themes appeared in the arts and literature. David Garrick’s popular poem Hearts of Oak, a celebration of the victories of 1759, unhesitatingly ranked ‘Our Soldiers’ alongside ‘our sailors, our statesmen and King’ as objects of esteem.¹³¹ Paintings of Wolfe’s demise, as we will see, were widely disseminated in cheap prints;¹³² British soldiers were praised in poetry for their bravery (‘our triumphant Bands’, as George Cockings proudly called them, who ‘force their way’);¹³³ and fans for ladies even carried maps of the army’s operations in Germany.¹³⁴ Is there a case, then, for arguing that the mid-century wars were significant influences on the development of eighteenth-century British and Irish society? It must be said that the impact of the conflicts was, in many respects, merely ephemeral; it lasted no longer than the wars themselves, or their immediate aftermath. We should also recognize that in other ways the wars intensified or accelerated rather then initiated change. But, notwithstanding these necessary qualifications, ¹²⁷ See Ch.6. ¹²⁸ Craftsman, 3 Feb. 1739. ¹²⁹ See Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), 689; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 196. Brumwell, Redcoats, 54–7, is more cautious about the extent to which attitudes changed. ¹³⁰ W. S. Lewis et al. (eds.), Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, xxxvii (London, 1974), 273. See Ch. 8 for a discussion of Vernon and other war heroes. ¹³¹ Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford, 1987), 483. ¹³² See Ch. 8. ¹³³ George Cockings, War: An Heroic Poem (Boston, Mass., 1762), 1, 5. ¹³⁴ Timothy Clayton, The English Print 1688–1802 (New Haven, Conn., 1997), 150.

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the conflicts of our period made a difference. An obvious example is medical advances that owed much to wartime experience of disease. Their beneficial effects were to be felt for many years after the memory of the wars had faded— indeed, they continue to be felt to this day. Less obvious, perhaps, but still significant, are the reforms by which the state sought to improve the health, vitality, and prosperity of the nation for war-waging purposes. Initiatives on crime, drinking, policing, and the promotion of economic development were to have more than a short-term impact. And the reformation of the Highlands, though not without its setbacks, and far from as complete as its most fervent advocates wished, must surely be counted as one of the long-term consequences of the ’Forty-five rebellion, which, as has been argued already, was an integral part of the War of the Austrian Succession. Finally, we can see that a prolonged period of more-or-less continuous warfare changed attitudes towards the military. In 1739, after decades of avoidance of major wars, the army was still widely regarded with suspicion and fear. The navy, by contrast, was seen as a bulwark of liberty, as epitomized in the lyrics of Rule, Britannia (1740), with its assertion that ‘Britons never will be slaves’.¹³⁵ By 1763 the navy’s reputation had reached new heights, but the army was not far behind in public estimation. The successes of the Seven Years War— especially the victories secured by the regulars in North America, the Caribbean, and Germany—elevated the standing of the redcoats. The army had become, or at least was starting to become, a source of national pride. ¹³⁵ Lonsdale (ed.), New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, 192.

6 War and Politics In November 1759, when a French landing threatened, the Duke of Bedford, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, enthused ‘that there never at any Time appeared a greater Spirit for the Defence of their King and Country, and a greater Harmony and Union amongst each other, than in the present Parliament’.¹ Yet, even amongst Ireland’s anxious Protestants, war caused more division than unity. The conduct of foreign policy was still a prerogative of the Crown, and therefore technically off-limits for all but the King’s ministers; however, this did not stop war and peace becoming major issues on which there was much debate and disagreement. The principal arena for these arguments was the Westminster Parliament, though it should be stressed that they were played out within ministries as well as between governments and oppositions.² However, debate was far from confined to the parties and factions in the hothouse world of ‘high politics’. War was news, and newspapers and periodicals carried frequent and lengthy reports on military and naval operations.³ News, in turn, generated comment—the press itself promoted debate through the publication of opinions in the form of letters, and there was a great outpouring of pamphlet literature on particularly contentious warrelated subjects. Ballads, poetry, and satirical prints added to the engagement of the wider public with the issues.⁴ Indeed, perhaps the most important aspect of the impact of war on mid-eighteenth-century British and Irish politics was the way in which public opinion became an increasingly important element in the political process. In a very real sense oligarchical politics was put under pressure, in both Britain and Ireland, as ruling groups were held to account for wartime failures by a politicized public. This development, and the key role played in it by William Pitt, will be discussed at the end of the chapter, as will an important structural change in the world of ‘high politics’ itself—the decline of the old battle ¹ SP 63/416, fo. 121. ² Jeremy Black, Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004), 78. ³ For the reporting of wartime developments, see, e.g., Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1987), ch. 7; Bob Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France, 1620–1800 (London, 1996), esp. 87. For the growth of newspaper sales during wartime, see C. Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1997), 124, 128. ⁴ See M. John Cardwell, Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years War (Manchester, 2004).

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between Whigs and Tories. Before these matters are considered, however, the emphasis will be on the content of political disputation. There was argument over whether Britain (and therefore Ireland also) should be involved in war at all. There was disagreement in the Austrian war, particularly, about British participation. This debate related closely to another—if Britain were to be engaged in war, where should that war be fought, and for what purposes? A great many words were spoken and great quantities of ink were employed on the vexed question of colonial and maritime warfare versus continental European warfare. This in turn was related to Britain’s Hanoverian connections, which war in Europe brought into sharp relief and made a matter of great controversy. The mobilization of manpower and resources for war was also a much contested matter: what form should military and naval mobilization take, which branches of the armed forces should be augmented, and what role, if any, should a reformed and revitalized militia play? And how should Britain’s war effort be paid for? If entering into hostilities and the conduct of wars were controversial, the endings of conflicts were no less so. The peace negotiations proved at least as divisive as the wars themselves. In both the 1740s and the early 1760s, when to end the war and on what terms were vexed questions that interested the political nation.

WAR OR NO WAR? Walpole was reluctant to engage in conflict with the Spanish in 1739. His long period in office had been based on low taxes at home and peace abroad; he was convinced (rightly, as it transpired) that war would not only be expensive but would also provide an opening for a foreign enemy to play the Jacobite card and endanger Whig Government, the Hanoverian dynasty, and the Protestant succession itself.⁵ But the Spanish war did not cause a major division amongst the parliamentary and political classes. Public opinion, egged on by the press, mercantile interests, and the parliamentary opposition, seems to have been strongly in favour of fighting the Spanish. Even Walpole acquiesced, though probably more as a result of the breakdown of negotiations with the Spanish than as an act of surrender to enraged public opinion.⁶ The outbreak of hostilities was greeted with patriotic verse;⁷ and Vernon’s victory at Porto Bello was the cause of widespread and ecstatic celebration.⁸ Even when this initial success was not followed up by further triumphs, public opinion seems to have remained committed to the struggle. In November 1740 the people of London were said to be ‘quite unanimous in ⁵ See Jeremy Black, ‘Walpole and Foreign Policy’, in idem (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (London, 1984), 160. ⁶ See Philip Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain (Woodbridge, 1998), for the argument that diplomacy mattered more than public opinion. ⁷ ‘On the Declaration of War against Spain: A Rhapsody’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 9 (1739), 596–7. ⁸ See Ch. 8 for Vernon as a national hero.

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pushing ye War with ye utmost vigour’.⁹ The next summer, a letter written in London emphasized ‘the hatetred our common people have taken to the Spaniards’.¹⁰ War with France was more controversial. Although there was undoubtedly a great deal of animus directed at the French and their ambitions, conflict with France excited less overwhelming support than war with Spain. Even before the shooting started, there was criticism of the sending of troops to the Low Countries to support Maria Theresa of Austria. Walpole’s successors were accused of using the ‘Circumstances of Europe’ as an excuse for not remedying domestic ills.¹¹ Once formal hostilities began, opponents of the ministry went further and condemned the conflict as a deliberate attempt to strengthen the hands of Government. The current Whigs, one pamphlet claimed, ‘raise a Cry against France, only to call off our Attention, while they undermine the English Constitution, in order to bury every Whiggish principle in the Ruins’.¹² In 1745, just after news of the battle of Fontenoy reached home, an opposition newspaper was more critical still, lamenting that the nation was involved ‘in a cruel, bloody, expensive and unnecessary WAR’.¹³ In the next conflict, there was less overt criticism of fighting the French; Edward Gibbon told his father in 1758 that his view ‘that a war can hardly be a good one, and a peace hardly a bad one’ was ‘unfashionable politics’.¹⁴ But as the conflict dragged on, war-weariness began to set in. Oliver Goldsmith used the device of a fictional Chinese philosopher to provide an outsider’s perspective to highlight what he saw as the absurdity of the struggle for Canada: the war between the British and French, in the words of Goldsmith’s Chinaman, had ‘already spilled much blood’ and was ‘all upon account of one side’s desiring to wear greater quantities of furs than the other’.¹⁵ However, popular support for the struggle in North America seems to have been considerable, and it was not until Canada had been secured in the autumn of 1760 that pressure to end the war began to mount. When, in June 1761, the Duke of Bedford described himself as one of ‘the pacifick party’, willing to accept the terms offered by the French to end the war, he was referring to a division within the Cabinet;¹⁶ however, by that stage ⁹ Glasgow City Archives, Hamilton of Barns Papers, TD 589/572. ¹⁰ Marion Tinling (ed.), The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia 1684–1776 (2 vols., Virginia Historical Society, xii–xiii, Charlottesville, Va., 1977), ii. 588. ¹¹ [Anon.,] National Unanimity Recommended: Or, the Necessity of a Constitutional Resistance to the Sinister Designs of False Brethren, Founded on the Conduct of All our Ministries since the Accession; and Particularly that of Certain Late Professing Patriots. In Answer to a Late Ministerial Pamphlet, Intitled, An Enquiry into the Present State of our Domestick Affairs. Shewing the Danger of a New Opposition, &c. (London, 1742), 15. ¹² [Anon.,] A Defence of the People: Or, Full Confutation of the Pretended Facts, Advanc’d in a Late Huge, Angry Pamphlet; Call’d Faction Detected. In a Letter to the Author of that Weighty Performance (London, 1744), 11. ¹³ Old England; or, The Constitutional Journal, 18 May 1745. ¹⁴ J. E. Norton (ed.), The Correspondence of Edward Gibbon (3 vols., London, 1956), i. 117. ¹⁵ Arthur Friedman (ed.), Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith (3 vols., Oxford, 1966), ii. 72. ¹⁶ TNA: PRO, Granville Papers, 30/29/1, Bedford to Lord Gower, 27 June 1761.

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there was probably a sizeable segment of the wider public similarly disposed to bring the conflict to a speedy conclusion.

CONTINENTAL VERSUS COLONIAL AND MARITIME WARFARE It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that there was significant hostility to war with France, either in the 1740s or again in the 1750s and 1760s. Much of the criticism should be seen not so much as opposition to a French war as such, but rather to the commitment of British manpower and resources to a war in Europe. Continental warfare was portrayed by its opponents as in the interest of Britain’s allies—particularly the Dutch and the Habsburgs in the Austrian Succession conflict, and the Prussians in the Seven Years War—but much less obviously (to put it mildly) in Britain’s own interests. ‘How many brave honest Men have been voted Abroad on our destructive Expeditions in this Land War’, an opposition pamphlet demanded in 1747, ‘Contrary to . . . the true Interest of the Nation, only to be made a Sacrifice of, or gratify the Ambition of Foreigners, and to secure them in their Pretensions?’¹⁷ The point was often made that ‘Britain and Ireland, by being Islands, are under no Necessity to purchase the good Will of their Neighbours’;¹⁸ or, in the words of another pamphlet, ‘Surrounded by the Seas, and having nothing to acquire, or defend upon the Continent, it cannot be our Prudence to mix with any of its Interests.’¹⁹ This isolationism, this desire to avoid continental entanglements, should not be confused with a reluctance to fight the French. At least some Jacobites had no desire to resist the French—they saw them as potential deliverers. But nonJacobite opponents of Government made their hostility to the traditional enemy very plain: ‘If the French should be so Quixotish as to make a Descent’, an opposition newspaper declared in February 1744, ‘they will find us the Sons of those Englishmen, who drove them out in the Time of Henry the 3d’.²⁰ The point repeatedly made by such critics of the Government was that the French could be countered more effectively by means other than a significant continental commitment. An attack on Dunkirk and the destruction of its fortifications and harbour, according to one pamphlet, ‘would answer the End of our vast Expence better than Conquests on the Rhine’.²¹ The coastal raids on various French ports in both ¹⁷ [Anon.,] The Freeborn Englishman’s Unmask’d Battery; Or, a Short Narrative of our Miserable Condition (London, 1747), 16. ¹⁸ George Burrington, Seasonable Considerations on the Expediency of a War with France; Arising from a Faithful Review of the State of both Kingdoms (London, 1743), 47. ¹⁹ [Anon.,] The Natural Interest of Great Britain, in its Present Circumstances, Demonstrated; in a Discourse in Two Parts (London, 1748), pt. ii, 10. ²⁰ Craftsman, 18 Feb. 1744. ²¹ [Anon.,] The Triumphant Campaign. A Critical, Political, Panegyrical, Poetical History of the Late Active Glorious German Campaign; To which is Added an Impeachment Brought by the H——nTroops

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wars—Lorient, Rochefort, St Malo, Cherbourg, and even the occupation of Belle Isle in 1761–2—can be seen as practical acknowledgement of this preference. A more frequently articulated position was that French ambition could best be checked by attacking French trade and French possessions overseas. An opposition newspaper, having decried the way in which the Government had joined ‘Britain to the Continent, and forfeit[ed] every Blessing, destroy[ed] every Advantage meant her by Nature’, went into raptures of delight at news of the capture of Cape Breton by the New Englanders (or fellow-Englishmen, as they were described).²² A periodical made the same point in a ‘Hymn to Victory on the taking of Cape Breton’, by referring comparatively to Flanders, where ‘The British blood is split in vain, / for not the British cause is fought’.²³ This line of argument was to be pursued again in the next conflict, when the German war was depicted in some quarters as a wasteful distraction from the maritime and colonial struggle against the Bourbon powers.²⁴ The argument for involvement in Europe was put with equal vigour by its supporters. In the British House of Commons, Walpole explained that French power had to be checked, and support for Maria Theresa was therefore imperative. It would be a disaster, Walpole maintained, if a French puppet were allowed to take the imperial crown. William Pulteney, one of Walpole’s bitterest Whig critics, accepted the Government case without demur: ‘I shall not delay, for a single moment’, he told his fellow MPs, ‘my consent to any measures that may re-establish our interest on the continent, and rescue Germany once more from the jaws of France.’²⁵ A pamphlet defending Walpole’s successors emphasized the importance to British interests of combating French ambitions within Europe. The vital task was to ‘reduce France within such Bounds as could not endanger publick Liberty’; ‘we ought to miss no favourable Opportunity of reducing the Power and Limits of a Nation, who have laid it down as a stated Maxim, never to miss any for distressing and destroying us’; if France humbled Austria and annexed the Low Countries, ‘what would stand in her Way to universal Influence, which implies universal Monarchy?’²⁶ Another pamphlet made the point that ‘this island would in the Field, against My Lord S—r; and the Design of a Medal to Perpetuate the Memory of Our Conduct (London, 1743), 17. ²² Old England; or, The Constitutional Journal, 1 Sept. 1744, 27 July 1745. ²³ Gentleman’s Magazine, 15 (1745), 357. ²⁴ See, e.g., [Anon.,] The Proper Object of the Present War with France and Spain Considered; and the Independence of Great-Britain Vindicated from the Connection with Foreign Politics (London, 1762). ²⁵ PH, xii. 169, 178 (13 April 1741). Pulteney was to continue to support the commitment to Maria Theresa and maintenance of the European balance of power, once he became a minister after Walpole’s fall: see Stephen Taylor and Clyve Jones (eds.), Tory and Whig: The Parliamentary Papers of Edward Harley, 3rd Earl of Oxford, and William Hay, M.P. for Seaford 1716–1753 (Woodbridge, 1998), 179. ²⁶ [Anon.,] An Apology for the Conduct of the Present Administration, as to Foreign Affairs Generally, But Particularly with regard to France; Illustrating the Views of that Ambitious Crown on all Flanders, from Authentic Proofs; and Shewing that His Majesty’s Commanding the Confederate Army in Person, is the Only Way of being really at the Head of the Confederacy, and of Humbling that Haughty Hereditary Enemy. In a Letter to a Noble Lord in the Opposition (London, 1744), 18, 33, 34.

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be the Seat of the War, if once our Out-works on the Continent were entirely in the Possession of the Enemy’,²⁷ and this conception of Britain’s defences starting in the Low Countries explains the deep concern of William Cranston, a London attorney, at the fall of Brussels to the French at a time when much of the British army was tied up in campaigning against the Young Pretender in Scotland.²⁸ At the beginning of the next conflict in Europe, when hostility to British involvement was again vociferous and well supported, another pamphleteer ventured to argue that a commitment to the Continent—at this stage through subsidy treaties rather than a direct military presence—was important not just to preserve the balance of power and the ‘liberties of Europe’ from French aggression, but also to secure the extensive British trade with the continental states.²⁹ Richard Walpole, grandson of the former Prime Minister, complained of the reluctance of the ministry to send British troops to Germany to help Cumberland’s ‘army of observation’ defend Hanover from the French.³⁰ Towards the end of the Seven Years War, when hostility to its German aspect was mounting, the point was made that the German campaigns tied down the French for a relatively small British commitment, and so enabled the maritime and colonial war to be pursued with less hindrance from the enemy.³¹ It was also argued that without a war in Germany the French would be able to devote more resources to an invasion of the home territories,³² and that if the French and their allies were unchecked on the Continent, the ‘Protestant Interest’, uniting Protestants everywhere in a common cause against Catholicism, would be fatally undermined.³³ It would be easy to assume that the division over what kind of war to fight reflected the continuing political split between Whigs and Tories. Historically, the Whigs had been associated with balance-of-power foreign politics, and the Tories with isolationism and the ‘blue-water strategy’ of a maritime and colonial war.³⁴ But if the Tories were suspicious of any continental commitment and inclined to favour fighting to protect trade and empire, these views were not confined to the ranks of the Tory party. Sir Francis Dashwood, one of the leading critics of continental connections and the German war,³⁵ was an opposition Whig, not a Tory, while Henry Bilson Legge, who refused to support the subsidy treaties ²⁷ [Anon.,] A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous Libel, Entitled, An Apology for the Conduct of a Late Celebrated Second-Rate Minister (London, 1747), 20–1. ²⁸ East Sussex RO, Sayer MS 836, Cranston to [John Collier], 20 Feb. 1746. ²⁹ [Anon.,] The Occasional Patriot: Or, An Enquiry into the Present Connections of Great Britain with the Continent (London, 1756). ³⁰ OIOL, Clive Papers, MSS Eur. G. 37/Box 23, Walpole to Clive, 8 Nov. 1757. ³¹ [Anon.,] Reasons in Support of the War in Germany, in Answer to Considerations on the Present German War (London, 1761). ³² See, e.g., Monitor, 4 Aug. 1759. ³³ See, e.g., ibid., 12 May 1759; [Anon.,] A Letter Addressed to Two Great Men, on the Prospect of Peace; and on the Terms Necessary to be Insisted upon in the Negociation (2nd edn., Dublin, 1760), 31; Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser, 27 July 1762, letter of ‘M. X.’. ³⁴ For the classical exposition of the positions of the two parties in the early 18th century, see Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (rev. edn., London, 1987), esp. 64–81. ³⁵ See Ch. 8.

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concluded just before the Seven Years War, was briefly Newcastle’s chancellor of the exchequer.³⁶ At various points, indeed, opposition to war in Europe seems to have been the prevalent sentiment. This appears to have been the case for much of the Austrian Succession struggle, and especially when the threat of a French invasion was causing much alarm at home—in September 1745, even Lady Hardwicke, the wife of the Lord Chancellor, was arguing that ‘to talk of Europe & her dangers, when England is on the Brink of ruin, is nonsense’.³⁷ Public opinion, insofar as we can gauge it, seems likewise to have been against any continental commitment during the opening phase of the Seven Years War, and still more so in its closing stages. Israel Mauduit’s Considerations on the Present German War of 1760 appears to have been immensely influential; at the beginning of the next year, the Revd Laurence Sterne, not yet the celebrated author he was to become, wrote from London that ‘The Stream now sets in strong against the German war’.³⁸ But we should not underestimate the strength of support for checking France in Europe.³⁹ Even in the Austrian war, there were plenty of voices raised in support of the Government’s approach: the Revd George Harbin, for instance, looked forward to seeing ‘the Ambition of France rendered incapable of disturbing the Peace of Europe for some ages’.⁴⁰ Nor should we forget that the battle of Dettingen inspired great celebration (‘We have nothing but rejoicing now on account of ye victory’)⁴¹ and the submission of many loyal addresses.⁴² Equally, we should remember that in the next conflict, Frederick the Great was much praised, especially when British military success seemed elusive and he was carrying the torch for the ‘common Cause of Europe’ almost single-handedly.⁴³ George Bubb Dodington, a Whig who opposed the German war, wrote regretfully in November 1758 that the public seemed perfectly happy to fund Prussia, as Frederick was producing victories, and was expected to win still more.⁴⁴ ³⁶ Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke (eds.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790 (3 vols., London, 1964), ii. 300, iii. 30. ³⁷ BL, Hardwicke Papers, Add. MS 35, 354, fo. 139. ³⁸ Lewis Perry Curtis (ed.), Letters of Laurence Sterne (Oxford, 1935), 128. See also OIOL, Sutton Court Collection, Carnac Papers, MSS Eur. F. 128/26, Clive to Carnac, 4 March 1761. ³⁹ See Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), 30–4. ⁴⁰ Somerset RO, Carew of Crowcombe MSS, DD/TB, Box 16, FT 18, Harbin to Thomas Carew, 28 Aug. 1742. ⁴¹ Brotherton Library, Wentworth of Woolley Hall Papers, MS 1946/1, Box 15, bundle 3, Dorothy Wentworth to Godfrey Wentworth, 3 July [1743]. For more on celebrations, see Ch. 8. ⁴² See, e.g., ‘Lincoln Corporation MSS’, in HMC, Fourteenth Report, Appendix, pt. viii (London, 1895), 117; Robert Renwick et al. (eds.), Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow (11 vols., Glasgow, 1882–1916), vi. 155; J. H. Gilbert and R. M. Gilbert (eds.), Calendar of the Ancient Records of Dublin (19 vols., Dublin, 1889–1944), ix. 124–5. ⁴³ See Ch. 8. The quote is from Lady Margaret Heathcote’s lauding of Frederick in a letter of Dec. 1757 (Bedfordshire RO, Lucas of Wrest Park Papers, L30/9/56/35). ⁴⁴ John Carswell and Lewis Arnold Dralle (eds.), The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington (Oxford, 1965), 380. See also the comments of Andrew Fletcher, who marvelled at the lack of opposition to funding Frederick and other German auxiliaries: ‘how gentle & tractable the Tories are in these extraordinary times’, he wrote on 20 April 1758 (NLS, Fletcher of Saltoun Papers, MS 16520, fo. 32).

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If opposition to war against France was usually based on opposition to war on the Continent, opposition to continental warfare was itself often linked to hostility to Britain’s Hanoverian connection. Jacobites, whether open or covert, naturally wanted to create and exploit anti-Hanoverian sentiment, and we can be reasonably confident that some of the highly tendentious anti-Hanoverian material published in this period was designed to further the Jacobite cause.⁴⁵ However, we can be just as confident that anti-Hanoverian feeling extended well beyond the Jacobites, especially at certain critical junctures during the mid-century wars.⁴⁶ Hostility to Hanover reached fever pitch between December 1742 and November 1744, when it seemed to be the view of almost the whole political nation: even the Duke of Newcastle, committed European though he was, complained at this time that ‘Too great an attention to Electoral considerations, has been in my opinion the cause of most of our difficulties’.⁴⁷ Thereafter, anti-Hanoverian feeling reverted to a lower level of grumbling resentment—punctuated by occasional outbursts of hysteria, notably in 1756—until the death of George II and the accession of the much more obviously British George III effectively took the heat out of the issue.⁴⁸ Anti-Hanoverians repeatedly made the obvious point that Britain was obliged to become involved in European conflicts to protect Hanover and its interests. Hanover was widely regarded as an exposed territory that could easily be threatened by Britain’s enemies if they wanted to divert attention from elsewhere—a weakness that put Britain at a constant disadvantage in its attempts to check French power.⁴⁹ Furthermore, George II’s dedication to his homeland meant that he was perceived to be willing to put its protection before any considerations of British foreign policy, despite the safeguard supposedly provided by the Act of Settlement of 1701, which forbade any foreign monarch going to war for the sake of his continental territories without the permission of Parliament. The people, an opposition pamphlet announced gravely, wanted ‘the Act of Settlement strictly observed with regard to Foreign Concerns’.⁵⁰ During the Austrian Succession struggle, Hanover was denounced as ‘the Source of all our Mismanagements Abroad’;⁵¹ and ‘the darling E——e’, ‘eased and cherished far beyond this ⁴⁵ See, e.g., [Anon,] A Dialogue between Thomas Jones, a Life-guard-man, and John Smith, Late Serjeant in the First Regiment of Foot-Guards, Just Returned from Flanders (London, 1749). ⁴⁶ Hostility to Hanover was not as virulent before the Austrian war as it was to become during that conflict: see Nick Harding, ‘Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover’, Historical Research, 76 (2003), 164–88. ⁴⁷ See Ch. 8. For Newcastle’s comments, see HMC, Buckinghamshire MSS (London, 1895), 100. ⁴⁸ George, as Prince of Wales, had famously described Hanover as ‘that horrid electorate’: G. M. Ditchfield, George III: An Essay in Monarchy (London, 2002), 23. ⁴⁹ See, e.g., Glasgow City Archives, Stirling of Keir Papers, T-SK 11/2/25, John Stirling to Robert Stirling, 22 April 1742. ⁵⁰ [Anon.,] National Unanimity Recommended, 53. ⁵¹ [Anon.,] A Defence of the People, 147.

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unhappy Land’.⁵² Preferment, a contemporary verse claimed, was the reward of all who praised Hanover and its soldiers (‘If nothing better, you’ll be made a Knight’).⁵³ Frederick, Prince of Wales, from 1737 the effective head of the opposition to his father and his ministers, had no hesitation in seeking to ingratiate himself with the anti-Hanoverians to further his reputation as a true ‘patriot’. In September 1749 he considered dividing the British and Hanoverian Crowns, with his eldest son (the future George III) inheriting the British throne, and his second son, Edward, becoming the elector of Hanover.⁵⁴ Frederick’s death in 1751 deprived opponents of the Government of a natural leader, but did not stop criticism of the Hanoverian connection. When his son George came of age in 1759, Leicester House, the London residence of the Prince of Wales, once again became the headquarters of opposition and the source of much anti-Hanoverian sentiment. However, in the meantime, there was no shortage of patriotic rhetoric directed against Hanoverian influence. At the start of the Seven Years War, George II came in for the same kind of attacks that had been levelled against him in the previous conflict. ‘His Majesty’s very Natural affection for his German Electorate’, Earl Waldegrave recalled, ‘was brought as an undoubted proof of his Settled Aversion to his British Subjects’.⁵⁵ The injury to national pride caused by the apparent favouritism given to Hanover was exacerbated by the hiring of Hanoverian troops as British auxiliaries on the Continent in both the mid-century wars. The Hanoverians in British pay were routinely portrayed as blood-sucking mercenaries, pampered at the taxpayer’s expense while British troops experienced real hardship and shouldered the main military burden.⁵⁶ When Hanoverian troops (together with Hessians) were in 1756 brought over to defend Britain from French invasion, resentment increased to fury: ‘Must these be brought to assist once brave English in repelling the Foes of their native Land?—Abject, degenerate Thought!’⁵⁷ Defenders of George II understandably preferred not to dwell on Hanover: there was little mileage in trying to extract anything positive from the King’s commitment to his German lands (though Malachy Postlethwayt did gamely argue for Hanover’s importance to British trade).⁵⁸ Instead, they justified British involvement on the Continent by stressing the need to check French power ⁵² [Anon.,] The Triumphant Campaign, 11. George’s decision at Dettingen to wear a sash in Hanoverian yellow rather than British red was cited frequently as evidence of his partiality: see Ch. 8. ⁵³ [Anon.,] The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated (London, 1745), 5. ⁵⁴ Aubrey N. Newman (ed.), ‘Leicester House Politics, 1750–60, from the Papers of John, Second Earl of Egmont’, Camden Miscellany, xxiii (Royal Historical Society, Camden, 4th series, vii, London, 1969), 192. ⁵⁵ J. C. D. Clark (ed.), The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, 1742–1763 (Cambridge, 1988), 175. ⁵⁶ See, e.g., [Anon.,] A Defence of the People, 146; [Anon.,] The English Nation Vindicated, 11. ⁵⁷ [John Shebbeare,] A Second Letter to the People of England. On Foreign Subsidies, Subsidiary Armies, and their Consequences to this Nation (4th edn., London, 1756), 31. ⁵⁸ See, e.g., Great-Britain’s True System (London, 1757), cviii.

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there—an imperative that would have operated whether or not the King was also the elector.⁵⁹ In the Austrian Succession war, hostility to George as a foreigner was reduced by the threat to the Protestant succession caused by the Jacobite rebellion. As a contemporary poem proclaimed, ‘His Cause is Britain’s, and his Rights your own!’⁶⁰ The rebellion, it should be remembered, also brought forth the patriotic song, later to be adapted as the national anthem, God Save Great George Our King.⁶¹ At the same time, George benefited from the carefully fostered association of the Young Pretender with France and Rome. The chorus to a new ballad boldly declared that ‘King GEORGE is for England, / Young Perkin is from France’,⁶² while on a contemporary map of the battle of Culloden, Prince Charles is identified as ‘The Young ITALIAN’.⁶³ Cumberland’s victory in Scotland elevated him (at least for a time) into a hero, and cast some reflected glory on his father’s dynasty. Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabœus (1746), with a libretto by the Revd Thomas Morell, was a thinly disguised tribute to the young royal duke. The same composer’s Joshua (1748), with its memorable ‘See the conquering hero comes!’, can be viewed in the same light.⁶⁴ Handel, of course, was himself German, and a German musician praising a German royal family was not necessarily the best way to convince sceptical Britons. But Cumberland, though subsequently suspected of a disposition to German-style military rule, ⁶⁵ was a more plausible Briton than his father. Even before Culloden he was described in a periodical as ‘British WILLIAM’.⁶⁶ A cartoon published in 1749 was still lauding the duke as a national saviour. Its title—The True Contrast. The Royal British Hero [Cumberland]—The Fright’ned Italian Bravo [Charles]—was clearly designed to leave its viewers in no doubt as to the Britishness of the duke, and by extension of the Hanoverian line.⁶⁷ In the next conflict, George II’s Hanoverian homeland became less of an issue once conquests outside Europe started to be secured. In August 1758, celebrating news of the capture of Louisbourg, a patriotic Yorkshireman effused that the victory would be ‘a glory to the close of the reign of our good old king, who may truly ⁵⁹ See, e.g., [Anon.,] An Apology for the Conduct of the Present Administration, 28–9. ⁶⁰ [Anon.,] The Alarm. A Poem, Addressed to All Lovers of Our Constitution in Church and State: Occasioned by the Present Rebellion in Scotland, and the Approaching Invasion (London, 1745), 9. ⁶¹ For the singing of this during celebrations after the suppression of the rebellion, see W. Brockbank and F. Kenworthy (eds.), The Diary of Richard Kay, 1716–51, of Baldingstone, Near Bury, a Lancashire Doctor (Chetham Society, 3rd series, xvi, Manchester, 1968), 114. ⁶² Humphrey Chaunter, King George for England. A New Ballad, to an Old Tune: Necessary to be Sung by all True and Loyal Englishmen, upon all Occasions; More Especially at the Present Conjuncture (London, 1745). ‘Perkin’ is an allusion to Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the throne in Henry VII’s reign. ⁶³ Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 12 May 1746. In November 1745 James Jurin wrote of receiving ‘a Charm, or Incant[at]ion in Italian Verse, to drive ye Chevalier out of Scotland & send him back to Rome’: Andrea A. Rusnock (ed.), The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684–1750) Physician and Secretary to the Royal Society (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga., 1996), 481. ⁶⁴ T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002), 275–7. ⁶⁵ Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), 47–8. ⁶⁶ Scots Magazine, 7 (1745), 469. ⁶⁷ BM 2790.

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be stiled the father of his people’.⁶⁸ The King’s decision in that year to pay out of his own income for Hanoverian troops in British service also helped to diffuse criticism of their hire.⁶⁹ Nor should it be assumed that there was universal condemnation of the bringing over of Hanoverian regiments to defend England at the beginning of the Seven Years War. On this issue, as on all others connected with the mid-century conflicts, there was a wide range of views. James Wolfe, though he thought it ‘reflects no honour upon the British Nation to call for foreign Aid’, was relieved that ‘the Hanoverians are come’. His relief was professional; he recognized that the Hanoverian troops were well trained and ready for immediate use, whereas the newly raised British regiments would be too inexperienced to be a match for any French invading force.⁷⁰ Observers with less military knowledge than Wolfe were also impressed by the Hanoverians. Gertrude Savile visited their camp at Coxheath in September 1756 and commented favourably on the order, regularity, and good nature of the Germans. She rated the Hanoverians much more highly than the British troops, whose drunkenness and rudeness at Chatham provoked her condemnation.⁷¹

THE POLITICS OF MOBILIZ ATION So far consideration has been given to disputes over whether to fight, and where to fight. We now turn to the no-less-heated arguments about who should fight. The highly contentious role of foreign auxiliaries has been touched upon already, but there was much debate on domestic mobilization also. Expansion of the Royal Navy was perhaps the least problematic aspect of this process. The navy was seen as a bulwark of British liberties, as it protected the country from foreign enemies and yet posed no obvious threat as a potential coercive weapon at the disposal of the Government. ‘Our naval force is our natural strength’, John Philipps, a leading Tory MP, argued in December 1742, when he voted against maintaining such a large army;⁷² while earlier, in November 1739, William Shippen, another Tory MP, and an implacable opponent of a professional standing army, had been happy to support an increase in the size of the navy, on the grounds that the war with Spain was a maritime conflict.⁷³ But even naval expansion was not without its political problems. Any growth of the armed forces—including the navy—inevitably meant greater opportunities for ⁶⁸ ‘A Family History begun by James Fretwell’, in Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Surtees Society, lxv, Durham, 1875), 241. ⁶⁹ See Ch. 4. ⁷⁰ West Sussex RO, Goodwood MS 223/3/9. ⁷¹ Alan Saville (ed.), Secret Comment: The Diaries of Gertrude Savile 1721–1757 (Thoroton Society, Record Series, xl, Nottingham, 1997), 318–19. See also, for pro-Hanoverian sentiment, James Fergusson (ed.), Letters of George Dempster to Sir Adam Fergusson 1756–1813: With Some Account of His Life (London, 1934), 12. ⁷² PH, xii. 914. ⁷³ Ibid., xi. 249.

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the Government of the day to use appointments to the officer ranks as a political tool to secure or maintain the allegiance of MPs. Parliamentarians, or their relatives or friends, could be offered naval commissions on the understanding (tacit or explicit) that the MPs in question supported ministerial measures in the House of Commons. Edward Southwell, a Tory MP, argued in January 1740 that the augmentations of the navy, army, and marines must add considerably to the power of Government, increasing proportionately the risk to ‘the freedom of parliament, and the security of our constitution’.⁷⁴ There was also the issue of how the navy was to be manned. Pressing was routinely used in time of war to provide the crews for naval vessels, yet compulsion was widely disliked. Not only was there grassroots resistance,⁷⁵ there were also voices raised in the British Parliament against the practice. In January 1741, Phillips Gybbon, a leading opposition Whig, pointed to the irony of sending ‘men to fight for that liberty, of which we have deprived them’.⁷⁶ At the beginning of the next war, in a debate in December 1755, Gilbert Elliot, MP for Selkirkshire, argued that impressment had ‘never been expressly authorized by law’, while George Grenville, who had recently served as treasurer of the navy, referred to ‘that tyrannical and unjust method, called pressing’.⁷⁷ Despite such criticism, impressment survived as one of the principal means by which the navy secured the necessary manpower; however, attempts to facilitate still further the transfer of merchant seamen into the navy were confronted with fierce libertarian objections. Parliamentary bills to register seamen to assist naval recruitment met with vociferous opposition in the Commons in the early stages of the Austrian war and were therefore dropped.⁷⁸ Expansion of the army was hotly contested. In part this was for the same constitutional reason that there was some concern about the growth of the navy: more commissions at the disposal of the Government almost certainly meant an increase in the number of MPs who were financially connected with the Government and therefore a reduction in the ability of the House of Commons to act as an independent check on ministers. As Lord Talbot, a Tory peer, told the House of Lords in December 1740, ‘That the army is instrumental in extending the influence of the ministry to the parliament, cannot be denied, when military preferments are held no longer, than while he that possesses them, gives a sanction by his vote to the measures of the court’.⁷⁹ Suspicion that the army was being increased in size for political rather than military reasons was perhaps especially strong during Walpole’s last years: the Walpole regime had been criticized extensively for its use of patronage to secure support in Parliament, so there was a predisposition to view all of its actions as an attempt to increase still further its patronage power. Robert Vyner, an opposition Whig, indicated his suspicions when he argued against expansion of the army in April 1741: ‘why we increase our armies by land when we only fight by sea . . . I am at a loss to determine’.⁸⁰ ⁷⁴ PH, xi. 344. ⁷⁵ See Ch. 5. ⁷⁶ PH, xii. 28. ⁷⁷ Ibid., xv. 549, 590. ⁷⁸ See Taylor and Jones (eds.), Tory and Whig, 161. ⁷⁹ PH, xi. 918. ⁸⁰ Ibid., xii. 174.

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These constitutional concerns influenced arguments about the form that augmentation of the army should take. The second Duke of Argyll, another critic of the Walpole Government, wanted to see an increase in the establishment of the existing regiments rather than the raising of new corps. Larger existing regiments meant more common soldiers, but not a great increase in the number of officers. New regiments, on the other hand, would produce a host of new officers, whom the Government could appoint on a political basis. If the new corps route was followed, Argyll feared, ‘we shall only gratify the minister with the distribution of new commissions, and the establishment of new dependants; we shall enlarge the influence of the court’.⁸¹ Needless to say, Argyll’s argument was rejected, and new regiments were formed, though probably for reasons of military expediency rather than political advantage—new corps were usually recruited for rank, with potential officers agreeing to raise a certain number of soldiers in order to obtain their commissions, and this enabled them to be brought up to strength more readily than old regiments pursuing traditional recruitment methods. A few years later, the raising of the so-called noblemen’s regiments during the ’Forty-five rebellion gave a new twist to the patronage issue. Offers to raise muchneeded troops were made by several peers who had only recently become government supporters, causing some hostility from long-standing members of the Old Corps Whigs—not least because the new units were to be formed only if the nobles in question were given the power to appoint the officers. Henry Pelham, the first minister, was reluctant to accept the loss of government patronage and control that the noblemen’s regiments involved, but he recognized that he had little choice in time of emergency but to accept whatever military assistance was proffered.⁸² The disputes about army expansion were not just about patronage, however. They related to the desirability of recruiting certain parts of the population of the three kingdoms. The issue of Irish Catholic service in the army was a matter of great sensitivity; the willingness of the British state to countenance the enlistment of Catholics in the Seven Years War caused much uneasiness amongst Irish Protestants.⁸³ In the final analysis, though, military necessity overrode the concerns of Protestant Ireland. As the demand for soldiers increased to unprecedented levels, the potential of the large Irish Catholic population simply could not be ignored. Recruitment in the Scottish Highlands, as we have seen, was hardly less controversial.⁸⁴ In 1739, a letter in a periodical stressed the military potential of the Highlanders, ‘a numerous and prolifick People’, who ‘might be made a considerable Accession of Power and Wealth to Great Britain’.⁸⁵ But the formation of Highland regiments in the Seven Years War was opposed by the Earl of ⁸¹ PH, xi. 907. ⁸² See P. A. Luff, ‘The Noblemen’s Regiments: Politics and the ’Forty-Five’, Historical Research, 65 (1992), 54–73. ⁸³ See Chs. 7 and 8. ⁸⁴ See Ch. 5, and, for more on the implications of this for British state power, Ch. 2. ⁸⁵ Gentleman’s Magazine, 9 (1739), 287.

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Hardwicke, one of the architects of the legislative assault on the Highland way of life from 1746, on the reasonable grounds that using and therefore re-legitimizing clan loyalties to raise the regiments effectively undermined ‘the plan which has been pursuing for that country, ever Since the last Rebellion’.⁸⁶ Yet not even Hardwicke could stop the forming of the Highland regiments; as the third Duke of Argyll, the leading Scottish Whig, explained, there was no possibility of effectively tapping Highland manpower other than through clan-based regiments. Again, military considerations took precedence.⁸⁷ The manner of army recruitment was also a subject of political dispute. The compulsory conscription of men under the provisions of the various Recruiting Acts was not only unpopular with the victims, and regarded with distaste by many military and civil officers;⁸⁸ it was criticized by public and politicians as an attack on the liberty of the subject as indefensible as press-ganging for the navy. George Dempster, a Scottish landowner recently returned from the Grand Tour, regarded the operation of pressing for the army in 1757 as ‘Contrary to all law’ and ‘in repugnance to all liberty’.⁸⁹ The next year, Pitt himself tried to boost his libertarian credentials by promoting legislation allowing the extension of habeas corpus to men impressed into the army. A bill for this purpose was introduced by the Attorney General, Charles Pratt, and supported by Pitt, though opposed by some of his Cabinet colleagues.⁹⁰ It passed the House of Commons, only to fail in the Lords, but thereafter there was no use of military conscription during the Seven Years War.⁹¹ Once again, however, ideology probably played second fiddle to practicalities. However politically convenient it was to be seen not to be employing compulsion to man the army, the failure of the Recruiting Acts to yield significant quantities of appropriate soldiers was probably the decisive consideration. In a memorandum almost certainly written in 1759, Lord Barrington, the secretary at war, though admittedly no enthusiast for impressment as a system, expressed the view that the rate of return was too poor to justify bringing in another bill legalizing compulsory military service.⁹² At the beginning of our period, as we have seen,⁹³ there was still much hostility to the very existence of a regular standing army. The alternative, favoured by the Tories and many country-minded Whigs, was a revived militia. Arguments in favour of the militia, while sometimes emphasizing the savings in public expenditure involved, as ⁸⁶ Quoted in E. M. Lloyd, ‘The Raising of the Highland Regiments in 1757’, English Historical Review, 17 (1902), 469. ⁸⁷ See ibid., 468. For more on the dukes of Argyll and Scottish politics, see Ch. 10. ⁸⁸ See Ch. 3. ⁸⁹ Fergusson (ed.), Letters of George Dempster, 29. ⁹⁰ See NLS, Fletcher of Saltoun Papers, MS 16520, fo. 23. ⁹¹ Richard Middleton, ‘The Recruitment of the British Army, 1755–1762’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 67 (1989), 233. For the arguments, see PH, xv. 871–926, and [Anon.,] An Inquiry into the Nature and Effect of the Writ of Habeas Corpus, The Great Bulwark of British Liberty, Both at Common Law, and Under the Act of Parliament. And Also into the Propriety of Explaining and Extending that Act (London, 1758). ⁹² See Ch. 3. ⁹³ See Ch. 5.

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the militia would be called out only in time of actual emergency, essentially boiled down to a basic constitutional point: whereas the standing army could be used as an instrument of coercion and patronage power by unscrupulous ministers, the militia could protect the nation both from external enemies and from home-bred tyranny. Militia advocates had been pressing their case, with no real progress, for generations, but the mid-century wars brought the militia to the forefront of politics, and eventually led to reform in 1757. The outcome, however, was very different from what earlier militia enthusiasts had envisaged.⁹⁴ War in Europe, opposed so strongly by a sizeable part of the political nation, gave a new impetus to debates about the militia. Critics of a continental commitment tended to be the warmest advocates of a militia, not least because the consequent reduction of the standing army would make direct involvement in continental conflicts all but impossible. The success of what were supposed to be New England militiamen at Louisbourg in 1745 also gave a great boost to devotees of a revived militia in Britain. Still more important was the Jacobite uprising. As one pamphleteer argued in the aftermath of the rebellion, the Highlanders had managed to penetrate so far into England because they were ‘armed, and [had] been disciplined for a few Months’, while those who suffered at their hands ‘were unarmed, and undisciplined’. The answer, it naturally followed to the author, was a reformed militia.⁹⁵ In the next war, events in North America were again influential: Braddock’s ignominious defeat on the Monongahela in July 1755 was taken to prove, once more, the value of irregular forces and the limited utility of the standing army. However, as in the War of the Austrian Succession, developments nearer home were vital. The so-called Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, which involved the Austrians forsaking their traditional anti-French stance and becoming formal allies of Louis XV, raised the possibility that the French might be able to use the Austrian Netherlands as a launching pad for an invasion without having to fight to gain access to its ports. With Britain’s outer defences exposed, attention naturally focused on maximizing domestic military potential.⁹⁶ The arrival of German auxiliaries to help defend England from invasion in that same year gave a golden opportunity to advocates of the militia to press the advantages of a homegrown force. As John Shebbeare argued in characteristically uncompromising style, ‘I believe it may be justly ascertained a Maxim in Politics, That no Nation which can defend itself, and effectively annoy it’s Enemy, should ever retain mercenary Troops for these Purposes.’⁹⁷ In the debates on militia reform that began in ⁹⁴ The classic account, on which I have drawn heavily in the following summary of arguments, is J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue 1660–1802 (London, 1965). Also valuable is Eliga H. Gould, ‘To Strengthen the King’s Hands: Dynastic Legitimacy, Militia Reform and Ideas of National Unity in England 1745–1760’, Historical Journal, 34 (1991), 329–48, and the same author’s Persistence of Empire, ch. 3. ⁹⁵ [Anon.,] A Proposal for Arming, and Disciplining the People of Great Britain. With Some Occasional Reflections on the Late Conduct of France (London, 1746), 4, 6, 23. ⁹⁶ See Gould, Persistence of Empire, 76–7. ⁹⁷ [Shebbeare,] Second Letter to the People of England, 22.

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1756 and culminated in the Militia Act of the following year, the militia therefore emerged not so much as an alternative to the standing army, but as an alternative to imported foreign mercenaries.⁹⁸ Indeed, earlier arguments that the militia should replace the regulars now tended to be eclipsed by the idea that the militia should supplement the standing army. With much of the army being deployed in 1756 and 1757 in North America, and not in Germany, hostility to the army as such diminished. The militia, it was now claimed, could be entrusted with home defence, while the regular troops could promote British colonial and commercial interests beyond Europe. ‘The better capacity we are in to defend ourselves at home’, one pamphlet of 1756 claimed, ‘the more force we can spare to secure his Majesty’s AMERICAN dominions’.⁹⁹ Militia reform was resisted to the end by some old corps Whigs who stressed the potential damage to the economy, but were probably also worried about the patronage power that would be exercised in some counties by their implacable opponents, and by the impossibility, if the standing army were much reduced in size, of pursuing an active foreign policy in continental Europe. But when it came, militia reform disappointed its warmest enthusiasts on two counts. It transpired that the new militia was far from popular amongst those expected to serve in its ranks—anti-militia riots, as we saw earlier, broke out in many English counties, leaving Pitt lamenting ‘the infatuated Spirit of resistance to the militia-act’.¹⁰⁰ But perhaps more disappointing still was the balance of political power inherent in the new arrangements. The new militia, while recruited locally and providing opportunities to leading county families to give favoured candidates posts as officers, was controlled from the centre. Militia regiments were deployed away from their home areas, and trained in camps alongside regular troops.¹⁰¹ In a very short time it became apparent that the new militia was certainly not an alternative, or even a supplement, to the regulars; it was merely an adjunct to the army. Some militia officers, far from seeing themselves as part of a constitutional check on central Government, bemoaned any attempt to distinguish them from the regular army, even in the matter of drill.¹⁰² For many of George II’s British and Irish subjects, the deepest disappointment was that militia reform was confined to England and Wales. The unreformed Irish militia had been lauded by Protestants in the Austrian war; the young Edmund Burke, for instance, was confident in June 1744 that the Dublin militia ‘could deal with an equal if not a superior Number of French’.¹⁰³ The Irish militia was ⁹⁸ See, e.g., NLS, Fletcher of Saltoun Papers, MS 16518, fos. 53, 57. ⁹⁹ [Jonas Hanway?,] Thoughts on the Duty of a Good Citizen, With Regard to War and Invasion; In a Letter from a Citizen to a Friend (London, [1756]), 20. ¹⁰⁰ Centre for Kentish Studies, Stanhope MSS, U1590 S5/C1, Pitt to Lord Stanhope, 3 Oct. 1757. See Ch. 5, for anti-militia riots. ¹⁰¹ See Ch. 8. ¹⁰² See Wiltshire RO, Ailesbury of Savernake Papers, 1300/1669, Major William Young to Lord Bruce, n.d., but 1759. ¹⁰³ Thomas W. Copeland et al. (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (10 vols., Cambridge, 1958–78), i. 21.

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successfully arrayed the next year when the Jacobite rebellion threatened to spread from Scotland, and again in 1756, at the beginning of the Seven Years War. But in 1760, when Thurot attacked Carrickfergus, there was some concern at the poorly equipped state of the local militia, and agitation for its revitalization.¹⁰⁴ However, the pressure for change in Ireland was muted compared with the public campaign in Scotland.¹⁰⁵ The British Parliament had not included Scotland in its militia legislation mainly due to lingering English memories of the ’Forty-five. Scottish resentment did not fully manifest itself until the invasion scare of 1759 brought the need for a proper militia again to the forefront. With the prospect of a landing causing some alarm, the regular troops in Scotland were concentrated near Edinburgh, leaving much of the rest of the country exposed. As Andrew Pringle remarked, ‘The Cry [for a militia in Scotland] is now become general’.¹⁰⁶ To the Edinburgh literati, Scotland needed a militia to recover public spirit in a commercializing society, but one suspects that to many Scots a militia was required above all to show that they were being treated in the same way as the English. Patrick Craufurd, MP for Renfrewshire, urged patience until ‘a plan can be properly disgested for ane universal Brittish militia’,¹⁰⁷ but many of his countrymen seem to have been disinclined to accept any longer what was seen as a denial of equal status. Neither the agitation of 1759 nor its follow-up in 1762 achieved its goal. Indeed, by 1762 enthusiasm seems to have been waning, partly, no doubt, because the mobilization of a large portion of Scottish manpower for the regular army and navy was making employers concerned about any further reduction in the diminished labour supply.¹⁰⁸

THE POLITICS OF WAR FINANCE Mobilization for war involved more than raising the number of soldiers and sailors needed to fight; crucial to the whole process was provision of sufficient quantities of money to pay for the army, navy, and militia, and for the foreign auxiliaries and colonial forces deployed on behalf of the British state. There was, unsurprisingly, a good deal of debate about the costs of armed conflict. In January 1742, William Pulteney painted a gloomy picture of rising taxes and a declining economy. There had been problems, he claimed, even before the war against Spain began, but now the situation was much worse.¹⁰⁹ A few years later, however, a pamphleteer explicitly rejected such pessimistic prognostications: ‘we are not yet ¹⁰⁴ Harris, Politics and the Nation, 234. ¹⁰⁵ See John Robertson, The Militia Issue and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1985). ¹⁰⁶ NLS, Minto Papers, MS 11031, fo. 8, Pringle to Gilbert Elliot, 1 March 1760. ¹⁰⁷ William Muir (ed.), Selections from the Family Papers Preserved at Caldwell (2 parts in 3 vols., Maitland Club, lxxi, Glasgow, 1854), pt. II. i. 137. ¹⁰⁸ Harris, Politics and the Nation, 190–1. For heavy recruitment in Scotland, see Ch. 4. ¹⁰⁹ PH, xii. 337.

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Bankrupts, nor near it’, he argued, and added that ‘we are able, on urgent Necessity, . . . to bear a much greater Proportion of Taxes than at present’.¹¹⁰ At the beginning of the Seven Years War, as we have seen, much the same debate occurred: John Shebbeare attempted to paint a picture of impending ruin as taxes went up, and Joseph Massie endeavoured to provide detailed calculations of the true burden for different social and occupational groups—calculations intended to counter Shebbeare’s alarmism.¹¹¹ There was also much concern about the growth in the National Debt and how to reduce the tax burden that it generated. In 1740, one opposition pamphlet argued that ‘the higher the Debts of the nation are, the more must the power of the Minister increase’,¹¹² and in the Seven Years War it was claimed that ‘our Taxes are so multiplied by the Increase of our National Debt, that they are now become a Burthen almost insupportable’.¹¹³ Arguments about taxation and borrowing were often linked—inevitably—to views about the nature of the war in question. Opponents of a continental commitment emphasized the cost of supporting British troops serving in mainland Europe and paying foreign subsidies, and the relatively limited burden of a domestic militia and even an army deployed across the Atlantic. Money spent on the Continent, it was claimed in the Seven Years War, had little or no positive effect on the British economy, whereas money spent on a militia and on troops in North America benefited Britain in the form of orders for goods and services.¹¹⁴ In the early stages of the Austrian conflict, the Government anticipated this kind of argument by maintaining that it was preferable for British troops to be sent to the Austrian Netherlands than for Maria Theresa to be given a subsidy in their stead, ‘for by sending the Money, the whole is spent Abroad; but by sending the Men not above a third part is so’.¹¹⁵ Taxation debates also intersected with arguments about the boundaries of the nation. Plans for parliamentary taxation of the American colonies were advanced during the preliminaries to the Seven Years War, and—more familiarly—at its end. These plans were at least partly framed on the assumption that the American ¹¹⁰ [Anon.,] An Enquiry into the Nature, Foundation, and Present State of Publick Credit (London, n.d., [but 1747?]), 20–1. ¹¹¹ See Ch. 4, and Massie’s Calculations of Taxes for a Family of Each Rank, Degree or Class: For One Year (London, 1756), 6, where his wish to refute Shebbeare is made clear. See also [Anon.,] The Man’s Mistaken, Who Thinks the Taxes So Grievous as to Render the Nation Unable to Maintain a War (London, 1755). ¹¹² [Anon.,] The Present State of the National Debt: With Remarks on the Nature of Our Public Funds, and the Uses which a Large National Debt may be to a Sole M—— r (London, 1740), 20. ¹¹³ Bourchier Cleeve, A Scheme for Preventing a Further Increase of the National Debt and for Reducing the Same (2nd edn., London, 1756), 6. See also, [Anon.,] Thoughts on the Pernicious Consequences of Borrowing Money: With a Proposal for Raising a Supply for the Current Service. And Also for Taking off Part of Our Present Load of Taxes. To which is Added, Some Estimates to Shew the Advantages that would Arise from an Equal Land-Tax. And Also, a Method Proposed, for Discharging the National Debt (2nd edn., London, 1759), 4. ¹¹⁴ See, e.g., [Anon.,] Proposals for Carrying on the War with Vigour, Raising the Supplies within the Year, and Forming a National Militia (London, 1757). ¹¹⁵ Taylor and Jones (eds.), Tory and Whig, 186.

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colonists, as part of the extended British nation, should share in the taxation levied by the national parliament.¹¹⁶ The mid-century wars similarly saw consideration of the value of an incorporating union with Ireland. Security concerns were no doubt influential, but the primary advantage, from the perspective of several advocates, was that Ireland could be subjected to ‘an equal Share of Taxes’. The aim, according to Josiah Tucker, should be ‘To lay by Degrees the English Taxes upon Ireland; and to ease the English of the most burdensome of theirs in the same gradual manner’.¹¹⁷ Perhaps most interestingly, arguments also developed about how best to find the necessary money within Britain. Ministers were bombarded with pet schemes to raise taxes painlessly, or at least less painfully. Robert Bonell, for instance, tried to persuade Pelham in 1747 that additional duties on wines and spirits would be the best course, and would have no significant effect on the level of consumption.¹¹⁸ However, questions of war finance were not confined to private communications to the King’s servants; they entered the public realm through newspaper pieces and pamphlets. Even in the Austrian war, which cost much less than the next struggle against France, concern about mounting taxation led to criticism of the inequality of the tax burden. One author complained that the ‘monied interest’ escaped largely unscathed, whereas merchants and manufacturers ‘feel all the Burthen of the State’; they had been stretched so far, it was claimed, ‘that a little farther Stretch may destroy the whole Machine’.¹¹⁹ Another pamphlet protested that the window tax was a very inexact way of taking account of ability to pay, and suggested instead a form of income tax, with the poor exempted, or at least paying only a little.¹²⁰ Massie argued that a tax on bachelors and widowers without children was the fairest solution, as their costs were lower than married men’s,¹²¹ while a further suggestion was that ‘Jobbers, Pedlars, and Dealers in Stocks’ should be ‘compell’d to bear’ part of the burden of taxation by yielding up a share of their profits.¹²² Many of these proposals seem to have had no influence on government policy, and so in one sense they are of only limited interest. But the individual schemes are perhaps less important than the fact that there was such a lively public debate: the financial burdens of the mid-century wars certainly promoted serious questioning of the nature and equity of the tax regime. ¹¹⁶ See Ch. 9 ¹¹⁷ A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which Respectively Attend France and Great Britain, with Respect to Trade. With Some Proposals for Removing the Principal Disadvantages of Great Britain. In a New Method (3rd edn., London, 1753), 44, 62. ¹¹⁸ Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 305/1 and 2. ¹¹⁹ [Anon.,] An Enquiry into the Nature, Foundation, and Present State of Publick Credit, 21–2. ¹²⁰ [Anon.,] An Essay on the Inequality of Our Present Taxes, Particularly the Land-Tax; and On the Means to Raise, by an Equal, easy Taxation, the Necessary Supplies Within the Year (London, 1746), 24, 38–9. ¹²¹ Ways and Means for Raising the Extraordinary Supplies to Carry on the War for Seven Years, If it Should Continue so Long; Without doing any Prejudice to the Manufacturies or Trade of Great Britain, pt. I (London, 1757), 4. ¹²² [Anon.,] Considerations on the Necessity of Taxing the Annuities Granted by Parliament, and Reducing One Fifth of the Capital Stock of All Persons Possessed of Five Thousand Pounds, or More, in the Public Companies; In Order to Pay Off the National Debt (London, 1746), 13.

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When to make peace, and on what terms, caused as much disagreement as whether and where to fight. Indeed, arguments about the peace were closely related to arguments about the war. Negotiations to end the War of the Austrian Succession brought into sharp relief the vexed questions of continental commitment versus imperial and naval warfare. In the closing stages of the conflict, proponents of a maritime and colonial approach urged that the war should be continued, to enable more conquests to be made at French expense.¹²³ There was great anxiety and resentment in some quarters that colonial acquisitions— particularly Cape Breton—were to be returned in exchange for a French withdrawal from the Low Countries. This was portrayed by critics of the Government as a sacrifice of true British interests to the requirements of the Dutch and the Austrians: ‘as our Wars are no longer our own Wars’, a letter in an opposition newspaper moaned, ‘so neither are our Peaces our own’. Or, as another letter put it, ‘after we have made some valuable Acquisitions to ourselves, and are in a fair Track of making as many more as we shall properly attempt, we are Most Christianly to renounce all, that those Allies who did not assist in defending themselves, may not be curtail’d of what was once their Property’.¹²⁴ Government apologists, on the other hand, sought to remind their readers that the principal objective of the war was to ‘defeat the Design of aggrandizing the House of Bourbon in such a Manner as might be dangerous to the Liberties of Europe’.¹²⁵ Linked to this was the long-standing aim to ‘preserve the Balance of Power’.¹²⁶ The peace, by securing the evacuation of the victorious French armies from the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, could therefore be seen as a great triumph, since France was confined to its prewar borders. One pamphlet went as far as to claim that ‘the treaty of Aix la Chapelle will be considered as a Model in succeeding Times, and be thought in them what it ought to be thought in these, a Masterpiece of Politicks’.¹²⁷ The same issues resurfaced in the later stages of the Seven Years War. On this occasion, however, the very successes of the struggle, especially beyond Europe, and the arrival of a new monarch and ministers, somewhat changed the nature of the arguments. The Government that sought to end the conflict was much less committed to the European balance of power than its predecessor in 1747–8. ¹²³ See, e.g., [Anon.,] The Grand Secret of Precipitating the Preliminaries Brought to Light. Or, a View of the Motives that Induced the Courts of L——n and the Hague to Overlook the Visible Advantages of Continuing the War (London, 1748), esp. 20–1. ¹²⁴ ‘Tom Tar’ and ‘Camber’, in London Evening Post, 3–5 and 7–10 May 1748. ¹²⁵ [Anon.,] Considerations on the Definitive Treaty, Signed at Aix la Chapelle, October 7/18th 1748. In Which the Advantages Stipulated in the Articles of the Said treaty with Respect to the Present State of Things, and their Influence with Regard to the Future Posture of Affairs in Europe, are Modestly but Clearly Demonstrated (London, 1748), 24. ¹²⁶ [Anon.,] The Conduct of the Government with Regard to Peace and War, Stated (London, 1748), 4. ¹²⁷ [Anon.,] Considerations on the Definitive Treaty, 22.

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In 1761–2, George III and the Earl of Bute were both keen to conclude the war in Germany as quickly as possible, and were willing to make colonial concessions to France and Spain to secure an early peace.¹²⁸ The result was a treaty that, while greatly expanding the British Empire, restored to the Bourbon powers many of the overseas territories that they had lost during the war. Again there was much criticism of the apparent generosity of the peace, though this time there was also condemnation of the desertion of European allies, and particularly Frederick the Great. In December 1762, Pitt, who had resisted sending British troops to Germany for so long, attacked the peace preliminaries not only for returning some of the conquests, but also as a sacrifice of ‘the public faith by an abandonment of our allies’.¹²⁹ Pitt’s resignation in 1761 had left him in the fortunate position that he was praised for the triumphs of the war but freed from any responsibility for securing its conclusion. His reputation intact (enhanced, even: in a contemporary verse he was said to have ‘sav’d his country—triumph’d—& retir’d’)¹³⁰ he was to come back in five years as head of his own government. The hapless Bute, by contrast, received no credit for the victory, but a great deal of opprobrium for the peace.¹³¹ Within months of the signing of the definitive treaty, he left office for ever. THE END OF THE OLD PART Y SYSTEM? Bute’s resignation continued what was becoming something of a trend. There was to be a procession of short-lived governments from Pitt’s leaving office in 1761 until Lord North was appointed first minister at the beginning of 1770. The ministerial instability of the first decade of George III’s reign was attributed by nineteenth-century historians to the young king’s determination to increase his own power by ignoring party distinctions.¹³² George III, according to this interpretation, wilfully undermined a working two-party system to maximize his room for manoeuvre. Whereas his grandfather, George II, had regarded the Tories as tainted with Jacobitism, and so accepted only purely Whig ministries, the new king, it was said, opened the door to Tories because he, like them, had authoritarian tendencies. The work of Sir Lewis Namier established that the personality and preferences of the King were less important than changed political circumstances. Namier argued that the old party labels of Whig and Tory had largely lost their meaning before George III came to the throne.¹³³ It now seems that the Seven ¹²⁸ For more on the choices to be made, see Ch. 9. ¹²⁹ PH, xv. 1260. ¹³⁰ Richard Graves, ‘On Mr. Pitt’s return to Bath, after his Resignation 1761’, in Ian A. Gordon, Shenstone’s Miscellany 1759–1763 (Oxford, 1952), 38. ¹³¹ See, e.g., [Anon.,] An Ode to Lord B***, on the Peace (London, 1762), esp. 8 and 14; and the undated and equally anonymous The Peace-Botchers. A New Satyrical, Political Medley, Being a Parody on the Celebrated One of Macheath’s, in the Beggar’s Opera. By a Disconsolate Englishman. ¹³² See Sir Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London, 1988 edn.), ch. 5. ¹³³ See esp., England in the Age of the American Revolution (2nd edn., London, 1961), 179–202.

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Years War played an important part in completing the decline of party that made it possible for George III to turn away from the reliance on the Old Corps Whigs that had so constrained his predecessor. Party had arguably been in decline for many years. The coming of the Hanoverians to the British thrones in 1714 shut the Tories out of office, not simply because the party was associated with Jacobitism, but also because George I linked the Tories with the recent British withdrawal from the War of the Spanish Succession—a withdrawal that had left Hanover and the other continental allies in the lurch. Walpole tried to keep party sentiment alive, not least because it suited him to depict the Tories as crypto-Jacobites who could not be trusted to maintain the Protestant succession. His own policies, however, limited the opportunities for a truly Tory attack, as his non-interventionist approach to international politics, his avoidance of threats to the Anglican Church, and his commitment to a low land tax all chimed well with Tory preferences. Opposition to Walpole was increasingly based on ‘country’ hostility to growing government power, rather than purely Tory animus against a Whig administration. And the longer the Tories were kept out of office, the more ambitious politicians gravitated towards the Whigs, leading the Tories increasingly to become a collection of discontented backbenchers. The War of the Austrian Succession revived party conflict in that the issues of war and peace harked back to the days of the War of the Spanish Succession, when Tories and Whigs had been bitterly divided over where and how the conflict with France should be pursued. But it should be remembered that this old fault line was less important than it had been, for now opposition to a continental commitment was not confined to the Tory party, which meant that the central debates of the time were not usually framed in simple party terms. Of greater significance was the way in which the Austrian Succession struggle brought Jacobitism back to centre stage. The very real threat of a Stuart restoration during the ’Forty-five served as a forceful reminder of the fundamental commitment of the Whigs to the Protestant succession, and at the same time cast fresh doubt on the loyalty of the Tories to the Hanoverian dynasty.¹³⁴ In October 1745, Newcastle was worried about how much support there might be for the Pretender in the Tory heartlands of the West Country and Wales.¹³⁵ The following February, when Newcastle and his colleagues briefly left office after a disagreement with the King, the Duke of Cumberland, still trying to put down the rebellion in Scotland, wrote that he trembled ‘for the old Whig cause that fix’d us here, and that must support us here. I don’t doubt’, he told Newcastle reproachfully, ‘you had all your reasons for resigning yet I think it’s at a most fatall juncture & that the enemies of the King, & his family will profit of these inward confusions’.¹³⁶ In the Seven Years War, the process of party decline was resumed and substantially completed. Pitt deliberately courted the Tories as he tried to lever himself ¹³⁴ Harris, Politics and the Nation, 63–4. ¹³⁵ Cumbria RO, Pennington MSS, YD/Pen/13. ¹³⁶ BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32,706, fo. 157.

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into power as a Patriot fighting for the ‘country’ platform, and once in high office he sought to secure their support in order to maximize the popularity of the new ministry. The Tories, as Jonathan Clark has argued, were ‘drawn into a Whig dogfight and deeply compromised’.¹³⁷ Pitt’s success in attaching the Tories to his coalition with Newcastle from 1757 changed the political landscape. Tories were first admitted in greater numbers to the magistrates’ bench, then to positions in the newly reformed militia, and finally to minor posts at national level. As they entered into office, they lost even the cohesion provided by a sense of shared exclusion. In 1758 a pamphleteer was able to argue that¹³⁸ DISAFFECTION,

is a Word, of which the Meaning is very near forgot; for Names must die, when the Things signified by them cease to exist. A great Majority of the WHIGS have laid aside their Principles, and most of the TORIES have laid aside their Profession. . . . the happy Effect of these mutual Concessions hath been, that the Principles of the WHIGS and the Name of TORIES no longer obstruct, the Peace and Unanimity of this Nation.

George III, then, inherited a political system in which factions jockeying for power were the basic elements and the old polarity of Whig and Tory had lost almost all of its relevance. The new king did not so much subvert a working twoparty arrangement, as read the last rites to a party division that was already so drained of life that it was little more than an empty shell.

THE IMPORTANCE OF EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY OPINION We come finally to perhaps the most important political development that can be linked to the armed conflicts of 1739–63. The two mid-century conflicts, and particularly the Seven Years War, made public opinion more central to politics than ever before and so paved the way for the popular extra-parliamentary reform movements of the 1760s and 1770s associated with John Wilkes and the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights. This is not to say that ‘low politics’ had never before exerted an influence. In Ireland, popular involvement had been pioneered in 1748–9 by Charles Lucas, a Dublin apothecary, who led a challenge to the oligarchic power of the city’s aldermen in a heated parliamentary by-election.¹³⁹ The campaign brought forth a veritable tide of pamphlets and saw the brief appearance of a newspaper, edited by ¹³⁷ J. C. D. Clark, Dynamics of Change: The Crisis of the 1750s and English Party Systems (Cambridge, 1982), 454. ¹³⁸ [Anon.,] The State of the Nation Considered, with Respect to a French Invasion (London, [1758]), 25. ¹³⁹ See Sean Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas and the Dublin Election of 1748–49’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1983), 93–111; Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997), ch. 3.

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Lucas, dedicated to forwarding the anti-aldermanic cause.¹⁴⁰ A few years later, in 1753–4, the Money Bill dispute, over the Irish Parliament’s claims to have the right to decide on the use of a revenue surplus, and the Government’s contrary view,¹⁴¹ stimulated the emergence of a host of Patriot clubs amongst the Protestant population. The consequences of this mobilization of popular (Protestant) opinion were still being felt in the Irish general election of 1761, when there were several attempts to challenge the control of powerful borough patrons.¹⁴² The events of the Seven Years War, and particularly the invasion threat in 1756 and Thurot’s descent on Carrickfergus in 1760, might have helped to sustain a popular, extraparliamentary dimension to Irish politics, and the peace, which promised such an expansion of trading opportunities, brought into sharp relief the restrictions on Ireland’s overseas commerce that were increasingly irritating the Irish Patriots, outside as well as inside the Dublin Parliament.¹⁴³ But the origins of popular involvement clearly predated the war. Both the Lucas agitation and the Money Bill crisis occurred in the brief gap between the ending of the Austrian Succession conflict and the formal renewal of hostilities with France; neither owed much, if anything, either to war or to war-related issues. In England, it should be added, there had been earlier occasions when opinion ‘out of doors’ was mobilized and pressure was put on government. Most famously, in 1733 Walpole faced the wrath of large parts of the country over his excise scheme. But that campaign against Walpole had been orchestrated and to a large extent controlled by his opponents in Parliament, who hoped to exploit the situation to wound, or even fell, the all-powerful minister. A distorted and exaggerated impression of Walpole’s proposal was artfully disseminated, and succeeded in alarming enough people for the Prime Minister to take fright at the likely consequences in the general election due the following year.¹⁴⁴ Public involvement in the politics of the wars could be viewed in a similar way. The pressure on Walpole to begin hostilities with Spain, and still more the hero worship of Admiral Vernon, owed a good deal to the determined efforts of the parliamentary opposition to manipulate popular opinion for its own ends.¹⁴⁵ Even so, the war years saw an intensification of the tendency for ‘the people’ to be drawn in as political participants, not least because, as noted earlier, information and ¹⁴⁰ See David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (2nd edn., Dublin, 2000), 95–7. ¹⁴¹ See Declan O’Donovan, ‘The Money Bill Dispute of 1753’, in Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (eds.), Penal Era and Golden Age (Belfast, 1979), 55–87. See also Eoin Magennis, The Irish Political System 1740–1765: The Golden Age of the Undertakers (Dublin, 2000), ch. 3; Martyn J. Powell, Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Empire (London, 2003), 16–37. ¹⁴² Harris, Politics and the Nation, ch. 5. ¹⁴³ See [Sir James Caldwell,] Debates Relative to the Affairs of Ireland; in the Years 1763 and 1764 (2 vols., Dublin, 1766), ii. 613. ¹⁴⁴ The key study of this episode remains Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis (Oxford, 1975). ¹⁴⁵ See Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 140–65, for the relationship between public agitation and opposition politicians.

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comment on the wars became widely available, and so many of the British and Irish felt equipped to express a view on war-related issues. There are even reasons to believe that during the wars, and particularly in the Seven Years War, popular opinion became an influence on elite political action rather than merely a tool to be shaped and then used by elite politicians. William Pitt was chiefly responsible for the new prominence given to the views of the wider public during the Seven Years War.¹⁴⁶ Although Pitt’s impact was probably greatest in England, he contributed to the increasing importance of Irish Protestant public opinion, not least because newspapers and literature favourable to him heavily influenced the form of political debate, and the growth of the Patriot movement, in Ireland.¹⁴⁷ Pitt cultivated popularity with a single-mindedness that no senior politician had shown before him, and used popular support as a means of compelling a deeply reluctant George II to accept him as a minister. He tried, like earlier parliamentarians, to manipulate public opinion for his own purposes, but he also seems to have responded to what he thought the public wanted. The unsuccessful Rochefort raid of autumn 1757 was a direct consequence of the recently appointed Pitt’s precipitate wish to satisfy the public craving for a victory involving Britain’s naval strength.¹⁴⁸ These political considerations meant that the expedition was launched too late in the year, and on the basis of inadequate intelligence. Consider also Pitt’s shift over the commitment of British troops to Germany. He had come to prominence as an implacable opponent of a continental commitment and a champion of a maritime and colonial war. His change of tack in 1758 has been variously interpreted. It has been argued that, recognizing the military need for a British force in Germany as part of the overall strategy against the French, Pitt worked sedulously to persuade a sceptical public to embrace this change.¹⁴⁹ But it has also been argued, no less persuasively, that Pitt followed rather then led the public on this issue—that he accepted the need for British troops in Germany because he realized that Frederick the Great had become very popular, especially after his dramatic victories in November and December 1757, and ‘the people’ now seemed willing to support the sending of a British army to sustain him and Britain’s other German allies.¹⁵⁰ Many members of the political elite felt distinctly uncomfortable with Pitt’s populism. Both the language it encouraged and its implications for government were unnerving. Pitt’s supporters had little hesitation in blaming the early failures of the war on ‘fine gentlemen, whose gayeties, pleasures, [and] self-indulgence’ had made them unsuitable for senior military and naval office.¹⁵¹ But if this attack ¹⁴⁶ See Marie Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years War (Oxford, 1980), esp. ch. 9. ¹⁴⁷ Harris, Politics and the Nation, 201. ¹⁴⁸ N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004), 268. ¹⁴⁹ This, in essence, is the line taken in Cardwell, Arts and Arms, ch. 9. ¹⁵⁰ Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt–Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War (Cambridge, 1985), 73. ¹⁵¹ Monitor, 13 Jan. 1759.

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on the lifestyle of men of birth and connection was bad enough, perhaps worse still was the way in which the middling ranks were led to believe that their views could prevail. The Earl of Breadalbane exemplified patrician disdain for popular politics. He took a very dim view of Pitt’s pandering to those who knew nothing of the complexities of international politics. He disapproved strongly of Pitt’s keeping his friends in the press up to date with war plans and developments, which the Earl believed could happen in ‘no Government but this’. To cap it all, by bringing the public into such an influential position, Pitt had made negotiating a peace all but impossible. There could be no speedy end to the war—which Breadalbane thought imperative—without the return of at least some captured French possessions, but ‘how will giving up any Conquests agree with Popularity?’¹⁵² Breadalbane’s fears no doubt led him to overstate the influence that ‘the people’ had acquired, but he had reason to be alarmed. Once mobilized, public opinion was not easily demobilized. A cartoon of March 1763, entitled The Politicians, remarked on how ‘E’en low Mechanicks’ involved themselves in discussion of political issues. The emphasis was still on artisans ‘freely talk[ing] of Fleets and Camps’;¹⁵³ but popular participation continued to be an important factor in politics once the war itself was well and truly over. In 1774, an Irish visitor to London was amazed to find that ‘Every coal-porter is a politician . . . he claims the privilege . . . of damning the ministry and abusing the king’.¹⁵⁴ It was in London that this popular involvement was most marked; however, it would be a mistake to assume that it was confined to the metropolis. In rural Sussex, Thomas Turner, a village shopkeeper, closely followed wartime developments in his diary, often adding his own remarks on their significance. He continued to be interested in politics thereafter. In July 1763, he commented favourably on the opposition newspaper the North Briton (‘an extreme good paper’), which had invited government attack for its criticism of the peace treaty.¹⁵⁵ John Wilkes, MP for Aylesbury, author of the article in the North Briton that so enraged ministers, was probably the chief beneficiary of the mobilization of popular opinion during the Seven Years War. The Government’s overreaction in the North Briton affair gave Wilkes the opportunity to appear as a victim of oppression, and thereby launched his career as a popular anti-authoritarian hero.¹⁵⁶ ¹⁵² Bedfordshire RO, Lucas of Wrest Park Papers, L 30/9/17/6, 21, 29. ¹⁵³ BM 4018. ¹⁵⁴ William Henry Curran, The Life of the Right Honourable John Philpot Curran, Late Master of the Rolls in Ireland (2 vols., London, 1818), i. 67–8. See also, for a similar comment a year later, James L. Clifford (ed.), Dr Campbell’s Diary of a Visit to England in 1775 (Cambridge, 1947), 58. ¹⁵⁵ David Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754–1765 (Oxford, 1984), 275. ¹⁵⁶ See George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (London, 1962); Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform (London, 1962), chs. 1 and 2; John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1972), ch. 3; John Brewer, ‘The Wilkites and the Law, 1763–1774’, in Brewer and John Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People (London, 1980), 128–71; H. T. Dickinson, ‘Radicals and Reformers in the Age of Wilkes and Wyvill’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789 (London, 1990), 123–46; Wilson, Sense of the People, ch. 4; P. D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford, 1996).

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His followers were drawn to a large extent from the very middling ranks of tradesmen and lesser merchants who had been such enthusiastic supporters of Pitt. The Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, set up to help with Wilkes’s legal expenses, soon started to produce plans for reform of the law and the representative system, taking the Wilkite movement, and eventually Wilkes himself, into new territory. But if Wilkes’s significance is often taken to lie in his role as a pioneer of parliamentary reform, we should not forget from whence he came. He was himself a Pittite, and his meteoric rise can be linked to the arguments about the peace, and British interests, that Pitt’s resignation in 1761 had stimulated, and, more fundamentally, to Pitt’s wartime populism, which had accustomed the middling ranks to a greater voice in national politics.

7 War and Religion The armed conflicts of the mid-eighteenth century were intimately connected with religion and they had profound effects upon religious divisions and religious attitudes. The picture, to be sure, can be confusing, for very different— indeed, contradictory—impulses were produced by the wars. In general terms, however, we can see that armed conflict, while sometimes decried as against the spirit of Christianity, was usually depicted as a providential test of national virtue, a view that led naturally to the conclusion that defeat was a punishment for moral shortcomings. We can also say that the two wars, involving hostilities with France and Spain, the great Catholic powers, intensified an existing disposition towards crude and vociferous anti-Catholicism on the part of many British and Irish Protestants. No less clear, however, is the way in which the British state’s military and naval manpower requirements led to a softening in official (and more broadly in elite) attitudes towards Catholicism. The fevered anti-popery rhetoric of the ’Forty-five Rebellion years had become more muted by 1763—at least among leading British politicians. Nor was this just a temporary change induced by wartime pressures. There could be no easy return to pre-war mentalities, because the decision to keep conquered Canada, with its significant Catholic population, obliged the British governing classes to rethink the role (and threat) of Catholicism in the home territories. The politico-religious landscape had changed in other respects. In the twenty years after Prince Charles’s defeat at Culloden, the Jacobite challenge to the Hanoverian monarchy and the Whig regime appeared steadily less credible. So long as Catholicism continued to be associated with France, and French-style ‘despotism’, anti-Catholicism remained a potent force; however, fear of Catholicism as an immediate and persistent menace, aided and abetted by a domestic ‘fifth column’, was tempered by the effective decline of the Stuart alternative to the Hanoverians. The falling away of Jacobitism, Catholic military service, and the expansion of the Empire also played their part in weakening Protestant unity. The post-Seven Years War period was to see renewed assaults by Protestant Dissenters on the special position of the established churches throughout the three kingdoms, especially in England and Wales.

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CONTEMPORARY UNDERSTANDINGS OF WAR In an age when Christianity still provided the vast majority of the British and Irish people with their route map through life, war was naturally viewed as an event that had to be understood and lived out religiously. The contemporary desire to reduce the suffering involved in armed conflicts can be seen as a manifestation of Christian charity and as a means of demonstrating the superiority of one type of Christianity over another. A pamphlet published in 1747 lambasted the French for their severe treatment of civilians, a view clearly influenced by the pillage and heavy loss of life that followed the recent storming of Bergen-op-Zoom in the Dutch republic. It was an insult, the author of this pamphlet claimed, for Louis XV to be styled ‘Most Christian’, when his forces were guilty of such unchristian cruelty.¹ The British army, by contrast, was often depicted—by the press, by writers, by clergymen, and by its own commanders—as particularly committed to the avoidance of undue bloodshed and the disruption of civilian life. In July 1759 Wolfe went so far as to tell the French Canadians that his king ‘wages no war with the industrious peasant, the sacred orders of religion, or the defenceless women and children’.² This did not stop Wolfe’s army committing some dreadful atrocities during operations around Quebec that summer, but the desire to minimize the suffering associated with war was both real and widely shared. Enlightenment rationalism perhaps provides part of the explanation for this commitment to softening the horrors of armed conflict; the work of the Swiss jurist Emerich de Vattel, surely the most influential writer on public law in this period, is suffused with moderation and humanitarianism.³ But religious sentiment was frequently invoked as the primary spur. According to Richard Terrick, the Bishop of Peterborough, ‘wherever the natural Courage of our Troops led them on to Victory, the mild and generous temper of the Gospel disposed them to triumph ¹ [Anon.,] Memoirs of the Most Christian-Brute; or, the History of the late Exploits of a Certain Great K——G. Being a Genuine Narrative of his Cruel, Inhuman Proceedings in all his Attempts against the Lives and Properties of his Neighbours. Including the most Affecting Particulars relating to all the Battles and Sieges, from the Commencement of the Present War, to the taking of Bergen-op-Zoom (London, 1747), 3. For the same disapproval of the conduct of the French in the next war, see Dr Williams’s Library, Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence, MS 24.157 (35); Centre for Kentish Studies, Amherst MSS, U 1350 O31/5. ² Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (London, 1909), 439. See also NAM, MS 6707–11, Notebook of Lt. Hamilton, c.1762, p. 130; and Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), 179–90. Captain Sir James Douglas of the Royal Navy was no less convinced of British ‘moderation’: see NMM, Douglas Papers, DOU/4, Douglas to the French governor of Martinique, 1 June 1761. ³ The Law of Nations; or Principles of the Law of Nature: Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (2 vols., London, 1759–60), esp. ii. 59–60, 107. See Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London, 1983), ch. 1, for Vattel’s importance.

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with humanity’.⁴ Christian charity was likewise claimed as the main motive of those involved in the remarkable subscription in the Seven Years War to clothe the French prisoners who had been deprived of financial support by their own hardpressed government: ‘we may hope’, the author of the introduction to the printed proceedings of the subscription committee wrote, that, as a result of this instance of charity, the French themselves would ‘no longer detest as heresy that religion, which makes its professors the followers of HIM, who has commanded us to “do good to them that hate us” ’.⁵ A desire to limit the afflictions of war was not the same, however, as an anti-war commitment. There were expressions of pacific sentiment in our period, such as the poem that described war as the ‘Bane of Subjects, and the Sport of Kings’, in which ‘the guiltless die, the guilty live’, and the comment of John Conybeare, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, that ‘War, in every View of it, is a terrible Calamity . . . it interrupts our Enjoyments,—breaks in upon Commerce,— exhausts our Wealth,—and deprives us of many a valuable Life.’⁶ We might also note that proposals for avoiding future international conflict through a treaty of union between the various European states, on the model of the Holy Roman Empire, or Switzerland, or the United Provinces of the Netherlands, were published at the height of the Austrian war.⁷ But if clergymen regularly denounced war as an evil, Christian pacifism was not a strong force in mideighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. The established churches of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, the Catholics, and most of the Protestant Dissenters, regarded war in a just cause, or in self-defence, as sanctioned by the Scriptures and therefore as legitimate. Conybeare, having declared war an awful scourge, maintained that Britain’s involvement in the Austrian Succession struggle was both right and necessary. Likewise, Nathaniel Ball, an Essex clergyman, was certain that war ‘when commenced upon Principles of Honesty and Self-Defence, with a Desire only to secure undoubted Rights and Liberties, is perfectly just and lawful’.⁸ ⁴ A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; at their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday February 17, 1764 (London, 1764), 27. ⁵ Proceedings of the Committee Appointed to Manage the Contributions begun at London Dec. XVIII MDCCLVIIII for Clothing French Prisoners of War (London, 1760), introd. Compassion, not necessarily of a religious kind, might also have been influential: see J. E. Norton (ed.), The Correspondence of Edward Gibbon (3 vols., London, 1956), i. 117; and Arthur Friedman (ed.), Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith (3 vols., Oxford, 1966), ii. 97–101. ⁶ [Anon.,] The Review. A Poem Inscribed to the Right Honourable the Earl of Litchfield (London, 1744), 12; True Patriotism. A Sermon Preach’d before the Honourable House of Commons, at St. Margaret’s Westminster, on Tuesday, April 25, 1749. Being the Day of Thanksgiving for the General Peace (London, 1749), 37. ⁷ [Anon.,] The New System: Or, Proposals for a General Peace upon a Solid and Lasting Foundation (London, 1746)—a translation from the French language original. For anti-war sentiment in our period and later, see Martin Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730–1854 (Oxford, 1996), esp. ch. 3. ⁸ Conybeare, True Patriotism, 37; Ball, The Evil Effects of War, and the Blessings of Peace, Represented in a Sermon Preach’d at Chelmsford, on the 25th of April, 1749. Being the Day Appointed for a Public Thanksgiving, on Account of the Happy Restoration of Peace (London, [1749]), 7.

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The significant exceptions to this general belief in the legitimacy of certain types of war were the Quakers. As one of their number wrote during the Austrian conflict: ‘Wars and fighting, are neither consonant to the Laws of Nature, nor to the Doctrine of Christianity’.⁹ At the end of the Seven Years War, the Quakers sent an address to the King, congratulating him on the peace and pledging their loyalty, but also praying that ‘the Sovereign of the universe, who created all nations of one blood, [would] dispose the minds of princes . . . to learn other means of reconciling their jarring interests and contentions than by the ruin of countries, and the destruction of mankind’.¹⁰ Even with the Quakers, however, one must be careful not to exaggerate the strength of pacifist sentiment. Their refusal to countenance military measures was of some importance in those British North American colonies where they exerted political influence: in January 1745 the governor of New Jersey was obliged to report to the Duke of Newcastle that ‘all my Endeavours to get an Act for the Settlement of the Militia for the defence of the Province, have hitherto prov’d ineffectual; and I fear always will do so while Quakers are admitted to be of the Legislature; it being against their profess’d principles to do any Thing of that kind’.¹¹ But not all Quakers in Britain and Ireland seem to have taken the same firm line. In November 1745 Quakers were said to be supplying flannel waistcoats to the army, and wishing Cumberland’s troops success against the Jacobites.¹² Dr John Fothergill, a London Quaker, welcomed the prospect of peace in the spring of 1748 ‘as a Christian’ who wished that ‘another sword might never be drawn’, but ‘as an Englishman’ he hoped that the war would be pursued ‘with vigour’ until ‘a solid peace’ could be secured, for ‘by accepting peace such as a perfidious enemy will condescend to give us, we suffer ourselves to be disarmed and must soon become an easy prey’.¹³ During the next conflict, Quakerism was no bar to Isaac Fletcher’s celebrating the ‘Great news’ of the taking of Montreal and Frederick the Great’s victories in Germany.¹⁴ Many people, from a variety of backgrounds, were confident that God’s will determined whether particular military or naval operations were successful. God’s ⁹ [Joseph Besse,] An Enquiry into the Validity of a Late Discourse, Intituled The Nature and Duty of Self-Defence (London, 1747), 13. ¹⁰ Annual Register, vi (1763), ‘State Papers’, 206. ¹¹ Eugene R. Sheridan (ed.), The Papers of Lewis Morris, iii. 1738–1746 (New Jersey Historical Society, xxvi, Newark, 1993), 347. ¹² Edward Hughes (ed.), Letters of Spencer Cowper, Dean of Durham, 1746–74 (Surtees Society, clxv, Durham, 1956), 49. ¹³ Betsy C. Corner and Christopher C. Booth (eds.), Chain of Friendship: Selected Letters of Dr John Fothergill of London, 1735–1780 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 127–8. See also 202, where, ten years later, Fothergill writes that ‘War is not our province and the less we interest ourselves in anything that concerns it, the better, yet it is scarce possible to escape the general contagion.’ For the view that the Quakers became stricter from the 1740s about non-involvement in war, see Jacob M. Price, ‘English Quaker Merchants and War at Sea, 1689–1783’, in idem, Overseas Trade and Traders: Essays on Some Commercial, Financial and Political Challenges Facing British Atlantic Merchants, 1660–1775 (Aldershot, 1996), 64–86. ¹⁴ Angus J. L. Winchester (ed.), The Diary of Isaac Fletcher of Underwood, Cumberland, 1756–1781 (Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, extra ser., xxvii, Kendal, 1994), 91.

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blessing was sought on the eve of battle, and victory was ascribed to His favour. James Clegg, a Dissenting minister, had no hesitation in attributing Vernon’s success at Porto Bello to God’s intervention.¹⁵ The Earl of Cholmondeley, the Lord Lieutenant of Cheshire, alarmed by the rapid progress of the Jacobite army through the northern counties of England, hoped that ‘Providence may grant, that The Blow, that rids this Land of Such a Plague’ would be delivered by the army under Cumberland’s command.¹⁶ When, at length, the Jacobites were vanquished at Culloden, Elizabeth Fordyce was convinced that Cumberland’s triumph was ‘indeed the doing of the lord of Hosts’.¹⁷ At the end of the Austrian war, a Dissenting minister asked his congregation to ‘call back your Thoughts this Day to the Storm that hung over us, when France was preparing so formidable an Invasion, and GOD blew with his Wind, and scattered them’—the biblical allusion (Exodus 15: 10) happily concurring with the reality of the storms that wrecked the French invasion scheme of 1744.¹⁸ James Warne, a Dorset farmer, noted in September 1758 the ‘General Thanksgiving To Almighty God, for granting Success to his Majesty’s Arms in Taking Louisbourg from the French’.¹⁹ The Earl of Holdernesse, one of the secretaries of state in the Newcastle–Pitt coalition, disappointed at the lack of success over the French at Kloster Kamp in October 1760, concluded fatalistically: ‘There is no commanding Events, Victory is in the Hand of God’.²⁰ The lives of individuals involved in battles were similarly seen as dependent upon the Almighty’s design: ‘I do feel very thankful to Providence’, Lady Caroline Fox wrote after learning of the casualties in the allied triumph at Minden, ‘every one I at all interested myself about have escaped’.²¹ To the religiously minded, however, victory and safety were not necessarily causes for complacency. Divine favour could not be taken for granted. In the aftermath of Culloden, Richard Kay, a Lancashire Dissenter, wrote in his diary: ‘Lord, May we not only rejoice and be thankful, but may we be careful to prize and improve our Protestant Priviledges better for the future’.²² Similarly, Hawke’s crushing of the French fleet at Quiberon Bay in 1759 inspired the Revd James Newton of Newnham Courtenay in Oxfordshire to hope that ‘God’s Goodness to us will lead ¹⁵ Vanessa S. Doe (ed.), The Diary of James Clegg of Chapel en le Frith 1708–55 (3 parts, Derbyshire Record Society, ii, iii, and v, Derby, 1978–81), pt. ii. 389. ¹⁶ Cheshire RO, Cholmondeley of Cholmondeley Papers, DCH/X/9a/28. ¹⁷ G. F. Nuttall (ed.), The Correspondence of Philip Doddridge 1702–1751 (Northamptonshire Record Society, xxix, London, 1979), 255. ¹⁸ Philip Doddridge, Reflections on the Conduct of Divine Providence in the Series and Conclusion of the Late War: A Sermon Preached at Northampton, April 25, 1749. Being the Day Appointed by His Majesty for a General Thanksgiving on Account of the Peace Concluded with France and Spain (London, 1749), 10. ¹⁹ J. F. James and J. H. Bettey (eds.), Farming in Dorset: Diary of James Warne, 1758, Letters of George Boswell, 1787–1805 (Dorset Record Society, xiii, Dorchester, 1993), 79. ²⁰ BL, Holland House Papers, Add. MS 51, 380, fo. 252. ²¹ Brian Fitzgerald (ed.), Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster (3 vols., Dublin, 1949–57), i. 247. ²² W. Brockbank and F. Kenworthy (eds.), The Diary of Richard Kay, 1716–51, of Baldingstone, near Bury, a Lancashire Doctor (Chetham Society, 3rd ser., xvi, Manchester, 1968), 115.

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us to Repentance & Reformation of Manners’.²³ Unsurprisingly, defeats or setbacks induced even more soul-searching. Here we must remember that the experience of war in general, and not just the outcomes of particular battles, was commonly seen as a divine visitation, much like harvest failures, cattle plagues, and earthquakes.²⁴ Politicians, or monarchs, might be condemned for their role in bringing on, or avoiding, hostilities, but the Almighty was widely believed to use war as a test of a nation’s virtue, and as a punishment for sin. Seen in this light, the suffering involved in war became not so much a cause of lamentation as part of God’s grand design for checking wrongdoing, and therefore something that might even be welcomed as a timely corrective.²⁵ Hence frequent statements were made during the mid-century wars that defeats or crises were caused by national shortcomings. In November 1745, as the victorious Jacobite forces continued their seemingly relentless advance southwards, Capt. William Congreve, an officer in Lord Gower’s fencible regiment, wrote to his brother of his wish that ‘after it has pleas’d God to chastise us wch. we deserve he will have mercy & put a stop to our growing Calamities’.²⁶ The Revd William Stukeley was more explicit as to the causes of the Almighty’s displeasure: the ’Forty-five Rebellion, he pronounced after Culloden, was ‘a divine scourge to punish a nation overrun with vanity, pleasure, & an absolute rejection of all religious duty, thinking there is no God in the world, at least that he is not to be worshipped’. Later that year, reflecting on the war in Flanders, Stukeley warmed to his theme: ‘I think we are in a wretched condition, & owing to our great irreligion & flagrant luxury. Till we mend of that, times will not mend.’²⁷ The Scotsman James Burgh was still more certain of the precise causes of the Lord’s punishment and the narrow escape from disaster: ‘when Luxury and irreligion enter a Nation’, he told the readers of a frequently reprinted tract, ‘with them enter Venality, Perjury, Faction, Opposition to legal Authority, Idleness, Gluttony, Drunkenness, Leudness, excessive Gaming, Robberies, clandestine Marriages, Breach of Matrimonial Vows, Self-murder, and innumerable others’.²⁸ Although much of this kind of hand-wringing probably had only limited and temporary effect, there can be little doubt that providential views of the role and purpose of war were a significant influence on all manner of reform initiatives in the mid-eighteenth century.²⁹ ²³ Gavin Hannah (ed.), The Deserted Village: The Diary of an Oxfordshire Rector James Newton of Newnham Courtenay 1736–86 (Stroud, 1992), 72. ²⁴ See, e.g., Edward Arrowsmith, God’s Judgments Considered, as to their Nature, and End; and the Use that should be Made of them. A Sermon, Preach’d at the Parish Church of St. Olave, Hart-Street, on the 18th of December, 1745. Being the Fast-Day on Account of the War (London, [1745]), 19; John Dupont, National Corruption and Depravity the Principal Cause of National Disappointments. In a Sermon Preach’d at Aysgarth, on Friday, the 11th of February, 1757, Being the Day Appointed by Proclamation for a General Fast (London, [1757]), 9. Nor was war necessarily seen as the worst of these calamities: see Kenneth G. C. Newport (ed.), The Sermons of Charles Wesley (Oxford, 2001), 232–3. ²⁵ See the comments in Hannah (ed.), The Deserted Village, 143. ²⁶ Staffordshire RO, Congreve Papers, D 1057/M/1/12/3. ²⁷ The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, i (Surtees Society, lxxiii, Durham, 1880), 379, 383. ²⁸ [James Burgh,] Britain’s Rembrancer, or the Danger Not Over (4th edn., London, 1747), 8. ²⁹ See Ch. 5.

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ANTI-CATHOLICISM AND PROTESTANT SOLIDARIT Y Appeals to God, and thanks for victory and deliverance, were perhaps all the more heartfelt in wars against France and Spain, the great Catholic powers of Europe. ‘I trust my God will hear ye Prayrs of his Praying People’, the elderly Sarah Savage wrote during the Austrian Succession struggle, ‘and not suffer Popish Enemyes to prevail over us’.³⁰ While in England it was perfectly possible for Catholic families to be reasonably well integrated into predominantly Protestant communities,³¹ Catholicism as a religious and political system was far from accepted. Indeed, fear and loathing of Catholicism was deeply imbedded in Protestant culture.³² Every 5 November Protestants celebrated the foiling of the Catholic plot to kill the King and destroy the English Parliament in 1605. ‘Queen Mary’s burning zeal’ and ‘the Massacre in Ireland’ in 1641 were advanced, together with the Gunpowder Plot, as incontrovertible evidence of the determination of Catholics, given the opportunity, to ‘extirpate’ Protestantism.³³ ‘Popery’, regarded with suspicion and hostility even in peacetime, became still more hated during conflicts with the great Catholic powers.³⁴ Here we should also note that the mid-century wars coincided with a period of Evangelical revivals on both sides of the Atlantic. From the 1720s, continental Europe, Britain, and the British colonies in North America—from newly founded Georgia in the south to the New England provinces in the north—were affected by waves of Evangelical enthusiasm amongst different Protestant denominations.³⁵ Evangelical revivals can be linked to many different developments of the time, but they were at least partly based on fear of a resurgent Catholic threat— Catholicism seemed to be on the advance in continental Europe in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the Counter-Reformation still full of verve and vigour. War against the Catholic powers would have served only to intensify Evangelical anxieties. ³⁰ Dr Williams’s Library, MS 90.2, Sarah Savage’s Journal, 24 Sept. 1745. ³¹ See, e.g., Malcolm Wanklyn, ‘Catholics in the Village Community: Madeley, Shropshire, 1630–1770’, in Marie B. Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town 1558–1778 (Catholic Record Society, v, London, 1999), 210–36. ³² See Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1714–1780: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993). ³³ Quoting from Penny London Post, or, The Morning Advertiser, 25–7 Sept. 1745. ³⁴ J. M. Black, ‘The Catholic Threat and the British Press in the 1720s and 1730s’, Journal of Religious History, 12 (1983), 364–81. ³⁵ See, e.g., Susan O’Brien, ‘Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755’, American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 811–32; Michael J. Crawford, ‘Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared’, Journal of British Studies, 26 (1987), 361–97, and Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in its British Context (Oxford, 1991); D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), ch. 2; W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992); G. M. Ditchfield, The Evangelical Revival (London, 1998).

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When conflict with Spain began in 1739, the Catholicism of the enemy was soon emphasized; a poem penned by Benjamin Coles, and addressed to an army officer, appealed to God to defend the subject of the verse against the popish Spaniards, and offered encouragement to all Britons that they were fighting for their Church as well as their king and country.³⁶ The situation in the War of the Austrian Succession, it must be said, was somewhat complicated by the alliance with the Catholic Habsburgs. The apparent naturalness of the relationship with Maria Theresa—Walpole told the British House of Commons in April 1741 that Austria and Britain were ‘equally endangered by the French greatness, and equally animated against it by hereditary animosities’³⁷—would seem to suggest that antiCatholicism was very much subordinate to other considerations. But it would be unwise to assume that the Austrian alliance significantly muted hostility to ‘popery’. The parliamentary opposition in Britain pointed to the incongruity of fighting ‘for Roman Catholicks and against Roman Catholicks’,³⁸ and British troops despatched to the Austrian Netherlands in 1742 seem to have caused considerable offence by behaving disrespectfully towards Catholic priests and disrupting Catholic ceremonies.³⁹ The extent of the awkwardness caused by such a close connection with a Catholic power was perhaps fully revealed only in 1756, when Frederick of Prussia replaced the Austrians as the chief ally of Britain; from that point Government-supporting pamphleteers were able to trumpet the naturalness of the relationship with a Protestant state—a message that clearly struck a chord with many Protestants at home, who warmed to the idea of Frederick as the champion of a ‘Protestant Interest’ that was locked in a life and death struggle with Catholicism.⁴⁰ Hostility to Catholics was based not simply on a distinctly Protestant reading of history, but also on a calculation of current danger. In Ireland, where Catholics formed an overwhelming majority of the population in all of the provinces but Ulster, Protestants were particularly fearful that an enemy landing would spark off a great Catholic uprising. Such fears might well have been unfounded, especially by the end of our period, but they had a powerful hold on the mind of many Protestants. Should the Jacobite rebels continue to be successful in Britain, the Anglican Bishop of Down and Connor wrote from Dublin in November 1745, ³⁶ Brotherton Library, MS Lt. 53, Commonplace-book of Benjamin Coles, 54–6. ³⁷ PH, xii. 169. The Earl of Stair, soon to command the British forces sent to the Low Countries, argued in June 1741 that the alliance was appropriate because Austria was the weakest power in Europe, and offered no competition on the seas or as a trading rival: John Murray Graham (ed.), Annals and Correspondence of the Viscount and the First and Second Earls of Stair (2 vols., Edinburgh and London, 1875), ii. 278. ³⁸ [Anon.,] The Freeborn Englishman’s Unmask’d Battery: Or, a Short Narrative of our Miserable Condition (London, 1747), 20. ³⁹ Bodleian Library, Journal of the Expedition to Flanders, 1742, MS Eng. Hist. e. 214, fos. 37–8; Herefordshire RO, Dunne of Gatley Park Papers, F76/G/23, Journal of Edmund Cox, 16 Oct. 1742. ⁴⁰ See, e.g., NLI, Bruce Papers, MS 20903, Sermons of Rev. Samuel Bruce, 11 Feb. 1757, 17 Feb. 1758, 13 Feb. 1761; [Anon.,] Reasons in Support of the War in Germany, in Answer to Considerations on the Present German War (London, 1761), 49–55, 60. For enthusiasm for Frederick, see Chs. 1, 6, and 8.

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‘the Papists here would rise in all parts except the Northern Counties’.⁴¹ The Protestant gentry and freeholders of County Meath declared themselves to be ‘truly sensible of the bloody Spirit of Popery wherever it prevails’ and anxious to do all they could to prevent the progress of the Pretender.⁴² The sense of relief when Cumberland finally defeated the Jacobites was almost palpable; it was not surprising, perhaps, that Sir Lawrence Parsons and other Anglican landowners in King’s County paid for a fifty-foot-high pillar with a statue of the Duke on top— ‘the first public Monument of Gratitude upon that glorious Occasion in the three Kingdoms’.⁴³ At the beginning of the next war, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was convinced that Catholic disaffection required only foreign military intervention to turn into a general insurrection that could sweep away the Protestants. He strongly disapproved of any Catholic recruitment in the regiments in his jurisdiction, arguing that ‘was an Enemy to land in Ireland they [the Catholic soldiers] would undoubtedly join them’.⁴⁴ In Britain, where we know that Catholics formed a tiny minority, it might be expected that such fears would not have existed. But at the time knowledge of the true number of Catholics was very imprecise, and in an atmosphere of uncertainty, grossly exaggerated accounts of Catholic strength fed anxieties about a bloody uprising. ‘If France and Spain knew the state of Popery in England’, a Somerset clergyman wrote in October 1739, ‘I am confident they would venture 1000 men if they could upon our English Shore and would quickly have 10000 to joyn them’.⁴⁵ In February 1744, when a French invasion was expected, anonymous intelligence passed on to the Duke of Newcastle expressed the view that ‘half London are perverted & turnd Papists’.⁴⁶ At the end of the next year, London was said to have been ‘several times’ alarmed that the ‘Roman Catholicks would rise’; most Protestants, according to this account, had ‘furnished themselves with Arms’, and ‘a strong guard’ was out every night to ensure that everything remained quiet.⁴⁷ In 1756, Lord Tyrawley was again warning that ‘The many Thousands of Roman Catholicks, that are in London’ needed to be watched very carefully.⁴⁸ Unsurprisingly, fear of Catholicism was at its height at the time of the ‘Fortyfive Rebellion. The Jacobite uprising, as Colin Haydon has demonstrated so clearly, brought forth a great wave of anti-Catholic hysteria.⁴⁹ In January 1746, Gertrude Savile was noting in her diary that Catholic ‘Mass Houses’ were being attacked ‘in several places’; while she was worried about the consequences of such independent action by ‘The Mob’, she still thought it ‘Shamefull’ that any places ⁴¹ Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Collection, D 3155, WH 3433. ⁴² NLI, MS 9103, Declaration of loyalty of Co. Meath Protestants, 28 Sept. 1745. ⁴³ Faulkener’s Dublin Journal, 9–13 Sept. 1746. ⁴⁴ Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Collection, D 3155, WH 3450. ⁴⁵ A. P. Jenkins (ed.), The Correspondence of Bishop Secker (Oxfordshire Record Society, lxii, Stroud, 1991), 46. ⁴⁶ BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32,702, fo. 46. ⁴⁷ Leicestershire RO, Herrick Papers, DG.9/2476. ⁴⁸ BL, Leeds Papers, Egerton MS 3444, fo. 67. ⁴⁹ Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, 130–63.

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of Catholic worship were allowed to exist at all.⁵⁰ The Government, keen to inspire the people to resist the Pretender’s forces, had contributed to this feverish atmosphere by encouraging the public to see Prince Charles as an agent of both France and the Pope.⁵¹ But encouragement was not much needed. In early October 1745, Arthur Jessop, a Yorkshire apothecary, heard a sermon preached by his local Presbyterian minister in which ‘he showed that Popery was directly against liberty in all cases, [and] gave reasons why we should make a vigorous stand against popery and Slavery, and for liberty’.⁵² An opposition newspaper said much the same at the beginning of the following month: ‘Wherever Popery is predominant, it is destructive of the religious and civil Liberties of Mankind’.⁵³ A still more lurid picture was painted by pamphlets of the time. If a Catholic prince took the throne, one anonymous author wrote, ‘The Spirit of his Government would soon be seen in Imprisonments, Massacres, and all kinds of Tortures! ’. ‘In short’, the diatribe continues, ‘Popery is a bloody, an inhuman Institution, and is of the Devil, who was a Murderer from the Beginning’.⁵⁴ With fear of Catholicism reaching fever pitch, the differences between various types of Protestants could be laid aside in the interests of Protestant solidarity. This is not to say that Protestant unity was the invariable rule: far from it. The Scottish Episcopalians were recognized to be largely Jacobite in sentiment;⁵⁵ as they pinned their hopes for the restoration of their church to its former established status on the success of the Stuarts, the Episcopalians were very unlikely to be attracted by calls to make common cause with the Presbyterian Church of Scotland that they sought to supplant. The willingness of Irish Dissenters to sign up to an anti-Catholic crusade was also questioned in some quarters: resentment at their formal exclusion from public office by the Irish Test Act of 1704 was reported to have led them to argue ‘that they are no way obliged to venture their Lives in Defence of a Place, where they are treated with no greater respect than Papists’.⁵⁶ And there were some ⁵⁰ Alan Saville (ed.), Secret Comment: The Diaries of Gertrude Savile 1721–1757 (Thoroton Society, record series, xl, Nottingham, 1997), 266–7. ⁵¹ See Hardwicke’s letter to the Archbishop of York, 12 Sept. 1745, in R. Garnett (ed.), ‘Correspondence of Archbishop Herring and Lord Hardwicke during the Rebellion of 1745’, English Historical Review, 19 (1904), 535. ⁵² C. E. Whiting (ed.), ‘The Diary of Arthur Jessop’, in idem (ed.), Two Yorkshire Diaries (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, record series, cxvii, Gateshead, 1952), 105. ⁵³ Craftsman, 9 Nov. 1745. ⁵⁴ [Anon.,] An Earnest Address to Britons. Wherein the Several Artifices made Use of by the Emissaries of France and Rome, to Corrupt the Minds of the People, and to Overturn our Happy Constitution, are Explained, and Laid Open to Public View. Recommended to the Perusal of all who Prefer Liberty to Slavery, Christianity to Popery, Property to being Dragooned, and Riches to Wooden Shoes (London, [1745]), 5, 12. See also, for a rehearsal of all the old arguments against the Catholics, Daniel Gittins, A Short View of Some of the Principles and Practices of the Church of Rome: Being the Substance of a Sermon Preached on Occasion of the Late General Fast, December 18. At the Churches of Southstoke and Arundel (London, 1746). ⁵⁵ See Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 85/4, where Episcopalian meeting houses are described as ‘Nurserys for young Traytors, and rendezvous’s for old ones’. ⁵⁶ BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32,702, fo. 153.

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churchmen in England who looked with suspicion on Protestant Dissenters at this juncture, recalling, perhaps, James II’s attempts to drive a wedge between Protestants by offering concessions to Dissenters to promote an anti-Anglican alliance of Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists. The Dissenters in Northamptonshire, according to Philip Doddridge, were ‘insulted by their enemies here as if the Presbyterians were for bringing in the Chevalier’.⁵⁷ Richard Kay commented similarly on tensions in Lancashire in the aftermath of Cumberland’s victory at Culloden: High Anglicans, whom Kay seemed to equate with ‘Jacobites, alias Papists’, attacked the ‘low Church or Presbyterians very much’.⁵⁸ The Methodists, who regarded themselves at this stage as still part of the Anglican Church, were also criticized as unreliable: Newcastle was presented with a report from Newark that accused the Methodists of being ‘secret Friends of ye Pretender’.⁵⁹ The rabidly anti-Catholic pamphleteer quoted earlier recognized the difficulties involved in creating Protestant unity, and tried hard to promote it by blaming all divisions on the ‘artful Nonjuror’ and the ‘subtle Papist’ who sought to ‘disunite Protestants’. Our security, he told his readers, lay ‘in our Union, as Protestants, regarding our Interests as one and the same; it being certain, that a Change of Government will equally affect us, of the Establishment, as those who are Protestant Dissenters of every Denomination’.⁶⁰ That he had to make such efforts might tell us something about the fragility of Protestant unity in England, but we should not forget that many Dissenters did respond favourably. Even the Quakers, as we saw earlier, were reported to have provided the army with clothing and to have wished success to Cumberland, and after his triumph at Culloden Protestant Dissenters were as enthusiastic in their celebrations as any Anglican: the Independent Church in Bedford, for instance, offered praise and thanksgiving at the end of April 1746 for ‘the complete victory over the rebels’.⁶¹ In Scotland, the Presbyterian Seceders from the established Kirk, who had offered a radical critique of the Union based on seventeenth-century Covenanting principles—the need for a Presbyterian system of church government throughout the three kingdoms—proved as keen as the Church of Scotland to see off the Jacobite threat.⁶² The Seceders of Galloway, Nithsdale, and Annandale sent a loyal address to the ⁵⁷ Nuttall (ed.), Correspondence of Philip Doddridge, 223. ⁵⁸ Brockbank and Kenworthy (eds.), Diary of Richard Kay, 116. ⁵⁹ BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32,702, fo. 81. For earlier suggestions that the Methodists were connected with Catholicism, see BM 2425, Enthusiasm Delineated, and BM 2432, Enthusiasm Display’d, both 1739. See also David Butler, Methodists and Papists: John Wesley and the Catholic Church in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1995), esp. ch. 3. ⁶⁰ [Anon.,] An Earnest Address to Britons,1, 21. ⁶¹ H. G. Tibbutt (ed.), The Minutes of the First Independent Church (now Bunyan Meeting ) at Bedford 1656–1766 (Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, lv, Bedford, 1976), 174. ⁶² For the position of the Seceders and other radical Presbyterian Dissenters see Colin Kidd, ‘Conditional Britons: The Scots Covenanting Tradition and the Eighteenth-Century British State’, English Historical Review, 117 (2002), 1147–76.

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King in November 1745, offering to raise their own regiment for ‘the preservation of the Covenanted Reformation, their Country & liberties, as well as the defence of Your Majestie, as their Lawfull Sovereign’.⁶³ In Ireland, as in the other two kingdoms, denominational tensions within Protestantism could not be brushed under the carpet, and the Dublin Parliament felt it necessary to declare that ‘any person who shall commence a prosecution against any dissenter who has accepted, or shall accept of a commission in the array or militia’—which was technically a breach of the Test Act of 1704—‘is an enemy to King GEORGE and the protestant interest, and a friend to the Pretender’. Yet the very fact that the Anglican-dominated Irish Parliament was able to agree (without opposition) such a resolution, and another that praised Dissenters who were serving as militia officers for their timely loyalty to the King and the ‘protestant interest of this kingdom’,⁶⁴ suggests that Protestant unity was both obtainable and to a considerable degree achieved.

THE BEGINNING OF CATHOLIC REHABILITATION The defeat of the Young Pretender at Culloden can be seen, in retrospect, as the beginning of the end for Jacobitism. This was not necessarily apparent at the time; indeed, fears of a renewed insurrection in Scotland were voiced at various times during the rest of the Austrian war. In July 1746 the Marquis of Granby wrote that ‘untill a peace is concluded, France will no doubt try to keep up the Rebellion in the Highlands’; he was convinced, moreover, that this would be ‘no difficult matter . . . for the spirit of rebellion still prevails amongst the greatest part of the clans’.⁶⁵ After the war was over, Jacobite sentiment manifested itself in various public guises: in Shropshire, for instance, there were celebrations of the Pretender’s birthday on 10 June 1749, with extensive wearing of white roses (the Jacobite emblem).⁶⁶ Jacobite plotting continued until at least 1753. The failure of the great French invasion plans of 1759, which would, if successful, have placed the Old Pretender on the thrones of the three kingdoms, was perhaps a more decisive moment, though even then the dashing of the French plans did not necessarily preclude a further attempt to install a Stuart claimant.⁶⁷ George III’s succession ⁶³ Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 1711/2. ⁶⁴ Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland, vii. 650. ⁶⁵ HMC, Rutland MSS (5 vols., London, 1888–1905), ii. 198. See also Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), The Albemarle Papers (2 vols., Aberdeen, 1902), i. 214; East Suffolk RO, Albemarle Papers, HA 67/D 4/15/480. ⁶⁶ Shropshire RO, Attingham Papers, 112/12/Box 20/175. ⁶⁷ See Claude Nordmann, ‘Choiseul and the Last Jacobite Attempt of 1759’, in Eveline Cruikshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), 201–17. For fears at this time that ‘the Inhabitants of the popish’ parts of the Highlands were ‘daylie in hopes and expectations of a french landing’, see NLS, Erskine Murray Papers, MS 5080, fos. 210, 219, 229.

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in 1760 can be seen as another important development in the decline of Jacobitism, primarily because his keenness to end the German war, and his assertion of his British credentials, made it more difficult for Jacobites to exploit popular anti-Hanoverian sentiment.⁶⁸ The end effectively came, however, when Rome finally turned its back on the Stuarts. With the death of James Francis Edward, the Old Pretender, in 1766, the Pope refused to recognize Charles Edward’s claim to the British throne. The language of Jacobitism—or, rather, anti-Jacobitism—was resurrected in the American crises of the 1760s and early 1770s, when there was much concern about the apparent influence of the Earl of Bute, the first Scotsman to occupy a senior political post in London, whose family surname unfortunately happened to be Stuart.⁶⁹ But by this time Jacobitism was invoked metaphorically rather than literally: when supporters of a hardline towards the colonists were accused of ‘Jacobitism’, they were not—in most cases, at least—thought to be plotting the return of the Stuarts; they were being accused of favouring an authoritarian approach to government.⁷⁰ As hostility towards Catholicism in Britain and Ireland had been intimately connected with fear of domestic support for a Stuart restoration, the decline of Jacobitism to the point where it offered no serious challenge was perhaps bound to influence Protestant attitudes towards Catholics. Charles O’Conor, a Catholic landowner and scholar from County Roscommon, argued along these lines as early as 1755, maintaining that as the Protestant succession was now secure, Protestants no longer had any reason to be apprehensive about their Catholic neighbours.⁷¹ Joseph Priestley, an English Dissenter, said much the same a few years later. In 1768 his Essay on the First Principles of Government maintained that as ‘the pope himself has refused to acknowledge the heir of the Stuart family to be king of England’, there was no longer anything to fear from Catholicism.⁷² Another influence, at least on elite thinking, was the need to tap Catholic manpower for the armed forces.⁷³ The Test Acts meant that naval officers could not be Catholics, but recruitment of Irish Catholics as common sailors seems to have ⁶⁸ For an instance of Jacobite propaganda from George II’s reign that played on anti-Hanoverian prejudice to make the Stuarts seem more acceptable, see [Anon.,] A Dialogue between Thomas Jones, a Life-Guard-Man, and John Smith, Late Sejeant in the First Regiment of Foot Guards, Just Returned from Flanders (London, 1749), 22. ⁶⁹ As the Duke of Devonshire commented in Oct. 1762, Bute ‘has his Birth per Contra’: BL, Holland House Papers, Add. MS 51,382, fo. 137. ⁷⁰ For an example of anti-authoritarian imagery that uses the language of Jacobitism, see R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament Respecting North America, 1754–1783 (6 vols. to date, Millward, N.Y., 1982– ), v. 169. See also BM 4140, The Repeal, Or the Funeral of Miss Ame Stamp, 1766, a cartoon that associates the Stamp Act with Jacobitism and authoritarian measures such as ship money and general warrants. ⁷¹ See Jim Smyth, The Making of the United Kingdom 1660–1800 (London, 2001), 187. ⁷² Peter N. Miller (ed.), Joseph Priestley: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1993), 62. ⁷³ See Thomas Bartlett, ‘ “A Weapon of War Yet Untried”: Irish Catholics and the Armed Forces of the Crown, 1760–1830’, in T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffery (eds.), Men, Women and War (Historical Studies, xviii, Dublin, 1993), 66–85.

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been allowed, probably because the navy was seen as no real threat to liberty—on the contrary, as it served on the seas beyond the three kingdoms, and was the first line of defence against invasion, the navy was widely viewed as the bulwark of British freedom.⁷⁴ The army, however, was another matter. Given its potential as a coercive force within the home territories, its composition was an issue of some sensitivity. In the Austrian Succession struggle, Catholic recruits were regarded as inappropriate, and every effort was made to root them out.⁷⁵ The Earl of Chesterfield, Lord Lieutenant during the ’Forty-five Rebellion, tried to persuade Irish Protestants that they had little to fear from their Catholic fellow-countrymen, though with little success.⁷⁶ But in the next conflict the demand for ever greater numbers of soldiers meant that a more pragmatic approach was adopted. While there continued to be considerable opposition to the employment of Irish Catholics in regiments that remained in Ireland, the presence of Catholics in corps serving overseas was tolerated by the British and Irish governments.⁷⁷ Some Catholic leaders, seeing an opportunity to demonstrate their reliability, actively sought to encourage recruitment. In 1762, for instance, the Catholic peers Lords Kenmare and Kingsland suggested that a ‘Roman Legion’ of seven regiments of Irish Catholics might be recruited for service in the Portuguese campaign. Even before formal hostilities opened, Charles O’Conor was advocating scrupulous loyalty by Catholics as the way to secure, in the long run, repeal of anti-Catholic penal laws, and in 1759 the Catholic Association was founded with this objective. O’Conor was accordingly delighted with the impeccably loyal sentiments expressed by the Catholic clergy at the time of Thurot’s descent on Carrickfergus, and he followed with interest the progress of the ‘Roman Legion’.⁷⁸ Despite the efforts of the Catholic gentry and merchant leaders, there were to be no significant concessions to Catholics until the Europeanization of the American war in 1778, which both posed another Bourbon threat to Ireland and necessitated a further great expansion of the armed forces to fight a global conflict; even then, many Protestant Irishmen remained deeply suspicious of Catholic motives and reluctant to approve any relaxation of the penal laws.⁷⁹ Nonetheless, the start made in mobilizing Irish Catholic manpower in the Seven Years War can be ⁷⁴ Andrew Fletcher wrote in 1759 that recruitment of Catholics into the marines was unproblematic, ‘as they can do no harm being dispersed on board several Men of War’ (NLS, Fletcher of Saltoun Papers, MS 16521, fo. 53). The Duke of Bedford had already suggested Catholic recruitment into the marines the year before (SP 63/415, fo. 172). ⁷⁵ See Ch. 8. ⁷⁶ See, e.g, John Ainsworth (ed.), The Inchiquin Manuscripts (Dublin, 1961), 160. The contrast between Chesterfield’s attitude towards the Scots and the Irish is brought out in Bruce Lenman, ‘Scotland and Ireland 1742–1789’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789 (London, 1990), 86–7; and S. J. Connolly, ‘Varieties of Britishness: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the Hanoverian State’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995), 193–4. ⁷⁷ See Ch. 8. ⁷⁸ Catherine Coogan Ward and Robert E. Ward (eds.), The Letters of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare (2 vols., Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980), i. 10, 80, 89, 135 and n. ⁷⁹ See Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), 176–7, 184–6, 247–52.

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seen to have prepared the ground for later measures of Catholic relief, and the conspicuous loyalty of the Irish Catholic elite during that struggle almost certainly helped to soften attitudes towards Catholicism in British governing circles. Shifts in attitude conditioned by the strains and demands of war could easily have been subject to regression once those strains and demands subsided. However, any reversion to a less sympathetic line was made less likely by the outcome of the Seven Years War in North America. The importance of the acquisition of Grenada, in the West Indies, might be noted in this regard, for on Grenada the French planters were not only allowed to keep their property and practice their religion, they were also permitted to vote in the new assembly established when the island became a British colony. But British Governments managed to separate the issue of the governance of Grenada from the wider matter of the treatment of Catholics throughout the King’s dominions, largely, one suspects, because the French Catholic population on the island was so small. The same cannot be said for Canada, however, because its conquest, and the decision to retain it at the peace, had profound consequences for Catholics in Ireland, England, and Wales.⁸⁰ While the movement to Canada of anglophone Protestants was encouraged as the necessary precondition for the establishment of representative institutions on the model of the older British colonies, settlement incentives should be seen alongside the toleration offered to the existing Catholic inhabitants, whom the British authorities wanted to persuade not to abandon the new colony. In December 1761 the Earl of Egremont, the Secretary of State responsible for the colonies, informed Amherst of the King’s wish that the French Canadians ‘be humanely & kindly treated’ and that no insult be offered to them on the basis of ‘the Errors of that mistaken Religion, which They unhappily profess’.⁸¹ However much this attitude might have been influenced by the short-term desire to avoid a crisis of depopulation in the aftermath of the British conquest, it was to have longer-term implications. As the anticipated tide of anglophone settlers failed to materialize, conciliation of the Catholic population continued to be necessary if Canada were to remain of any value to the British Crown. The tolerant approach adopted in the years immediately following the surrender of New France therefore developed into the much fuller recognition of the position of the Catholic Church in the Quebec Act of 1774.⁸² British and Irish Protestants, it should be said, were not lacking in experience of ruling foreign Catholics before 1760. Minorca’s Catholic population, under British ⁸⁰ Grenada’s French Catholic population in 1763 was about 3,500; Quebec’s was around 70,000. See Ian K. Steele, ‘The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected: Governance of the British Empire, 1689–1784’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 122–3. ⁸¹ CO 5/214, pt. ii, fo. 242. ⁸² As Peter Marshall notes, the Act gave the Catholic Church in Quebec a semi-established status: ‘Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: IV, The Turning Outwards of Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001), 8. For more on the Quebec Act and its origins see Philip Lawson, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal, 1989).

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jurisdiction since 1708, had already been offered similar latitude.⁸³ However, as we have seen, numbers appear to have been crucial, and as the number of French Canadian Catholics far exceeded the number of Minorcans,⁸⁴ the granting of liberal concessions to the Catholics of Canada had obvious repercussions for the treatment of Ireland’s Catholic majority.⁸⁵ As with Irish Catholic military service, the benefits were not to be felt immediately, but the expansion of British dominion in Canada almost certainly influenced the gradual amelioration of the Catholic position in Ireland. The first sign of this development came with the passage through the Irish Parliament in 1772 of a modest reform of the landownership laws, allowing Catholics to take out reclamation leases for sixty-one years. Two years later an oath of allegiance for Catholics was approved, after a protracted period of negotiation in which the Anglican Bishop of Derry acted as honest broker between the Catholic hierarchy and the Dublin Government.⁸⁶ The popularity of the new oath amongst the Catholic gentry and merchants made it more difficult for opponents of relief to sustain their claim that the Catholics were by nature disloyal to the Hanoverian regime, and so eased the way for the next (and more significant) round of concessions that began during the American war.

THE CRUMBLING OF PROTESTANT UNIT Y The Protestant front that largely bound together the established churches and Dissenters during the anti-Catholic grande peur of 1744–6 began to break down as soon as the fear of invasion and Jacobitism subsided. In January 1748, as the Austrian war entered its last months, George Stone, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, was convinced of the need to avoid giving any opening to the Presbyterians who, in his view, wanted to take control of parliamentary boroughs in Ulster.⁸⁷ Protestant unity was again the order of the day as tensions with France mounted in the early 1750s; reports in the periodical press of the persecution of French Protestants were likely to have reminded readers both of the dangers of a Catholic regime and of Britain’s role as the champion of the Protestant interest.⁸⁸ A sense of solidarity with fellow Protestants overseas was evident when invasion threatened in 1756, and it continued to operate in many quarters until the end of ⁸³ Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), 21. ⁸⁴ According to the London Magazine, 25 (1756), 104, the island’s population at that time was 30,652—less than half, in other words, of the estimated number of French Canadians. ⁸⁵ See Jacqueline Hill, ‘Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws: An Imperial Perspective, 1763–1780’, Archivum Hibernicum, 44 (1989), 98–109. ⁸⁶ David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (2nd edn., Dublin, 2000), 160–1. ⁸⁷ Centre for Kentish Studies, Sackville MSS, U 269/C146/9. ⁸⁸ See esp. Gentleman’s Magazine, 22 (1752), 386 and 538. The plight of the French Protestants was to be a recurring theme in later years: see, e.g., George Whitfield, A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations, Occasioned by the Alarm of an Intended Invasion (London, 1756), 17.

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the Seven Years War.⁸⁹ In the following decade, however, Protestant unity was much less apparent. Ulster Presbyterians, as we have seen, engaged in protests against the tithe in the immediate aftermath of the conflict,⁹⁰ while secessions from the Church of Scotland accelerated in the 1760s.⁹¹ Perhaps most conspicuously, in 1772–3 English and Welsh Dissenters launched a concerted effort to liberate themselves from the supervision of the established church: the British Parliament considered (but rejected) bills to relieve English and Welsh Dissenting teachers from the requirement that they subscribe to most of the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles.⁹² Protestant tensions had already been visible during the war. In the early stages of the fighting across the Atlantic, there was a great deal of discussion about the inability of the colonists to offer effective resistance to the French and their Native allies (‘I am sorry to say they are very much disunited notwithstanding their common danger’).⁹³ Some of the criticism centred on the reluctance of the colonial assemblies to respond to British control and direction, but where this resistance to central authority came from colonies with a strong Dissenting tradition, the religious as well as the political make-up of the provinces became a matter for comment. The obstructionism of the Quakers—who had been censured, as we have seen, in the previous conflict—became a matter of considerable concern at the beginning of the Seven Years War. Condemnation of Pennsylvania’s Quaker elite, moreover, spilled over into public disapproval of Quakers in Britain. In January 1756 a ‘letter from Philadelphia’ in a London newspaper asked ‘How long’ Pennsylvania would have to ‘groan under the government of a set of enthusiasts, who will not suffer us to put forth our strength, even when the sword is at our throats?’ Shortly afterwards, Quaker property was attacked in London when its owners failed to respond to the King’s proclamation for a day of prayer and fasting to secure divine sanction for the British cause.⁹⁴ In Ireland, furthermore, tensions between Anglicans and Presbyterians occasionally surfaced again. Shortly after the ⁸⁹ See, e.g., Whitfield, A Short Address; Richard Winter, The Importance and Necessity of His Majesty’s Declaration of War with France Considered and Improved, in a Sermon Preached, May 23, 1756, at the Meeting-House in Moorfields, and to the Congregation of Protestant Dissenters at Islington (London, 1756), iii. ⁹⁰ See Ch. 5, for the Ulster Oakboys. ⁹¹ See Calum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh, 1997), ch. 2. ⁹² For episcopal resistance in the House of Lords, see PH, xvii. 440, 790; G. M. Ditchfield, ‘The Subscription Issue in British Parliamentary Politics, 1772–1779’, Parliamentary History, 7 (1988), 55–6. For the hostility of Dissenters to the actions of the bishops, see Dr Williams’s Library, Minutebook of the Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers of the Three Denominations, MS 38.106, p. 116. ⁹³ William Salt Library, Congreve Papers, S.MS. 478C, Lt. James Cuninghame to William Congreve, 6 Aug. 1754. Adams’s Weekly Courant, 17–24 June 1755, carried a piece noting the disparity between the large numbers of British subjects in North America compared with the population of the French colonies, implying that if the British colonies cooperated with each other, their numerical superiority would ensure victory. ⁹⁴ Public Advertiser, 19 Jan. 1756; Monitor, 14 Feb. 1756. For a later example of hostility to Quakers in London, see London Metropolitan Archives, Eliot and Howard Family Papers, Acc. 1017/983, Philip Eliot to John Eliot III, 9 Aug. 1759.

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Dublin anti-union riot of December 1759, the Duke of Bedford, the Lord Lieutenant, characterized the New Light Presbyterians as ‘totally Republican, & averse to English Government, and therefore they are at least equally with the Papists to be guarded against’.⁹⁵ The war itself, then, did some damage to Protestant unity, even if in rhetorical terms it was portrayed, on both sides of the Atlantic, as a struggle against ‘Popery’ by a free Protestant people.⁹⁶ But more important in undermining Protestant solidarity were the very factors that helped to promote a gradual improvement in the position of Catholics in Britain and Ireland—the withering of the Jacobite threat, Catholic military service, and the expansion of empire. So long as the threat of a Stuart restoration remained potent, Protestants of all denominations were inclined to stand together for fear of aiding a return of Catholicism. Protestant Dissenters were inhibited from launching a full frontal assault on the defects of the established churches while there appeared to be a pressing danger to the continuation of an ecclesiastical dispensation that was at least reformed (even if imperfectly so) and offered them toleration (if not equality). Richard Price, a Dissenting minister who was later to become a vocal critic of the existing order in church and state, in 1759 delivered a sermon on Britain’s Happiness, and the Proper Improvement of It, in which, while he hinted at his hostility to religious tests and subscriptions, the dominant theme was a celebration of the ‘religious liberty [that] is the crown of all our national advantages’. ‘All sects’, he went on, ‘enjoy the benefits of toleration, and may worship God in whatever way they think most acceptable to him’.⁹⁷ If Dissenters like Price were restrained by fear of something worse, the established churches themselves were perhaps less inclined to look on Dissenters as dangerous subversives while their support in a common Protestant front was required. Once Jacobitism ceased to appear threatening, however, the fissiparous tendencies within Protestantism reasserted themselves.⁹⁸ Priestley’s Essay on the First Principles of Government of 1768, as we have seen, argued that with the pope’s turning his back on the Stuarts there was no longer any Catholic danger to worry Protestants. He proceeded, on this basis, to attack the privileged position of the Church of England and the restraints placed on Dissenters. Whereas in 1759 Price had lauded the toleration available to all Protestants, in 1768, with the Jacobite alternative no longer a real threat, Priestley felt confident enough to move onto the offensive: ‘toleration in England’, he asserted, ‘notwithstanding our boasted liberty, is far from being complete’.⁹⁹ ⁹⁵ SP 63/416, fo. 260. ⁹⁶ For a good example of this, see Samuel Davies, Religion and Patriotism the Constituents of a Good Soldier. A Sermon Preached to Captain Overton’s Independent Company of Volunteers, Raised in Hanover County, Virginia, August 17, 1755 (Philadelphia and London, 1756), esp. 19–20. ⁹⁷ D. O. Thomas (ed.), Richard Price: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1991), 4, 5. ⁹⁸ J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 5, lays particular stress on the connection between the decline of Jacobitism and the militancy of Dissent—especially heterodox ‘Rational Dissenters’— from the 1760s. ⁹⁹ Miller (ed.), Joseph Priestley: Political Writings, 68–9, 88.

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Catholic military service exerted a more subtle influence. At first its divisive effect on Protestants was distinctly limited. Politicians and army commanders who recognized the utility of recruiting Catholics for service abroad were clearly out of line with the thinking of most Protestants, particularly in Ireland, who remained deeply suspicious of the Catholics and very doubtful of their loyalty. Chesterfield’s relaxed and easygoing attitude towards the Irish Catholics was far from typical even of the political elite; the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Lieutenant before Chesterfield, was much more in tune with the fears of Irish Protestants. When, in November 1739, Irish Catholics objected to a bill coming before the Dublin Parliament to disarm them, the Irish Commons addressed the Lord Lieutenant asking him to press ahead. Devonshire responded the very next day, telling the anxious MPs that he would ‘at all times be ready to do every thing in my power’ to preserve the public peace, and to this end ‘a proclamation is already ordered, for disarming the Papists of this kingdom’.¹⁰⁰ In 1741, when he was approached about the governorship of Galway, Devonshire made it plain that he regarded this not as a political sinecure but as a post for a military commander who would play his part in keeping the local Catholics in check.¹⁰¹ With the coming of the war against France, Devonshire further revealed his predilections by ordering an immediate crackdown on Catholics and the strict enforcement of all penal laws.¹⁰² His son, who became Lord Lieutenant in February 1755, just as the next round of conflict with France was about to begin, was no less robust in his hostility to Catholics.¹⁰³ Allowing Catholics to carry arms was seen by both dukes of Devonshire, and the vast majority of Irish Protestants, as asking for trouble. In 1762, the projected ‘Roman Legion’, supported and sponsored by the Irish Catholic leadership and intended to be used in the war in Portugal, was opposed by Protestants nervous at the thought of so many Catholics in the possession of firearms.¹⁰⁴ Although Ireland’s Protestant elite was able to see off this particular enterprise, it could not stop increasing recruitment of Catholics by existing army regiments. The result was a growing suspicion amongst Irish Protestants that the British and Irish Governments were all too willing to subordinate the interests of Ireland’s Protestants to Britain’s military and imperial requirements. This suspicion acquired the character of a conspiracy theory in the American war, when Catholic troops were being recruited for service against fellow Protestants in the colonies,¹⁰⁵ but even in the Seven Years War and its aftermath, the British state’s willingness to countenance the recruitment of Irish Catholics both reinforced ¹⁰⁰ Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland, vii. 101, 104, 105. ¹⁰¹ West Sussex RO, Goodwood MSS, 110/125, Devonshire to [the Duke of Richmond], 24 Aug. 1741. ¹⁰² Devonshire claimed that he thought it ‘absurd to alarm The Papists before we are in the best State of Defence’; none the less, he agreed to a crackdown on priests, monasteries, and nunneries: see SP 63/406, fos. 89–90. ¹⁰³ See Ch. 8. ¹⁰⁴ For an expression of Protestant anxiety, see [Anon.], Some Reasons against Raising an Army of Roman Catholicks in Ireland in a Letter to a Member of Parliament (Dublin, 1762). ¹⁰⁵ See, e.g., W. H. Crawford (ed.), Letters from an Ulster Land Agent 1774–1785 (Belfast, 1976), 5.

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Irish Protestant Patriotism, with its ingrained hostility to British encroachments, and widened the rift between the visceral anti-Catholicism of the majority of Irish Protestants and the increasingly tolerant and pragmatic British Protestant political elite. Imperial expansion affected Protestant unity in a variety of ways. The liberal treatment of Catholics in Canada (and to a lesser extent in Grenada) may well have encouraged Protestant Dissenters in England, Wales, and Ireland, and Presbyterians in Scotland, and even Low Church Anglicans, to look suspiciously on the Anglican elites who presided over the new tolerance. Thomas Hollis, a prominent Rational Dissenter, led a campaign in sections of the press against the concessions to Catholicism in both Canada and Grenada, culminating in a long piece in the Political Register in 1769 attacking successive governments for their seemingly pro-Catholic policies. A series of letters from ‘Pliny Junior’, published in the Public Advertiser in 1769–70, pursued the same theme.¹⁰⁶ We should be careful not to overstate this point, however. There is no significant evidence of hostility towards the Anglican governing classes on this issue until the Quebec Bill debates of 1774.¹⁰⁷ By this stage, the question of how Catholics were to be treated in Canada had become inextricably bound up with the treatment of the older, and overwhelmingly Protestant, British colonies in North America: there was much talk, on both sides of the Atlantic, of an authoritarian, even crypto-Catholic, plot to destroy Protestant liberties, and the use of ‘papists’—both Irish and Canadian—as a military force to compel the American Protestants to obey Lord North’s Government. However, it should be stressed that such concerns were given full voice only in the fevered atmosphere in the year preceding the outbreak of open fighting between the British army and the New England colonists—a time when many people were particularly susceptible to the deceptive simplicity of conspiracy theories. Of more immediate importance in promoting Protestant disunity was the increased migration from Europe to North America that followed the conquest of Canada in 1760, and became even more apparent after the ending of the Seven Years War in 1763. About 137,000 white settlers arrived in the British North American colonies between 1760 and the outbreak of the War of Independence. English Anglicans would have constituted only a small minority of these incomers, for the total of English migrants was a mere 30,000. The largest ethnic group was the Irish (55,000), the vast majority of whom were Presbyterians from Ulster. Scots migrants were the next most numerous (40,000), and while some of them would have been Episcopalian Highlanders, they also included significant numbers of Presbyterians and a small quantity of Catholics. The 12,000 German ¹⁰⁶ See Philip Lawson, ‘ “The Irishman’s Prize”: Views of Canada from the British Press, 1760–1774’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 588–90. ¹⁰⁷ For a contemporary cartoon that links the Quebec Bill explicitly with the Anglican Church hierarchy, see BM 5228, The Mitred Minuet.

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arrivals were nearly all Protestants of one description or another, but most emphatically not Anglicans.¹⁰⁸ A consequence of this surge of migration was an intensification of the tendency towards greater religious heterogeneity that had been evident since the beginning of the eighteenth century. English America in 1650 had been overwhelmingly Puritan (or Congregationalist) in New England and largely Anglican in the Chesapeake colonies. A hundred years later, the picture was much more complicated. In New England, Congregationalism remained dominant, but Anglicanism was making some headway; in the middle colonies, Presbyterians, Quakers, Dutch and German Reformed Churches, Anglicans, Lutherans, and assorted German sects were to be found in competition with each other; while in the south, Anglicanism was facing a serious challenge in the backcountry from various Dissenters, particularly the Baptists and Presbyterians (‘I cannot forbear expressing my concern to see Schism spreading itself through a colony which has been famous for uniformity of Religion’, an Anglican clergyman wrote of the situation in Virginia).¹⁰⁹ It would be wrong, then, to overstate the importance of the migratory surge following the fall of New France; religious diversity had been becoming more marked for several decades before the Seven Years War even started. But there can surely be no doubt that the new arrivals, because they were largely non-Anglicans, increased the sense of a competition for souls between Anglicans and Dissenters throughout the British Atlantic world. The Revd Henry Caner, a pugnacious Anglican clergyman tending a congregation in Boston, the citadel of New England Congregationalism, was characteristically explicit about the new atmosphere. In January 1763 he wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury of a ‘bitterness of spirit which seems thus of a sudden to break out among the Dissenters’. This he attributed to the ending of the war and the expansion of British dominion in North America, which opened up a new field of operations for the Church of England and the Dissenters. ‘Their activity’, Caner concluded, ‘is therefore employed to the uttermost, both here and in England, to secure the Event in their favor’.¹¹⁰ What Caner omitted to say was that his efforts were no less strenuously employed to achieve the contrary outcome, and were also increasing the temperature; like many Anglican clergymen on missions for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Caner saw himself on the front line in a war against Dissent.¹¹¹ It was at least partly in response to the perceived threat of Dissenting advance that the post-Seven Years War period saw another concerted effort to obtain government support for the appointment of

¹⁰⁸ Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve of the Revolution (London, 1987), 26. ¹⁰⁹ William Stevens Perry (ed.), Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church (5 vols., Hartford, Conn., 1870–8), i. 366. ¹¹⁰ Ibid., iii. 490. ¹¹¹ As did their supporters back in London: see John Egerton, Bishop of Bangor, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; at their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday February 18, 1763 (London, 1763), 18.

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Anglican bishops to serve in America.¹¹² As a writer in favour of an American episcopacy argued in a letter published in a London newspaper, in some of the colonies ‘Quakerism, Independency, and Presbytery, have acquired as it were a National Establishment’; an Anglican episcopacy was therefore necessary to wean ‘those People from their pernicious and unreasonable Schism’.¹¹³ Again, it is important to stress that the idea was not new; American bishops had been suggested in the 1750s, and earlier, but the creation of an American episcopacy became a major issue of concern after the Seven Years War. The project came to naught, largely because successive governments were reluctant to risk offending Dissenting opinion in North America; however, there was no lack of enthusiasm on the part of Archbishop Thomas Secker, who tried to persuade senior British politicians at various points in the 1760s.¹¹⁴ Competition between Anglicans and Dissenters (and between different Dissenting denominations) was intensified after 1763 by the enticing prospect of converting the native population that resided in the great inland wilderness stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. As early as December 1760, the Revd Thomas Barton, an Anglican clergyman in Pennsylvania, was writing of ‘the happy period’ that had arrived with the extension ‘of our dominions far into America’, which had turned ‘many barbarous Nations who are immersed in the grossest Idolatry without even the knowledge of the God that made them’ into British subjects. ‘I hope’, Barton concluded, ‘we shall seize so favourable an advantage to enlarge the dominion of Christ, by propagating his Gospel among those poor Heathen who “sit in darkness and the shadow of death” ’.¹¹⁵ Back in London, Anglican clergymen similarly waxed lyrical about the delights of ‘bringing an ignorant savage race of people to the knowledge of truth’.¹¹⁶ The Presbyterians were no less impressed by the opportunities presented by the British triumph for converting the Native Americans. Pennsylvania’s Presbyterians dispatched preachers to the backcountry ‘to report how we may best promote the Kingdom of Christ among . . . the Indian Nations’, and the Synod of Ulster, in regular contact with Presbyterians in North America, addressed the King shortly afterwards, expressing the hope that ‘with her widely ¹¹² See Jack M. Sosin, ‘The Proposal in the Pre-Revolutionary Decade for Establishing Anglican Bishops in the Colonies’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 13 (1962), 76–84; Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (Oxford, 1986), 199–209; J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1994), 162, 342–4; Stephen Taylor, ‘Whigs, Bishops and America: The Politics of Church Reform in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 331–56; Boyd Stanley Schlenther, ‘Religious Faith and Commercial Empire’, in Marshall (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, ii. 145–6; Peter Doll, Revolution, Religion, and National Identity: Imperial Anglicanism in North America, 1745–1795 (Madison, N.J., [2000]). ¹¹³ St James’s Chronicle, 31 Oct. 1771. ¹¹⁴ See Herbert and Carol Schneider (eds.), Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College, His Career and Writings (4 vols., New York, 1929), iii. 259–60, 277–8, 286; John S. Macauley and R. W. Greaves (eds.), The Autobiography of Thomas Secker Archbishop of Canterbury (Lawrence, Kans., 1988), 58. ¹¹⁵ Perry (ed.), Historical Collections, ii. 294–5. ¹¹⁶ Egerton, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society, 20–1.

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extended Empire the invaluable blessings of British freedom & of pure uncorrupted Christianity may spread, and be diffused to the remotest ends of the Earth’.¹¹⁷ The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland was just as enthusiastic. ‘As the chief obstacles which have hitherto prevented the instruction of the American nations are now removed’, the Assembly noted in its congratulatory address to the King on the Peace of Paris, ‘we trust . . . that the people now under your dominion which know not God, shall at length receive the knowledge of that holy faith which civilizes and refines the manners of men, at the same time that it improves and sanctifies their hearts’.¹¹⁸ This keenness to seize the opportunities presented by the successful conclusion of the Seven Years War did not necessarily have to increase rivalry between denominations, but it certainly seems to have had this effect in some instances. When the Bishop of London was invited to become a trustee of the newly opened Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, which aimed to train native converts, he declined on the grounds that the head of the college was not an Anglican, the prayers used did not confirm to the Anglican liturgy, and many of the trustees were Dissenters.¹¹⁹ The wars of the years 1739–63 coincided with a period of profound change in the Protestant world connected with the evangelical revivals that influenced the development of religious practice on both sides of the Atlantic from the early 1730s. Compared with the impact of evangelicalism, war can easily be relegated to a secondary role as a force for change. Yet the influence of armed conflict should not be understated. Failure or merely temporary setbacks in war inspired introspective consideration of the need for personal and national reformation, and even success could be cause for reflection on the importance of maintaining the goodwill of the Almighty. Reform initiatives in a wide range of different areas can be linked to providential views of the function of war. As the conflicts of this period were waged against Catholic powers—France and Spain—it was more or less inevitable that they would increase anti-Catholic feeling amongst British and Irish Protestants, and that they would help to unite Protestants throughout the three kingdoms. On the other hand, the demands of war, particularly in the 1750s and early 1760s, led to a considerable mobilization of Catholic manpower, especially in Ireland. This mobilization, together with the decline of Jacobitism as an effective alternative to the Hanoverian regime, and the expansion of the Empire, both started a process of Catholic rehabilitation that eventually matured into the Emancipation of 1829 and encouraged different types of Protestants to emphasize what divided them rather than maintain a Protestant solidarity. ¹¹⁷ Records of the General Synod of Ulster, from 1691 to 1820 (3 vols., Belfast, 1897), ii. 468, 473. ¹¹⁸ Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 1638–1842 (Edinburgh, 1843), 755. ¹¹⁹ HMC, Dartmouth MSS (3 vols., London, 1887–96), ii. 79.

8 War and the Nation We have already seen something of the divisive impact of the mid-eighteenth-century wars,¹ but if war caused division, it can also be seen as an agent of unity. Eighteenth-century armed conflicts have been identified by some historians as one of the ingredients promoting a popular sense of Britishness. Linda Colley, in particular, has pointed to the ways in which war helped to bring together the various peoples of Britain, subordinating narrower patriotisms and even papering over the cracks caused by social and political tensions.² Her work has provoked much controversy; debate continues over both the timing and the reality of a widespread identification with Britain.³ In our period, even if we leave aside the social, religious, and political divisions explored elsewhere in this book, there are good reasons for believing that in the years c.1739–63 a unifying sense of Britishness made only slow and fitful progress towards capturing hearts and minds. Indeed, at this time the development of a popular commitment to Britain is often less evident than the persistence of localism and the continuing appeal of older national loyalties. But if Colley’s argument is perhaps more persuasive when applied to the era of the War of American Independence and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,⁴ our period still provides some support for ¹ See Chs. 5, 6, and 7. See also Ch. 9. ² Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), esp. 18, 53, 322, 364–8, 370–1. See also her essay on ‘The Reach of the State, the Appeal of the Nation’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), 165–84. ³ On the issue of timing John M. Mackenzie has pertinently asked, ‘Is the forging of Britishness to be located in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries?’, ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998), 215. For denials of the emergence of Britishness as a unifying concept, from very different standpoints, see Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997), esp. 60–3; Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford, 1997), esp. 152–67; and Richard J. Finlay, ‘Caledonia or North Britain? Scottish Identity in the Eighteenth Century’, in Dauvit Broun, R. J. Finlay, and Michael Lynch (eds.), Image and Identity: The Making and Re-making of Scotland through the Ages (Edinburgh, 1998), 143–56. ⁴ I have argued elsewhere for the importance of the American war in this regard: see Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), ch. 5. For the importance of the war against revolutionary France see Murray G. H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789 (London, 1997), esp. 173. For a contrary view, which looks critically at the idea of a unifying sense of Britishness at this time, see J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), esp. Introd.

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her thesis. Britishness seems to have been embraced more readily in the Seven Years War than in the War of the Austrian Succession, which suggests movement towards the adoption of a new and broader national identity. It would be a mistake, however, to assume from this a simple process of linear progression, reaching its culmination in the great struggles of 1793–1815. There was no relentless upward trajectory, but rather a jagged faltering movement forward. In one important respect, Britishness in our period meant something very different from that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The American colonists who broke away to form the new United States were in the mid-century still generally regarded as part of the British nation.

LOCAL LOYALTIES Before we examine the ways in which the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War contributed to the gradual emergence of a popular sense of Britishness, proper account needs to taken of the strength of what might be seen as countervailing forces, pulling in the opposite direction. One of these is usually assumed to be local loyalty. It could be argued that in the eighteenth century provincialism was much less evident in Britain than in continental Europe. Provincial sentiment certainly lacked the institutional underpinning to be found, say, in France, where some provinces (the pays d’état) were not liable to taxes that were imposed on others (the pays d’élection). Where separate institutions existed in the British Isles, they tended to be national rather than regional in character, such as the Irish Parliament, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and the Scottish legal system. Nonetheless, we can see that localism was given something of a boost by the more hands-off approach adopted by central government after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, an event that might be interpreted, on one level, as a victory for the provinces over the centre. True, the years of the ‘Rage of Party’ at the beginning of the eighteenth century saw a good deal of involvement by central government in vetting appointments to the magistrates’ bench, and during Walpole’s period of power, especially in the 1720s, there was more interference from London. However, by the mid-eighteenth century, local government was left largely to its own devices, which probably had the effect of focusing many minds on local sources of power and on local issues.⁵ ⁵ For a subtle and thorough examination of the extent to which central authorities ‘disengaged’ from local government see Joanna Innes, ‘The Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State: Government and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War, 96–127. She has stressed in two other important essays that Parliament continued to play an important role in local affairs: ‘Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century Social Policy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 40 (1990), 63–92, and ‘The Local Acts of a National Parliament: Parliament’s role in Sanctioning Local Acts in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Parliamentary History, 17 (1998), 23–47.

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The War of the Austrian Succession brought the persistence of local sentiment into sharp relief. Between September 1745, when the defeat of the government forces at Prestonpans made a Jacobite advance into England likely, and the end of that year, some fifty-seven associations were formed in various parts of England and Wales pledged to offer armed resistance to the rebels. These loyal associations, though trumpeted by the ministry as proof of the popularity of the Hanoverian regime, were strongly localist in orientation. They saw themselves as local defence bodies, not as part of a national force. Cornwall’s 6,300 associators, while reported to be ready to ‘defend their country’, seem to have meant by this ‘their county’. They had no interest in exerting themselves beyond their locality.⁶ A similar perspective is apparent in those areas more directly at risk of attack. The inhabitants of Penrith wrote of their wish to form a volunteer body ‘for the Defence of this Town And its Neighbours’,⁷ while Arthur Jessop, an apothecary, recorded in his diary that a meeting was called at York to consider ‘what method to take to prevent the Rebels from Coming into Yorkshire’.⁸ Not in my back yard seems to have been the general view. Associations of volunteers were intended to fill the gap left by the decay of the militia. In the next conflict, the revitalization of the militia both recognized and sought to accommodate local loyalties. Under the provisions of the 1757 Act, and subsequent revising legislation, the militia, as before, was based on the counties. It was to be led by local landowners and its rank and file was supposed to be raised by ballot in the parishes and hundreds. Even though in practice substitutes from neighbouring counties were extensively used to make up the numbers,⁹ the militia remained sufficiently regionally based to act as a focus for local sentiment. The grenadiers of Norfolk’s regiment carried ‘the arms of the county’ on their caps.¹⁰ A local newspaper praised the Suffolk militia as the equal, at the very least, of that of ‘any other County in the Kingdom’, while the Somerset regiment was claimed to be ‘so fine a body of men’ that it could not be exceeded by any ‘in his Majesty’s service’.¹¹ Local pride can be seen most clearly, paradoxically, when the militia was believed to have behaved improperly. William Thomas, a Glamorgan schoolmaster, recorded the activities of his county’s militia in his diary. He was distressed that its poor conduct—especially drunkenness, brawling with civilians, and general immorality—reflected badly on the county from which the militiamen came. ‘Our militia’, he wrote with a mixture of anger and dismay on 17 September 1762, ‘wherever they goes, is a shame to our shire’.¹² ⁶ Colley, Britons, 80. ⁷ Cumbria RO, Pennington MSS, YD/Pen 18. ⁸ C. E. Whiting (ed.), ‘The Diary of Arthur Jessop’, in Two Yorkshire Diaries (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, cxvii, Gateshead, 1952), 104. ⁹ See, e.g., the men from Bedfordshire and other neighbouring counties who served in the Buckinghamshire militia: Buckinghamshire RO, Quarter Sessions Records, Q/FBm 13, passim. ¹⁰ William James Smith (ed.), The Grenville Papers: Being the Correspondence of Richard Grenville, Earl Temple, K.G., and the Right Hon: George Grenville, their Friends and Contemporaries (4 vols., London, 1852–3), i. 313. ¹¹ Ipswich Journal, 10 Nov. 1759; Somerset RO, Mynors (Halliday) MSS, DD/My 48. ¹² R. T. W. Denning (ed.), The Diary of William Thomas of Michaelston-super-Ely, near St Fagans Glamorgan 1762–1795 (Cardiff, 1995), 48.

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If local identification remained strong in England and Wales, it was probably stronger still in Ireland and Scotland. In both countries, vast areas were effectively ruled by local elites with little reference to central authority. In 1746 the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland described the Earl of Kerry as ‘a kind of sovereign in the wild county’ of the west from which he took his title.¹³ In the Scottish Highlands, prior to the ’Forty-five uprising, clan chieftains still exercised considerable influence through their landownership, patronage, and independent judicial power. After the rebellion, as we have seen, there was a determined attempt by the British Government to crush the autonomous power of the clan leaders, and to eradicate a distinctive Highland culture.¹⁴ However, this onslaught, as noted earlier, had only a limited impact. The Highland regiments raised in the Seven Years War reflected both the continuing pull of clan loyalties and the British state’s recognition of its inability to mobilize Highland manpower on its own account. Looked at in a different light, however, local loyalties appear not so much as impediments to the adoption of Britishness but as identities that could be made compatible with a wider allegiance. Consider again the Highland regiments in the British army. The willingness of the old chiefs to mobilize their manpower in the service of the British state was an indication, surely, of the way in which traditional local loyalties could be put to British purposes. Some of the clan leaders were undoubtedly motivated by a desire to reclaim estates confiscated after the ’Forty-five Rebellion, but the chiefs also looked to the British state as a new source of patronage and profit.¹⁵ Consider also the attitudes in England and Wales to the reformed militia. Expressions of localist sentiment were not necessarily at odds with loyalty to the nation. William Thomas’s concern at the bad behaviour of the Glamorgan militia, it could be argued, stemmed from his wish that the county be seen as making an appropriate contribution to the national effort. Likewise, Lady Margaret Heathcote wrote from Rutland in August 1759 of the local decision to raise the militia, so ‘that we may not be quite distanced by other Counties in shewing our Zeal & Loyalty’.¹⁶ The militia, while a county institution, was clearly intended in the Seven Years War to play a national role—defending the country (not just the county) from foreign invaders. It was, to use the words of Sir Richard Bampfylde, a ‘great, & National Concern’,¹⁷ and from 1759 militia units were often deployed a long way from their home areas. The essential compatibility of local loyalties and allegiance to the nation can be illustrated further by looking at the regiments raised during the ’Forty-five Rebellion. The Liverpool Blues, while recruited in the town, and clearly a focus of ¹³ Quoted in Bruce C. Lenman, ‘Scotland and Ireland 1742–1789’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789 (London, 1990), 85. ¹⁴ See Ch. 5. ¹⁵ See Andrew Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands 1715–1815 (East Linton, 2000). ¹⁶ Bedfordshire RO, Lucas of Wrest Park Papers, L30/9/56/47. ¹⁷ Devon RO, Bedford Papers, L 1258 M/SS/M, bundle 1, Bampfylde to the Duke of Bedford, 9 Sept. 1759.

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local pride, was a corps intended not for the protection of Liverpool alone, but more generally ‘for the defence of His Majesty’s person and government’. The regiment served between October 1745 and January 1746, joining Cumberland’s army that pursued the Jacobites back to Scotland, and taking part in the recapture of Carlisle.¹⁸ The Duke of Kingston’s Light Horse, raised in Nottinghamshire, was viewed with great pleasure in its home county. Gertrude Savile, the sister of a local MP, regarded it as a great day ‘for the honour of Nottinghamshire’ when the regiment was the first to cross the river Spey as part of Cumberland’s forces in April 1746.¹⁹ But Miss Savile’s delight at the glory attached to this county corps needs to be put in its proper context: her expression of local pride stemmed from an awareness that Kingston’s troopers were playing a prominent role in a national enterprise. Animated, it seems, by the same sentiments, the composer of a verse intended to celebrate the achievements of the regiment wished ‘Prosperity to ye County of Nottingham’, but at the same time delighted in the part performed by the Light Horse in the defeat of ‘Perfidious and rebellious subjects’ who had been ‘stirred up and Supported’ by the ‘French King’, the ‘implacable Enemy Of ye Protestant Religion An[d] publick Liberty’.²⁰

OTHER PATRIOTISMS If local loyalties could be compatible with Britishness, what about the other, older, patriotisms of the peoples of the three kingdoms? Welshness offered no real barriers to the general adoption of a British identity. For administrative purposes, Wales had been absorbed into England in Henry VIII’s reign. Despite the survival and extensive use of the Welsh language, the country lacked both the distinctive institutions and the leadership required for the emergence of any desire for independence or even greater autonomy. There were no universities in Wales, and the vast majority of the Welsh still adhered to the Anglican Church—not until the nineteenth century would a close association be established between Welsh identity and Nonconformist chapels. The gentry were largely anglophone and Anglophile; indeed, Sir John Philipps of Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire was by no means the only Welsh landowner to regard himself as an Englishman.²¹ Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, one of the most influential MPs in the principality, saw himself as contending for ‘ye most valuable priviledges inherent to English ¹⁸ Sir James A. Picton (ed.), City of Liverpool: Municipal Archives and Records (Liverpool, 1907), 107–8. ¹⁹ Alan Saville (ed.), Secret Comment: The Diaries of Gertrude Savile 1721–1757 (Thoroton Society, Record Series, xl, Nottingham, 1997), 270. ²⁰ Nottinghamshire Archives, DD 956/1, Commonplace-book, possibly of Anne Ayscough of Nottingham, 35. ²¹ Philipps wrote to Pitt in Aug. 1757 of his wish ‘that every English heart and hand may join with and support you’: Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790 (3 vols., London, 1964), iii. 274.

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men & so essential to ye Constitution of ye Country’.²² The economy was still overwhelmingly agricultural, and the population very small and scattered, so much so that it is tempting to see mid-eighteenth-century Wales less as a nation and more as a collection of linguistically connected but otherwise inward-looking communities. Such Welsh national sentiment as there was, fostered by the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, founded in 1751 (in London) to preserve and promote all things Welsh, was not difficult to reconcile with Britishness. The Welsh, after all, saw themselves as descendants of the Ancient Britons, and therefore had a ready appreciation of their place in a bigger picture.²³ Scottishness presented more difficulties so far as identification with Britain was concerned. Despite the attempts of the moderates in the Church of Scotland to soften its Presbyterianism, Richard Finlay has argued that many ordinary Scots defined themselves by reference to a ‘radical Covenanting Presbyterian vision’ rooted in the seventeenth century, which was deeply antagonistic to episcopacy and therefore seriously at odds with the Anglicanism of the vast majority of the English. Whereas Colley stresses the common Protestantism that united the English and the Scots, Finlay emphasizes the denominational chasm that divided them.²⁴ It should also be noted that Scotland possessed the separate institutions lacking in Wales—as well as the separate system of church government that has just been mentioned, a distinctive legal system and well-established universities. Furthermore, the legislative union between England and Scotland had taken place as recently as 1707. The union was initially unpopular in many parts of Scotland, and anti-unionism played a significant role in widespread support for the Jacobites in the 1715 rebellion. Some might say that the ’Forty-five uprising was substantial proof of the continuing appeal of a Scottish patriotism that was based on hostility to the English and a desire to recover a distinct and separate Scotland. It certainly cannot be denied that in 1745–6 there were Scots Jacobites who looked to a restoration of the Stuarts as the means of repealing the Act of Union and restoring Scotland’s independence: the Young Pretender, recognizing the importance of this side of his appeal, announced in the manifestos issued as he progressed through Scotland that ‘the Union was declared Nul’.²⁵ But it would be a mistake to regard the ’Forty-five as a Scottish national movement. Many Jacobite Scots seem to have seen themselves as taking part in a British ²² NLW, Powis Castle MSS, 1101, Wynn to the Duke of Powis, 2 Oct. 1740. ²³ See Prys Morgan, A New History of Wales: The Eighteenth Century Renaissance (Llandybie, 1981), 57; and Hugh Owen (ed.), Additional Letters of the Morrises of Angelsey (1735–1786) (Hon. Society of Cymmrodorion, xlix, pt. i, London, 1947), 323–4. See also Thomas Richards, Antique Linguae Britannicae Thesaurus: Being a British, or Welsh-English Dictionary (Bristol, 1753). ²⁴ Richard J. Finlay, ‘Keeping the Covenant: Scottish National Identity’, in T. M. Devine and J. R. Young (eds.), Eighteenth-Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton, 1999), 121–33. The Jacobite Lord Pitsligo could be cited in support of Finlay. He argued that the Presbyterian Church of Scotland ‘hates the Church of England . . . no less than it hates Popery itself ’: NLS, Fettercairn Papers, Acc. 4796, Box 101, bundle 5, Pitsligo to ——, 6 Dec. 1745 (copy). ²⁵ David Wemyss, Lord Elcho, A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland in the Years 1744, 1745, 1746, ed. Hon. Evan Charteris (Edinburgh, 1907), 251.

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enterprise—restoring the Stuarts not just to Scotland but to all the thrones of the British Isles. John McLean, an officer in the Jacobite army that marched into England in November 1745, referred to himself as serving ‘Charles Prince of Wales And Regent of Scotland England and Ireland And the Dominions thereunto belonging’.²⁶ Indeed, the very act of marching into England demonstrated clearly that Jacobitism was ultimately a British movement; it might draw strength from the Celtic lands but it could only succeed if the Stuarts controlled the levers of power in London.²⁷ If the ’Forty-five was more than an expression of Scottishness, it was also less than a national movement. Enthusiasm for the Stuarts was confined largely to the Highlands and the north-east, and even in these areas considerable support for the Hanoverians was to be found. In the Lowlands, particularly in the west, the union seems to have been viewed positively as the route to a new prosperity based on access to the hitherto exclusively English colonial trade, because if the economic benefits were slow to materialize in the years immediately following 1707, by the time of the ’Forty-five Rebellion Glasgow was beginning to experience significant expansion.²⁸ Post-1707 Scottish patriotism, as Colin Kidd has demonstrated so well, was often far from incompatible with Britishness. Outbursts of Scottishness were generally provoked by resentment at denial of equal status with the English; Scottish patriotism, despite its occasionally harsh and discordant tones, was essentially the patriotism of partnership.²⁹ When Scottish regiments played a prominent role in an action at Hulst near Antwerp in May 1747, John Hamilton in Glasgow gloried in the honour gained by his ‘Country men’, but lauded their success as British soldiers.³⁰ Similarly, when in 1760 Capt. John Elliot defeated Thurot’s squadron off the Isle of Man, Isabella Carr was delighted because the victory was obtained by a fellow Scot, but also because his triumph had served truly British ends—Thurot’s force had landed in Ireland and was seen as a threat in both Scotland and England.³¹ William Robertson took the opportunity in his History of Scotland (1759) to praise the recent victories and assert that ‘Great Britain hath risen to an eminence and authority in Europe which England and Scotland could never have obtained’.³² ²⁶ Iain Gordon Brown and Hugh Cheape (eds.), Witness to Rebellion: John McLean’s Journal of the ’Forty-Five and the Penicuik Drawings (East Linton, 1996), 20. ²⁷ There were reports to the effect that ‘the Scotch will not fight an inch upon English Ground for ye Pretender, all they want is to breke the Union’ (Brotherton Library, Wentworth of Woolley Hall Papers, MS 1946/1, Box 20, bundle 3, Dorothea Wentworth to Godfrey Wentworth, 10 Oct. [1745]). But these assessments were penned before the Jacobite forces crossed the border and marched through northern England to Derby. ²⁸ T. M. Devine and Gordon Jackson (eds.), Glasgow, i, Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester, 1995), chs. 2 and 4. ²⁹ Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century British Patriotisms’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 361–82. ³⁰ Glasgow City Archives, Hamilton of Barns Papers, TD 589/638. ³¹ Cheshire RO, Stanley of Alderley Papers, DSA2, Carr to Margaret Owen, 6 and 21 March 1760. See also the comments of Andrew Fletcher: NLS, Fletcher of Saltoun Papers, MS 16522, fo. 58. ³² Quoted in W. A. Speck, Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: Ideology, Politics and Culture, 1680–1820 (London, 1998), 96.

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Indeed, Britishness was perhaps most likely to be invoked by the Scots, as a means of ensuring their inclusion and staking their claim to equal treatment. When in 1746 a Scottish officer in the garrison of newly captured Louisbourg prepared for a French attack, it was natural for him to ‘hope to be able to give them a reception worthy of brave Britons’.³³ The patriotic song Rule, Britannia, composed in 1740, with its proud boast that ‘Britons never will be slaves’, was, of course, the work of James Thomson, a Scot. Ireland, so often seen as immune to the appeal of an overarching Britishness, was in truth not irreconcilable. Members of the Catholic Irish elite paraded their commitment to Britain almost as much as did the Scots, and for the same reason—as a means of sharing the privileges of the English. Catholic gentlemen and merchants, recognizing the British state’s need for Irish manpower in the Seven Years War, and hoping that this might provide a lever for securing repeal of the anti-Catholic penal statutes, started to submit addresses and petitions identifying themselves and their co-religionists as loyal subjects of the Crown.³⁴ Private letters suggest a genuine change of attitude: in 1745 Owen Callanan, a member of the minor Catholic gentry, had expressed bewilderment and uncertainty at the Jacobite uprising; in 1760 he looked forward to Thurot’s being ‘Nabb’d, to pay for his impudence’.³⁵ Meanwhile, Ireland’s Protestant middle and upper classes, though increasingly adopting the outward appearance of a robustly Irish patriot identity, jealous of British encroachments and suspicious of British governments,³⁶ saw themselves as part of an essentially British world. When in July 1756 the Protestant merchants and tradesmen of the corporation of Youghal, in County Cork, conferred the freedom of the town on General Blakeney, they described him as ‘the brave and gallant Irish Hero’; however, Blakeney’s fame rested on his role as the commander of the garrison that held St Philip’s Castle on Minorca against overwhelming odds for a month after all hope of naval support had disappeared—he was an Irish hero, but fighting for the British cause.³⁷ Similarly, Charles Lucas, a Dublin politician on the radical wing of the patriot movement, complained bitterly in November 1759 that Pitt had insulted the Irish nation by comparing its contribution to the war effort unfavourably with London’s—‘O! how my soul was fired with ³³ NAS, Cuningham of Thorntoun Muniments, GD 21/344/14, Archibald Cuningham to Helen Cuningham, 9 July 1746. ³⁴ Charles O’Conor, a leading Catholic gentleman, had advocated such an approach as early as Jan. 1755 (Catherine Coogan Ward and Robert E. Ward (eds.), The Letters of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare (2 vols., Ann Arbor, 1980), i. 10), and it was surely no coincidence that the Catholic Association, which began in earnest to lobby for the repeal of the penal laws, was founded in 1759. ³⁵ NLI, Sarsfield Papers, MS 2643, fo. 90, and MS 17891, Callanan to Dominick Sarsfield, 29 Feb. 1760. ³⁶ See J. L. McCracken, ‘Protestant Ascendancy and the Rise of Colonial Nationalism, 1714–1760’, in T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (eds.), A New History of Ireland, iv. EighteenthCentury Ireland 1691–1800 (Oxford, 1986), ch. 5. ³⁷ Richard Caulfield (ed.), The Council Book of the Corporation of Youghal (Guildford, 1878), 462.

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indignation at the base, unjust representation’, Lucas wrote to the Earl of Charlemont.³⁸ His Irish patriotism, in short, was perfectly compatible with a wider British loyalty. Nor should we be surprised that the same was true of Irish Protestants generally. The Anglican landowners and merchants tended to look to England for their political and cultural lead, while the Presbyterians of Ulster maintained strong links with their ancestral Scottish homeland.³⁹ And we should recognize that the patriotism of the Irish Protestants, like contemporary expressions of Scottish patriotism, and colonial American resistance to metropolitan control, was primarily intended to protect and promote what they perceived to be their right to equal treatment under the British constitution.⁴⁰ The real problem, so far as widespread acceptance of Britishness in Ireland was concerned, was the resistance of the mass of the Catholics of Ireland, who composed about 80 per cent of the Irish people. Ireland’s Catholic peasantry seem to have been much more reluctant than their social superiors to embrace a British identity. A central feature of popular culture in Gaelic Ireland was the idea of the Stuarts as deliverers; Jacobitism remained deeply rooted in the consciousness of many ordinary Irish Catholics.⁴¹ Indeed, in the first half of the eighteenth century, military service for Ireland’s Catholics meant service not in the British army but in the army of a continental Catholic state. As late as 1760, a judge on his tour of the Munster Circuit referred to the great numbers of Catholics who, ‘notwithstanding the laws to the contrary, enter into the service of foreign powers’.⁴² The French, in particular, had Irish regiments in their service; their so-called Irish brigade sent over clandestine recruiting parties to enlist men in Ireland itself.⁴³ These soldiers, we should remember, were employed in the wars of our period against British forces. At Fontenoy in 1745 it was noted by many observers that the fiercest attack on the British and Hanoverian troops came from the Irish brigade.⁴⁴ Even given the eagerness of their leaders to forge new links with the British state, it was bound to take time to change the attitudes of the majority of Irish ³⁸ HMC, Charlemont MSS (2 vols., London, 1891–3), i. 256. ³⁹ See Graham Walker, Intimate Strangers: Political and Cultural Interaction between Scotland and Ulster in Modern Times (Edinburgh, 1995), ch. 1; I. R. McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), esp. 27–9 and chs. 2–3. ⁴⁰ For an insight into the connections between the different provinces of the Empire, see Ned C. Landsman, ‘The Provinces and the Empire: Scotland, the American Colonies and the Development of British Provincial Identity’, in Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War, 258–87. ⁴¹ See Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ‘The Stuarts and Deliverance in Irish and Scots-Gaelic Poetry, 1690–1760’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1500: Integration and Diversity (Dublin, 1999), 78–94. See also Murray G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1994). ⁴² James Kelly (ed.), The Letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick 1757–62 (Aberystwyth, 1990), 75. ⁴³ See Harman Murtagh, ‘Irish Soldiers Abroad, 1600–1800’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds.), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), 294–314. ⁴⁴ See, e.g., London Magazine, 15 (1745), 348; Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Papers, D 3155, WH 3433, John Potter to [Sir Robert Wilmot], 21 Aug. 1745.

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Catholics. In September 1745 it was said that the people living along Galway Bay, ‘who are all Papists’, on seeing the East India Company’s ships offshore ‘made bonfires and rejoicings, imagining it was either the French or Spanish squadrons with troops’.⁴⁵ In the next war, the townspeople of Kilkenny (‘Mostly Romans’) were reported to be far from enthusiastic about the defeat of the French fleet at Quiberon Bay in November 1759—a fleet believed to be on its way to land troops in Ireland. ‘Scarcely any of the inhabitants illuminated’ their windows in celebration, according to an outraged Protestant volunteer serving in an Irish cavalry regiment.⁴⁶ Nonetheless, a start was made, one might say, in the Seven Years War, when Irishmen, including Catholics, begun to serve in considerable numbers in the ranks of the British army—the experience of military service itself, as we will see, helped to widen horizons and promote Britishness. But even then, the allegiance of the Catholic Irish was thought by many Protestants to be questionable. Lord Loudoun, commanding the British forces in North America in 1756, complained that ‘great numbers of the Irish Recruits’ in his regiments had deserted to the French, whose army in Canada included a battalion of the Irish brigade.⁴⁷ Only when progress was made in dismantling the penal laws, a process effectively begun in the American war, could widespread Catholic identity with Britain be thinkable.⁴⁸ However, it could be said that it was the English who were the most reluctant to conceive of themselves as British. An extract from a letter describing the triumph at Porto Bello, said to be written by a sailor in Admiral Vernon’s squadron, refers simply to ‘English Ships’, the ‘English Colours’ (rather than the Union Jack), and the superior fighting qualities of ‘Englishmen’.⁴⁹ Although the army operating in Flanders and Germany was truly British—it included Scottish and Welsh soldiers, and initially it was even commanded by a Scot, the Earl of Stair—most English commentators regarded it simply as English. An order-book of the army sent to the Low Countries in 1742 refers routinely to ‘the English Forces’, ‘English Regiments’, ‘English Troops’, and ‘English Officers’.⁵⁰ Similarly, in July 1743, the Duke of Newcastle, lauding the allied army’s victory at Dettingen, wrote of ‘the gallant Behaviour of all our English Officers, & the never to be forgotten bravery ⁴⁵ B. McL. Ranft (ed.), Vernon Papers (Navy Records Society, London, 1958), 468. ⁴⁶ Bodleian Library, Journal of Patrick Thomson, MS Eng. hist. D. 155, fo. 42. ⁴⁷ Stanley Pargellis (ed.), Military Affairs in North America 1748–1765: Selected Documents from the Cumberland Papers (Hamden, Conn., 1969), 232. ⁴⁸ Colley, Britons, 8, explicitly excludes the Irish—Protestant as well as Catholic—from her analysis, on the grounds that the Irish could not subscribe to Britishness. However, the inevitability of Irish disaffection has been questioned: see particularly S. J. Connolly, ‘Varieties of Britishness: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the Hanoverian State’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995), 193–207. See also Conway, British Isles and the War of American Independence, ch. 5, where the case is put for Irish inclusion at a later period. ⁴⁹ Gentleman’s Magazine, 10 (1740), 145. ⁵⁰ Buckinghamshire RO, Howard-Vyse Papers, D/HV/B/2, pp. 27, 28, 36. Later, in September 1742, there is a reference to ‘British Troops’ (p. 56), but this stands out as unusual.

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of the English Foot’.⁵¹ The following February, when invasion threatened, the corporation of Leicester addressed the King ‘As Protestants & as English Men’, not as Britons.⁵² Thomas Turner, a Sussex shopkeeper, lamenting the loss of Minorca in 1756, referred to its having ‘been possessed by the English nation forty-seven years’. ‘Never did the English nation suffer a greater blot’, Turner continued.⁵³ In the same year, Hogarth’s two prints entitled The Invasion, while appealing explicitly to Britishness in its call to arms, emphasized Englishness by comparing ‘Old England’s Beef and Beer’ with French ‘soup maigre’ and frogs.⁵⁴ This culinary contrast, we should note, had already been made popular by Hogarth’s earlier work, O The Roast Beef of Old England, published at the close of the previous war. In this print the two opposites are emphatically not Britain and France, but England and France. Thin French soldiers subsisting on soup maigre, a fat French priest, and French nuns examining recently caught fish, all act as supporting cast to the central image—the arrival of a vast haunch of English beef at the gates of Calais.⁵⁵ In part, the persistent use of ‘England’ and ‘English’ rather than ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ stemmed from a complacent belief that Britain was merely as extension of England. For many English people, it seems that ‘England’ and ‘English’ were used almost unconsciously as substitutes for the more appropriate ‘Britain’ and ‘British’. Sometimes, indeed, ‘England’ and ‘English’ were used interchangeably with ‘Britain’ and ‘British’, as though the terms were synonymous. In November 1740, for instance, a song to commemorate the anniversary of Vernon’s victory at Porto Bello, performed at the Drury Lane theatre, included references to ‘British thunder’ and ‘Ev’ry Briton acting wonders’, while praising ‘English Tars’ and recommending the steering of ‘Old England’s course’.⁵⁶ But the frequent failure of the English to use the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ was not always unthinking. It could be a deliberate device to exclude the non-English. Military defeats had the effect of exposing English hostility to the other peoples of the British Isles. Setbacks were often blamed on the Irish, who were thought to be less than committed to British success. The poor performance of the two dragoon regiments attached to Sir John Cope’s army, first in failing to protect Edinburgh from the advancing Jacobite forces, and then at the battle of Prestonpans, elicited much criticism. A Scottish observer had a ready explanation: ‘alace they were Irishmen!’, he wrote of their conduct at Edinburgh; ‘the pultrown Irish fled’ was his equally unflattering verdict on the dragoons at Prestonpans.⁵⁷ ⁵¹ Timothy J. McCann (ed.), The Correspondence of the Dukes of Richmond and Newcastle 1724–1750 (Sussex Record Society, lxxiii, Lewes, 1984), 105. ⁵² G. A. Chinnery (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, v. Hall Books and Papers 1689–1835 (Leicester, 1965), 194. ⁵³ David Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754–1765 (Oxford, 1984), 55. ⁵⁴ BM 3446 and 3454. ⁵⁵ BM 3050. ⁵⁶ Gentleman’s Magazine, 10 (1740), 567. ⁵⁷ A. Francis Steuart (ed.), The Woodhouselee MS. A Narrative of Events in Edinburgh and District during the Jacobite Occupation, September to November 1745 (London and Edinburgh, 1907), 19, 35.

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After the crushing defeat at the Monongahela ten years later, Lady Charlotte Watson-Wentworth linked the two disasters by claiming that one of Braddock’s regiments was the same ‘that deserted [Colonel] Gardiner at Prestonpans’—adding for good measure that Braddock’s troops had come from Ireland.⁵⁸ Nor was this an idiosyncratic view: ‘Had the Irish Regiments done their Duty’, a newspaper report announced with more wishful thinking than logic, ‘General Braddock would have gained a complete Victory; for owing to their Ill Behaviour, he was totally defeated’.⁵⁹ Another account, while asserting that Braddock’s troops were English, argued that their insubordination stemmed from their being ‘tainted in Ireland ’ by the ‘wicked Spirit instilled there by Pamphlets and Conversation’.⁶⁰ Anti-Scots feeling amongst the English was given a boost by the ’Forty-five uprising, and particularly by the march into England of the Pretender’s largely Highland army. There was some English recognition that many Scots opposed the rebellion and remained loyal to the Hanoverians.⁶¹ But rather more of the English seem to have been less discriminating. Lady Hardwicke, whose son was serving in the Foot Guards, was suspicious of the Scots even before the Pretender’s troops marched into England. ‘The Scotch act as they have ever done, a Double part’, she wrote on 3 September 1745, claiming that none had joined Cope’s army; a month later she was calling for the return from Flanders of the British forces, though she added pointedly that it would be best to ‘keep ye north Britains [sic] where they are’.⁶² The Earl of Chesterfield was similarly hostile to the Scots in general, and made it plain that he distrusted even those Highlanders who remained with the Government. ‘I am very sorry to hear that any loyall Highlanders are to be arm’d at all’, he told Newcastle on 6 December 1745. ‘I would . . . employ only English and Hessians in subduing the Highlands’, he wrote the following Spring; so long as the ‘distinction remains of loyall and disloyal, the rebellion will never be extinguish’d’.⁶³ Indeed, the Highlander became, in the minds of many of the English, representative of the Scots in general.⁶⁴ A good number of the English chose to depict Charles Edward Stuart’s movement south as a Scottish invasion of England. The Duke of Richmond, serving with Cumberland’s army as it advanced to block the Pretender’s march on London, wrote from Lichfield that he longed ‘to be revenged upon these Scotch Rascalls, that dare disturb such a nation as this’. The nation that he had in mind, we can be reasonably confident, was England, not Britain.⁶⁵ ‘A Loyal Song’ that appeared in a metropolitan periodical ⁵⁸ Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, R1-69. ⁵⁹ Adams’s Weekly Courant, 26 Aug.–2 Sept. 1755. ⁶⁰ [Anon.,] The Expedition of Major General Braddock to Virginia; With the Two Regiments of Halket and Dunbar (London, 1755), 14. ⁶¹ See, e.g., True Patriot, 5 Nov. 1745. ⁶² BL, Hardwicke Papers, Add. MS 35,354, fos. 139 and 147. ⁶³ Sir Richard Lodge (ed.), Private Correspondence of Chesterfield and Newcastle 1744–46 (Royal Historical Society, Camden Series, xliv, London, 1930), 93, 123, 130. ⁶⁴ See the comments of Lord Kilkerran, 19 May 1746, in G. F. Nuttell (ed.), The Correspondence of Philip Doddridge 1702–1751 (Northants Record Society, xxix, London, 1979), 234. ⁶⁵ McCann (ed.), Correspondence of the Dukes of Richmond and Newcastle, 191.

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in 1745 denounced the invaders and appealed to age-old English hostility to ‘Sawney’ in his ‘Scotch plad’, while in the same publication a charge to the grand Jury of Suffolk similarly appeals to ‘true English Spirit’ to see off ‘these Frenchified Scots back to their Mountains’.⁶⁶ Arthur Jessop, after having related the sufferings of the people of the north-west of England during the Jacobite advance and retreat, decided on the last day of 1745 to record his displeasure at what he saw as the advantageous terms that the Scots had secured under the Act of Union of 1707. In return for paying only ‘a fortieth part of the Expence’ of Great Britain, Jessop complained, the Scots had ‘the eleventh part of the Legislature given to them’. This analysis is followed immediately by the bald statement that ‘The Rebellion began in Scotland in August 1745’, which was presumably Jessop’s pointed way of demonstrating Scottish ingratitude.⁶⁷ Even during the War of the Austrian Succession, it must be said, some of the English were prepared to embrace Britishness. A verse written ‘On the Declaration of War against Spain’, published in a leading periodical of the day, mentions ‘The British lion’, ‘British valour’, ‘British rage’, and ‘dauntless Britons’, while conjuring up the image of a nation stretching ‘From Scilly’s rocks to Orkney’s snowy isles’.⁶⁸ However, the English appear to have been more willing to see themselves as British during the next conflict. In 1755, when fighting had already started outside Europe, a cartoon published in London called the British people to arms, with Britannia saying ‘be Britons, and be Brave’, Mars invoking ‘the British Sword’ and Neptune ‘the Honour of the British Flag’.⁶⁹ When news arrived of the capture of Louisbourg in 1758, James Fretwell, a Yorkshireman, exulted that this triumph ‘will shine in the British annals’.⁷⁰ Thomas Turner, whom we met earlier bewailing the loss to the ‘English nation’ of Minorca, was by 1759 celebrating Wolfe’s victory at Quebec by noting ‘what pleasure is it to every true Briton’.⁷¹ Admiral Sir Edward Hawke exhibited the same tendency to adopt more inclusive language. In his report of the victory off Cape Finisterre in October 1747 Hawke referred to his men behaving ‘with the very greatest spirit and resolution, in every respect like Englishmen’. By the time of his great triumph at Quiberon Bay in November 1759, he was praising his men for their showing ‘the strongest proofs of a true British spirit’.⁷² The contribution of the Irish and, even more conspicuously, the Scots to British military success—or even honourable defeat—might have played a part in ⁶⁶ London Magazine, 15 (1745) 561, 602. See also Robert Hargreaves, Unanimity, and a Patriot Spirit, Recommended in Two Sermons. The First Preached September the 22nd, 1745, the Sunday before the Association at York. The Second Preached December the 18th, 1745, the Fast-Day (York, 1746), first sermon, 18, 51. ⁶⁷ Whiting (ed.), ‘Diary of Arthur Jessop’, 120. ⁶⁸ Gentleman’s Magazine, 9 (1739), 596–7. ⁶⁹ BM 3331, Britain’s Rights maintaind; or French Ambition dismantled. ⁷⁰ ‘A Family History begun by James Fretwell’, in Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Surtees Society, lxv, Durham, 1875), 241. ⁷¹ Vaisey (ed.), Diary of Thomas Turner, 191. ⁷² Ruddock F. Mackay (ed.), The Hawke Papers: A Selection 1743–1771 (Navy Records Society, Aldershot, 1990), 54, 347.

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what seems to have been a shift in English attitudes. It was not just Irish Protestants who celebrated the achievements of the elderly General Blakeney, who held on at Minorca for a month after Byng’s retreat left it exposed to the full power of the French besiegers. The tune of a new dance, Irish Hero, or Blakeney for ever, appeared in the English periodical press the following year.⁷³ The Scottish Highlanders, perhaps because their distinctive dress so readily identified them, were praised still more. The bravery of the Highlanders at Ticonderoga brought forth encomiums on the ‘immortal Glory’ that they had acquired.⁷⁴ In 1759 a London newspaper praised the ‘Highland laddies’ employed against the French in North America, particularly lauding their use of the broadsword—a weapon that had struck terror into British regulars in the previous conflict.⁷⁵ Pitt, who on many issues reflected English prejudices, was certainly prepared to put the past behind him so far as the Scots were concerned. In a well-known speech to the Commons on repeal of the Stamp Act in January 1766, in which he sought to deny that his hostility to the Earl of Bute was based on anti-Scots feelings, he ostentatiously pronounced that he had ‘no local attachments: it is indifferent to me, whether a man was rocked in his cradle on this side or that side of the Tweed’. It was his proud boast, he continued, that he had realized the military potential for the British state of the Highlanders, those ‘hardy and intrepid’ men from ‘the mountains of the north’, who ‘in the last war, were brought to combat on your side . . . and conquered for you in every part of the world’.⁷⁶ But we should recognize that English hostility to the Scots and the Irish was far from eradicated as a result of the military service of these Celtic peoples. The Scots, in particular, continued to attract much criticism. In December 1762, two Highland officers, newly arrived in London after having taken part in the capture of Havana, were pelted with fruit and treated to cries of ‘No Scots! No Scots! Out with them!’ when they attended a performance at Covent Garden.⁷⁷ In the same year, prints of Sawney in the Boghouse, a very crude expression of hostility to the Scots, were reissued—the first version having appeared in 1745.⁷⁸ This new outburst of anti-Scottish hysteria was itself a product of the progress made by the Scots during the Seven Years War. Not only were more Scots occupying posts in the military, but they were becoming prominent in politics and the law. Bute became first minister in 1762, and his fellow Scot, William Murray, was made Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench and Earl of Mansfield in 1756. The continuing influence of Scots—and particularly Bute and Mansfield—at or near the centre of power was sufficient to fuel, as Linda Colley has emphasized, the ⁷³ London Magazine, 26 (1757), 91. ⁷⁴ Adams’s Weekly Courant, 5 Sept. 1758. ⁷⁵ Monitor, 27 Oct. 1759. See also the report that, after the fall of Quebec, the Royal Navy believed that ‘the Highlanders behaved like Angels’: NAS, Rose of Kilravock Muniments, GD 125/22/17/29. ⁷⁶ PH, xvi. 98. ⁷⁷ Frederick A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763 (London, 1982), 78. For an earlier observation of fiercely anti-Scots prejudice in England, see Lewis M. Knapp (ed.), The Letters of Tobias Smollett (Oxford, 1970), 65. ⁷⁸ BM 2648 and 3988.

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virulently Scotophobic side of the radicalism of John Wilkes and his associates.⁷⁹ It was not until another major conflict—the American war of 1775–83—had called forth a further extensive mobilization of Scottish manpower, and provided another opportunity for a demonstration of Highland loyalty, that popular English images of the Scots as Jacobites, as instruments of despotism, and as despoilers of England gradually came to be displaced by more positive representations.⁸⁰ Even then, the process was long-drawn out and contested. It was not completed, arguably, until the end of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

THE ARMED FORCES AND BRITISHNESS If military service, particularly in the Seven Years War, was a means by which Scottish Highlanders, and to a lesser extent even the Catholic Irish, could start to be seen as Britons by other peoples of the three kingdoms, it was also a transforming experience for many of those who joined the armed forces. Participation in the army, navy, or militia often meant a widening of horizons. True, the loyalty of many sailors was to their officers, rather than to the navy as a whole, let alone to the British state. Equally, army regiments generated their own allegiances, even if the practice of drafting men from one corps to another tended to undermine unit loyalties.⁸¹ However, both ships’ crews and army regiments acted as ethnic melting pots and can be regarded as truly British institutions. Unfortunately, the navy’s muster books did not record the birthplace of new entrants until 1765, making it impossible to provide comprehensive breakdowns of the origins of the crews in our period. We are reliant on fugitive pieces of literary information that give us a flavour of the geographical backgrounds of the navy’s ratings. Nicholas Rodger has demonstrated that naval officers—particularly those from landed families—often recruited men from their own localities;⁸² however, given that naval officers came from all corners of Britain and Ireland, this was likely to mean sailors from different areas were brought together on board the same ship. Add to this the distribution of landmen volunteers and pressed seafaring men amongst naval vessels according to need, and one can see that in almost every ship the crew was likely to be drawn from each of the three kingdoms. In 1739, for instance, large numbers of volunteers were recruited in London, and used to complete the manning of various ships at Portsmouth,⁸³ whereas later in ⁷⁹ See Colley, Britons, esp. 105–21. ⁸⁰ See Conway, British Isles and the War of American Independence, esp. 180–2. ⁸¹ For what seems to be an instance of this, see Gloucestershire RO, Rooke of St Briavels Papers, D 1833 F2/31, Lt. Robert Rooke to his brother, 14 June 1756. ⁸² See, e.g., Nicholas Rodger, ‘ “A Little Navy of Your Own making”; Admiral Boscawen and the Cornish Connection in the Royal Navy’, in Michael Duffy (ed.), Parameters of British Naval Power 1650–1850 (Exeter, 1992), 82–92. ⁸³ Daniel A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), 164–5.

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the same conflict Maurice Hearn, a Waterford Catholic, was captured at sea en route to Bordeaux to study for the priesthood and pressed into the navy, ‘where he was obliged to serve until God was pleased to send him an opportunity of making his escape’.⁸⁴ At the beginning of the next war, Admiral Boscawen’s ship the Torbay contained a good number of men from Cornwall, the admiral’s own county, but also a sizeable contingent of Scots, recruited by one of the ship’s lieutenants.⁸⁵ Two years later, 154 pressed Irishmen were used to bring up to strength the crews of the Alcide and the Royal Sovereign.⁸⁶ Army recruitment also owed much to the local influence of officers, who used local loyalties to attract enlistees;⁸⁷ however, the army was a truly British institution. England was the main source of recruits, especially, as we saw earlier, urban England, where young men drawn from the surrounding countryside, looking for work and opportunity, could be encouraged to join the colours.⁸⁸ Wales was expected to provide its share of recruits, even though it was the least populous of the four countries. In the Seven Years War, the Eighty-fifth Foot was raised mainly in Wales and Shropshire,⁸⁹ and many other regiments sent recruiting parties to the principality, or picked up Welsh enlistees in the Marcher towns, such as Hugh Davies, who in 1758 joined the Fifty-eighth Foot at Hereford, and then served in Canada.⁹⁰ The Seven Years War also saw a considerable mobilization of Scottish manpower. Not only were new Highland regiments raised, but significant numbers of Scots served in regiments with no obvious Caledonian connections. In 1759 Scots composed 16 per cent of the rank and file of the infantry regiments based in Britain, a rather higher proportion than Scotland’s population at this time would lead one to expect;⁹¹ the overall proportion was certainly higher still, however, for the Highland regiments all served abroad. Even in the previous war, there had been no shortage of Scots in the army; Lowland officers were to be found in many regiments, not just those with strong Scottish traditions.⁹² There were also plenty of Irish Protestant, or rather Anglican, officers in the army. In theory, however, Irishmen were not eligible for recruitment into the ranks. Catholics were regarded as unreliable by definition, and it was thought that Protestants should be kept at home to suppress any Catholic uprising.⁹³ But practice and theory diverged markedly. Recruitment of Protestants in Ulster was ⁸⁴ Patrick Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers (2 vols., Dublin, 1995), ii. 53. ⁸⁵ N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1986), 156. ⁸⁶ Mackay (ed.), Hawke Papers, 161. ⁸⁷ See, e.g, Gloucestershire RO, Rooke of Briavels Papers, D 1833 F2/33. ⁸⁸ See Ch. 3. ⁸⁹ HMC, Various Collections (8 vols., London, 1901–13), viii. 178. ⁹⁰ Gomer Morgan Roberts (ed.), Selected Trevecka Letters (1747–1794) (Caernarvon, 1962), 71–2. ⁹¹ WO 27/6. ⁹² James Hayes, ‘Scottish Officers in the British Army, 1714–63’, Scottish Historical Review, 37 (1958), 23–33. ⁹³ Thomas Bartlett, ‘Army and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in W. A. Maguire (ed.), Kings in Conflict: The Revolutionary War in Ireland and its Aftermath, 1689–1750 (Belfast, 1990), 175, 179–80.

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regarded as acceptable, no doubt because they formed a majority in most of the northern counties. The Enniskillen Dragoons, as their name suggests, were recruited in the north,⁹⁴ and other regiments of cavalry based in Ireland over many years seem to have become Irish in composition. In 1745 the formal ban on the entry of Irish Protestants into the rank and file was lifted, at least so far as Ulster Protestants were concerned, as it was again in 1759, when three of the infantry regiments based in Ireland were specifically encouraged to enlist Ulster Protestants for three years, or until the end of the war, ‘to serve in Ireland only, and not to be sent out of the kingdom’.⁹⁵ Recruitment of Protestants from beyond Ulster was still usually frowned upon, however; one subaltern found himself in deep water for enlisting more than forty Protestants near his father’s estate in King’s County.⁹⁶ There was even more sensitivity about the recruitment of Catholics. Revelations of fraudulent enlistment of Catholics prior to the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession caused quite a stir, and in 1744 several known ‘Papists’ were ejected from General Irwin’s Regiment.⁹⁷ The same concern was evident at the beginning of the next conflict. The Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Devonshire, was convinced that any Catholic recruits must be rooted out: ‘we shall be much safer & stronger for getting rid of them’, he told his London secretary. But less than six months later, the same secretary was writing to his Irish counterpart on the need for ‘Latitude’ in recruiting for the six regiments about to embark across the Atlantic: ‘a Few Papists may not be so bad Consequence in North America as the want of Numbers’.⁹⁸ The significance of the Irish contribution is not at all clear from inspection returns of regiments based in Britain—of the infantry rank and file in 1756, a mere 4.4 per cent was Irish, and in 1759 the proportion had marginally fallen to 4.2 per cent.⁹⁹ But most of the Irish entrants were not employed in the corps that were based in Britain; they served overseas. Indicative of the importance of the Irish component in the army as a whole are the complaints about the large number of disbanded soldiers who gathered in Bristol at the end of the Seven Years War waiting for a passage across St George’s Channel.¹⁰⁰ A more precise sign comes in ⁹⁴ John Murray Graham (ed.), Annals and Correspondence of the Viscount and the First and Second Earls of Stair (2 vols., Edinburgh and London, 1875), ii. 256. When the regiment was inspected in June 1758, 327 of the 385 troopers (or 85%) were found to be Irish: see WO 27/5. ⁹⁵ HMC, Charlemont MSS, i. 253. ⁹⁶ For the case of Ensign Milo Bagot, see William Salt Library, S.MS 29/3 and 4, and Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Papers, D 3155, C2020-3. Later in the war, it should be said, recruitment of Protestants generally was permitted: see Alan J. Guy (ed.), Colonel Samuel Bagshawe and the Army of George II 1731–1762 (Army Records Society, vi, London, 1990), 210; NLI, MS 681, orders and letters regarding the army in Ireland, 1756–1763, orders of 10 April 1759, 26 Jan., 6 Jan. [i.e., Feb.] 1760. ⁹⁷ Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Papers, D 3155, C 657 and 697. ⁹⁸ Ibid., D 3155, WH 3450, Devonshire to [Wilmot], 7 Aug. 1756; D 3155, C 1966, Wilmot to Richard Rigby (copy), 28 Jan. 1757. ⁹⁹ These percentages are calculated from information in WO 27/4 and 6. ¹⁰⁰ E. E. Butcher (ed.), Bristol Corporation of the Poor 1696–1834 (Bristol Record Society, iii, Bristol, 1932), 110.

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the form of the returns for the British army in North America in the summer of 1757, which show that 27.5 per cent of the rank and file was Irish.¹⁰¹ At the level of individual regiments, the proportions of English, Scots, and Irish varied considerably, but we should recognize that ethnic mixing was the norm.¹⁰² Even the exceptions—regiments with a distinctive regional or national character— came into close contact with corps raised in other areas or countries, or with regiments that more clearly blended men from widely varied geographical origins. At Fontenoy in 1745, for example, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the Scots (or North British) Fusiliers, the Royal Scots, and the newly formed Highland Regiment of Foot (the Black Watch) fought alongside regiments that were predominantly English, whereas in the next war the British regiments sent to Germany included the Royal Welch Fusiliers again, and from November 1759 the British contingent was made more visibly British by the arrival of the Eighty-seventh Foot, a Highland regiment.¹⁰³ This point about corps with a regional or national character mixing with other units, from different areas of Britain, can be applied also to the English and Welsh militia, which was organized on a county basis. In the Seven Years War, at least, militia units and regular regiments rubbed shoulders in garrison, and perhaps more thoroughly mingled in the camps formed to concentrate and train regulars and militia to repel an enemy landing. In the summer and early autumn of 1761, Edward Gibbon, later the famous historian of Rome but at this time merely a captain in his county militia, was one of those encamped near Winchester with nearly 5,000 other men, drawn from the Thirty-fourth Foot and six militia corps—the Wiltshire, South Hampshire, Dorset, Berkshire, and North and South Gloucestershire regiments. ‘A friendly emulation’, Gibbon recalled much later, ‘ready to teach and eager to learn, assisted our mutual progress’, suggesting the building of amicable relationships (as well as competition) among the officers of the different militia corps.¹⁰⁴ Mixing took place not just between soldiers, sailors, and militiamen themselves, but also between soldiers, sailors, and militiamen on the one hand, and civilians on the other. The travel that was a feature of most military and naval service was in itself a potentially broadening experience. Thomas Court, after having completed his seven years as an apprentice to a Lancashire surgeon and apothecary, joined the navy in 1756. His new life took him overseas—to North America and the West Indies in 1757 and 1758, and to Germany, when he helped to convey troops to the Weser in 1760. But Court also became familiar with parts of ¹⁰¹ Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), 318 (table 5). ¹⁰² As it was in some of the regiments still in Britain. The 46th Foot, when inspected in Sept. 1758, was reported to contain in its rank and file the following proportions: English and Welsh, 48%; Scots, 32%; Irish, 20%: see WO 27/5. ¹⁰³ Sir Reginald Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years War (Oxford, 1966), 460, 476. ¹⁰⁴ Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Own Life, ed. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth, 1984), 126.

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Britain and Ireland that he would probably never have visited had he chosen to take up his trade in Lancashire. To join the navy itself required a trip to Plymouth; in the course of the war he was also to see Cork, where he stayed for a few days in 1757, and he spent a good deal of time on the south coast near Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight.¹⁰⁵ Similarly, in 1760 the Suffolk militia was based in Leicester. The colonel, the Duke of Grafton, and many of his senior colleagues were no doubt familiar with parts of the country beyond Suffolk and East Anglia— through family connections, landownership, education—but we can surmise that the same might not have been true of some of the junior officers, such as John Cobbald, a yeoman who kept a careful account of all the places that the Suffolk regiment visited,¹⁰⁶ and still less so of the rank and file militiamen, most of whom would have come from Suffolk or its neighbouring shires and who, in all probability, were making their first excursion outside their home region when they marched west as members of the county’s militia. Movement around the country almost certainly promoted a sense of belonging to something greater than one’s own community, not simply because it enabled soldiers, sailors, and militiamen to see parts of Britain that they had never seen previously, but also by giving them the opportunity to meet and befriend the inhabitants of distant areas. Soldiers and militiamen were not always, of course, well suited to the task of breaking down barriers between people of different regions and countries. We have already seen William Thomas’s distress at the ill-conduct of the Glamorgan militia; it can readily be imagined that the host communities were no more enamoured of the Welshmen’s behaviour—indeed, Thomas recorded that in October 1762 there were serious riots in Bristol between members of the Glamorgan militia and the city’s butchers.¹⁰⁷ But in the case of the Suffolk militia, harmony and friendship were more apparent than discord and violence. Grafton and his fellow officers were entertained by the mayor and corporation of Leicester.¹⁰⁸ In some instances, as we have seen, mixing led to marriage between military visitors and local women,¹⁰⁹ which often must have helped, on individual, family, and even community levels, to break down regional barriers. Many civilians seem to have been fascinated by the spectacle of the military. The movement of the army attracted much interest, and its camps were regularly visited. After the battle of Prestonpans, when the Government made Doncaster a rendezvous for troops marching north to resist a feared Jacobite advance into England, Arthur Jessop recorded in his diary on 18 October 1745 that ‘Abundance of people’ had gone to the town ‘to see the Soldiers encamp’d there’.¹¹⁰ Part of this, no doubt, ¹⁰⁵ J. C. Dickinson (ed.), ‘A Naval Diary of the Seven Years’ War’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, new series, 38 (1938), 238–44. ¹⁰⁶ J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue 1660–1802 (London, 1965), 399. ¹⁰⁷ Denning (ed.), Diary of William Thomas, 53–4. ¹⁰⁸ Chinnery (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, v. 196. ¹⁰⁹ See Ch. 5. ¹¹⁰ Whiting (ed.),’The Diary of Arthur Jessop’, 105.

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was simply a matter of novelty. The arrival of the army was perhaps bound to provide entertainment for those whose lives were largely uneventful: as one officer wrote of the vast crowds that turned out to witness the review of the regiments encamped at Colchester in September 1741, ‘the Sight was as well worth seeing, as any thing of that kind, that has been in England for a good many years’.¹¹¹ But the attraction owed something, surely, to the conception of the army as a manifestation of national power. When Cumberland’s forces arrived at Manchester that December in pursuit of the retreating Jacobites, Richard Kay, a Lancashire doctor, exclaimed ‘Lord, Let our Forces go forth conquering and to conquer.’ The army, it seems, was not simply the King’s, but the nation’s—‘Our Army’, as Kay was again to describe it when he looked forward to its being successful in Flanders against the French.¹¹² As the embodiment of the nation, the armed forces naturally became the focus of a great deal of emotion. Kay’s hope that the British troops would be as successful in the Low Countries as they had been against the Jacobite rebels was to be disappointed; however, victories in both the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War provided opportunities for great outpourings of patriotic sentiment. Victories on land were far from plentiful in the first conflict—though the battle of Dettingen was said to have caused ‘great rejoicing all over the nation’,¹¹³ and inspired Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum—so public enthusiasm mainly concentrated on naval triumphs, notably Anson’s defeat of the French fleet off Cape Finisterre in May 1747, Hawke’s success against the French in the second battle of Cape Finisterre the following October, and, most spectacularly of all, Vernon’s capture of Porto Bello in November 1739.¹¹⁴ However, the Seven Years War, which was ultimately a much more successful contest from the British point of view, provided many more opportunities for such expressions of national joy. At the end of August 1758, Thomas Turner attended ‘a rejoicing for the taking of Cape Breton’ at Halland House, the Duke of Newcastle’s local country seat, at which there was a giant bonfire, cannons, beer, and ‘a very good supper’. The following year Turner was back at Halland for another ‘rejoicing on account that Admiral Hawke hath dispersed a fleet which was preparing to invade this nation’, and in 1760 he was there again for a neighbourhood ‘supper, wine punch and strong beer’ to mark the surrender of Montreal.¹¹⁵ ¹¹¹ Tyne and Wear Archives, Ellison Papers, A19/20. ¹¹² W. Brockbank and F. Kenworthy (eds.), The Diary of Richard Kay, 1716–51 (Chetham Society, 3rd ser., xvi, Manchester, 1968), 104, 128. ¹¹³ Whiting (ed.), ‘Diary of Arthur Jessop’, 80. See also Brotherton Library, Wentworth of Woolley Hall Papers, MS 1946/1, Box 20, bundle 3, Dorothea Wentworth to Godfrey Wentworth, 3 July 1743. ¹¹⁴ See Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon’, Past and Present, no. 121 (1988), 74–109, and The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 140–65; Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, ‘Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Hanoverian England’, Journal of British Studies, 28 (1989), 201–24. ¹¹⁵ Vaisey (ed.), Diary of Thomas Turner, 161, 194, 212.

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HEROES The mid-century wars, as we have seen, created some public hate-figures from amongst military and naval commanders—especially Admiral Byng, but also Lord George Sackville, whose controversial leadership of the British cavalry at Minden threatened to make him a ‘second Bing’;¹¹⁶ the Duke of Cumberland, a national hero in the aftermath of Culloden, but humiliatingly dismissed from his command after the surrender of his army in Germany in 1757; and the unfortunate Admiral Knowles, sidelined after the unsuccessful raid on Rochefort in the same year (‘Hard, indeed, is my fate’, he lamented, ‘after Forty one years constant and faithful Service’).¹¹⁷ But there were also many long-lasting heroes, who became the focus of intense national pride. Admiral Anson, lauded after his famous voyage around the world as ‘Our second Drake’,¹¹⁸ must surely be one, and General Blakeney, whose staunch defence of Minorca has already been mentioned, was no less certainly another. Also in this category must be Col. Lord Howe, killed in the fighting near Ticonderoga in July 1758, who had the rare distinction amongst regular army officers of winning the affection of the American provincials.¹¹⁹ The Marquis of Granby, Sackville’s successor as commander of the army in Germany, was much loved, too—his qualities of paternal care were captured in Edward Penny’s painting of The Marquis of Granby Relieving a Sick Soldier (1764–5), and the general’s common touch is reflected in the number of public houses named in his honour. William Pitt, while a politician rather than a soldier or sailor, attracted lavish praise and long-lasting reputation as a ‘patriot’ statesman, who put national interests first and foremost. A popular print of March 1763 depicts public opinion as ‘Stand[ing] up for PITT & ENGLAND’s Right’.¹²⁰ Of all the war heroes of this time, Admiral Vernon and General Wolfe were probably the most celebrated. Vernon’s capture of Porto Bello at the start of the war with Spain brought forth, as noted earlier, a great outpouring of national pride, and Vernon’s status as an opponent of Walpole’s administration only added ¹¹⁶ Brian Fitzgerald (ed.), Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster (3 vols., Dublin, 1949–57), i. 251. ¹¹⁷ [Charles Knowles,] The Conduct of Admiral Knowles on the Late Expedition Set in a True Light (London, 1758), 30. ¹¹⁸ London Evening Post, 21–3 June 1744. ¹¹⁹ See, e.g., E. C. Dawes (ed.), Journal of Gen. Rufus Putnam Kept in Northern New York during Four Campaigns of the Old French and Indian War 1757–1760 (Albany, N.Y., 1886), 68. The Massachusetts Assembly paid for a monument to Howe in Westminster Abbey. ¹²⁰ BM 4018, The Politicians. See also Richard Graves’s ‘On Mr. Pitt’s return to Bath, after his Resignation 1761’, in Ian A. Gordon (ed.), Shenstone’s Miscellany 1759–1763 (Oxford, 1952), 37–8. Pitt’s reputation no longer stands so high: see, e.g., Marie Peters, ‘The Myth of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, Great Imperialist. Part I: Pitt and Imperial Expansion 1738–1763’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 21 (1993), 31–74. It should be added, however, that he is somewhat rehabilitated in N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004), esp. 290.

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to his heroic stature in the minds of many Britons. Prints of Vernon and his victory appeared in great numbers, and such was the popular appetite for all things Vernonesque that Staffordshire potters churned out ‘Vernon Mugs’, bearing the inscription ‘He took Porto Bello with Six Ships Only’.¹²¹ The admiral was also lauded in prose and poetry: ‘Our dear cok of an Admiral’, a published letter, purportedly from one of his sailors, pronounced, ‘has true English blood in his vains’, while ‘gallant VERNON’ even merits a mention in James Thomson’s The Seasons (1746).¹²² Wolfe had a major advantage over Vernon in heroic terms—he died at the moment of his greatest triumph. ‘Poor Wolfe’, Lady Caroline Fox wrote, ‘is a great loss’, but, she added tellingly, ‘he has acquired great honour’.¹²³ His relative youth was also an ingredient in his popularity: the dead hero was described in an anonymous verse as ‘WOLFE the Young, the Brave, the Wise’.¹²⁴ The general was immortalized on canvas even more than in words. Penny’s Death of General Wolfe appeared in 1764, but was soon overshadowed by Benjamin West’s more famous painting with the same title, which was first exhibited in 1771 and was made accessible in cheap popular prints. The painting, with the expiring Wolfe cradled in the arms of attendant officers and surrounded by an anxious cast of representatives of empire—a Scottish Highlander, an American Ranger, and even a Native American warrior—remains powerful, and much used, to this day. West, as David Solkin has aptly observed, had ‘manufactured the apotheosis of a national hero’.¹²⁵

THE THREAT OF INVASION The danger of invasion seems to have preoccupied the public on a number of occasions in both wars. In February 1744 a French descent on southern England was widely expected. ‘Nothing is talked of here but an invasion from the French’, Dr Richard Hurd wrote from Cambridge, while Lord Orrery reported to his wife the consternation in London caused by the French Fleet being ‘said to be near our Shores’. Both Hurd and Orrery professed to be unconcerned themselves; Hurd surmised that the intention of the French was merely to prevent the British from sending their army into Germany.¹²⁶ But for every Hurd and Orrery there appear ¹²¹ Wilson, Sense of the People, 148. ¹²² Gentleman’s Magazine, 10 (1740), 184; Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford, 1981), 107. ¹²³ Fitzgerald (ed.), Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, i. 261. ¹²⁴ Public Advertiser, 19 Oct. 1759. For a more thorough analysis of Wolfe’s posthumous popularity, see Nicholas Rogers, ‘Brave Wolfe: The Making of a Hero’, in Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004), 239–59. ¹²⁵ David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven and London, 1993), 211. ¹²⁶ Sarah Brewer (ed.), The Early Letters of Bishop Richard Hurd 1739–1762 (Church of England Record Society, iii, Woodbridge, 1995), 130; Countess of Cork and Orrery (ed.), The Orrery Papers (2 vols., London, 1903), ii. 181.

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to have been countless more anxious Britons. ‘We hear the French are attempting to invade us’, James Clegg, a Derbyshire Dissenter, noted on 26 February,¹²⁷ while the following month, Spencer Cowper, Dean of Durham, was still able to record ‘great apprehensions . . . of an Invasion’.¹²⁸ There was another scare at the end of 1745 and the very beginning of 1746, when French troops were known to be massing at Dunkirk—‘The certain intelligence of one hundred & forty transports with twelve thousand men ready to Sale hath put us into such convultions that I never saw’, Francis Eld wrote from London;¹²⁹ ‘it is impossible to express the terrors we have been in on account of the intended French invasion’, a Hampshire clergyman announced as the immediate crisis passed;¹³⁰ ‘a general Consternation ran through all Degrees of people’ when it was reported (incorrectly) that the French had landed in Pevensy Bay.¹³¹ Concern about a French descent continued until the end of the conflict: in June 1747 Job Staunton Charlton, one of the MPs for Newark, was told confidently that the French intended to land ‘next year’.¹³² In the Seven Years War, invasion alarms were just as frequent. Even before the outbreak of formal hostilities in Europe, George Ridpath, a Church of Scotland minister, was recording in his diary reports ‘of an invasion meditating from France, and a fleet of men-of-war and transports prepared for that purpose at Rochelle’.¹³³ In 1756 Hessian and Hanoverian troops had to be brought over to Britain because there were not thought to be enough British regulars available to repel an expected French attack. In April 1757 the city of London was reported to be ‘again terrified with that bugbear of a French invasion’,¹³⁴ and in November 1758 Leicester’s corporation subscribed £100 towards a fund to encourage enlistment in the army on the ground that augmentation of the forces was vital ‘at a time when we are threatened with a powerfull Invasion’.¹³⁵ In April 1759 Lord George Sackville wrote from Germany that ‘All our Private letters from England represent every body in apprehensions of an Invasion from France’, while John Campbell, a Scottish MP, wrote from London the following September that ‘We are still apprehensive of an invasion’.¹³⁶ The Royal Navy’s victory at Quiberon Bay that November was believed to have saved Ireland from an enemy landing: ¹²⁷ Vanessa S. Doe (ed.), The Diary of James Clegg of Chapel en le Frith 1708–55 (3 pts., Derbyshire Record Society, ii, iii and v, Matlock, 1978–81), pt. ii. 508. ¹²⁸ Edward Hughes (ed.), Letters of Spencer Cowper, Dean of Durham, 1746–74 (Surtees Society, clxv, Durham, 1956), 37, 55. ¹²⁹ Staffordshire RO, Eld Papers, D 798/3/1/1, Eld to Capt. [John] Eld, 7 Dec. 1745. ¹³⁰ HMC, Lothian MSS (London, 1905), 156. ¹³¹ A. P. Jenkins (ed.), The Correspondence of Bishop Secker (Oxfordshire Record Society, lvii, Stroud, 1991), 142. ¹³² Nottinghamshire Archives, Staunton of Staunton Papers, DD.S 50/249. ¹³³ Sir James Balfour Paul (ed.), The Diary of George Ridpath (Scottish History Society, 3rd ser., ii, Edinburgh, 1922), 34 (10 Oct. 1755). ¹³⁴ HMC, Round MSS (London, 1895), 295. ¹³⁵ Chinnery (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, v. 194. ¹³⁶ BL, Leeds Papers, Egerton MS 3443, fo. 173; HMC, Laing MSS (2 vols., London, 1914–25), ii. 426. See also [Anon.,] The Invasion, A Farce. Most Humbly Inscrib’d to the Antigallican Society (London, 1759), which the Dedication explains is ‘design’d to ridicule’ the French ‘and dissipate any idle fears that might subsist amongst ourselves’—humour being employed, as so often, as an antidote to anxiety.

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Dublin’s corporation made Hawke a freeman on the grounds that the defeated French fleet was intending ‘to favour a descent on this Kingdom’.¹³⁷ There can surely be little doubt that the perception of such an external menace acted as a strong unifying force. We have seen that the Highland invasion of northern England in November–December 1745 stimulated a distinctly English nationalism, fuelled by images of the marauding Scots. But for most of the period we are considering, the threat of invasion came from continental Europe. The danger posed by powerful ‘outsiders’ helped to bring together the peoples of Britain in a joint endeavour. Hogarth’s cartoon, The Invasion, published in 1756, to which reference has already been made, depicts the preparations in England for a French landing, and bears a patriotic verse that concludes with the battle cry: ‘Britons to Arms! and let ’em come! Be you but Britons still, Strike Home, and Lion-like attack ’em’.¹³⁸ Even the Irish, especially the Protestant Irish, could respond to this kind of appeal. As a pamphleteer remarked ten years earlier, the differences between the Irish and the British, ‘like Family Disputes, always cease on the Approach of a common Enemy’.¹³⁹ ENEMIES That the French were the principal enemy in the mid-century wars probably furthered a sense of national solidarity. Both mid-century conflicts also involved hostilities with Spain: the so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear, which began in 1739 and merged into the War of the Austrian Succession, was a purely Anglo-Spanish affair, and at the end of the Seven Years War there was renewed fighting with Spain, both in Portugal and in the far-flung Spanish empire. In neither war, however, did Spain pose a major threat to the home territory, despite some fevered speculation about an intended Spanish descent on England or Ireland in 1739–40.¹⁴⁰ In both conflicts the focus of operations was primarily extraEuropean—the Caribbean and Spanish Central America in 1739–48, and the Caribbean and the Pacific in 1762–3. Spain as a Catholic power and as an imperial rival could, of course, be portrayed as a natural enemy, especially when British mercantile interests were unhappy at denial of access to Spanish overseas possessions. Cartoons of the period soon fixed upon a caricature of the Spaniard in a ruff and ornate breeches.¹⁴¹ But this image, depicting the national stereotype in a version of sixteenth-century dress, while probably designed to stir up memories of the days of the Armada,¹⁴² could easily serve as a reminder of Spain’s decline. ¹³⁷ J. H. Gilbert and R. M. Gilbert (eds.), Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin (19 vols., Dublin, 1889–1944), ix. 417. ¹³⁸ BM 3454, The Invasion, pt 2, ‘England’. ¹³⁹ [Henry Brooke,] The Farmer’s Six Letters to the Protestants of Ireland (Dublin, 1746), 3. ¹⁴⁰ See Saville (ed.), Secret Comment, 238; Ranft (ed.), Vernon Papers, 102, 118, 175, 468. ¹⁴¹ See, for instance, BM 2419, Hocus Pocus; or the Political Juglers, 1739. ¹⁴² For the frequent references to the Elizabethan past in the run-up to the outbreak of the war, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994), 154–61.

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In truth, mid-eighteenth-century Spain was but a shadow of its former self, and too weak to excite the necessary level of fear amongst Britons to act as a strong unifying force. Caricature Frenchmen, by contrast, were nearly always shown in the cartoons of the time as dressed in contemporary clothing—exaggeratedly foppish, perhaps, but very much up-to-date. This reflected, surely, both the immediacy and the potency of the French threat. France, unlike Spain, was not living on past glories. France was unquestionably a great power, and as such was well suited to fulfil the role of menacing outsider. Two qualifications should be made to this point. First, France was historically the enemy of England, and even at this time conflict with France tended to promote a very English-centred national sentiment. At the start of the Seven Years War, a song proclaimed that ‘The lillies of France and the fair English rose Could never agree, as old history shows’.¹⁴³ The Scots and Irish, it could be argued, were excluded from this very English ‘hereditary hatred’;¹⁴⁴ indeed, history could suggest to some English people that the ’Forty-five Rebellion was an attempt to resurrect a Franco-Scottish axis, the so-called Auld Alliance.¹⁴⁵ The second qualification is that there were Britons who looked positively on France and were therefore unlikely to be carried away on a tide of Francophobia.¹⁴⁶ The aristocracy, with their French lifestyle, were perhaps the most likely to have ambivalent feelings, but we have seen that fears were voiced that France was becoming something of a cultural beacon even for the middling sort.¹⁴⁷ Nonetheless, neither of these qualifications seriously undermines the point that France acted as an agent of British unity. Although traditional AngloFrench enmity was stressed in much of the propaganda of the time, a more encompassing British hostility to France and all it represented is also observable, albeit one that laid rather less emphasis on history. George Ridpath, the Scottish clergyman mentioned earlier, had no hesitation in condemning the ‘chicanery and effrontery of the French’ in North America, while Samuel Blacker, a County Armagh Protestant, wrote of the French in April 1756 as ‘the enemies of our liberties’.¹⁴⁸ So far as Francophilia is concerned, we should recognize that the articulation of worries that French influence was percolating down the social scale was itself an indication that Britons who aped French fashions and French taste were regarded as deeply suspect by many of their compatriots. For all the alarm about creeping Frenchification, there can be little doubt that the majority of the people viewed the French with a mixture of aversion and fear. Alexander Colden, the nephew of ¹⁴³ London Magazine, 25 (1756), 500. ¹⁴⁴ West Sussex RO, Goodwood MS 223/3/5. It was noticeable, however, that the Scottish James Thomson made reference to past English kings and their struggles against the French: see Thomson’s The Seasons, ed. Sambrook, 126–7. ¹⁴⁵ For a depiction of the rebellion as another Anglo-Scottish war, see Westminster Journal, 3 May 1746. ¹⁴⁶ See Robin Eagles, Francophilia in English Society 1748–1815 (Basingstoke, 2000). ¹⁴⁷ See Ch. 5. ¹⁴⁸ Paul (ed.), Diary of George Ridpath, 115; HMC, Charlemont MSS, i. 226.

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the lieutenant governor of New York, was clearly taken aback by the intensity of anti-French feeling that he met with in Britain. He wrote from Brighton in August 1758 of the deep ‘national Resentment’ against the French, which was ‘inflamed to the pitch of Rage’.¹⁴⁹ France’s population—which was roughly twice that of the British Isles throughout the eighteenth century—gave it a truly awesome military potential. In addition, French proximity meant that the southern coasts of England and Ireland were seen as vulnerable to attack. Even east coast towns such as Hull were thought to be at risk: in August 1758 intelligence was received that suggested a raid on the town and its shipping was imminent.¹⁵⁰ The French were also widely recognized to be Britain’s chief commercial rival. In 1745 the Laudable Association of Anti-Gallicans was founded to discourage the import of French goods and to promote British manufactures. During the early stages of the next conflict, France was again identified as a strong commercial competitor, well able to undersell British goods in foreign markets.¹⁵¹ Commercial rivalry was linked in many minds, of course, with imperial rivalry. In all parts of the globe, it seemed, British and French interests were jostling for superiority. A cartoon published in London in 1755 displayed the French as a threat in both India and North America, while another warned of the general danger of ‘French Ambition’.¹⁵² This was a familiar theme: British commentaries repeatedly claimed that France was restless and expansionary, her rulers bent on ‘universal monarchy’.¹⁵³ Even during the period of Anglo-French alliance after the War of the Spanish Succession, the relationship between the two peoples was described as one of ‘natural & necessary enemies’, and in 1745 Chesterfield had no hesitation in writing of the French as ‘our great and natural enemy’.¹⁵⁴ We can even go so far as to say that at a popular level France gave meaning to national identity. It was, in a very real sense, the defining counterpoint—an opposite that must have seemed all the more dangerous to Britons who believed that the external threat was effectively supported by a Francophile fifth column. The liberty,

¹⁴⁹ Alexander J. Wall (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, v. 1755–1760 (Collections of the New York Historical Society for 1921, New York, 1923), 256. See also Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London, 1997 edn.), esp. chs. 1–6. For the association of the French with ‘effeminacy’, see Ch. 4 of this book, and Michèle Cohen, ‘Manliness, Effeminacy and the French: Gender and the Construction of National Character in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (eds.), English Masculinities 1660–1800 (London, 1999), 44–61. ¹⁵⁰ West Sussex RO, Goodwood MS 206. ¹⁵¹ Malachay Postlethwayt, Great-Britain’s True System (London, 1757), vi–vii. ¹⁵² BM 3284, The Grand Monarque in a fright; Or the British Lion rous’d from his Lethargy; BM 3331, Britain’s Rights maintaind; or French Ambition dismantled. ¹⁵³ See, e.g., [Anon.,] An Apology for the Conduct of the Present Administration, as to Foreign Affairs Generally, But Particularly with Regard to France; Illustrating the Views of that Ambitious Crown on all Flanders, from Authentic Proofs (London, 1744), 34. ¹⁵⁴ Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1986), vi; HMC, Buckinghamshire MSS (London, 1895), 131.

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Protestantism, and prosperity of Britain were readily contrasted with the slavery, Catholicism, and poverty of France. That France was the greatest Catholic power was perhaps the most important stimulus to a sense of British solidarity.¹⁵⁵ As Welshman Howell Harris put it in February 1744, the intention of French invaders would be ‘not only to take away all Tolleration & Liberty of Protestantism but [to] re-establish Popery again’.¹⁵⁶ At the same time, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik was convinced that the French invasion plans should be seen as a ‘Roman-Catholick project’, while Dublin’s corporation had no doubt that all the civil and religious rights of the people ‘must fall a sacrifice should a popish invader succeed’.¹⁵⁷ The corporation of Leicester made the same point in a loyal address to the King submitted at the outbreak of the next war: to the town’s worthies the consequences of defeat at the hands of France were truly terrifying, ‘When we Consider the many and great Blessings of which we are Possessed, and set them against the Fires, Racks, and Exile, your Subjects must suffer should your Enemies Prevail’.¹⁵⁸

ALLIES Britain’s allies, as well as its enemies, might well have helped to further national identity. Fighting alongside allies could sometimes, it must be said, engender a sense of common purpose that blurred national distinctions. During the Seven Years War the triumphs of Frederick the Great were celebrated with almost as much gusto as British victories. ‘He is a most extraordinary man indeed’, was the view of Lady Caroline Fox; ‘our defender’, in the words of Lewis Morris; we ‘so much admire him’, enthused the Revd George Woodward.¹⁵⁹ To support Frederick was to support the ‘Protestant Interest’ in Germany in particular and Europe in general, and many Britons seem to have taken seriously their commitment to Protestant solidarity.¹⁶⁰ Frederick’s reputation perhaps owed something to the way in which he was trumpeted as the ideal ‘patriot king’ by those—notably Tory politicians—who sought to discredit George II and his ministers.¹⁶¹ ¹⁵⁵ For more on the religious dimension see Ch. 7. ¹⁵⁶ Gomer Morgan Roberts (ed.), Selected Trevecka Letters (1742–1747) (Carnarvon, 1956), 130. ¹⁵⁷ John M. Gray (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (Scottish History Society, xiii, Edinburgh, 1892), 169; Gilbert and Gilbert (eds.), Calendar of the Ancient Records of Dublin, ix. 137. ¹⁵⁸ Chinnery (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, v. 185. ¹⁵⁹ Fitzgerald (ed.), Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, i. 182; Owen (ed.), Additional Letters of the Morrises, 314; Donald Gibson (ed.), A Parson in the Vale of White Horse: George Woodward’s Letters from East Hendred, 1753–1761 (Gloucester, 1982), 105. See also [Anon.,] The Eulogy of Frederic, King of Prussia (London, 1758); and W. H. Dilworth, The Life and Heroick Actions of Frederick III [sic], King of Prussia (London, 1758). ¹⁶⁰ See Chs. 6 and 7. For scepticism about the importance of the ‘Protestant Interest’ as a factor in the war, see [Anon.,] A Letter to the People of England, on the Necessity of Putting an Immediate End to the War; and the Means of Obtaining an Advantageous Peace (London, 1760), 28–9; and [Israel Mauduit,] Considerations on the Present German War (London, 1760), 17. ¹⁶¹ See Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), 283.

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Frederick-mania also reflected the early British failures in the war; while British forces experienced defeats in the Mediterranean and North America, the King of Prussia was triumphant. As William Anderson of Glasgow wrote in February 1758, ‘we frequently wish that our Generals were sent to Germany [to serve under Frederick] and made sergeants’.¹⁶² But Frederick remained popular even when British fortunes brightened. In November 1760, for instance, Sir Roger Newdigate told his wife that London had greeted news of the Prussian defeat of the Austrians at Torgau with tremendous enthusiasm: ‘all the Town is bonfire & illumination’.¹⁶³ Indeed, Frederick continued to be admired and favourably regarded long after the Seven Years War, even though the formal alliance between Britain and Prussia had ended.¹⁶⁴ This kind of public recognition of allies was less visible in the previous conflict, though there was some sympathy and support for Maria Theresa of Austria when her territories were under attack from the French, Bavarians, and Prussians.¹⁶⁵ Even the Hanoverians could be viewed positively. While serving with the British army in the Low Countries in the summer of 1744, Lord George Sackville reported that ‘The Hanoverians are in great favour with us’, and that British and Hanoverian troops ‘get drunk very comfortably together, and talk and sing a vast deal without understanding one syllable of what they say to one another’.¹⁶⁶ Sir John Clerk of Penicuik noted that after the fiercely fought battle of Fontenoy the British troops were so impressed with the conduct of the Hanoverians that ‘they were willing to divide a Loaf with them’.¹⁶⁷ Lieutenant Philip Brown, a cavalry officer who had been present at the battle, was still more generous. After relating the bravery of his own troops, he added: ‘by the Behaviour of the Hanoverians they may henceforth Justly be Stild of the same Nation’.¹⁶⁸ Yet friction with allies was more evident than solidarity, and tensions between the allied powers tended to underscore popular perceptions of national identity by making obvious the separate agendas pursued by the different coalition partners. As Col. John Mordaunt wrote of morale amongst the British troops after Fontenoy, ‘I know not whether the spirit of revenge against our foes, or of resentment against ¹⁶² J. G. Dunlop (ed.), The Dunlop Papers, iii, Letters and Journals 1663–1889 (London, 1953), 101. ¹⁶³ A. W. A. White (ed.), Correspondence of Sir Roger Newdigate (Dugdale Society, xxxvii, Hertford, 1995), 101. ¹⁶⁴ Affectionate anecdotes of Frederick appeared in the British press at the time of the brief War of the Bavarian Succession, which again pitted the Prussians against the Austrians: see, e.g., the reporting of the conflict in the July 1778 issues of the twice-weekly London Chronicle, and the Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser for that July and Aug. ¹⁶⁵ See, e.g., The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, i (Surtees Society, lxxiii, Durham, 1880), 332–3; together with the following two cartoons of 1742—BM 2515, F——H Pacification or the Q——N of H——Y Stript, and BM 2554, The Queen of Hungary in Splendor, or the Monsieurs Pounded in Prague. See also, [Anon.,] A Defence of the Rights of the House of Austria against the Unjust Claims of the King of Prussia (London, 1741). ¹⁶⁶ HMC, Stopford Sackville MSS (2 vols., London, 1904–10), i. 289, 290. ¹⁶⁷ Gray (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 191. ¹⁶⁸ Buckinghamshire RO, Baker of Penn Papers, D/X 1069/2/116.

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our Friends is strongest’.¹⁶⁹ In the War of the Austrian Succession difficulties with allies seem to have been more acute than in the Seven Years War, probably because the first conflict was not so successful as the second from the point of view of the anti-French coalition, and also because Frederick the Great’s Protestantism made it easier to see the Prussians as natural allies in the war of 1756–63. At any rate, all Britain’s allies came in for criticism in the Austrian war. There was great resentment at the subsidies given to Maria Theresa and the King of Sardinia, which were said to have been squandered on their respective courts rather than used to put troops into the field.¹⁷⁰ The Dutch were attacked for their unwillingness to commit themselves fully to the war. Field Marshal Wade, in command of the British forces in Flanders in 1744, while at pains to refer to the good relations between the British and Hanoverian troops, reported the ‘great Disputes and Animosities that have arisen at Ostende, between the English & Dutch Soldiers’, which involved much ‘Rage & Violence’ on both sides.¹⁷¹ In July 1745, as Marshal Saxe’s army advanced triumphantly across the Low Countries, Chesterfield announced that he ‘never in my life saw the public in a worse humour than at present. . . . Many are absurd enough to think, as well as say, that the Dutch have an underhand dealing with France, to destroy our trade’.¹⁷² A cartoon of the time, entitled The Benefit of Neutrality, depicts a cow, with a Frenchman and a Spaniard pulling her horns, and an Englishman grabbing her tail, while a Dutchman secretes her milk into a pail.¹⁷³ ‘If we have no better friends & allies to trust than these’, a British officer wrote of the Dutch in 1747, ‘God have mercy on us’.¹⁷⁴ The Hanoverians, despite the favourable reports of their steadfastness at Fontenoy, were criticized too. George II’s partiality for his German homeland caused particular outrage, with his decision to wear a Hanoverian yellow sash at Dettingen, rather than British red one, repeatedly cited as evidence of this failing.¹⁷⁵ Between December 1742 and November 1744, according to a recent historian of Anglo-Hanoverian relations, anti-Hanoverian feeling in Britain was running at a particularly high level, fuelled by resentment at the British payrolling of Hanoverian troops and the apparent dominance of Lord Carteret, the secretary of state who accompanied the King during the campaign in Germany and was widely assumed to be prepared to work to George’s electoral agenda.¹⁷⁶ British interests, it seemed, were being subordinated to those of Hanover. As Lord Orrery sarcastically wrote in

¹⁶⁹ BL, Althorp Papers, Add. MS 75,455, Mordaunt to Stephen Poyntz, 13 June [1745]. ¹⁷⁰ Countess of Cork and Orrery (ed.), Orrery Papers, ii. 28; Saville (ed.), Secret Comment, 286. ¹⁷¹ Bodleian Library, MS Eng. hist. C 314, fos. 13 and 33. ¹⁷² HMC, Buckinghamshire MSS, 118. ¹⁷³ BM 2665. ¹⁷⁴ Glasgow City Archives, Hamilton of Barns Papers, TD 589/641. ¹⁷⁵ See, e.g., [Anon.,] The Triumphant Campaign. A Critical, Political, Panegyrical, Poetical History of the Late Active Glorious German Campaign (London, 1743), 11. Unsurprisingly, the yellow sash episode was used in Jacobite propaganda: [Anon.,] A Dialogue between Thomas Jones, a Life-guard-man, and John Smith, late Serjeant in the First Regiment of Foot-Guards, Just Returned from Flanders (London, 1749), 9. ¹⁷⁶ Uriel Dann, Hanover and Great Britain 1740–1760 (Leicester, 1991), 55–6.

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February 1744, when a French invasion seemed imminent: ‘pray observe the Wisdom of our Governors, who have given so close attention to the great and important Territory of Hanover, that they have totally neglected the Defence of this insignificant Island’.¹⁷⁷ So strong was the current of anti-Hanoverian sentiment that it could even overcome English hostility to the other peoples of Britain and Ireland. When there was some doubt about whether a dragoon who had covered himself in glory at Dettingen was English or Irish, one pamphleteer argued that it was immaterial, so long as he was one of ‘my Fellow-Islanders’ rather than a Hanoverian.¹⁷⁸ The German orientation of the King and some of his ministers was to cause further difficulties in the next war. At the outbreak of the conflict, the importation of Hessian and Hanoverian troops to protect Britain from invasion was taken as a national rebuke and a spur to greater national effort.¹⁷⁹ The despatch of a British expeditionary force to Germany in 1758 was accepted by many politicians only on the understanding that a continental commitment was vital to the success of the war in North America and the Caribbean, where unambiguously British interests were at stake. But when the British army in Germany was reinforced, and when operations in Germany continued after the British had secured Canada and had started to capture French islands in the West Indies, the old animosity to involvement in Germany resurfaced. Israel Mauduit’s Considerations on the Present German War, published in 1760, encapsulated and furthered this hostility.¹⁸⁰ It was reinforced by the accession of a new monarch—the Britishborn George III—who had none of the affection for Hanover of his grandfather, and who was anxious to end the German war as quickly as possible. A note in the papers of Sir Francis Dashwood, a long-standing critic of continental warfare, indicates one of the reasons hostility to the conflict in Germany was growing—the expense was escalating to an alarming degree. Some £692,477 had been spent on operations in Germany in 1757, ‘exclusive of transports’; by 1761 the bill had risen to £5,063,218, ‘besides Subsidy to King [of ] P[russia] 670000 and exclusive of the expence of Transports’.¹⁸¹ However, more fundamental than the cost of the German war was the concern that it was serving the purposes of Britain’s allies rather than Britain itself. Old Time’s advice to Britainnia or English Reflections on G—m–n Connections, a cartoon published in 1761, made plain the view that Britain’s allies alone were the beneficiaries of the ¹⁷⁷ Countess of Cork and Orrery (ed.), Orrery Papers, ii. 181. ¹⁷⁸ [Anon.,] The Triumphant Campaign, 39. See also [Anon.,] The English Nation Vindicated from the Calumnies of Foreigners (London, 1744), 23. ¹⁷⁹ For more on the political controversy caused by the bringing over of the German troops, see Ch. 6. ¹⁸⁰ For the reception of Mauduit’s pamphlet see Karl Schweizer, ‘Israel Mauduit: Pamphleteering and Foreign Policy in the Age of the Elder Pitt’, in Stephen Taylor et al. (eds.), Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson (Woodbridge, 1998), 198–209. ¹⁸¹ Buckinghamshire RO, Dashwood Papers, D/D/19/5.

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conflict in Germany.¹⁸² At the grassroots level, too, there is evidence of hostility towards Germans in the Seven Years War. British troops serving in Germany regularly clashed with their Hanoverian allies. At Munster in November 1758 there were a number of incidents, one of the most serious of which involved a trooper in the Enniskillen Dragoons, who was flogged and then drummed out of the garrison ‘for wounding a drummer of the Hanoverians’.¹⁸³

THE BOUNDARIES OF BRITISHNESS It might be tempting to add the American colonists to the list of vilified allies. If the British criticized their European partners and auxiliaries, they criticized the Americans too. Wolfe was scathing about the colonial provincial troops attached to the army during the siege of Louisbourg in 1758. ‘The Americans are in general the dirtiest most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive’, he told Lord George Sackville.¹⁸⁴ However, British attacks on the colonials were qualitatively different from their barbed comments about their German, Dutch, Austrian, and Italian allies. Criticism of the American provincials mainly focused on their poor discipline and other military deficiencies—‘Such rascals as those are rather an encumbrance than any real strength to an army’, Wolfe continued in his letter to Sackville; ‘it has taken infinite pains and labour to bring them to any sort of Regularity and Discipline’, was General Braddock’s condescending view of the Virginia and Maryland troops under his command in 1755; ‘left to themselves’, Amherst wrote scornfully of the provincials in 1759, they ‘would eat fryed Pork and lay in their tents all day long’.¹⁸⁵ These disparaging remarks—and many others like them—reflected not a sense of national difference, but the contempt of professional regular soldiers for untrained amateurs.¹⁸⁶ Indeed, Americans not only saw themselves as Britons, but appear to have been seen as such by inhabitants of the three kingdoms. The capture of Louisbourg in 1745 was greeted with wild enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic, and the prospect of its return to France at the peace excited as much anger in Britain as it did in New England. ‘Cape Breton’, the Earl of Chesterfield pronounced wearily in August 1745, ‘is become the darling object of the whole nation’.¹⁸⁷ Popular ¹⁸² BM 3826. For more on the politics of the German war, see Ch. 6. ¹⁸³ HMC, Various Collections, viii. 519. See also 447, 514, 559. ¹⁸⁴ Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (London, 1909), 392. ¹⁸⁵ Ibid.; Pargellis (ed.), Military Affairs in North America, 84; J. C. Webster (ed.),The Journal of Jeffery Amherst (Toronto, 1931), 167. ¹⁸⁶ Similar contempt was shown by British soldiers towards the French militia encountered on the coastal raids in the Seven Years War: see Andrew Cormack and Alan Jones (eds.), The Journal of Corporal Todd 1745–1762 (Army Records Society, xviii, Stroud, 2001), 91, 95, 96. ¹⁸⁷ HMC, Buckinghamshire MSS, 127. See also [Anon.,] National Prejudice, Opposed to National Interest Candidly Considered (London, 1748), 21.

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determination to keep Louisbourg was partly a natural consequence of the effort that had been expended in taking the fortress, and partly a product of the delight that flowed from bettering the French. However, enthusiasm for the victory, and determination to retain the conquest, owed much to the public perception that giving up Louisbourg in exchange for a French withdrawal from the Low Countries would subordinate a British interest (the retention of Louisbourg) to what was perceived by many Britons to be an Austrian or Dutch or Hanoverian interest (the checking of French power on the Continent).¹⁸⁸ That British interest, so far as we can tell, was conceived as consisting not just in protecting the trade of the North American colonies for the benefit of the metropolitan core—though that was clearly a major consideration¹⁸⁹—but also in protecting the colonists themselves, who, as fellow Britons (‘Our countrymen and kinsmen’),¹⁹⁰ deserved security from the danger of attack.¹⁹¹ At the beginning of the next conflict, Britons seem to have been just as keen to include the Americans in the same nation. In 1756 an unnamed MP was reported to have told the British House of Commons that he ‘still look[ed] upon the people in our plantations, notwithstanding their great distance, as a part of ourselves’.¹⁹² Eliga Gould argues that the Diplomatic Revolution of that year, by giving France access to the Austrian Netherlands, led to a widespread recognition in Britain that more reliance had to be placed on British resources. One fruit of this was militia reform in England and Wales, another was a heightened concern for the security of the North American colonies and an increasing tendency to regard the Americans as an integral part of the British nation.¹⁹³ Even before the FrancoAustrian accord undermined Britain’s time-honoured system of alliances to check French power, French incursions in the Ohio Valley and Nova Scotia were increasing the British public’s interest in America. Books and pamphlets poured forth from the presses: according to a recent study there were twenty-four published in 1752, twenty-three in 1753, forty-two in 1754, fifty-nine in 1755, and eighty-eight ¹⁸⁸ See the ‘Hymn to Victory on the taking of Cape Breton’ in Gentleman’s Magazine, 15 (1745), 357. It should be added that other Britons recognized that Britain’s interests were well served by maintaining the balance of power on the Continent, and particularly by keeping the French out of the Low Countries: see Bob Harris, ‘ “American Idols”: Empire, War and the Middling Ranks in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain’, Past and Present, no. 105 (1996), esp. 125; Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2000), ch. 1; and Ch. 6 in this book. ¹⁸⁹ See Picton (ed.), City of Liverpool: Municipal Archives and Records, 106. ¹⁹⁰ Craftsman, 3 Aug. 1745. See also [Anon.,] Two Letters, Concerning some Farther Advantages and Improvements that may seem Necessary to be made on the Taking and Keeping of Cape Breton Humbly Offer’d to Public Consideration (London, 1746), 10, 12. ¹⁹¹ See the piece by Robert Auckmuty on ‘The Importance of Cape Breton to the British nation’, in Gentleman’s Magazine, 15 (1745), 356. There was some pride, it should be added, in the cooperation of the Royal Navy and the New England land forces. A contemporary newspaper, Old England, referred approvingly on 27 July 1745 to the courage of ‘Englishmen, in whatever Latitude they are born’—a recognition that the Americans were part of the same nation, even if that nation was taken to be English rather than British. ¹⁹² London Magazine, 25 (1756), 314. ¹⁹³ Gould, Persistence of Empire, ch. 2.

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in 1756.¹⁹⁴ It seems reasonable to suppose that the increase in the numbers indicates an increased awareness of, and fascination with, North America. In the aftermath of the Seven Years War, when irritation with the colonists was fuelled by reports circulating in Britain of the way in which the Americans had traded with the enemy during the conflict, members of the public still subscribed generously to an appeal for funds for two colonial colleges. The success of this appeal, Peter Marshall has concluded, ‘suggests that colonial Americans were still being included in a comprehensive definition of Britishness, based on fear of popery, an interdenominational Protestantism, and the celebration of political and religious freedom’.¹⁹⁵ A few years later, when successive British ministries were asserting the imperial authority of the British Parliament and looking to extract a revenue from the North Americans, the old colonies were often conceptualized not simply as part of the British dominions but as outposts of the extended British nation. Thomas Whately, in a pamphlet published in 1765, justified parliamentary taxation of the colonies on the grounds that the Americans were part of the British commons, and therefore subject to Parliament, the ‘national Legislature’.¹⁹⁶ Not until the Americans persistently resisted British authority in the course of the following decade did this inclusive attitude start to give way to a more detached view of the colonists, and not until the outbreak of fighting between the colonists and the British army in 1775 did large numbers of Britons begin to see the Americans as foreigners rather than compatriots. Even then, there were many who wished to reconstruct the broken British Atlantic community. Their hopes were in vain, of course, for the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, the creation of the United States, and, perhaps more importantly, the Franco-American alliance of 1778 effectively put paid to the idea of the British as a transatlantic people.¹⁹⁷ But we should avoid the temptation to read history backwards and see this development as long prefigured. In the period from the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession to the end of the Seven Years War, Britishness, when it was invoked by people in the British Isles, seems often to have incorporated rather than excluded the North American colonists. National identity is a slippery subject. It would be foolish to claim that the mideighteenth-century wars created a pervasive sense of belonging to a British nation. To the extent that such a feeling was forming, it owed a good deal to developments unconnected, or only tangentially linked, with the armed struggles of this period. ¹⁹⁴ R. C. Simmons, British Imprints Relating to North America, 1621–1760: An Annotated Checklist (London, 1996), 210–28. ¹⁹⁵ P. J. Marshall, ‘Who Cared about the Colonies? Some Evidence from Philanthropy’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 27 (1999), 64. ¹⁹⁶ Thomas Whately, The Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies, and the Taxes Imposed upon Them, Considered (London, 1765), esp. 109–11. ¹⁹⁷ See Gould, Persistence of Empire, chs. 5 and 6; and Stephen Conway, ‘From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (2002), 65–100.

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And one can legitimately question whether there was a widespread identification with Britain at this time. There is much evidence of the continuing appeal of local loyalty, and of the pull of other identities. In particular, the great mass of the Catholic Irish could not be readily incorporated in an overarching Britishness—at least not until progress was made in dismantling the penal laws. More surprisingly, many of the English were also reluctant to embrace the idea of Britain. Yet there are solid grounds for seeing these years as ones in which a sense of Britishness made some headway, and for seeing war as promoting this development. Neither local loyalties nor other patriotisms were necessarily incompatible with a commitment to Britain. Service in the armed forces brought together the English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish in a common endeavour, and presented to the wider public an image of Britishness at work. Military and naval triumphs were the focus for much British pride. The recurring threat of invasion furthered a sense of unity born of adversity. That France—powerful, menacing, absolutist, and Catholic—was Britain’s principal enemy in these wars also helped, by providing a defining counterpoint. Britain’s allies on the Continent gave added impetus to an emerging national sentiment: although allies could remind Britons of their role in a broader struggle, more usually they became the butt of bitter criticism for their pursuit of interests perceived to be inimical to those of Britain, or for their alleged unwillingness to pull their weight. If Britishness made some progress in capturing hearts and minds, it is important to recognize that this was a different form of Britishness to the late-eighteenthcentury version. In our period, the sense of a British nation was not geographically tied to Britain itself, or even to the British Isles. The American colonies were generally seen as part of the extended British community. Indeed, in many ways the mid-century wars can be said to have furthered rather than weakened an inclusive vision of Britishness. When the Seven Years War drew to a victorious close, a sense of British pride united the transatlantic nation. As we will see in the next chapter, however, the process of coming together ultimately had the paradoxical effect of leading to a clash between two very different conceptions of what it was to be British—a clash that lay at the heart of the American Revolution.

9 War, Empire, and the Loss of America The frontispiece to the London Magazine for 1763 was an engraving of Britannia, accompanied by a verse that extolled victory in the struggle against France and Spain, and celebrated the ‘vast heights’ to which ‘the Nation’ would rise, thanks to the expansion of British dominion that was a consequence of success in the recently concluded war. This triumphal perspective was understandable, if not, as we will see, universally shared. In 1739, when the conflict against Spain began, British possessions overseas comprised the colonies of settlement in North America, stretching from Nova Scotia in the north to newly established Georgia in the south; the island colonies in the West Indies; and scattered trading posts in Central America, West Africa, and Asia. By 1763, the North American colonies had been augmented by French Canada, Spanish Florida, and the vast inland wilderness between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi. Further acquisitions had been made in the Caribbean, and the footholds in West Africa had been strengthened by the creation of a new colony of Senegambia. Two years later, the Muhgal Emperor granted the British East India Company the right to collect revenues and administer justice in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, thereby transforming the company from a commercial concern into a territorial power. This change in the size and the nature of the British presence in three continents had important repercussions on the way in which the Empire was perceived in Britain and Ireland, and on the ways in which the British and Irish perceived themselves. The expansion of empire, its changing character, and its domestic impact also had a profound effect on the old Empire, notably the North American colonies, which, along with the West Indian islands, had formed the most important element of the King’s overseas dominions at the beginning of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, but occupied a more uncertain place in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. The aim of this chapter is to explore attitudinal shifts—particularly in Britain, but also in North America—and in the process to help to explain the apparent paradox that the growth of the Empire led, in a mere twelve years after 1763, to war with most of the British North American colonies, and in 1776 to their Declaration of Independence from the British Crown.

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The triumphal outcome of the Seven Years War can easily overshadow the considerable uncertainty—even anxiety—about Britain’s place in the world and the security of its Empire that characterized much of our period. A cartoon of 1739 depicts France’s Cardinal Fleury as the victor of a race between the European powers, collecting his prizes from a booth labelled ‘Europe Asia Africa America’.¹ The assumption that the French posed a potent threat continued to shape British thinking throughout our period. The victories that began in 1758 might have started to diminish the fear of France, but the belief that it had the capacity to strike back, and was locked in enmity with Britain, was influential even after the Seven Years War, when French defeat and British dominance might have been expected to produce greater confidence. We should also note the limited appetite for imperial expansion until the last phase of the Seven Years War. The conflict with Spain that began in the autumn of 1739 was fought for commerce rather than territory. There were some voices calling for the occupation of enemy possessions in the Caribbean and Central America ‘for the future security of our trade in that part of the world’,² but there seems to have been general agreement that the primary aim was to force the Spanish to come to terms on the commercial issues. Vernon’s victory at Porto Bello, as Kathleen Wilson has demonstrated, led to widespread and excited celebration at home,³ but his immense popularity was probably primarily attributable to the contrast between his daring exploits and the seeming sluggishness of the Walpole ministry’s prosecution of the war. If Vernon-mania was a symptom of popular ‘imperialism’, it does not seem to have signified a general enthusiasm for ‘empire’ in the territorial sense. The objective remained the maintenance and defence of ‘our ancient Trade, Commerce and Navigation’.⁴ After Porto Bello little progress was made in this theatre, so there was to be no great national debate over the desirability of retaining any wartime acquisitions in the region. Although Anson’s successful circumnavigation, begun in 1740 and completed in 1744, raised expectations of enhanced national prestige and encouraged flattering comparisons with ancient Rome (‘Her fierce Dominion, Asia, Afric knew; / But round the Globe her eagle never flew’),⁵ there was to be no expansion of British overseas territories. The war with France had its moments of imperial success, notably in 1745 with the taking of Louisbourg by New England irregulars supported by the Royal ¹ BM 2431, The European Race Heat IIId. ² PH, xi. 152 (Samuel Sandys, 27 Nov. 1739). ³ ‘Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon’, Past and Present, no. 121 (1988), 74–109. ⁴ Nottingham’s instructions to its MPs, quoted in Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 149. ⁵ Daily Advertiser, 5 July 1744.

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Navy. Colonial spokesmen vigorously pressed the case for the retention of Cape Breton, arguing for its immense value.⁶ Their arguments were echoed in British towns interested in colonial trade and in the British press,⁷ and such was the popular clamour that one pamphleteer mused that ‘for a time, I don’t know whether it might not have been safer for the Ministry to cede the Isle of Wight to France, than yield up that of Cape-Breton’.⁸ Nonetheless, the conquest was returned in 1748 as part of a settlement designed to minimize the impact of French success in the strategically important Austrian Netherlands, and in India, where Fort St. George at Madras had fallen rapidly (‘They have sufficiently paid for their neglect and bad Intelligence’, was one comment on the East India Company’s performance).⁹ In the West Indies, the capture of Port Louis in Saint-Domingue at the end of the war encouraged some parts of the British press to clamour for its retention;¹⁰ however, the British planters were opposed to annexing French islands, for fear that this would increase the volume of sugar reaching the British market and so lower prices. Even if the British forces had been more successful, and captured the whole of Saint-Domingue, the governor of Jamaica would have preferred to see the French plantations destroyed rather than added to King George’s Caribbean possessions.¹¹ One episode in the war of 1739–48 offered possible lessons for the future of imperial cohesion, or even national unity. American troops had been raised in 1740 to fight against the Spanish in the Caribbean and Central America. The 3,500 men who served under William Gooch, the governor of Virginia, were drawn from many different colonies. Large numbers lost their lives in the fruitless operations before Cartagena—a disaster sometimes interpreted as the start of colonial disillusionment with Britain, a disillusionment supposedly deepened with the return of Louisbourg in 1748.¹² Yet, seen from a different angle, the war demonstrated the possibilities of Anglo-American partnership. The American troops were raised to serve under colonial officers—this was said to be essential to ⁶ See, e.g., William Bollan, The Importance and Advantage of Cape Breton, Truly Stated and Impartially Considered, with Proper Maps (London, 1746). ⁷ See, e.g., SP 36/67, pt. ii, fo. 62, the City of London’s address to the King, 10 Sept. 1745; and Liverpool’s address, 17 Sept. 1745, in Sir James A. Picton (ed.), City of Liverpool Municipal Archives and Records (Liverpool, 1907), 106. The London Magazine, 15 (1745), 348, carried ‘A Song upon the Times’, which announced uncompromisingly that ‘Cape Breton we’ve conquer’d, Cape Breton we’ll keep’. For more on the importance of Louisbourg’s capture, see Ch. 5. ⁸ [Anon.,] National Prejudice, Opposed to National Interest, Candidly Considered in the Detention or Yielding up Gibraltar and Cape-Briton by the Ensuing Treaty of peace: With Some Observations on the Natural Jealousy of the Spanish Nation, and how far it May Operate to the Prejudice of the British Commerce if not Removed at this Crisis. In a Letter to Sir John Barnard, Knight (London, 1748), 21. ⁹ BL, Anson Papers, Add. MS 15,955, fo. 294. ¹⁰ See Ch. 6. ¹¹ Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (Oxford, 1936), ch. 5. ¹² See Douglas Edward Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986). For criticism of this approach, see Richard Harding, ‘The Growth of Anglo-American Alienation: The Case of the American Regiment, 1740–42’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17 (1989), 161–84.

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bring the four-battalion regiment up to strength—but the men were then paid in the same manner as the British regulars.¹³ The successful raising of the American Regiment owed something, no doubt, to the lure of Spanish gold;¹⁴ however, the regiment, and the way in which it was recruited, can also be seen as the embodiment of the colonial (or perhaps provincial) view of what it was to be British: self-governing communities of Britons, led by their local elites, cooperated in the service of their common sovereign. Accommodating local preferences had been critical to the mobilization of colonial manpower, which had then been deployed for British ends. This, we should note, was the first time British North Americans had been recruited specifically to fight outside North America itself. Perhaps we can glimpse here, then, signs of a greater integration of the British Atlantic world, or even a further unifying of the extended British nation, rather than the beginnings of disintegration.¹⁵ From the perspective of metropolitan Britain, however, the lessons to be learnt were of a different kind. A more authoritarian approach to the North American settlements was adopted, and there was little appreciation of the benefits of a loose-reined partnership of Britons on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1748, when the Austrian war ended, the Earl of Halifax became the president of the Board of Trade, and he set about strengthening metropolitan government control over the colonies. He encouraged governors to stand up to their assemblies, and so to become more reliable tools of imperial administration. A regular packet boat system was established to improve communication between the Government in London and the colonial governors. There was also a number of new and important initiatives by the British Parliament, including in1748 a bounty on indigo production (to produce blue dye for the British textile industry); the Iron Act of 1750, to encourage colonial production and export to Britain of crude bar and pig iron, while prohibiting the making of refined iron and steel; and in 1751 a Currency Act, designed to return the New England colonies to hard money after their wartime emissions of paper bills.¹⁶ ¹³ As Gov. William Shirley of Massachusetts explained to the Duke of Newcastle, colonial troops ‘have generally so great an aversion to inlist under any but American Officers whom they know and have an opinion of ’: Charles Henry Lincoln (ed.), Correspondence of William Shirley (2 vols., New York, 1912), i. 295. ¹⁴ See, e.g., Gertrude Selwyn Kimball (ed.), The Correspondence of the Colonial Governors of Rhode Island 1723–1775 (2 vols., Boston, Mass., 1902–3), i. 140. ¹⁵ Another sign of unity was the celebration in North America of the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion in Britain: see, e.g., Stewart Mitchell (ed.), Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, xxiii. 1746–1747 (Boston, 1948), 94–5. See also, for earlier transatlantic solidarity, Hull Abbot, The Duty of God’s People to Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem: and Especially for the Preservation and Continuance of their own Privileges both Civil and Religious, when in Danger at Home or Abroad. A Sermon on Occasion of the Rebellion in Scotland Rais’d in Favour of a Popish Pretender; with Design to Overthrow our Present Happy Establishment, and to Introduce Popery and Arbitrary Power into our Nations, from which, by a Series of Wonders, in the Good Providence of God, they have been Delivered, Preach’d at Charlestown in New England, Jan. 12, 1745,6 (Boston, Mass., 1746). ¹⁶ See Jack P. Greene, ‘An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the American Revolution’, in Stephen G. Kutrz and James H. Hutson (eds.), Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973), 32–80.


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This new interventionism seems to have been a direct consequence of the threat posed to the colonies during the Austrian war, which increased recognition of their value to Britain. In 1746, the Duke of Bedford had argued that the security of the British colonies depended upon ‘the entire expulsion of the French out of the Northern continent of America’.¹⁷ It was believed that this would require a considerable commitment of British manpower, and in that year an expedition from Britain was planned with the intention of achieving this objective, only for worries about the war in the Low Countries and the continuing threat of invasion of the home territories to prevent troops from being sent across the Atlantic.¹⁸ In the aftermath of the war, British politicians, press, and public, as Bob Harris has shown, remained in awe of French power and concerned to prepare for the next round of fighting.¹⁹ George Grenville, at this stage merely a junior minister, summed up this defensive mood when he told the British House of Commons in December 1753 that ‘a jealousy of France is what we ought always to entertain in time of peace as well as war’.²⁰ We should not be surprised, then, that when the British colonies were considered in the years following the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, it was usually in connection with French power, rather than in their own right. While Grenville urged the Commons to beware of French ambition, Josiah Tucker published a tract in which he explicitly compared French and British strength, and one of his conclusions was that the French ran their empire much more effectively.²¹ The period immediately preceding the formal renewal of hostilities saw increasingly intense worrying about French intentions in North America and India.²² From Fort St George at Madras, for instance, a British East India Company servant wrote that the French ‘have their People in all the Northern Places of any Consequence and their Influence is very considerable’.²³ The American colonies, meanwhile, were thought to be in danger of encirclement if the French succeeded in linking their Canadian heartland with their smaller colony at the mouth of the Mississippi by way of a string of forts in the Ohio Valley. In June 1754 the Cabinet in London decided that French activities in the area ‘endanger[ed] all the Northern Colonies, and tend[ed] to the total Destruction thereof, and of their Trade’.²⁴ If the French were not checked, the Duke of Newcastle argued, it would only be a matter of time before they secured ‘a Communication from Canada by the River Ohio to ¹⁷ Lord John Russell (ed.), Correspondence of John, Fourth Duke of Bedford (3 vols., London, 1842–6), i. 182. ¹⁸ See Ch. 1. ¹⁹ Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002). ²⁰ PH, xv. 170. ²¹ A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which Respectively Attend France and Great Britain, with Regard to Trade. With Some Proposals for removing the Principal Disadvantages of Great Britain. In a New Method (3rd edn., London, 1753), 45. ²² See, eg., BM 3284, The Grand Monarque in a fright; Or, the British Lion rous’d from his Lethargy; BM 3331, Britain’s Rights maintaind; or French Ambition dismantled. ²³ Berkshire RO, Benyon Family Papers, D/EBy B5, Nicholas Morse to Richard Benyon, 20 Oct. 1755. ²⁴ BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33,029, fo. 124.

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the Sea’.²⁵ Nor was this just the perception of the political elite. As a letter to a provincial newspaper explained in October 1755, ‘The Condition of our Colonies, and their Danger from the Views of France, are Subjects of Conversation, from the Alehouse-Club to his Grace’s Levee’.²⁶ The early stages of the great struggle now known as the Seven Years War gave no indication of the success later to come to British arms. Braddock’s rout on the Monongahela, the loss of Minorca, further setbacks in North America, and the seizure of Calcutta by the French-supported nawab of Bengal, all pointed to the inadequacy of Britain’s military and naval performance. In March 1756 James Wolfe announced dramatically that ‘All our Trade, all our Colonies, & consequently our Riches & power, seem to depend upon the present determinations’.²⁷ By the end of the year, successive disasters, and lack of confidence in the new Government, had made Lord Lichfield think that it could be ‘Adieu to Old England’.²⁸ Clive’s victory at Plassey in the summer of 1757 was the first significant indication of an upturn in British military fortunes, but news of his success did not reach home for many months.²⁹ More speedily reported was Montcalm’s capture of Fort William Henry in August 1757. Though most press reports dwelled unsurprisingly on the massacre of the prisoners,³⁰ the surrender of the fort reinforced the impression that the French were better organized and better able to harness the military potential of the Native Americans: ‘the French carry all before them;’ a letter from New York declared, ‘and what the next year will produce, God knows; I tremble to think’.³¹ It was surely no coincidence that 1757 also saw the publication of a work by Malachy Postlethwayt in which, echoing Tucker, he argued that decentralized governance of the British Empire was no longer appropriate when it was confronted by ‘enemies, who govern every part of their dominions by one and the same steddy principle of union; by the same interesting laws, and regulations, the due execution of all which, is vigorously, and orderly enforced’.³²

TRIUMPH—AND CONTINUING ANXIET Y British arms, as we have seen, were much more successful from 1758.³³ As Lady Anson wrote brightly to her husband that July, ‘our Affairs everywhere seem to ²⁵ Ibid., Add. MS 32,735, fo. 597. ²⁶ Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 27 Oct. 1755. ²⁷ West Sussex RO, Goodwood MS 223/3/8. ²⁸ Gloucestershire RO, Rooke of St Briavels Papers, D 1833 F1/24. ²⁹ See, e.g., London Magazine, 27 (1758), 59–60. For the impact of the news at a time when everything seemed to be going wrong for British arms, see, e.g., OIOL, Clive Papers, MSS Eur. G. 37/Box 23, Richard Walpole to Robert Clive, 8 Nov. 1757, John Stephenson to Clive, 16 Nov. 1757. ³⁰ See, e.g., Adams’s Weekly Courant, 11–18 Oct. 1757. ³¹ Gentleman’s Magazine, 27 (1757), 443. ³² Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved; In a Series of Dissertations (2 vols., London, 1757), i. 469–70. ³³ See Ch. 1.


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take a more favourable turn than formerly’.³⁴ Despite the defeat of Abercromby’s army at Ticonderoga, the British and their allies were able to secure victories in every sphere. The French and then the Spanish lost territory and prestige, and George II and then his grandson found themselves masters of a vast new empire. Unsurprisingly, there was a good deal of celebration in Britain itself. Liverpool’s corporation lauded the victories in North America that had made this ‘a distinguished æra in the annals of Great Britain’; the conquest of Quebec, now ‘subjected to Brittish dominion’, was a cause of particular pleasure.³⁵ A loyal address from the borough of New Windsor was no less effusive: ‘The Reputation of Great Britain hath been raised to a Degree of Glory, unknown in History’.³⁶ Not to be outdone, the Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland congratulated the King for his victories and acquisitions in Africa, the West Indies, and North America, which would be ‘lasting monuments of the glory which Great Britain has attained’.³⁷ Triumph, however, brought its own problems. While there were voices calling for the retention of each and every new acquisition, there were others that recognized the need to return at least some of the recent conquests if a peace were to be concluded in the near future.³⁸ Even before peace was on the agenda, the superior value of certain areas had been implied, or even emphasized. In November 1755, for instance, Robert Livingston of New York had written to a Glasgow contact to explain that whoever had effective possession of North America—Britain or France—would be able to ‘give Law to Europe’.³⁹ Similarly, when Niagara was captured in 1759, Charles Lee, an army officer serving in North America, claimed that this was a momentous victory indeed, for it ‘engrosses the whole fur trade to us, a more solid and real advantage to the Publick than the whole Commerce with the E. Indies’.⁴⁰ Once serious negotiations to conclude the war began, choosing between acquisitions became a pressing matter, and a lively debate ensued in pamphlets and the press about whether to retain Canada or the French islands in the Caribbean, and particularly Guadeloupe.⁴¹ Sections of the British West Indian lobby, repeating the arguments used in the Austrian war, wanted Guadeloupe returned, for fear that its abundant and relatively cheap sugar would depress the price in Britain.⁴² ³⁴ Staffordshire RO, Anson Papers, D 615/P(S)1/1/1/59. See also the ballad ‘One thousand and seven hundred and fifty-eight’, in Scots Magazine, 21 (1759), 34. ³⁵ Picton (ed.), Liverpool Municipal Archives, 119. ³⁶ Berkshire RO, Windsor Borough Records, W1/AC 1/1/2, Minute-book 1725–1783, 323. ³⁷ Thomas Hunter (ed.), Extracts from the Records of the Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland 1759–79 (Edinburgh, 1918), 46. ³⁸ For the debate over the peace negotiations, see Ch. 6. ³⁹ Glasgow City Archives, George Kippen and John Glassford Papers, TD 132/48. ⁴⁰ The Lee Papers, i (New York Historical Society, Collections for 1871, New York, 1872), 19. ⁴¹ See Philip Lawson, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal, 1989), 9–15, for a summary of the arguments. ⁴² Soon after Guadeloupe’s capture, the Earl of Breadalbane had predicted that the West Indian planters would clamour for its return to France: ‘for certainly such an addition of Sugar from our own Colonies must lower the value of a Jamaica Estate considerably’ (Bedfordshire RO, Lucas of Wrest Park Papers, L30/9/17/19).

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Others saw retention of the island, and its exploitation by British planters and merchants, as providing opportunities to compete more effectively in European markets, which had hitherto been dominated by more economically produced French sugar.⁴³ However, the deciding factor was probably the importance attached by the British public, press, and most politicians to securing the North American colonies from the French threat.⁴⁴ Throughout the war, letters home, and newspaper accounts, had created the impression that the colonists—still generally seen as fellow Britons—were exposed to the most horrific attacks from the French and their Indian allies. In June 1755, for instance, John Cutler had written from Boston to his sister in England that the campaigns of that year were designed ‘to curb the insolence of ye. Worst of Enymies ye. French & Indians’.⁴⁵ In July 1757 readers of a Chester newspaper would have learned of the ‘American news’ that the Indians were ravaging the backcountry and that exposed colonists dared ‘not go out to our daily Labour, for fear of being surprised and murdered by the Indians’.⁴⁶ Victory, Jonas Hanway maintained in 1760, would extinguish the French and Indian menace from the colonial frontier.⁴⁷ The expulsion of the French from Canada was therefore seen as vital to the security and future development of the old Atlantic seaboard colonies. As Sir William Baker, an MP and a London alderman, argued in a paper submitted to the Duke of Newcastle, ‘Guadeloupe is well worthy to be retained if possible, but not in an equal degree with North America, and if somewhat must be given up this island seems the fittest.’⁴⁸ Any expansion of empire was opposed by some commentators. Oliver Goldsmith was one of the most eloquent spokesmen for this viewpoint. He laid out his ideas in ‘Some Thoughts Preliminary to a General Peace’, published in the Weekly Magazine on 29 December 1759, and then in a series of letters, purportedly written by a Chinese philosopher in London, which appeared first in the Public Ledger in 1760 and 1761 and were then printed together as The Citizen of ⁴³ See, e.g., [Anon.,] An Examination of the Commercial Principles of the Late Negotiation between Great Britain and France in 1761 in which the System of that Negotiation with Regard to our Colonies and Commerce is Considered (London, 1762). ⁴⁴ See Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994), esp. 173, for the paramount importance attached by policy makers to security for the North American colonies. The West Indian islands seem to have excited less enthusiasm amongst the public: Scipio Carnac, an officer in the 3rd Foot involved in the capture of Guadeloupe, complained to his brother in a letter of 23 Feb. 1760 that the troops on the expedition ‘got neither honour nor advantage from our Acquisition, the People of England looking upon it, as of very little importance’ (OIOL, Sutton Court Collection, Carnac Papers, MSS Eur. F. 128/23). ⁴⁵ H. S. L. Dewar (ed.), The Thomas Rackett Papers (Dorset Record Society, iii, Dorchester, 1965), 13. ⁴⁶ Adams’s Weekly Courant, 12–19 July 1757. ⁴⁷ An Account of the Society for the Encouragement of the British Troops, in Germany and North America (London, 1760), 55. ⁴⁸ Quoted in Sir Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (2nd edn., London, 1961), 275.


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the World in 1762. Goldsmith’s Chinese philosopher had no doubt that it would be wrong to retain the new conquests: ‘It is in the politic as in the human constitution;’ he wrote in letter XVII, ‘if the limbs grow too large for the body, their size, instead of improving, will diminish the vigour of the whole.’⁴⁹ Comparisons with ancient Rome, which came naturally to a political class steeped in classical learning, might prove equally troubling, for the decline of the Roman Empire was commonly associated with its excessive expansion.⁵⁰ Had the British, like the Romans, over-reached themselves? Fears about unsustainable expansion were also linked in many minds with anxiety about the capacity of France, and to a lesser extent Spain, to strike back. France, it was generally recognized, was down but not out. When George Grenville introduced his budget of 1764, he said that France was fortunately in no condition to resume hostilities, adding that this was just as well, as Britain’s finances were also in a precarious state.⁵¹ His assumption—and we can be confident that this was widely shared—was that Britain and France remained natural enemies, and that sooner or later France would seek to recover lost territory and prestige.⁵² It followed (at least to Grenville and those who thought like him) that an extended empire could not be governed in the same loose-reined manner as in the past, for distant provinces, not properly incorporated, might make easy pickings for the vengeful Bourbons.⁵³ Hence, in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, there was a return to the rhetoric of the early stages of that conflict, when commentators like Postlethwayt had called for closer control of the colonies from the centre and the imposition of a more uniform system of imperial government. In 1764 we find Thomas Pownall, a former colonial governor, widely regarded as something of an expert on North America, writing that it was now the duty of government to ensure that the advantage gained over France be converted to lasting benefit, and that ‘our kingdom may be no more considered as the mere kingdom of this isle, with many appendages of provinces, colonies, settlements, and other extraneous parts; but as a grand maritime dominion, consisting of our possessions in the Atlantic and in America united into one interest, in one centre where the seat of government is’.⁵⁴ ⁴⁹ Arthur Friedman (ed.), Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith (3 vols., Oxford, 1966), ii. 74. ⁵⁰ Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), esp. 103–7; Bob Harris, ‘ “American Idols”: Empire, War and the Middling Ranks in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Past and Present, no. 105 (1996), 128–9. ⁵¹ P. D. G. Thomas (ed.), ‘The Parliamentary Diaries of Nathaniel Ryder, 1764–7’, Camden Miscellany, 23 (Royal Historical Society, Camden 4th series, vii, London, 1969), 234. ⁵² See John L. Bullion, ‘Securing the Peace: Lord Bute, the Plan for the Army, and the Origins of the American Revolution’, in Karl W. Schweizer (ed.), Lord Bute: Essays in Re-interpretation (Leicester, 1988), 17–39; H. M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990), esp. 48–9, 54. ⁵³ See P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: I, Reshaping the Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998), esp. 12–13. ⁵⁴ The Administration of the Colonies (London, 1764), 6.

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War, Empire, and the Loss of America THE NEW BRITISH EMPIRE

Pownall’s vision was of a united Atlantic empire, centred on London. However, the Seven Years War and its aftermath expanded British dominion not just in the Atlantic basin, but also in Asia. Francis Hayman showed an awareness of the global nature of the new British Empire in two paintings that he undertook in the closing stages of the war: The Surrender of Montreal to General Amherst and Lord Clive Receiving the Homage of the Nabob. Contemporary language as well as visual culture demonstrated a recognition that something important had happened. Before the Seven Years War, it was not unusual for the term ‘British Empire’ to be used, but it was generally associated with oceanic dominance (‘the empire of the seas’) or with a specific geographical area—often British America.⁵⁵ John Oldmixon, who wrote a well-known history of the settlements in North America and the West Indies, first published in 1708, used this formulation in his title.⁵⁶ After 1763, and still more so after the grant of the diwani in 1765, it became much more common for the term ‘British Empire’ to be applied to all British possessions and territories.⁵⁷ This was how Goldsmith conceived of the Empire in a work of 1768, and the vision of a single, unified whole, incorporating the home islands and ‘divers colonies and settlements in all parts of the world’ lay at the heart of the imperial writings of Arthur Young.⁵⁸ Awareness that the British Empire was now much more than the colonies on the North American mainland and the islands in the Caribbean led, almost inevitably, to changes in metropolitan attitudes towards the ‘old empire’. It was not just that the expansion of empire encouraged a greater emphasis on the need for more central control and coordination, and therefore an assertion of the authority of the British Parliament at the expense of the local power of the colonial assemblies; we can also see some suggestions of a subtle downgrading of the status of the British North Americans in the eyes of Britons in Britain. Disdain at the supposedly poor military showing of the colonists probably played a part in this— the people who were lauded for their martial qualities when they took Louisbourg in 1745 were now seen as incapable of defending themselves without substantial assistance from regular British troops. Press coverage in Britain of the victories in North America tended to emphasize the role of the British army and downplay ⁵⁵ The term seems to have come into common usage in the second quarter of the 18th century: see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 171. ⁵⁶ The British Empire in America, containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress and State of the British Colonies on the Continent and Islands of America (2nd edn., 2 vols, London, 1741). Another example is Henry Popple’s multisheet Map of the British Empire in America, published in 1733. ⁵⁷ See H. V. Bowen, ‘British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1756–83’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26 (1998), 1–27. ⁵⁸ Goldsmith, The Present State of the British Empire in Europe, America, Africa and Asia (London, 1768); Young, Political Essays concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London, 1772), 1.


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the part played by the provincials. Substantial column inches were devoted to the capture of Louisbourg in 1758, a success that was indeed very largely the work of Amherst’s regulars. By contrast, the seizure by a mainly provincial army of Fort Frontenac, which was scarcely less important strategically than Louisbourg, was accorded much less extensive treatment.⁵⁹ As a contribution to a London periodical, apparently submitted by ‘A New Englishman’, noted in 1759, the colonial troops were blamed when operations were unsuccessful, but hardly mentioned when they went well.⁶⁰ Letters sent home by regular officers, furthermore, routinely ran down the provincials, pointing to their lack of military qualities and their unreliability.⁶¹ Resentment at the apparently extensive American practice of trading with the enemy should also be recognized. As early as February 1755 Capt. Augustus Keppel, the local Royal Navy commander, had found it necessary to bring this issue to the attention of the governor of Pennsylvania;⁶² just over two years later, Lord Loudoun complained that ‘all’ of the colonies, ‘but particularly the People of Rhode Island, have carry’d on a Trade with the Enemy the whole time’.⁶³ So long as such concerns were confined to those in official circles, they had no affect on public attitudes generally. With the war in America safely won, however, Pitt’s circular letter to colonial governors of 23 August 1760, in which he condemned the ‘illegal, and, most pernicious trade’ by which the enemy were enabled ‘to sustain and protract this long and expensive war’, appeared in the British press.⁶⁴ But the inhabitants of the old colonies lost out primarily because they came to be viewed by at least some Britons less as compatriots and more as just another set of people to be ruled. Their downgrading, in other words, was comparative—they were increasingly viewed alongside the new subjects of the King (French Canadians, Native Americans, and even Bengalis) and, by extension, less clearly envisioned as a distant but nonetheless integral part of the British nation. This reappraisal of the Americans, it should be stressed, was merely part of a very longdrawn-out process whereby they eventually became, in British eyes, ‘foreigners’. Most Britons in Britain probably did not think of the Americans in this bleakly negative way until the breakup of the Empire after 1776, and—perhaps more importantly—the American alliance with France, the traditional foe, in 1778. ⁵⁹ See, e.g., London Magazine, 27 (1758) for extensive treatment of Louisbourg (379–83, 549–52, 615–17) and limited attention to Frontenac (593). John Bradstreet, commander of the force that took Frontenac, flattered himself that the public at home ‘fully understood’ the importance of its acquisition (NLW, Tredegar MSS, Box 128/45): newspaper and magazine coverage suggests otherwise. ⁶⁰ Gentleman’s Magazine, 29 (1759), 223–4. ⁶¹ See, e.g., Nottingham University Library, Galway MSS, Ga M 23, 38, 62. ⁶² East Suffolk RO, Albemarle Papers, HA 67/461/235, Keppel to Gov. Morris, 28 Feb. 1755 (Letter-book copy). See also, for illegal trade with the Dutch, BL, West Papers, Add. MS 34,728, fo. 54. ⁶³ Stanley Pargellis (ed.), Military Affairs in North America 1748–1765: Selected Documents from the Cumberland Papers (Hamden, Conn., 1969), 376. ⁶⁴ See, e.g., Annual Register, iii (1760), ‘State Papers’, 219–20; London Magazine, 30 (1761), 43–4.

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Even so, the transformation of the Empire as a result of the Seven Years War can be seen as an important step in the reassessment.⁶⁵ The British North Americans were perhaps bound to slip, if only subconsciously, in the estimation of British politicians and the British public because much attention focused on George III’s new subjects. True, this was not immediately obvious in the case of the millions of Indians now under the control of the East India Company. From the mid-1760s, the affairs of the Company absorbed a good deal of ministerial and parliamentary time, and so entered the wider public’s consciousness.⁶⁶ But for the Government the primary issue was how to secure a slice of the Company’s new revenues, while for the public the main concern was the way in which returning Company servants might use their newly acquired personal wealth to corrupt British politics and society—a concern articulated in Samuel Foote’s 1768 play, The Nabob.⁶⁷ Not for some time did the condition of the Indians themselves become a matter of major public interest. In 1769, a London periodical carried a piece that criticized Company servants for their ‘rapacity’ and their ‘crimes and cruelty’, implying that the local population was suffering as a consequence.⁶⁸ But it was not until news filtered home of the Bengal famine of 1769–70, which killed about a third of the province’s population, that there was more substantial sympathy with the native peoples, and even then this seems largely to have been an offshoot of concerns about Company mismanagement.⁶⁹ The King’s new subjects in North America much more rapidly attracted metropolitan attention. As we saw earlier, Lord Egremont, Secretary of State for the southern department in the closing stages of the Seven Years War, adopted a paternalistic line towards the defeated French Canadians.⁷⁰ Initially it was hoped that the French Catholic inhabitants might be ruled in much the same way as their Irish co-religionists—through an imported Protestant elite with its own representative body. But the anglophone Protestant population of Canada remained pitifully small, and comprised, for the most part, merchants who were described by one governor as ‘chiefly adventurers of mean education’, and ⁶⁵ See P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: II, Britons and Americans’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9 (1999), 1–16; Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), ch. 4; Stephen Conway, ‘From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (2002), 65–100. ⁶⁶ See H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757–1773 (Cambridge, 1991). ⁶⁷ See Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, ‘ “Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in MidEighteenth-Century Britain’, Albion, 16 (1984), 225–41. ⁶⁸ Gentleman’s Magazine, 39 (1769), 374. ⁶⁹ See, e.g., ibid., 41 (1771), 402–4; Annual Register, 14 (1771), ‘Appendix to the Chronicle’, 205–8. See also, Jeremy Osborn, ‘India and the East India Company in the Public Sphere of Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (eds.), The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge, 2002), esp. 210. ⁷⁰ See Ch. 7.


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therefore as unsatisfactory material for the construction of a governing class.⁷¹ Once it became clear that plans for attracting a substantial body of Protestant settlers to the new province of Quebec had failed, British ministers grappled with the problem of how to devise a system of government suitable for the Catholic French inhabitants.⁷² The eventual solution, in the absence of a viable Protestant landowning elite, was to conciliate the existing French Canadian landowners. The Quebec Act of 1774, which perpetuated government without an elected assembly, and gave the Catholic church a semi-established status, greatly alarmed the British colonists to the south, who feared that it was the British Government’s blueprint for an authoritarian system to be established throughout North America, but the act can best be seen as the outcome of years of deliberation by different ministries on how to rule a substantial body of conquered people whose Catholicism was believed to make impossible the adoption of the usual model of British colonial government. Of no less interest to British ministers were the native peoples of North America. Egremont was solicitous about the welfare of the Amerindians as well as the French Canadians. In December 1761 he asked Amherst to treat the natives with ‘Humanity’ and ‘Indulgence’.⁷³ He blamed unscrupulous traders from the old British colonies for all the troubles with the tribes. The Earl of Shelburne, who occupied the same post in the administration formed by Pitt (now the Earl of Chatham) in 1766, similarly spent much time trying to defend the Native Americans from the encroachments of settlers from the old colonies and the fraudulent practices of traders.⁷⁴ Nor was this protective attitude confined to patrician politicians. The opportunities for converting the native peoples of North America to Protestantism were embraced enthusiastically, as we have seen, by the various denominations in Britain and Ireland.⁷⁵ There was also a general fascination with the exoticism of the Amerindians, which long predated the Seven Years War but seems to have intensified in its aftermath.⁷⁶ This concentration on the Native Americans, and to a lesser extent on the other newly acquired populations of George III’s expanded empire, appears to have led even ordinary Britons to see themselves as exercising authority over, and having responsibility for, a wide ⁷¹ William L. Clements Library, Shelburne Papers, James Murray to the Lords of Trade, 2 March 1765. ⁷² On this subject generally, see Lawson, Imperial Challenge. ⁷³ CO 5/214, pt. II, fos. 243–4. ⁷⁴ See, e.g., William L. Clements Library, Shelburne Papers, Shelburne to the colonial governors, 13 Sept. 1766, ‘Remarks on the plan for the future management of Indian affairs by Mr Jackson’, Nov. 1766, Shelburne to John Stuart, 11 Dec. 1766. ⁷⁵ See Ch. 7. ⁷⁶ See Eric Hinderaker, ‘The “Four Indian Kings” and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 53 (1996), 487–526; David Milobar, ‘Aboriginal Peoples and the British Press, 1720–1763’, in Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors, and Clyve Jones (eds.), Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson (Woodbridge, 1998), 65–81; Troy O. Bingham, ‘Noble Savages? British Discussions and Representations of North American Indians, 1754–1783’, unpublished Oxford D.Phil. dissertation, 2001.

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range of peoples. Perhaps it was inevitable that the colonial Americans were added to the list, despite their generally recognized status as fellow Britons. In 1767, Benjamin Franklin, who had been a staunch defender of the idea that the Americans were part of the transatlantic British—or rather English—nation, wrote with evident irritation that ‘Every Man in England seems to consider himself as a Piece of a Sovereign over America; seems to jostle himself into the Throne with the King, and talks of OUR Subjects in the Colonies.’⁷⁷

A CL ASH OF EXPECTATIONS Changing British attitudes were almost bound to lead to some form of conflict with the inhabitants of the old British colonies—not least because North Americans emerged from the Seven Years War with a very different expectation of their role in the Empire. For the colonies, or at least those colonies that contributed significantly to the war effort, the struggle against the French had been a bruising but ultimately satisfying experience. There had been friction between British regulars and American provincials, and between British soldiers and colonial civilians, but the extent to which this persuaded Americans that they were a different people, with all the long-term consequences of such a perception for the Anglo-American relationship, has probably been exaggerated.⁷⁸ The tensions were most obvious in the first, largely unsuccessful phase of the war, particularly when the autocratic Lord Loudoun was commander-in-chief. Amherst was hardly less scathing about the fighting qualities of the colonial troops in private, but he was rather better at masking his contempt in his dealings with the Americans.⁷⁹ The only lasting damage, it could be argued, was the forming of an impression in British minds that the Americans could not cooperate with each other, and were not effective soldiers. These views almost certainly helped to convince later British decision-makers that, if necessary, force could be used to subdue the recalcitrant colonists.⁸⁰ Probably more important than the sometimes difficult direct contact between the British army and Americans was the feeling amongst the colonists themselves that they had played a major part in defeating the French in a struggle that was ⁷⁷ Leonard W. Labaree et al. (eds.), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (37 vols. to date, New Haven, Conn., 1959– ), xiv. 65. ⁷⁸ The case for a damaging effect is put in Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755–1763 (Berkeley, Calif., 1974); and Leach, Roots of Conflict, chs. 5 and 6. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), esp. 166–8, 219–31, also addresses this issue. ⁷⁹ See Ch. 8. ⁸⁰ After the battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, General Gage, who himself had served in America in the previous conflict, expressed wonderment at the New England militia’s determined resistance: ‘In all their wars against the French they never shewed so much Conduct Attention and Perseverance as they do now’ (CO 5/92, pt. II, fo. 187).


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not simply seen in narrowly American terms.⁸¹ In August 1755, Samuel Davies, a Dissenting minister, sought to inspire Virginians with a direct appeal to their sense not only of provincial loyalty but also of Britishness and Protestantism. The aim of the war, Davies claimed, was to ‘secure the inestimable Blessings of Liberty, British Liberty, from the Chains of French Slavery’.⁸² Four years later, during the great year of victories, Gerard Beekman, a New York merchant, was thinking in a similarly wide-angled way when he celebrated ‘the Good Success of our Kings Troops . . . both in Germany and America’.⁸³ At the same time, Jonathan Mayhew, a Massachusetts Congregational minister, placed the fall of Quebec in the context of ‘some other of our late military successes’, citing triumphs from 1758 in Germany, the coast of France, and West Africa, not forgetting the part played by Frederick the Great.⁸⁴ Likewise, in September 1760, shortly after the fall of Montreal, Massachusetts provincial soldiers garrisoning Louisbourg recorded in their diaries news of the Prussians having ‘gained a complete victory over ye French’, and the ‘Very Good Sucess’ of the British forces in India.⁸⁵ The perception that this was a global struggle, in which great issues were at stake, and rival ideologies in conflict, was perhaps felt the most keenly in New England, where there was a very substantial mobilization of manpower— more substantial, it should be noted, than in Britain and Ireland. In April 1758, the governor of Massachusetts reckoned that ‘every fourth freeholder’ in his colony was under arms; ‘an Instance scarce ever known before in any Governmt’.⁸⁶ The peculiarities of New England’s demography, social structures, and agricultural economy all help to explain this impressive level of military service.⁸⁷ So, in a sense, does tradition and history: Massachusetts had mobilized large numbers of men in previous wars against the French. Proximity to the threat posed by the French and their native allies was also no doubt influential. But the Protestant animus of the old Puritan colonies against the Catholicism of the French was probably critical. The mobilization of New England manpower can truly be seen as a crusade, the target of which was the destruction of popery. ⁸¹ See H. V. Bowen, ‘Perceptions from the Periphery: Colonial American Views of Britain’s Asiatic Empire, 1756–1783’, in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (eds.), Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York, 2002), esp. 284–6. ⁸² Samuel Davies, Religion and Patriotism the Constituents of a Good Soldier. A Sermon preached to Captain Overton’s Independent Company of Volunteers, Raised in Hanover County, Virginia, August 17, 1755 (Philadelphia and London, 1756), 19. ⁸³ Philip L. White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers 1746–1799 (3 vols., New York Historical Society, New York, 1956), i. 348. ⁸⁴ Two Discourses Delivered October the 25th 1759, being the Day Appointed by Authority to be Observed as a Day of Public Thanksgiving, for the Success of His Majesty’s Arms, More Particularly the Reduction of Quebec, the Capital of Canada (London, 1760), 3–8. ⁸⁵ B. F. Browne (ed.), ‘Extracts from Gibson Clough’s Journal’, Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, 3 (1861), 199; ‘Diary Kept at Louisburg, 1759–1760, by Jonathan Procter of Danvers’, ibid., 70 (1934), 48. ⁸⁶ WO 34/25, fo. 106. ⁸⁷ See Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (New York, 1984).

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The capture of Quebec and Montreal seemed to some millenarian minds to prepare the way for the Second Coming.⁸⁸ Looking ahead, we can perhaps see that New Englanders who were savouring the defeat of the Catholic French were going to be in no mood to accept an assertion of British authority over them, and may indeed have been particularly sensitive to anything that to them smacked of French-style despotism.⁸⁹ However, in the moment of triumph the predominant sentiment, in New England and throughout the British colonies, appears to have been pride in the achievement of a great victory that seemed to prove the superiority of British liberty and Protestantism over French slavery and Catholicism.⁹⁰ The conquest of Canada, some British commentators feared, by removing the French threat and therefore reducing dependence on Britain for protection, would loosen the ties that bound the old empire together.⁹¹ In the long term this might have been the case, and is an explanation for the American Revolution favoured by some historians,⁹² but the immediate consequence was something like the opposite. The Americans emerged from the Seven Years War prouder than ever of their Britishness. Just as the metropolitan British were starting to associate the colonists less with themselves and more with the new subject peoples of the Empire, the Americans were uplifted by a vision of partnership, in which their equal status would be gratefully recognized. In December 1760, the Massachusetts Assembly sent an address to the governor of the colony enthusiastically declaring its pride in the conquest of Canada. ‘This great Event’, the assembly claimed, would not only ‘firmly establish’ the power of Britain in North America, but would also ‘contribute to her maintaining the Figure which she now so gloriously makes among the Powers of Europe’. The address went on to assure the governor that the assemblymen ‘esteem it our highest Honour to be ranked amongst the foremost of his Majesty’s loyal American Subjects’ and ‘exult in the Blessings of being freeborn Subjects of Great-Britain, the leading and most Respectable power in the whole World’.⁹³ The Assembly of Maryland was similarly fulsome when it addressed the new king in April 1761, and expressed the hope that ‘we shall equally share the Blessings, which all the good and loyal Subjects of our most Gracious Sovereign have the greatest reason to expect’.⁹⁴ ⁸⁸ See Kerry Trask, In Pursuit of Shadows: Massachusetts Millennialism and the Seven Years’ War (New York, 1989). ⁸⁹ Nathan O. Hatch, ‘The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 31 (1974), 407–30. ⁹⁰ See, e.g., Samuel Langdon, Joy and Gratitude to God for the Long Life of a Good King, and the Conquest of Quebec. A Sermon Preached in the First Parish of Portsmouth, in New-Hampshire, Saturday, November 10th 1759 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1760), esp. 42. ⁹¹ See, e.g., the comments of the Duke of Bedford, who had grave doubts about the wisdom of keeping Canada: BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32,922, fos. 449–51. ⁹² See, e.g., the views of Lawrence Henry Gipson, as discussed in John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Oxford, 1976), ch. 5. ⁹³ Malcolm Freiberg (ed.), Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, xxxvii, pt. i, 1760–1761 (Boston, 1965), 115. ⁹⁴ J. Hall Pleasants (ed.), Archives of Maryland, lvi, Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly of Maryland 1758–1761 (Baltimore, 1939), 441.


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As post-war British Governments introduced a series of measures designed to bring the colonies under closer central supervision, the result, understandably, was bitter disappointment on the part of the Americans and a growing sense of resentment that their contribution to the great triumph over the French was largely ignored, and their claims to equal status with Britons in Britain were met by a metropolitan interpretation of equality that left them feeling like distinctly second-class subjects. We have seen that many Britons in Britain came to see the great triumphs of the war in America as the work of the British army and navy, and that the Americans themselves were widely regarded as a people who had lost their martial qualities, and were now incapable of defending themselves. From this view it was but a short step to the assumption that the colonists owed Britain a great debt of gratitude and should therefore be willing—indeed, happy—to make a financial contribution to the costs of maintaining a permanent regular garrison in North America. In truth, the army earmarked for post-war service in the colonies was seen as a force that could be deployed anywhere in the event of a renewal of hostilities with the Bourbon powers—much like the army in Ireland, which was usually called upon to provide troops for foreign expeditions in time of war. The American garrison was also seen as necessary to overawe the newly conquered French Canadians, and to police the frontier to prevent the British colonists from encroaching on Indian lands: most of the troops were stationed, until 1768, in the St Lawrence Valley or beyond the Appalachians.⁹⁵ None the less, it was widely argued that the army was in North America primarily to defend the old British colonies. Taxation of the colonists to cover at least part of the costs was therefore seen as wholly reasonable. As one MP put it when questioning Benjamin Franklin on the Stamp Act, ‘Do you think it right that America should be protected by this country, and pay no part of the expence?’⁹⁶ By deciding to impose parliamentary taxation on the colonies, British ministers raised an issue of particular sensitivity. While it was generally accepted in Westminster that this was a legitimate exercise of parliamentary power (the agent of the Connecticut Assembly reported in March 1765 that there was hardly an MP willing to dispute ‘ye right of Parliament to tax us’),⁹⁷ there was some recognition that the colonists might take a different view. Grenville even told agents acting on behalf of some of the American legislatures at a meeting on 17 May 1764 that he had delayed introducing an American Stamp Bill ‘to have a sense of ⁹⁵ See John L. Bullion, ‘ “The Ten Thousand in America”: More Light on the Decision on the American Army, 1762–1763’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 43 (1986), 646–57, and ‘Securing the Peace’, in Schweizer (ed.), Lord Bute, esp. 17–21. ⁹⁶ R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783 (6 vols. to date, Millward, N.Y., 1982– ), ii. 237. Franklin’s reply was equally revealing: ‘That is not the case. The colonies raised, cloathed and payed, during the last war, near 25,000 men, and spent many millions.’ ⁹⁷ Jared Ingersoll to Thomas Fitch, 6 Mar. 1765, in Albert Carlos Bates (ed.), The Fitch Papers: Correspondence and Documents during Thomas Fitch’s Governorship of the Colony of Connecticut 1754–1766 (Connecticut Historical Society, xviii, Hartford, 1920), 334.

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the Colonies themselves upon this matter’, and that he was ‘open to every proposition to be made’.⁹⁸ Grenville was perhaps being somewhat disingenuous: he seems to have been committed both to parliamentary taxation of America and to stamp duties as the best means to achieve that end; his idea of consultation appears to have been limited to the details, and to have excluded any serious consideration of alternatives. In February 1765 he was reported as saying that ‘The reason of delaying the proposal to this year was to gain all possible information’.⁹⁹ He was soon to discover that the colonists were unwilling to accept either his stamp duties, or the principle of parliamentary taxation. American resistance should have come as no surprise. The post-war depression that was encouraging ministers to look beyond Britain for new sources of revenue was affecting the colonies no less intensely. As government spending in North America was reduced, the colonial economies contracted.¹⁰⁰ The protests of the assemblies against Grenville’s Revenue Act of 1764 laid much emphasis on the inability of the colonies to pay additional taxes at such a difficult time.¹⁰¹ However, it was not just that the new parliamentary taxes were imposed at an unfortunate moment in the economic cycle. More importantly, the colonies had grown accustomed to taxing and—to a considerable extent—governing themselves. Walpole had allowed the assemblies to increase their power at the expense of the governors during his long period in office, primarily because he thought it unwise to insist on constitutional points at a time when the colonies were contributing to growing British prosperity.¹⁰² The Austrian war had not usually halted this process: governors in need of cooperation from their assemblies in raising the necessary provincial soldiers and the taxes to pay for them were inclined to agree to whatever new privileges their legislatures wanted.¹⁰³ The Earl of Halifax’s efforts from 1748 to recover the situation, by encouraging governors to stand up to their assemblies, produced only limited results and were anyway largely negated by the impact of the next conflict. The difficulties of mobilizing ⁹⁸ Edmund S. Morgan (ed.), Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (New York, 1959), 28. ⁹⁹ Simmons and Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and Debates, ii. 9. ¹⁰⁰ For British Government spending see Julian Gwynn, ‘British Government Spending and the North American Colonies 1740–1775’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 8 (1980), 74–84. More generally, see Anderson, Crucible of War, ch. 62. ¹⁰¹ See, e.g, Morgan (ed.), Prologue to Revolution, 15, 17 (Virginia’s memorial to the House of Lords and Remonstrance to the House of Commons, December 1764), and Merrill Jensen (ed.), English Historical Documents, ix. American Colonial Documents to 1776 (London, 1969), 666 (New York’s petition to the House of Commons, Nov. 1764). ¹⁰² See Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Developments in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga., 1986), esp. 45–7. ¹⁰³ On the other hand, some skilful governors turned this situation to their advantage, exploiting the patronage opportunities presented by the raising of provincial forces to strengthen their position in the assembly: for William Shirley’s efforts, see William Pencak, ‘Warfare and Political Change in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts’, in P. J. Marshall and Glyn Williams (eds.), The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (London, 1980), 51–73.


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American provincials during the Seven Years War were finally overcome only by Pitt’s conciliating the assemblies and allowing troops to be raised under regulations and on terms that suited the colonists. Pitt’s approach was in some respects a return to the ways of raising American soldiers during the previous conflict, which, as noted earlier, fitted well with the colonial sense of what it was to be British. In the Seven Years War, this method of operating produced impressive results in that it enabled sufficient manpower to be put into the field to more or less ensure the fall of French Canada.¹⁰⁴ Perhaps Pitt’s line, demonstrating the benefits that could come from treating the Americans as partners, should have been adopted by post-war British Governments. It has been suggested that this was an alternative route that might have avoided the imperial crises of the 1760s and beyond.¹⁰⁵ But British ministers were not inclined to take this route—not necessarily because they were more disposed to authoritarianism than Pitt had been, but because circumstances had changed. Compromises with local autonomy might have been necessary in wartime, but a newly expanded empire brought new responsibilities, and a sense that methods that had worked in the past were no longer appropriate. So, when, in the aftermath of the conflict, successive British Governments (including the one headed by Pitt as Earl of Chatham) attempted to reassert control from London, resistance from the colonial assemblies, and from the colonial elites who had benefited from local autonomy, was more or less inevitable. The assemblies had become accustomed to see themselves as the colonial equivalents of the British Parliament, and they rapidly made it clear that they believed that they possessed ‘the Only exclusive Right’—in the emphatic words of Rhode Island’s Assembly—to levy taxes within their own jurisdictions.¹⁰⁶ Taxation by the British Parliament, in which the Americans were not represented, was denounced as a violation of the constitution—an attack on the rights of the colonists as Britons. Pennsylvania’s assemblymen had no doubt that ‘the Inhabitants of this Province are entitled to all the Liberties, Rights and Privileges of his Majesty’s Subjects in Great-Britain, or elsewhere’. They were equally certain that ‘it is the inherent Birth-right, and indubitable Privilege, of every British Subject, to be taxed only by his own Consent, or that of his legal Representatives’, and therefore that ‘the Taxation of the People of this Province by any other Persons whatsoever than . . . their Representatives in Assembly, is unconstitutional, and subversive of their most valuable Rights’.¹⁰⁷ The response of British politicians and parts of the British public was instructive. While there were Westminster politicians, such as Charles Townshend, who ¹⁰⁴ See Anderson, Crucible of War, ch. 22. ¹⁰⁵ P. J. Marshall, ‘The Thirteen Colonies and the Seven Years’ War: The View from London’, in Julie Flavell and Stephen Conway (eds.), Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754–1815 (Gainesville, Fl., 2004), 69–92. ¹⁰⁶ Morgan (ed.), Prologue to Revolution, 51. ¹⁰⁷ Charles F. Hoban (ed.), Pennsylvania Archives, 8th series, vii (1935), 5779–80.

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argued that the colonists, by their very situation, were subordinate to the mother country and therefore were obliged to obey whatever the mother country decreed, and others—Sir William Blackstone and Lord Mansfield are good examples— who maintained that the British Parliament, working with the monarch, now possessed the sovereign authority that the Crown alone had possessed in the past,¹⁰⁸ a commonly enunciated view was that the Americans should pay precisely because they were Britons and therefore owed obedience to the British Parliament.¹⁰⁹ Here we see a very different vision of what it was to be British. Whereas the colonists saw Britishness in terms of largely self-governing communities of Britons that all owed allegiance to a common king, many metropolitan Britons assumed by the middle of the eighteenth century that true Britishness lay in loyalty to all central institutions—the Westminster Parliament as well as the Crown.¹¹⁰ The argument that the Americans, while electing no MPs of their own, were ‘virtually’ represented in the British House of Commons was used by ministerial apologists not simply because it was convenient, but because it put the colonists on the same footing as other Britons who were unable to vote in parliamentary elections, whose interests were assumed to be protected by both the electors and the British Parliament itself.¹¹¹ Soame Jenyns, writing in a pamphlet defending the American Stamp Act of 1765, observed tartly of the Americans: ‘are they not Englishmen? Or are they only Englishmen when they solicit for Protection, but not Englishmen when Taxes are required to enable this Country to protect them?’¹¹² Letters to newspapers made much the same point.¹¹³ While to the colonists the attempts of the British Parliament to tax them demonstrated that they were being viewed as less than British, or even, in the dramatic words of the Boston Town Meeting, as ‘tributary slaves’,¹¹⁴ to many British politicians, and perhaps also to many members of the wider British public, obliging the Americans to pay taxes levied by the British Parliament was an affirmation that the colonists were part of the extended British nation.¹¹⁵ This, needless to say, was hardly the kind of equality that Americans had anticipated as they emerged, flushed with triumph, from the Seven Years War. As the members of Connecticut’s Assembly put it in their ¹⁰⁸ Simmons and Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and Debates, ii. 13, 130, 140. ¹⁰⁹ For the views of Thomas Whately, Grenville’s secretary to the Treasury, see Ch. 8. Grenville himself later described the Americans as part of a ‘community’ that was ‘bound to obey its legislature’ (William L. Clements Library, Knox Papers, Grenville to William Knox, 15 Aug. 1768). ¹¹⁰ For more on the colonists’ position within the extended British nation, see Ch. 8. ¹¹¹ See Paul Langford, ‘Property and “Virtual Representation” in Eighteenth-Century England’, Historical Journal, 31 (1988), 83–115. ¹¹² The Objections to the Taxation of our American Colonies by the Legislature of Great Britain, briefly Consider’d (London, 1765), 8. ¹¹³ See, e.g., ‘William Pym’ in London Evening Post, 20 Aug. 1765; ‘John Ploughshare’ in London Chronicle, 20 Feb. 1766. ¹¹⁴ Jensen (ed.), English Historical Documents, ix. American Colonial Documents, 664. See also Stephen Hopkins, The Rights of the Colonies Examined (Providence, R.I., 1765), 16, where parliamentary taxation is seen as likely to reduce the colonists to ‘the most abject slavery’. ¹¹⁵ Gould, Persistence of Empire, esp. 119–20.


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response to the Stamp Act, they were ‘distressed’ to find that the British Parliament held ‘sentiments so different from ours respecting what we ever reckoned among our most important and essential rights as Englishmen’.¹¹⁶

THE ROAD TO CIVIL WAR? So, are we to conclude that the Seven Years War set in train a series of constitutional crises that eventually led to the loss of much of the old British Empire?¹¹⁷ There is a case for saying that the tensions that came to the surface in the 1760s and 1770s had been present in subterranean form long before the war—indeed, long before the Austrian Succession struggle. The conflict between the desire of metropolitan authorities to control colonial development and the wish of the colonists themselves for local autonomy had been evident from almost the very beginning of English settlement in North America, or at any rate from the time when the first colony, Virginia, started to export a lucrative cash crop. In 1621 an order in council decreed that all tobacco produced in the new colony should be shipped first to England, where it would be subject to customs duties. There had been moments of real crisis in the seventeenth century, especially when the later Stuart monarchs endeavoured to impose much closer central supervision in the 1670s and 1680s. The Navigation Acts, building on the principle established in 1621, provoked considerable resistance in New England, and in 1684 Massachusetts lost its charter for its persistent refusal to accept the English Parliament’s right to impose commercial legislation. The loss of the Massachusetts charter provided the opportunity for the metropolitan authorities to review the system of government in all the northern colonies: James II’s Dominion of New England subsumed all of the New England colonies, and eventually New York, in a single political entity in which there was no representative assembly, and the governor general was answerable only to the King and his ministers in London.¹¹⁸ Viewed in the long perspective, then, it could be said that the Stamp Act crisis did not disrupt a wholly harmonious relationship between Britain and its North American colonies: the potential for trouble had been present almost since the establishment of the first English settlements across the Atlantic. ¹¹⁶ Charles J. Hoadley (ed.), The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from May, 1762, to October, 1767, Inclusive (Hartford, Conn., 1881), 421. ¹¹⁷ For a fuller discussion of this question, which differs in certain respects from what follows, see Jack P. Greene, ‘The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution: The Causal Relationship Reconsidered’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, viii (1980), 85–105. The link between the war and the Revolution is a central theme in Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War. For an important new approach, see P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), esp. chs. 3 and 9. ¹¹⁸ For 17th-century developments, see Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester, 1990).

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It could equally well be argued that the Seven Years War and its consequences merely exacerbated tensions that were becoming serious as a result of Halifax’s determination to stiffen the resolve of the colonial governors after the Austrian Succession war. The Board of Trade was less successful in its endeavours than Halifax had intended, but there was a clear attempt to assert more control from the centre. Resistance to Halifax’s policies from the colonial assemblies anticipated, albeit in more muted form, the resistance that they were to mount to the American measures of the Grenville Government after the Seven Years War. Indeed, Jack Greene has written that ‘the reforms of the years 1748 to 1756 and the fundamental redirection of British policy that they represented must be given a central place in the causal pattern of the Revolution’.¹¹⁹ There is also a case for saying that the post-Seven Years War turmoil did not necessarily mean that a restoration of imperial harmony was impossible. The immediate cause of the trouble was removed fairly quickly: the Stamp Act was repealed by Grenville’s successor, the Marquis of Rockingham, only a year after it was passed. The colonists were naturally delighted. In North Carolina, the council and Assembly sent a joint address to the King expressing their ‘gratitude for the paternal goodness which has so graciously relieved them’, and praising the ‘Justice of Parliament’.¹²⁰ Daniel Dulany of Maryland, who had written an influential pamphlet attacking parliamentary taxation, reported that ‘The momentous event of the repeal of the stamp act has diffused the greatest joy throughout this continent’.¹²¹ Although it was necessary for the Rockingham Government to cover this retreat with the American Declaratory Act, based on the Irish Declaratory Act of 1720, which asserted the right of the British Parliament to legislate for the colonies, Rockingham himself seems to have regarded this primarily as a device to secure repeal, not as an announcement that the Westminster legislature still intended to tax America.¹²² His spokesmen in the Commons, Edmund Burke and General Conway, argued that the right to tax, while ‘clear beyond contradiction’, was best not exercised if the consequence was a disruption of trade and prosperity at home. There was a distinction, they maintained, between the ideal and the practical.¹²³ The elderly Duke of Newcastle went further, and argued, in the spirit of his mentor, Walpole, that it would have been better if neither side had raised constitutional issues.¹²⁴ He would have preferred repeal unaccompanied by an assertion of parliamentary rights, and he accepted the need for the Declaratory ¹¹⁹ Greene, ‘An Uneasy Connection’, in Kurtz and Hutson (eds.), Essays on the American Revolution, 74. ¹²⁰ William L. Saunders (ed.), The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vii. 1765 to 1768 (Raleigh, N.C., 1890), 333. ¹²¹ William L. Clements Library, Shelburne Papers, copy of Dulany to Lord Baltimore, n.d., but 1766. Dulany was the author of Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament ([Annapolis, Md.,] 1765). ¹²² See BL, Hardwicke Papers, Add. 35,430, fos. 32, 37–8. ¹²³ Simmons and Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and Debates, ii. 143. ¹²⁴ See his comments in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 2 Feb. 1766, copy in BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. 32,973, fo. 342.


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Act with much reluctance, and then simply as a means to the end in view: ‘The Repeal, your Lordship knows’, he told Rockingham, ‘is the great Point with me’.¹²⁵ There was a possibility, then, that with the Stamp Act out of the way, there could have been a return to a more-or-less harmonious relationship between Britain and its North American colonies. None of these arguments significantly undermines the key role of the Seven Years War. Latent tensions have to be made manifest before they become seriously disruptive. Walpole’s years of dominance demonstrated the ability of politicians to fudge the constitutional issues in the interests of material prosperity. Without the big changes to the size and nature of the Empire brought about by the war, it might have been possible to carry on much as before. Newcastle still wanted to pursue this path in the 1760s. However, most British politicians took a different line; they recognized that the war had created a new empire, and this inclined them to listen to voices pressing for greater central control. The Board of Trade had recommended measures for America during Walpole’s time that anticipated in many respects the measures implemented in the 1760s.¹²⁶ But whereas under Walpole there was no willingness on the part of leading ministers to introduce reforms, for fear that they might rock the boat, after the Seven Years War a new generation of politicians, faced with the problems associated with a larger and more diverse empire, was altogether more receptive. So far as Halifax’s efforts between 1748 and 1756 are concerned, it must be said that, for all his determination and ambitions, and despite the fact that the formal powers of the Board of Trade were enlarged in 1752, he was able to make little headway in curbing colonial autonomy. The Currency Act passed by the British Parliament in 1751 was much narrower in scope than the Board had wanted. Nearly everywhere colonial governors still found it difficult to resist local pressures. Only in the relatively new colonies of Nova Scotia and Georgia did Halifax’s plans truly bear fruit. If Henry Pelham was more receptive to Halifax’s proposals than Walpole had been to the Board of Trade’s recommendations, there was still not the same ministerial willingness firmly to embrace the Board’s views, and translate them into action, that was to be evident after the Seven Years War. Proposals to impose parliamentary taxes on the colonies were put to the Government in 1754 and 1755, but they were not pursued, as we have seen, for fear of provoking fierce resistance.¹²⁷ As Greene himself notes, ‘none of the Board’s recommendations received the necessary support from the administration’.¹²⁸ This does not mean, of course, that Halifax’s efforts were irrelevant. They clearly pointed the way to the approach that was to be adopted by successive administrations after 1763. ¹²⁵ Copy of Newcastle to Rockingham, 24 Jan. 1766, ibid., fo. 260. ¹²⁶ See Rory T. Cornish, ‘A Vision of Empire: The Development of British Opinion Regarding the American Colonial Empire, 1730–1770’, unpublished University of London Ph.D. dissertation, 1987, for the argument that there was much continuity in official attitudes. ¹²⁷ See Ch. 4. ¹²⁸ Greene, ‘An Uneasy Connection’, in Kurtz and Hutson (eds.), Essays on the American Revolution, 70.

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But precisely because they failed to secure the necessary level of ministerial backing, and therefore posed less of a threat to the colonies, Halifax’s policies provoked markedly less violent colonial opposition than the Stamp Act did, and so were much less damaging to the relationship between Britain and its North American provinces. We should also note that the position of the Rockingham Government on American taxation, notwithstanding the words of Newcastle, Conway, Burke, and Rockingham himself, was ambiguous, to say the least. Some ministers seem to have taken the Declaratory Act very seriously. Charles Yorke, the Attorney General, had even tried to strengthen it by adding a direct reference to the right of the British Parliament to tax the colonies.¹²⁹ That he was unable to persuade Rockingham should not detract from the existence of a hardline element within the ministry. Nor should we forget that the Rockingham Government actually proceeded to tax the Americans. The Revenue (or Plantation Duties) Act of 1766 is sometimes considered to be part of a drive to cement the good will of the colonists, since it cut the duty payable on molasses imported into the mainland colonies from three pence to one penny. This interpretation is given support by Grenville’s denouncing the proposed reduction as another concession to the Americans; the Rockinghams, he complained, were ‘taking off tax after tax’.¹³⁰ However, the aim of the framers of the Plantation Duties Act was not just, or even primarily, to conciliate the Americans. The fact that the penny duty was to be chargeable on all molasses entering the British North American colonies (not just on foreign molasses, as hitherto) made it abundantly clear that the ministry was not even pretending to regulate trade—on the contrary, the British West Indians, as they knew only too well, were being sacrificed for revenue collection.¹³¹ William Dowdeswell, Rockingham’s chancellor of the exchequer, later made it perfectly clear that he saw the 1766 Act first and foremost as a revenue-raising measure.¹³² The money produced, moreover, was to be devoted to precisely the same purpose as the Stamp Act that the Rockinghams had repealed—funding the British army garrison in North America.¹³³ That the Rockinghams should attempt to raise money for the same end as Grenville’s American taxes is testimony to the problems confronting all post-war British ministries. Successive British Governments were faced with the need to service a worryingly large post-war National Debt, and domestic hostility to continuation of wartime taxes. It was almost inevitable that new sources of revenue would be actively sought out. In his budget speech of April 1767, Charles Townshend, the chancellor of the exchequer in the Chatham administration, explained that there was a hole in the national finances (caused by the Commons recently forcing a reduction in the ¹²⁹ See Rockingham’s letter to Yorke, 25 Jan. 1766, in BL, Hardwicke Papers, Add. MS 35,430, fo. 38. ¹³⁰ Simmons and Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and Debates, ii. 377–8. ¹³¹ See, e.g., BL, Hardwicke Papers, Add. MS 35,607, fo. 255. ¹³² See Paul Langford, ‘The Rockingham Whigs and America, 1767–1773’, in Ann Whiteman et al. (eds.), Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), 147. ¹³³ 6 Geo. III, c.52, § 12.


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land tax from four to three shillings in the pound), which he would have to repair ‘by amelioration of our Revenues, and by an American Tax’.¹³⁴ His colleague Shelburne busied himself at the same time in trying to devise a scheme for raising money from colonial quit rents.¹³⁵ Even when British Governments appeared to be abandoning American taxation, they kept trying. In May 1769, the Cabinet decided that it would be inexpedient to attempt to ‘the laying any further taxes upon America for the purpose of raising a revenue’; however, it was careful to limit the proposed repeal of Townshend’s 1767 duties so that the most productive—that on tea—was retained.¹³⁶ Regardless of whether they were inclined to conciliate the Americans, or to punish them for challenging parliamentary authority, British politicians could not escape the fact that the costs of the army in North America— put there as a direct consequence of the Seven Years War—were rising at an alarming rate.¹³⁷ While American taxation from 1767 onwards was intended to cover the salaries of civil officers, in pursuit of Townshend’s dream of independent colonial executives, which would be more reliable instruments of British authority,¹³⁸ Townshend himself made it clear that this was merely a means to more effective taxation of America in the future, which ‘might in time save this country of a considerable part of the burthen for the colonies’.¹³⁹ Paying for the army, in other words, was off the agenda for the moment, but still the long-term objective. There were, to be sure, various attempts to patch up the transatlantic quarrel on the eve of the armed conflict that ripped the Empire apart, and all sorts of different decisions that might have been taken by British ministers at various points between 1766 and 1775 that could conceivably have avoided a breakdown. We might note also that during the 1760s American fears about parliamentary taxation were powerfully reinforced by anxiety about the impact of a rising tide of British luxury goods pouring into the colonies once the post-war depression ended. Colonial Americans, like metropolitan Britons in previous decades who had worried about the undermining of British virtue by French luxury, started to discern a threat to a way of life that they characterized (not necessarily accurately) as simple, unsophisticated, and community-minded. Non-importation movements in the late 1760s and early 1770s sought not only the repeal of obnoxious British legislation, but also a moral revival in the colonies.¹⁴⁰ In this sense they resembled ¹³⁴ BL, Hardwicke Papers, Add. 35,608, fo. 14. ¹³⁵ West Suffolk RO, Grafton Papers, Ac 423/441. ¹³⁶ Ibid., Ac 423/42. ¹³⁷ See, e.g., Conway’s comments in a letter of 2 May 1766, in Clarence E. Carter (ed.), The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage (2 vols., New Haven, Conn., 1931–3), ii. 37; Labaree et al. (eds.), Franklin Papers, xiii. 446–7. ¹³⁸ See also Ch. 2, for Townshend’s objectives. ¹³⁹ Simmons and Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and Debates, ii. 457. ¹⁴⁰ T. H. Breen has written extensively on this subject: see his ‘An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), esp. 498–9; ‘Baubles of Britain: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 119 (1988), esp. 83–4, 97–103; ‘Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and the Community on the Eve of the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, l (1993), 471–501; The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford, 2004).

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the Anti-Gallican associations of the 1740s and 1750s, which had tried to immunize Britain from the allegedly corrupting effects of French imports. By 1775, then, the dispute was about more than parliamentary taxation, and even, perhaps, about more than the claims of the British Parliament to pass laws binding the colonies. For many Americans, there seemed to be a wide-ranging assault on their virtue and their liberty, of which parliamentary pretensions formed merely a part. However, notwithstanding these important developments, the arguments on the two sides were in many ways a natural development from the issues aired in the Stamp Act crisis, when the case for both the British Parliament and the colonial assemblies had been thoroughly elaborated. Indeed, from the moment that the constitutional issues were raised, there was little disposition on either side to surrender carefully constructed positions. If one accepts that the Stamp Act was a direct consequence of the Seven Years War and the imperial expansion that it brought, then that conflict can be seen as one of the vital prerequisites—perhaps the vital prerequisite—to the constitutional clashes and ultimately the armed struggle that were central to the American Revolution. Over nearly twenty-five years of more-or-less continuous imperial conflict between Britain and France, and to a lesser extent Spain, the size and nature of the British Empire changed significantly. Metropolitan Britons, anxious about the threats to the King’s overseas possessions for much of our period, and often nervous of expansionism, came out of the Seven Years War with an enormously enlarged and much more heterogeneous empire. The consequences of this new British Empire for Britain itself, and for the colonists in British North America, were to be profound. Attitudes changed on both sides of the Atlantic. Newcastle’s Government had committed the country to war against France to protect the American colonies, yet the outcome of the war meant that those same colonies were downgraded in the minds of British politicians—and even parts of the British public—as they had to compete for attention with other peoples of the expanded Empire. When British politicians turned their minds to the old colonies in North America, it was with the expectation that they could be made to contribute to the costs of the new Empire, and be brought more closely under central control. The Americans, having emerged from the war confident of their importance, proud of their role in the triumph over the French, and expecting to be recognized as partners in the Empire, were bitterly disappointed at the treatment that they received. The Stamp Act crisis raised constitutional issues that had long been side-stepped, and once the genie was out of the bottle, it could not be put back in again.

10 The View from the Grassroots Many of the issues addressed in earlier chapters can be brought into sharper relief by looking in a little more detail at the impact of the mid-eighteenthcentury wars on various communities in Britain and Ireland. Local studies also enable us to see, over the whole of our period, how war impinged with varying degrees of intensity—at some times much more obviously and dramatically than at others. For case studies to be useful, they need to examine different types of communities, rather than look at places broadly similar. Accordingly, a selection that reflects the need for geographical spread, political diversity, and economic and social variation has been made. In Ireland, Cork has been chosen; in Scotland, Edinburgh; in England, the county of Berkshire. This means that we will have the chance to see how the mid-century wars affected a major Irish port with strong connections across the Atlantic and with continental Europe; an east coast city, which had its own trading links across the North Sea but was primarily notable as the Scottish capital; and a predominantly rural inland county in southern England.

CORK ‘It is a handsome, wealthy, and populous City, inhabited much by English, standing on an Island in the River Lee, where it has a commodious Haven.’ This was how a contemporary guide to Britain and Ireland described Cork in 1745.¹ The attractiveness and growing prosperity of the city were remarked upon also by its eighteenth-century historian, Charles Smith, who commented in 1750 upon its ‘neat houses, small pleasant gardens and pretty plantations, which begin to rise in proportion as the traffic of the city of Cork increases’.² So far as populousness is concerned, two years later, in 1752, Richard Pococke recorded that there were ‘7366 houses, & the souls are computed to be above 73000’.³ Even though ¹ [Guy Miège], The Present State of Great Britain and Ireland (10th edn., London, 1745), 451. ² Charles Smith, The Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork (2 vols., Dublin, 1750), i. 363. ³ John McVeigh (ed.), Richard Pococke’s Irish Tours (Blackrock, 1995), 99.

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The View from the Grassroots

Edinburgh

Cork

Berkshire

Map 3. Three Local Studies: Cork, Edinburgh, and Berkshire

modern scholarship suggests that 53,000 might have been nearer to the true total,⁴ Cork remained a considerable city by contemporary Irish and British standards. When the writer of the 1745 account referred to the large numbers of ‘English’ residents, he almost certainly meant the local Protestants, for at this time Ireland’s Protestants still tended to be seen, and to see themselves, as distinct from the Irish, a term generally applied only to the Catholics.⁵ Catholics probably accounted ⁴ Rosemary Sweet, ‘Provincial Culture and Urban Histories in England and Ireland during the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Peter Borsay and Lindsay Proudfoot (eds.), Provincial Towns in EarlyModern England and Ireland: Change, Convergence and Divergence (Oxford, 2002), 224. ⁵ See D. W. Hayton, ‘Anglo-Irish Attitudes: Changing Perceptions of National Identity amongst the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, ca. 1690–1760’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 17 (1987), 145–57.


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for about two-thirds of the total population in the 1730s, and when a religious census was carried out in 1731 it was claimed that the number of Catholics in Cork was increasing significantly.⁶ Protestants—or, more specifically, Anglicans—dominated the city’s institutions; it could hardly be otherwise given the Irish Test Act of 1704, which prohibited Catholics (and Protestant Dissenters) from holding public office. However, partly as a result of this formal exclusion from the world of politics, Catholics involved themselves in mercantile activities in many Irish towns and cities, entering guilds or trade incorporations as ‘quarter brothers’, without acquiring, in the process, voting rights at municipal or parliamentary elections. A pamphlet published in 1737 suggested that Catholics were set to dominate the commerce of Cork city;⁷ however, a modern study calculates that no more than a fifth of Cork’s overseas merchants were Catholics in the middle of the century.⁸ Cork’s prosperity was based on the export of products from the city’s agricultural hinterland, stretching in a wide arc around the city deep into Munster: an eighteenth-century poem claimed that the city was ‘Renowned for butter, beef and pork’.⁹ Meat and dairy products for provisions for the North American and Caribbean colonies and for the navy were indeed particularly important, and in recognition of the centrality of the provisioning trade, the city corporation was preparing in July 1739 to lease a substantial site for a new cattle market.¹⁰ But there were also significant exports of wool, yarn, tallow, and hides, and if many products were sent west across the Atlantic, others went south to France and the Iberian peninsular, often to ports with an Irish émigré merchant community.¹¹ Charles Smith, while acknowledging that the city was no match for London or Paris, claimed, with its overseas trade no doubt very much in mind, that Cork could justly be called ‘the Bristol of Ireland ’.¹² Cork returned two MPs to the Irish Parliament. The electorate comprised the freeholders, but the corporation, dominated by the merchant community, was influential, as was the Boyle family, subsequently earls of Shannon, based at Castlemartyr, some miles to the east of the city. In 1739 the senior MP was Emanuel Pigott, who had already been one of the city’s representatives for four ⁶ ‘Report on the State of Popery in Ireland, 1731’, Archivium Hibernicum, 2 (1913), 131. ⁷ ‘Alexander the Coppersmith’, Remarks on the Religion, Trade, Government, Police, Customs, Manners, and Maladys of the City of Corke (Cork, 1737). ⁸ David Dickson, ‘Catholics and Trade in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: An Old Debate Revisited’, in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Blackrock, 1990), 90. ⁹ David Dickson, ‘Second City Syndrome: Reflections on Three Irish Cases’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1500: Integration and Diversity (Dublin, 1999), 95. ¹⁰ Richard Caulfield (ed.), The Council Book of the Corporation of the City of Cork (Guildford, 1876), 585. ¹¹ See William O’Sullivan, The Economic History of Cork City from the Earliest Times to the Act of Union (Cork, 1937), esp. 144. ¹² Smith, Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork, i. 371.

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years. The English-educated son of a prominent Cork family, he had served in the city militia and was to distinguish himself by local benefactions and staunch defence of Cork’s interests in the Dublin Parliament. Pigott’s colleague, elected in a by-election in 1739, was Sir Matthew Deane, 4th Bart, a country gentleman from Dromore, County Cork. Deane died in 1751, and was replaced in the subsequent by-election by Thomas Newenham, another landed gentleman. In the 1761 Irish general election—the first since 1728—Cork’s representation changed again: Pigott, now in his mid-seventies, stood down, and Newenham, who had not been very active, was defeated. The two new MPs were Sir John Redmond Freke, who had deeply imbedded himself in Cork politics, serving as mayor in 1753, and John Hely-Hutchinson, a prominent Irish lawyer, who was embarking on what would prove to be a long and successful political career.¹³ None of these elections seems to have been influenced by the wars in which Britain (and therefore Ireland) was engaged for much of this period. Indeed, on a more general level, the outbreak of war with Spain in 1739 appears to have caused little immediate stir in Cork. Local records are dominated in 1740 by the problems created by the severe winter and subsequent food shortages. Just as in the rest of Ireland, or at any rate in the rest of Munster, there was a major subsistence crisis. ‘Great numbers of the poor perished, during the summers of 1741 and 1742’, Smith recalled in his contemporary account of Cork.¹⁴ To help the local population to survive, the corporation purchased cereals and flour—some from within Ireland, some from England, some from as far away as North America—and sold them at below the market price. Attempts were also made to prevent further price inflation: forestallers were threatened with legal action. At the same time, the corporation organized relief payments to the needy through the city’s churches.¹⁵ As an additional measure to bring down prices, the corporation lobbied for a suspension of the export of oats, ‘the chief support of the poor’.¹⁶ A rather different line was taken, however, when export embargoes were introduced by the British Government to prevent provisions falling into the hands of the enemy. In January 1741 the corporation was very concerned that butter exports might be prohibited, a step which ‘would be of the greatest prejudice to the Kingdom in general and the trade of this City in particular’, and three months later a petition was sent to the lords justices appealing for the prohibition of exports to be relaxed so that corn could be sent from England to Ireland, in view of the ‘very great scarcity’ of cereals in Cork.¹⁷ In March 1744, on the eve of the official declaration of war against France, ¹³ Edith Mary Johnston-Liik (ed.), History of the Irish Parliament 1692–1800 (6 vols., Belfast, 2002), ii. 208, iv. 38–9, 241–2, 394–403, v. 356, vi. 66. ¹⁴ Smith, Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork, ii. 229. ¹⁵ Caulfield (ed.), Council Book, 595, 596, 598, 601, 602. ¹⁶ Ibid., 594. ¹⁷ Ibid., 606, 608.


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the city’s authorities and the merchant community were again protesting at the hardships caused by embargoes.¹⁸ Appeals to the Government in Dublin or even London were one response to the difficulties apparently caused by the embargoes. But there were other ways of addressing the perceived problems. At least some of Cork’s merchants simply ignored the prohibitions and continued to trade with whom they pleased. Beef and cheese supplied by Walter Lavit of Cork were found on board a captured French ship in the summer of 1744.¹⁹ This might have been thought particularly embarrassing, as Lavit, of Huguenot descent, was a former city sheriff. However, his apparent trade with the enemy (as the French were by then) did not seem to have damaging consequences for his local reputation: he became mayor in 1745.²⁰ That same year, Archbishop Stone, in his capacity as a lord justice, reported that Richard Bradshaw, another Cork merchant, was ‘found to have an immediate entercourse and Trade with Martinico’. Information presented to the Government put it ‘beyond dispute’ that Bradshaw was sending beef, butter, candles, herrings, cordage, and sail cloth to the French West Indian island.²¹ Again, Bradshaw was a pillar of the local Protestant community: he had acted as a city sheriff in 1736 and as mayor in 1741.²² Illegal commerce with the enemy continued to be a major cause of concern in the Seven Years War. In September 1758 papers obtained by the Government pointed to some merchant houses in Cork offering to provision the French navy. Prosecution of the merchants was considered, but the Attorney General ‘found the bargain was made with Dutch Contractors in a way yt. made it impossible to convict them’. With recourse to the courts ruled out, a general embargo was seen as the only way to stop Irish victuals reaching the French fleet.²³ Towards the end of the same conflict, Sir Richard Cox, a revenue commissioner, was still hinting darkly at the ‘villainous Practices’ of Cork’s merchants, and threatening to expose them.²⁴ If illegal trade suggests dissatisfaction with embargoes, the corporation’s records reveal that there was also a good deal of tension between the local population and the ¹⁸ SP 63/403, fo. 120. ¹⁹ ADM 110/14, fo. 26. Lavit was amongst the signatories on the petition of March 1744 protesting at the hardships caused by the embargo. ²⁰ For the Lavits, see David Dickson, ‘Huguenots in the Urban Economy of Eighteenth-Century Dublin and Cork’, in C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough, and J.-P. Pittion (eds.), The Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an Emigration (Dun Laoghaire, 1987), 328. ²¹ NLI, Shannon Papers, MS 13298, Stone to Henry Boyle, 10 June 1745, John Yeamans to the Duke of Bedford, 30 May 1745. ²² Smith, Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork, i. 434. Lavit’s office is recorded in the same source (i. 433), though the mayor of 1745 is described as ‘William’ rather than ‘Walter’ Lavit. The corporation minutes for 1745 make it clear, however, that it was indeed Walter Lavit who served as mayor (see Caulfield (ed.), Council Book, 635). ²³ PRONI, Bedford Papers, T 2915/5/34, Richard Rigby to Bedford, 5 Sept. 1758. A petition from Cork merchants, protesting at the seizure of goods being sent to the foreign West Indies, was submitted in Oct. 1758: see SP 63/415, fos. 374–5. ²⁴ NLI, Shannon Papers, MS 13300, Cox to Shannon, 1 Aug. 1761.

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regular troops garrisoned in or about the city. In November 1748 local constables were attacked and detained by an officer of Ottway’s Regiment, and John Reily, one of the city’s sheriffs, was insulted and abused. In July 1755 there was ‘a terrible affray’ between soldiers and townsmen, leading to the death of a civilian. In view of the ‘ill blood’ caused by this incident, the corporation demanded that the regiment to which the soldiers belonged should be ‘immediately removed’. A little over two years later, the commanding officer of the garrison was accused of behaving in an arbitrary manner in ‘breach of the laws of the land’, and a year after that a memorial was sent to the Government complaining of the refusal of a regular officer to aid the civil power. In May 1761 the corporation drew up a memorial to send to the lords justices complaining of the imprisonment by the military lieutenant governor of one of the city’s revenue collectors, and about a year after there was another clash with the same officer, who ‘peremptorily refused the orders of the Mayor’ over the placing of guards in the city.²⁵ It would be easy to assume from the reports of illegal trade and the evidence of friction with the military that Cork was thoroughly disaffected. But any such impression needs to be set against considerable signs of loyalty and commitment to the wars against France and Spain. Obsequious addresses were submitted by the corporation opposing the Stuart Pretender and pledging support for ‘our present happy Establishment’ (March 1744), and on the conclusion of the peace (February 1749).²⁶ Almost every British success, by sea or land, was marked by celebrations during which large quantities of drink were provided by the corporation and bell ringers were paid to proclaim victories to the population at large.²⁷ Leading military and naval figures were given the freedom of the city, an honour extended in December 1759 to Pitt ‘in testimony of the just and deep sense we have of his wise, good, and faithful services to his king and country’.²⁸ The following January the corporation decided to pay £100 for an equestrian statue of George II, which it was subsequently agreed should be placed in the centre of one of the city’s major bridges, and the bridge itself widened to enable carriages to pass either side of the new statue.²⁹ Nor should we forget that in May 1755 the corporation, to aid the augmentation of the fleet, offered a bounty to mariners joining the navy in Cork harbour.³⁰ Recruitment into the army was not encouraged, and was probably not very significant; however, this was not desired by the government anyway—as we have seen, Protestants outside Ulster were not meant to be enlisted, and although Catholic recruitment was sometimes condoned, it was not officially approved.³¹ Part of the ²⁵ Caulfield (ed.), Council Book, 651, 686–7, 704, 715, 744, 758–60. ²⁶ Ibid., 623, 652. ²⁷ See, e.g., ibid., 623, 624, 637, 638, 691, 725, 727, 729, 749, 750, 762, 763, 770. ²⁸ Ibid., 729. See also 623, 635, 641, 698, 699, 730, 732, 744, etc. ²⁹ Ibid., 731, 736, 738. ³⁰ Ibid., 685. ³¹ See Chs. 7 and 8. For Catholics from Cork serving in a regular regiment, and being removed, see Derbyshire RO, Wilmot Horton of Catton Collection, D 3155 C657. They seem to have been recruited while the regiment was waiting to embark for overseas service.


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logic behind the ban on taking Protestant Irishmen into the regulars was that Protestants were needed at home in those areas where they formed a minority of the population; military enthusiasm amongst local Protestants is therefore better judged by their contribution to the militia. In both the Austrian Succession conflict and in the Seven Years War, Cork’s militia certainly displayed a readiness to defend the community.³² In 1746, according to Smith’s history, the city’s militia comprised 3,000 foot and 200 horse, plus an independent cavalry troop ‘composed of an hundred Gentlemen’.³³ Ten years later, when the Irish militia was again arrayed, the city contributed significantly to the militia mobilization in County Cork, which raised three regiments of militia infantry and six of cavalry, together with another independent troop.³⁴ In truth, however, Cork was neither as positive about the mid-century wars as these examples suggest, nor as disaffected as trade with the enemy and friction with the army implies. Cork’s merchants, and its corporation, sought above all to take advantage of the opportunities that the wars offered, and to minimize the risks that they entailed. Trade with the enemy, it should be noted, was not a practice unique to Cork: in January 1748 there was much discussion in the press about corn being sent to France by English and Irish merchants, and in the following month a royal proclamation expressly forbade such trade, repeating the prohibition included in the formal declaration of war on France in 1744.³⁵ We should also note that, despite concerns about the impact of the embargoes, Cork’s overseas trade boomed, especially during the Seven Years War. This was partly due to the repeal of the Cattle Acts in 1759, which stimulated Irish livestock exports to England, but it also owed much to the demand for foodstuffs for the navy and for the army operating in North America, which acted as a great stimulus to the provision trade.³⁶ Even in 1740, when the first embargoes of our period were imposed, ships were able to leave Cork harbour taking vast quantities of ‘Stores & provisions for the Fleet at Jamaica’.³⁷ In 1745, vessels were able to sail to North America and the West Indies, despite the embargo, so long as they provided sufficient securities for their cargoes going to the King’s colonies only.³⁸ Fear of attack from the enemy caused ‘great alarm’ in the city in 1744 and 1745,³⁹ and recurring anxieties of this kind probably help to explain the willingness of the ³² Caulfield (ed.), Council Book, 634–5, 721, 756–7. ³³ Smith, Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork, i. 426–7. ³⁴ NLI, Shannon Papers, MS 13299, ‘Co. Corke Field Officers of the Regts. of Militia C. of Cork. 1756’. ³⁵ See Gentleman’s Magazine, 18 (1748), 20, 71. ³⁶ Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, 1988), 164. ³⁷ Somerset RO, Dickinson Papers, DD/DN 200, John Westlake to Caleb Dickinson, 24 Oct. 1740. ³⁸ See NMM, Duff Papers, DUF/10, John Lyndon, Dublin Customs House, to Henry Cavendish, Collector at Cork, 6 April 1745 (copy). ³⁹ See NLW, Puleston Papers, MSS 3579D and 3580C, Walter Peard and Edmund Spencer to Archbishop Arthur Price, Feb. 1744, 27 Oct. 1745.

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corporation to heap honours on local naval and military commanders. Even so, such honours were not automatically given. When the commanding officer of the district was given the freedom of the city in October 1756, it was in recognition of his ‘good conduct in regulating the large body of Forces quartered in this City, for embarkation, whereby no disturbances have happened therein’: the army’s presence, in other words, was considered acceptable so long as the benefits—protection against the enemy and increased demand for goods and services—were not offset by the drawbacks, especially disorder, criminality, and insecurity of property.⁴⁰ While the corporation submitted loyal addresses to the King and Lord Lieutenant, it also complained about the lack of naval protection for the city’s overseas trade,⁴¹ and lobbied strenuously for adequate fortifications to preserve the port from enemy attack.⁴² Even the bounty to encourage naval recruitment can be seen as self-interested as well as patriotic. Cork’s merchants, like merchants elsewhere, probably wanted to reduce the number of valued men seized by impressment; they hoped that if enough mariners volunteered to join the navy, the disruption caused by the press-gangs, and the attempts made by seamen to escape their attentions, would be minimized.⁴³ Willingness to serve in Cork’s militia, it should be said, was less a sign of popular identification with the struggles against the Bourbons, and more a consequence of fear of a Catholic uprising that might follow an enemy landing. Arming of the Protestant householders was conspicuous both in 1745 and in 1756, when the militia throughout Ireland was arrayed, but still more so in 1762, when the Whiteboys were causing great alarm in Protestant circles in Munster. ⁴⁴

EDINBURGH Scotland’s capital has been the subject of a number of important studies of eighteenth-century history in recent years,⁴⁵ but none has specifically explored the impact on the city of the wars of 1739–63.⁴⁶ Edinburgh’s status within Scotland meant that it was a legal, religious, educational, and governmental centre, as well as a town with numerous retail outlets. Its population in 1760 ⁴⁰ Caulfield (ed.), Council Book, 694. ⁴¹ Ibid., 624, 745. ⁴² Ibid., 633. ⁴³ Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), 128. If this was their logic, they must have been disappointed by the small number of naval volunteers forthcoming: see Caulfield (ed.), Council Book, 687. ⁴⁴ Captain Richard Knight of the Royal Navy, commenting on the local Catholics, argued that their intention ‘may be to assist any Invasion should it take place’ (ADM 1/2011, Knight to John Clevland, 1 May 1762). ⁴⁵ Notably R. A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1994). See also Elizabeth C. Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh (Basingstoke, 1996). ⁴⁶ The nearest is R. A. Houston, ‘The Military in Edinburgh Society, 1660–1760’, War and Society, 11 (1993), 41–56.


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was perhaps 60,000, if Leith, Edinburgh’s outport, and the other dependent suburbs are included. At the beginning of our period, the city itself was largely confined within its walls, where some 23,568 people lived in 1752.⁴⁷ Six years later, an English visitor described it thus: ‘The streets are narrow, the houses ill built and immoderately high, some amounting to 14 stories, though they chiefly consist of 6. This is occasioned by the extravagant price at which ground sells.’⁴⁸ By this stage, however, ‘New Town’ was beginning to be developed, first south of the old city, and then, from the 1760s, to the north.⁴⁹ Edinburgh was governed by a council of twenty-five members—seventeen from the merchant community, and eight from the trades. For certain purposes, including the election of the city’s single MP, the council was augmented by eight extraordinary deacons, drawn from the remaining trades. The MP, elected only by the ordinary and extraordinary council members, was usually a member of the merchant community, though the dukes of Argyll exerted great influence and without their endorsement a candidate would usually struggle. In 1739, the MP was Patrick Lindsay, an Edinburgh upholster, who stood down at the general election of 1741. In that election, Archibald Stewart, a prosperous wine merchant and councillor, was returned after a contest with Alexander Nisbet, convenor of the trades. Stewart was supported by the second Duke of Argyll, and he followed his patron’s anti-Walpolean opposition Whig line.⁵⁰ Edinburgh, unlike either Cork or Berkshire, had the rare distinction of experiencing military operations at first hand in this period. ‘Little was it thought or Expected two months ago’, wrote William Ross, a local merchant, in October 1745, ‘That this poor City and Country about it, would become the seat of warr’.⁵¹ At the end of that August, the city council had started to make preparations for defence against the advancing Highland forces of the Young Pretender: the trained bands were put in a state of readiness, and instructions were given for innkeepers to provide information on any strangers in their premises. On 9 September the council received permission to raise a regiment in Edinburgh, specifically to defend the city.⁵² As the Highland army approached, ‘the walls were put in better order, and barricades of turfe at the gaites, and some canon planted’.⁵³ But the regular forces available to assist in the defence of the city were limited, as General Cope had allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred, and the main government army was now in Aberdeen. Besides the small garrison of the castle, there were just two dragoon regiments outside the walls, both of which retreated rapidly before the Highlanders arrived. ⁴⁷ J. Gilhooley, A Directory of Edinburgh in 1752 (Edinburgh, 1988), viii. ⁴⁸ John G. Dunbar (ed.), Sir William Burrell’s Northern Tour, 1758 (East Linton, 1997), 78. ⁴⁹ See Mary Cosh, Edinburgh: The Golden Age (Edinburgh, 2003), 3–5. ⁵⁰ Romney Sedgwick (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–1754 (2 vols., London, 1970), i. 398–9. ⁵¹ NLS, Spottiswoode Papers, MS 2933, fo. 170. ⁵² Edinburgh City Archives, Council Records, SL 7/1/65, pp. 276–9, 291, 308. ⁵³ Francis Steuart (ed.), The Woodhouselee MS. A Narrative of Events in Edinburgh and District during the Jacobite Occupation, September to November 1745 (London and Edinburgh, 1907), 14.

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On 16 September there was much talk of a move from leading townsmen to surrender the city to Prince Charles,⁵⁴ and the next day Jacobite troops entered the gates and took possession without opposition (‘Numbers of Highlanders crowd in to town all the day long’).⁵⁵ Cope was by this time disembarking his troops at Dunbar, to the east, and expressed ‘no small Surprize and Concern’ at Edinburgh’s rapid and bloodless fall to the rebels.⁵⁶ The bulk of the Highlanders then left the city to engage with Cope’s little army, defeating it comprehensively at Prestonpans on 21 September. Thereafter, Edinburgh remained in Jacobite hands until Charles and his army left for the march into England on 1 November. The occupation was far from peaceful: the Jacobites might have taken the city without firing a shot, but they had not captured the castle, and their attempts to cut off its supplies and compel its surrender led to bloodshed. The garrison, commanded by the elderly Gen. Joshua Guest, bombarded the Jacobite positions for several days and launched sorties to take prisoners. Only when Prince Charles agreed to lift the blockade did the bombardment cease, by which time there had been several fatalities.⁵⁷ Government troops marched into Edinburgh on 14 November, reinforcing the castle garrison that had taken possession of the city as soon as the Jacobites left. While there was alarm that there might be another visit from the rebels, especially when Charles’s army returned from its English adventure at the end of December,⁵⁸ there was to be no more fighting between contesting armies in Edinburgh itself. But if war came literally to the city for a few weeks in 1745, it was to affect Edinburgh in many ways over many years. As with Cork, this was not very apparent in the first part of the conflict with Spain that began in 1739. That October the council instructed the city’s MP to support ‘the Just and Necessary War in which his Majesty is engaged’,⁵⁹ but the main preoccupation, as in Cork again, was with food shortages. In October 1740, crowds attacked ‘meal-mongers’, who, it was believed, had exploited the dearth to increase their profits. Troops were employed, and they were obliged to fire on the protesters.⁶⁰ Within a short time, however, even the distant hostilities of the Spanish war started to impinge on Edinburgh. In June 1741 the bad news of the defeat of the British forces before Cartagena created ‘a damp in the Countenances of people of all ranks and parties . . . everybody has friends and relations there’.⁶¹ ⁵⁴ NLS, Fletcher of Saltoun Papers, MS 16513, fo. 56. ⁵⁵ ‘Leaves from the Diary of John Campbell, an Edinburgh Banker in 1745’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, i (Edinburgh, 1893), 538. ⁵⁶ SP 36/67, Pt. ii, fo. 90. ⁵⁷ NLS, Yester Papers, MS 7072, fos. 65, 140; ‘Leaves from the Diary of John Campbell’, 541, 547–9; Steuart (ed.), Woodhouselee MS, 56. ⁵⁸ Caledonian Mercury, 1 Jan. 1746. See also NLS, Yester Papers, MS 7073, fo. 57. ⁵⁹ Edinburgh City Archives, Council Records, SL 7/1/60, p. 202. ⁶⁰ NAS, Clerk of Penicuik Muniments, GD 18/5423/13; NLS, Erskine Murray Papers, MS 5075, fo. 18; Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment, 320–7. ⁶¹ NAS, Clerk of Penicuik Muniments, GD 18/5423/23.


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Recruitment of the city’s manpower was indeed to be a very important way in which war had an impact throughout this period. Shortly after the Jacobites captured Edinburgh, they ‘beat up for Volunteers’, and succeeded in recruiting ‘a good many’.⁶² Once the city was back in government hands, recruitment into the Edinburgh Regiment recommenced,⁶³ and after the rebellion was over, regular corps attempted, with some success, to raise more men in the city and its environs.⁶⁴ In the Seven Years War, the city actively promoted naval recruitment, offering one-and-a-half guineas for every able seaman (later increased to two guineas), and a guinea for every ordinary seaman, over and above the bounties authorized by the Government.⁶⁵ The council also sought to encourage enlistment in the army: in March 1759 the lord provost told the privy council of the city’s efforts in enacting the impressment clauses of the Recruiting Acts, and the following September the council agreed to give a supplementary bounty to all those joining the regiments that had distinguished themselves at the battle of Minden, subsequently amending this to include any army recruit raised in the city.⁶⁶ Precisely how many men from Edinburgh served in the armed forces remains unclear, but newspaper reports and deserter descriptions suggest that significant numbers were recruited.⁶⁷ Recruiting parties were not the only troops based in Edinburgh during the wars. Besides the garrison of the castle, there were sometimes other soldiers in the city. In the unusual circumstances of 1745–6, there was a considerable military presence. At the end of December 1745, the city itself was expected to accommodate 1,100 regular troops, with 400 members of the Glasgow militia at Leith.⁶⁸ In February 1746, a Hessian contingent, commanded by the Prince of Hesse himself, arrived. The prince was feted by Edinburgh’s social elite, and his soldiers were much admired for their military bearing. When they marched through the city on the way to Stirling, their appearance was said to be ‘grand and magnificent’.⁶⁹ In the next conflict, the invasion scare of 1759 brought a concentration of troops to protect the city from an enemy landing: that July the lord justice clerk reported to the secretary ⁶² Robert Fitzroy Bell (ed.), Memorials of John Murray of Broughton, Sometimes Secretary to Prince Charles Edward 1740–1747 (Scottish History Society, xxvii, Edinburgh, 1898), 198. ⁶³ Edinburgh City Archives, Macleod MSS, Bundle D0100/3, return of sergeants and corporals of the Edinburgh Regiment, 9 March 1746. ⁶⁴ See, e.g., NLS, Albemarle Papers, MS 3730, fo.14, where an officer in Sempill’s Regiment is said to be recruiting in Edinburgh in June 1746. ⁶⁵ Edinburgh Evening Courant, 31 March 1755; Edinburgh City Archives, Council Records, SL 7/1/73, pp. 140–1, 231–2; SL 7/1/75, pp. 197–8; SL 7/1/76, pp. 354–5; SL 7/1/77, pp. 18, 72–3, 264–5. ⁶⁶ Edinburgh City Archives, Council Records, SL 7/1/75, pp. 246, 369–70, 398. See also, BL, Barrington Papers, Add. MS 73,628, fo. 13. ⁶⁷ See, e.g., Edinburgh Evening Courant, 10 April 1755, 2 Feb. 1760, 8 Dec. 1760; Edinburgh Chronicle, 14–19 July 1759. ⁶⁸ Edinburgh City Archives, Macleod MSS, bundle DO104/29. ⁶⁹ Caledonian Mercury, 12, 14, 25 Feb., 7 March 1746.

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of state that soldiers were marching north to defend Edinburgh.⁷⁰ French prisoners were also housed in the castle. Sympathy with their sufferings seems to have been widespread: in October 1759 there was a collection in the city to help alleviate their ‘miserable condition’, and a year later more money was raised to provide the prisoners with new clothing.⁷¹ These positive images need to be set against the more negative impression conveyed by the problems associated with the military. Some of the Hessian troops became involved in an attack on a constable ‘in the Exercise of his Office’ and the abuse of other constables. The guilty soldiers were flogged in their camp. Newspaper reporting of the punishment was clearly designed to reassure the townspeople; ‘ ’Tis thought such exact Discipline will prevent Disorders for the future’.⁷² However, as in other towns and villages subjected to the presence of military personnel, no amount of ‘exact Discipline’ could entirely remove the risk of soldiers taking what they wanted: in March 1759 two British regulars were sentenced to be executed for robbing a city mason.⁷³ There was also much concern and jumpiness about the enemy prisoners, notwithstanding the local subscriptions to help them. In early October 1759 there was said to be ‘great confusion’ in the city, ‘on a current rumour that the French prisoners in the castle had set fire to the place where they are confined’. It turned out that this was a false alarm: the fire was ‘occasioned by a foul vent in the governor’s house; which was soon extinguished’.⁷⁴ Nearly two years later, it was claimed that an attempted escape of the prisoners in the castle had been discovered just in time.⁷⁵ Despite occasional friction between townspeople and the military in their midst, Edinburgh almost seemed to go out of its way to parade its loyalty during the mid-century wars—at least after the brief occupation of the city by the Jacobites in 1745. True, even before this traumatic event, the city’s worthies made the right noises at the appropriate times: a supportive address was sent to George II in 1744, when a Jacobite alarm inspired similar effusions of loyalty across Britain, and another on 7 September 1745, just before the arrival of Prince Charles and his Highlanders, in which the council claimed that ‘This City has always Distinguished herself by a firm & Steady Attachment to Revolution & Whig principles And a hearty abhorrence of all popish & arbitrary Governments’.⁷⁶ But this loyalty to Whig principles did not mean that the city was loyal to the ministers of the day: indeed, the council had been consistent in its opposition to government during Walpole’s last years in office, and it was far from supportive of his successors.⁷⁷ ⁷⁰ ⁷¹ ⁷² ⁷⁴ ⁷⁶ ⁷⁷

SP 54/24, fo. 32. Edinburgh Chronicle, 13–15 Oct. 1759; Edinburgh Evening Courant, 22 Oct. 1760. Caledonian Mercury, 25 Feb. 1746. ⁷³ Edinburgh Chronicle, 22 March 1759. Ibid., 4–6 Oct. 1759. ⁷⁵ Edinburgh Evening Courant, 8 July 1761. Edinburgh City Archives, Council Records, SL 7/1/64, pp. 200–1; SL 7/1/65, pp. 302–3. Ibid., SL 7/1/61, pp. 178–80, 242–6; SL 7/1/62, pp. 268–9; SL 7/1/63, pp. 144, 221–2.


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Unsurprisingly, then, after the departure of the Jacobite army, there was much keenness to demonstrate commitment to the Hanoverians. In this sense, Edinburgh represented in microcosm Scotland’s more general problem. Despite widespread opposition to the Jacobites in 1745–6, the Scots were generally assumed by the English to be suspect, both during and for some time after the rebellion. It would take many years for what Bob Harris calls ‘the taint of disloyalty’ to be removed.⁷⁸ In Edinburgh, a start was made with a local subscription that provided money to buy blankets for the British troops quartered in the town.⁷⁹ When General Hawley’s soldiers arrived in early January 1746, ‘the City was finely illuminate’. The entry into Edinburgh of the Duke of Cumberland at the end of that month was greeted with still greater signs of public approval—windows were illuminated, and bonfires lit. News of Culloden sent the city into an apparent frenzy of excitement: ‘there were great Rejoicings in this City and Suburbs’, a local newspaper recounted.⁸⁰ On 4 June, the city symbolically attempted to proclaim its hostility to the Jacobites:⁸¹ At Noon, fourteen Stand of Rebel Colours displayed, and supported by John Dalgleish the Hangman, as chief Bearer, and thirteen Chimney sweepers his Assistants, were carried down in procession from the Castle to the Cross, (escorted by a Detachment of Col. Lee’s Regiment) where a Bonfire was prepared, and amidst a numerous Crowd of Spectators were burnt by the Hands of the Hangman, with Sound of Trumpet and loud Huzzas from the Populace.

In 1747, the council granted the freedom of the city to Cumberland and to Albemarle, the new commander-in-chief in Scotland, and wished the royal duke the same success against the French as he had achieved against the rebels.⁸² In the next conflict, honours were again showered on successful commanders, and loyal addresses were submitted to assure the King of the city’s support at a time of threatened invasion (April 1756) and to celebrate the victories of his forces (October 1759, November 1761).⁸³ News of Minden brought forth the ringing of the city’s bells, as did accounts of the fall of Quebec (‘soon after the music-bells were set a-ringing; which filled every heart with gladness’).⁸⁴ Even without a specific victory to celebrate, bells were used to announce the city’s staunch support of the Hanoverian regime: in 1758, Sir William Burrell noted that the bells of the collegiate church of St Giles ‘play all manner of tunes; the present tune in vogue is God Save Great George etc.’⁸⁵ ⁷⁸ ⁷⁹ ⁸⁰ ⁸² ⁸³ ⁸⁴ ⁸⁵

Harris, Politics and the Nation, Ch. 4. Edinburgh City Archives, Macleod MSS, bundle DO104/32. Caledonian Mercury, 3, 6, 7, 31 Jan., 28 April 1746. ⁸¹ Ibid., 5 June 1746. Edinburgh City Archives, Council Records, SL 7/1/66, pp. 17, 164. Ibid., SL 7/1/73, pp. 255–7; SL 7/1/75, pp. 25–6, 433–6, 446; SL 7/1/76, pp. 199–200. Edinburgh Chronicle, 11–16 Aug., 17–20 Oct. 1759. Dunbar (ed.), Sir William Burrell’s Northern Tour, 78.

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It would seem, then, that the fall of the city to the Jacobites in September 1745 left a long shadow. Brief though the episode was, it created—or reinforced, perhaps—an impression of local disaffection. Even before Prince Charles’s troops marched in, there were accusations that the trained band officers were largely Jacobites,⁸⁶ and that Archibald Stewart, the lord provost at the time as well as the MP, was in contact with the rebels. According to Alexander Carlyle, son of the Church of Scotland minister at Prestonpans, who joined the volunteers assembled to help defend Edinburgh, ‘there was not a Whig in town who did not suspect that he favoured the Pretender’s cause’.⁸⁷ Stewart was accordingly arrested, and brought before the privy council in London to account for himself on 7 December 1745. He was then charged with neglect of duty and misbehaviour in the execution of his office, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Stewart was finally tried in Edinburgh, and on 2 November 1747 he was acquitted.⁸⁸ Whether Stewart was a convenient scapegoat, or a closet Jacobite, or had merely been hedging his bets remains unknowable. But in 1747, when the council was legally reconstituted after the rebellion, Lord Marchmont, a government supporter, argued that ‘Edinburgh has at last got a good whig magistracy’.⁸⁹ In the general election of that year, James Ker, a local jeweller who strongly supported the Government, became the city MP. Ker was accepted only with great reluctance by the third Duke of Argyll, who had succeeded his brother in 1743 and, after Lord Provost Stewart, can be considered the principal political casualty of the Jacobite occupation of the city. Argyll, unhappy with Ker, now sought to regain control.⁹⁰ In 1754, he was able to secure the election as MP of William Alexander, the Lord Provost. Alexander, however, turned out to be less reliable than Argyll had expected, and proceeded to take an independent line. The Duke turned against his protégé, and managed to exclude him and his supporters from the council in 1755. But Argyll had not yet reasserted his dominance. His chosen candidate for the general election of 1761 was Alexander Forrester, a lawyer who largely resided in England and was little known in Edinburgh. Influenced, perhaps, by wartime developments that had conferred more power on public opinion, as well as by the loosening of Argyll’s hold since the rebellion, the trades made clear their displeasure. Ten days before the election, a campaign began to discredit Forrester, and perhaps more importantly, to protest at Argyll’s attempted dictation. In local newspapers petitions from various of the trade incorporations were printed that complained of ⁸⁶ Steuart (ed.), The Woodhouselee MS, 15. ⁸⁷ John Hill Burton (ed.), The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk 1722–1805 (London and Edinburgh, 1910 edn.), 122. See also, NLS, Yester Papers, MS 7071, fos. 111 and 122. ⁸⁸ T. B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanours from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783 (21 vols., London, 1816), xviii. 863–1070. ⁸⁹ NLS, Fletcher of Saltoun Papers, MS 16514, fo. 77. ⁹⁰ The following account is heavily indebted to Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke (eds.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790 (3 vols., London, 1964), i. 502.


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Forrester’s unsuitability, and of the willingness of some of the council members to ask Argyll for his recommendation.⁹¹ A pamphlet rushed out for the occasion urged the council not to ‘force a representative upon this City unknown to its whole Inhabitants, and who knows them not’.⁹² Another piece, more incendiary in its language, claimed that Forrester was an Irishman—perhaps an allusion to the Jacobite history of his family–and that if he were to become Edinburgh’s MP, ‘then our chains are riveted; we shall be as much slaves of this great man [i.e., Argyll], as if he had bored our ears with an awl, and we had formally declared, that we would serve him for ever’.⁹³ A response was quickly published, arguing (somewhat unconvincingly) that Argyll ‘never could intend to meddle in our election at all’.⁹⁴ But faced with this unanticipated revolt, the Duke backed down. He switched his support to the Lord Provost, George Lind, who was duly elected. The Jacobite occupation had thus set in train a set of events that shook the Argyll hold on the city. The Duke, having seen off a challenge to his authority from the Government in the form of Ker, had then been confronted with a local insurrection against his dominance when he tried to foist Forrester on an unwilling city in the general election of 1761. This was Argyll’s last effort to reassert his control: he died only a few days later. His followers transferred their allegiance to the Earl of Bute, then in a powerful position nationally. Lind, the new MP, was given a post that required him to resign, and James Coutt was elected under Bute’s auspices. Noble influence had been re-established, but only once the local trades incorporations had demonstrated that they could not be taken for granted.

BERKSHIRE In the eighteenth century, Berkshire included parts of present-day Oxfordshire south and west of the River Thames. It was predominantly an agricultural county, with the downlands notable for sheep farming and the Vale of White Horse famous for its cereals and cattle. To the east of the River Loddon, there remained considerable areas of woodland and forest. Berkshire’s chief towns were Reading, which had an important corn market, and Abingdon, which, like Reading, despatched large quantities of malt to London for beer-making. Textiles were produced in Reading and Abingdon, and also in Newbury and Wokingham.⁹⁵ ⁹¹ Edinburgh Evening Courant, 4, 6 April 1761. ⁹² [Anon.,] A Humble, but Serious Address to the Right Honourable Lord Provost, Magistrates, TownCouncil, and Delegates of Crafts of the City of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1761), 3. ⁹³ [Anon.,] An Address to the Citizens of Edinburgh, on the Ensuing Election of their M——r of P———t (Edinburgh, 1761), 5. ⁹⁴ [Anon.,] Answers to the Address to the Citizens of Edinburgh, on the Ensuing Election of their M——r of P———t (Edinburgh, 1761), 4. ⁹⁵ Victoria County History, Berkshire, ed. P. H. Ditchfield and William Page (4 vols., London, 1906–24), i. 394–6, 407–8, ii. 219, 221.

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The View from the Grassroots Table 2. Average Number of Widows Supported by Ashbury Poor-Rates 1738 1740 1744

7.0 8.2 7.4

1748 1753 1763

7.8 7.0 8.0

Source: Berkshire RO, Ashbury Parish Records D/P9/12/1, Overseer’s Accounts.

Windsor, on the eastern edge of the county, was of no significance commercially or industrially, but its castle, the King’s principal residence, made it a place of some political and military importance. The impact of the mid-century armed conflicts is not always easy to discern. Ashbury parish, on the edge of the downs and at the western end of the county, was making slightly more poor-relief payments to widows in 1748 and in 1763 than in the preceding years, but whether this was a consequence of war-related casualties is unclear. In any event, the number of widows receiving relief was no larger in 1748 or in 1763 than it had been in 1740, when the hard weather and food shortages were probably responsible (see Table 2). In Bradfield, to the west of Reading, most ratepayers were contributing exactly the same sums to the maintenance of the poor in 1748 as they had been in 1741.⁹⁶ Nor is there any evidence of serious trade dislocation, or even anxiety about the effects of the mid-century wars on the local economy. The concerns about the high price of bread and the distresses of the poor in 1757 appear to have had little or nothing to do with the ongoing conflict with France. Reading’s corporation decided to petition Parliament at this time, but mainly because it objected to millers and dealers buying from the farmers and setting up markets ‘in Country Villages to the prejudice and Diminution of the Toll of this and other Market Towns’.⁹⁷ Even the politics of Berkshire seems to have been scarcely affected by the wars. The county constituency experienced no contests in our period, and remained an unchallenged Tory fief. New Windsor, heavily influenced by the castle, consistently returned Government-supporting MPs. In Reading there were contests between Whigs and Tories, and between opposition and court Whigs, but the wars, and their conduct, do not register as major issues. The election in 1747 of John Morton, a Tory, at Abingdon, seems to have reflected the Tory inclinations of the corporation, rather than any engagement with national concerns; the general election of that year was for the most part a success for the Government.⁹⁸ It would be a mistake to conclude from all this, however, that the wars of 1739–63 passed Berkshire by. Loyal addresses were submitted on the occasion of ⁹⁶ Berkshire RO, Bradfield Papers, DEIf Q1, Poor rates in Bradfield, 1741 and 1748. ⁹⁷ Ibid., Reading Borough Records, R/AC/1/1/22, Minute Book 1737–58, p. 236. ⁹⁸ This brief account is based on Sedgwick (ed.), History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–1754, i. 192–5, and Namier and Brooke (eds.), History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790, i. 208–13.


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the threatened French invasion in 1744, the fall of Louisbourg and the outbreak of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745, and Cumberland’s victory at Culloden in 1746.⁹⁹ More followed in 1756, on the formal renewal of hostilities with France, and in 1759, in response to the great victories of that year.¹⁰⁰ So far as we can tell, the sentiments expressed in these parchment addresses reflected the views not just of those borough oligarchs who wrote or approved them. Daniel Turner, minister of the Baptist church in Abingdon, published a song flowing with praise for Cumberland and his defeat of the ‘late horrid Rebellion’, several stanzas of which were sung at the public thanksgiving to celebrate Culloden.¹⁰¹ There were other public celebrations of triumphs, which, while no doubt orchestrated by local elites, appear to have been vehicles of popular enthusiasm. When news arrived in Reading of the Jacobites having lifted the siege of Stirling in February 1746, ‘the Bells rang at all our Churches’ and ‘the whole Town was illuminated’. In the following October, the day of thanksgiving for the suppression of the rebellion was similarly celebrated with ‘Ringing of Bells, Bonfires, Illuminations, and all other Demonstrations of Joy’.¹⁰² The village of East Hendred marked the capture of Louisbourg in 1758 with the most prolonged and noisy excitement: ‘nothing was heard almost the whole night long’, wrote the local vicar, ‘but huzzas, firing of guns, and ringing of bells’.¹⁰³ The fall of Belle Isle in 1761 encouraged the gentry near Maidenhead to emulate, on a more modest scale, the festivities in London, by supplying the townspeople with ‘as much beer’ as ‘they can find means to drink’.¹⁰⁴ The wars, furthermore, were not always seen as distant events. In September 1756 the London press reported that Newbury’s annual fair had seen a greater purchase of horses than anyone could ever remember, and the unprecedented scale of sales was attributed to military demand.¹⁰⁵ There was concern about invasion: in February 1744, when a French landing on the south coast seemed a real possibility, the anxiety was almost palpable. Robert Lee, a gentleman of Binfield, recorded in his diary on 5 February dining at Easthampstead Park, the country seat of the local squire William Trumbull, where there was ‘talk of an Invasion from ffrance’. Two weeks later, he noted that ‘Talk of Invasion ⁹⁹ Berkshire RO, Wallingford Borough Records, W/A/AC/1/1/2, Statute Book, 20 March 1744 and 1 Oct. 1745; Reading Journal; or Weekly Review, 28 Oct.-4 Nov. 1745; Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 16 June 1746. ¹⁰⁰ Berkshire RO, Reading Borough Records, R/AC/1/1/22, Minute-book 1737–58, p. 219; Windsor Borough Records, WI/AC1/1/2, Minute-book 1725–83, p. 323. See also Newbury’s loyal address to George III, which lauds ‘the Victorious and triumphant Progress of your Fleets and Armies, in all parts of the known World’ against ‘our implacable Enemies’: ibid., Newbury Borough Records, N/AC/1/1/2, Minutes, 28 Nov. 1760. ¹⁰¹ Daniel Turner, Divine Songs, Hymns, and Other Poems (Reading, 1747), 29–30. ¹⁰² Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 10 Feb., 13 Oct. 1746. ¹⁰³ Donald Gibson (ed.), A Parson in the Vale of White Horse: George Woodward’s Letters from East Hendred, 1753–1761 (Gloucester, 1982), 111. ¹⁰⁴ Gloucestershire RO, Rooke of St Briavels Papers, D 1833 F2/10. ¹⁰⁵ London Evening Post, 4–7 Sept. 1756.

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continued’.¹⁰⁶ The following year, when the Jacobite rising threatened to topple the Hanoverian regime, and French invasion was again feared, there was a county meeting at Reading to agree what steps to take ‘for the Support of his Majesty & the present Establishment against the pretender & his Adherents’.¹⁰⁷ The county’s gentlemen and representatives of the boroughs, invited to the meeting by the Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of St. Albans, appointed a committee to make recommendations, which were then considered at a subsequent meeting. Neither of the two proposals put to the second meeting was adopted, and instead it was decided—whether for prudential or ideological reasons is not clear—to wait on Parliament’s deliberations on a militia bill.¹⁰⁸ In the next conflict, a militia bill finally passed, and Berkshire was one of the first counties to embody its reformed militia for active service in July 1759.¹⁰⁹ Berkshire’s Tories were amongst the foremost enthusiasts for a militia: in April of that same year both of the county’s MPs—at that time Arthur Vansittart of Shottesbrooke and Henry Pye of Farringdon—attended a meeting in London to decide on a common approach.¹¹⁰ Vansittart busied himself writing to Berkshire squires, encouraging them to agree to become officers in the county’s regiment: ‘the example set by Gentlemen of the greatest property in several countys of accepting even the lowest Commissions for the general benefit’, as he put it, was clearly one he wanted to see followed in his own shire.¹¹¹ However, the newly embodied Berkshire militia was not simply a Tory preserve. True, Vansittart himself was the lieutenant colonel, and the colonel was Sir Willoughby Aston, 5th Bart, who owned land valued at £400 ‘& upwards’ in Farringdon parish, and was a Tory MP for Nottingham (his principal estate was in Derbyshire). But the major was John Dodd of Swallowfield, the Whig MP for Reading.¹¹² The working together of Tories and Whigs in the militia was, perhaps, one of the reasons for the decline in party identification notable in Berkshire, as elsewhere, in the closing stages of the Seven Years War and its aftermath: it seems that at the general election of 1761 the labels Whig and Tory were conspicuous by their absence in the Reading contest, even though Dodd, who had ¹⁰⁶ Berkshire RO, D/EZ 30 F1, Diary of Robert Lee, 5, 18 Feb. 1744. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., Windsor Borough Records, WI/AC1/1/2, Minute-book 1725–83, p. 228. See also John Charles Fox (ed.), The Official Diary of Lieutenant-General Adam Williamson Deputy-Lieutenant of the Tower of London 1722–1747 (Royal Historical Society, Camden 3rd series, xxii, London, 1912), 118. ¹⁰⁸ Reading Journal; or Weekly Review, 28 Oct.–4 Nov. 1745. ¹⁰⁹ J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue 1660–1802 (London, 1965), 447 (Appendix A). ¹¹⁰ Ibid., 123 and n. 3, and 453–4 (Appendix C). For Pye and Vansittart see Namier and Brooke (eds.), History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790, iii. 344 and 574. ¹¹¹ Berkshire RO, Clarke and Wiseman Family Papers, D/ECw 02, Vansittart to [William Wiseman Clarke], 12 May 1759. ¹¹² For Aston and Dodd, see Namier and Brooke (eds.), History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790, ii. 31 and 326–7. For the properties of the militia officers, see Berkshire RO, Quarter Sessions Papers, Q/Rom 1, Militia Officers’ Qualification Rolls, 1759.


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been engaged in close-fought campaigns against Tories in the past, was one of the candidates.¹¹³ Berkshire’s militia quota was fixed by the Militia Act at 560 officers and men. If finding the officers was not as difficult as in some counties, raising the rank and file militiamen was no easy matter. While there were no disturbances of the kind that occurred in Bedfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Surrey,¹¹⁴ there was the usual reluctance of some balloted men to serve in person, and the search for substitutes.¹¹⁵ But the militia was not the only military force recruiting in Berkshire. In July 1739, before the war with Spain began, an army officer trying to enlist men in the villages to the east of Reading was encountering reluctance on the part ‘the Country folks’ to serve overseas.¹¹⁶ At the time of the ’Fortyfive, recruiting for the Duke of Bedford’s fencible regiment, which was to serve in Britain only, was more productive: that autumn, fifteen enlistees, ‘all verry good men’, were collected by a corporal at Windsor.¹¹⁷ Urban centres were often viewed as promising recruiting grounds, as it was to these that the surplus, or underemployed, agricultural population migrated in search of work and opportunity. Newbury, for instance, was described in 1746 as ‘a good recruiting town’.¹¹⁸ There is ample evidence that Reading was seen in much the same light: deserter descriptions posted in local newspapers indicate that bargemen from the town were enlisted in the army,¹¹⁹ and we can be reasonably confident that the navy would also have sought to recruit men trained in river-carriage.¹²⁰ In the Seven Years War, Cpl. William Todd of the Thirtieth Foot, based in Reading from December 1757 until May 1758, recorded in his diary the significant number of men obliged to join his regiment as a result of the Recruiting Act then operating.¹²¹ Other locals were sent to the armed forces as an alternative to punishment after conviction for criminal offences: in 1756 three men found ¹¹³ Namier and Brooke (eds.), History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790, i. 211–12. Another contributory factor might have been Dodd’s declining enthusiasm: see PRONI, Bedford Papers, T/2915/11/22, Lord Fane to Bedford, 2 Feb. 1761. ¹¹⁴ See Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (London, 1978), ch. 8; Nicholas Rogers, Crowd, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), ch. 2. ¹¹⁵ On the other hand, there were also volunteers who came forward: see, e.g., Berkshire RO, Hungerford Parish Records, D/P71/17, Overseer’s Militia Papers, 1762, regarding Thomas Bradford, militia volunteer. ¹¹⁶ Edward Hughes (ed.), Letters of Spencer Cowper, Dean of Durham, 1746–74 (Surtees Society, clxv, Durham, 1956), 17. ¹¹⁷ Bedfordshire RO, Russell Papers, Box 769, Richard Dennison to [Robert Butcher], 2 Nov. 1745. ¹¹⁸ Charles Sanford Terry (ed.), The Albemarle Papers (2 vols., Aberdeen, 1902), i. 66. ¹¹⁹ See, e.g., Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 16 Dec. 1745. ¹²⁰ Unfortunately, the Admiralty records only began to list the place of origin of naval recruits after the Seven Years War. We know, however, that Reading men served in the navy in the American war: see Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), 297. ¹²¹ Andrew Cormack and Alan Jones (eds.), The Journal of Corporal Todd 1745–1762 (Army Records Society, xviii, Stroud, 2001), 38–9.

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guilty of grand larceny at the Reading Assizes were despatched ‘to serve his Majesty in the Navy’.¹²² The army was not just in Berkshire to recruit. It was common for troops to be quartered in the towns and villages of the county, while doing guard duty at Windsor castle, or after return from overseas service, or while preparing for inspection, either in Reading or in London. The plentiful number of inns, especially on the London to Bristol road that ran through the county, from Maidenhead in the east to Hungerford in the west, made it an obvious place to accommodate soldiers.¹²³ If this was the case in peacetime, the number of military personnel involved tended to increase during wars, as more troops were serving in the army, and there was a greater movement of soldiers as a result of expeditions abroad and in reaction to invasion fears. The quartering of troops could be a burden for the local community. In November 1746, Reading Corporation agreed to provide a bushel of coal per day for the soldiers wintering in the town, ‘to continue until the latter end of ffebruary if they stay that long’.¹²⁴ More concerning still was the behaviour of some of the soldiers. In September 1756 a dragoon was reported to have stolen a communion-table cover from St Laurence’s Church in Reading, and just over a year later a soldier of the Thirtieth Foot was flogged for taking a prayer book from a Newbury church.¹²⁵ However, we should not forget that the presence of the military also offered opportunities for increased sales of goods and services. Soldiers themselves might have had very limited purchasing power as individuals—their pay was too poor to enable them to buy very much—but officers were a different matter, and their expenditure, either on themselves or for their units, could be beneficial for local producers, retailers, innkeepers, and even the owners of wagons that were hired for military use. On a rather different scale was the camp established in 1740 near Newbury in order to train a number of regiments at the beginning of the conflict with Spain. Formed in the early summer, this tented military settlement was probably, at its largest, temporary home to about 6,000 soldiers.¹²⁶ The camp broke up in October, after what one of the cavalry officers based there described as a ‘pacifick’ campaign.¹²⁷ Supplying the troops was at least partly the work of a contractor who agreed to provide hay, straw, and wood for all that year’s encampments,¹²⁸ but there were certainly opportunities for local producers and retailers. The survival of an order book relating to the encampment enables us to see something of its impact on the locality—positive and negative. An order of 2 July indicates that the inns in Newbury and Speenhamland were sending unauthorized liquors to the ¹²² Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 15 March 1756. ¹²³ J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army 1715–1795 (Oxford, 1981), 34. ¹²⁴ Berkshire RO, Reading Borough Records, R/AC/1/1/22, Minute-book 1737–58, p. 91. ¹²⁵ Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury, 13 Sept. 1756; Cormack and Jones (eds.), Journal of Corporal Todd, 36. ¹²⁶ TNA: PRO, Chatham Papers, 30/8/75, fo. 5. ¹²⁷ Tyne and Wear Archives, Ellison Papers, A19/7. ¹²⁸ See T 52/41, pp. 83, 139, 238, for payments to the contractor.


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camp, and taking advantage of the new market on their doorsteps. Despite a threat to destroy any such alcohol sent to the soldiers, it was necessary to complain of the continuation of the sales nine days later. But if the neighbouring innkeepers sought to profit from the troops at the camp, other local people appear to have found the presence of the military less than welcome. Later in July, orders were issued to prevent the soldiers from taking fish out of local ponds, and in September the number of patrols sent to Newbury was increased to catch stray soldiers wandering about the streets after tattoo. At the same time, there were also concerns about the damage being done to the house and grounds of a local farmer called Appleford.¹²⁹ Two cavalrymen were arrested for entering and presumably stealing from his orchard. Further losses seem to have followed, including two sheep, and to compensate the farmer in some measure for the ‘Damage he hath sustained during the Encampment’, it was agreed that he should be allowed to have a considerable quantity of dung produced by the cavalry horses to fertilize his fields. Even this recompense was denied to the poor man, however, for on 2 October, as the camp was about to break up, the major of brigade was instructed to find out why Appleford had been refused at least part of the dung that had been promised to him.¹³⁰ Perhaps the local view was that the balance of opportunities and costs came down in the negative scale. At any rate, when in May 1760 there was talk of a camp being established at Reading, Newbury Corporation decided to petition Lord Bruce, a leading local landowner, and Lord Barrington, the secretary at war (as well as a Berkshire squire), to try to ensure that the camp was not put near Newbury instead.¹³¹ The mid-century wars clearly affected Cork, Edinburgh, and Berkshire in very different ways. The economy of Cork was more obviously influenced—positively and negatively—than were the local economies of either Edinburgh or Berkshire. Recruiting of manpower for service in the regular armed forces was a feature of the wartime experiences of Edinburgh and Berkshire, but less so that of Cork, where religious and security considerations limited the scope for local enlistment in the army, if not the navy. In Edinburgh, city politics was profoundly affected by the trauma of the Jacobite occupation in 1745, which, although brief, caused longrunning tensions and ultimately shook the hold of the Duke of Argyll. In Berkshire and Cork, meanwhile, the political impact was less dramatic. But for all these differences, there were some common elements. A military presence was a shared experience. Cork, Edinburgh, and Berkshire had troops quartered on them—many more than was usually the case in peacetime. They all felt the benefits, in terms of increased business for local shopkeepers and service trades, and they were all confronted with the more negative aspects of having soldiers in close proximity with civilians and their property. In all three of our case ¹²⁹ Further identification of the luckless farmer Appleford has not been possible. ¹³⁰ NLS, Wade Papers, MS 3076, fos. 28, 32, 34, 44, 45, 47, 48. ¹³¹ Berkshire RO, Newbury Borough Records, N/AC/1/1/2, Minutes, 19 May 1760.

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studies, local militias were raised, or augmented, or activated, during the wars for protection of the communities in question. And everywhere, bell-ringing, bonfires, civic ceremonies, and the consumption of considerable quantities of drink marked British and even allied victories. Very few people, in short, could have been in much doubt that they were living through a period of armed conflict.

11 Comparisons Historical and Geographical Local case studies enable us to see the imprint of the mid-century wars at the grassroots. To understand more fully the significance of the impact of the conflicts of this period, however, we need also to step back and consider the experience of the years 1739–63 in comparison with the British and Irish experience of earlier and later armed struggles of the long eighteenth century, particularly the War of the League of Augsburg, or Nine Years War (1689–97), the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), the American War (1775–83), and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815). Perhaps more importantly, we ought also to look beyond the British Isles. The stresses, strains, and opportunities created or intensified by the mid-century conflicts should be placed in a European context. How do they compare with what we know of war-related developments on the Continent at this time?

WAR AND THE STATE So far as the development of state apparatus is concerned, historical comparisons are perhaps less instructive than geographical ones. Waging war had always been a key function of the state—perhaps the key function—and every war in some measure enhanced that function, by increasing the size of the armed forces and the bureaucracy in the revenue services and by stimulating improvements in the effectiveness of the state machinery. In this respect, the mid-century wars merely carried forward a process already underway, and which was to continue in subsequent conflicts: indeed, one could argue that the wars against Louis XIV between 1689 and 1713 were more significant than those that followed, at least until the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. During the wars of William III and Queen Anne, the number of full-time employees in the fiscal bureaucracy almost doubled—a much larger increase than between 1739 and 1763 and in the American war.¹ ¹ John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989), 67 (table 3.3). See also Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society 1680–1730 (London, 1982), ch. 8.

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Comparisons Historical and Geographical

One feature in the mid-eighteenth century is perhaps worthy of note, however. Partnerships with those beyond state control were of great importance. True, in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War there was probably no greater emphasis than in the earlier War of the Spanish Succession on working with private and local interests. Contracts with the great Jewish merchants who dominated the Amsterdam grain trade ensured that the Duke of Marlborough’s army was properly supplied, just as contracting with British, Irish, and foreign merchants was vital to the sustenance of British and allied armies at home and abroad during the mid-century wars. However, if we look ahead to the long wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, there were some noticeable differences. From 1784 there was an army transport corps, rather than continued reliance on hired horses and civilian drivers, and in 1799 a uniformed Royal Wagon Train, while from 1793 there was a concerted programme of barrack building, which reduced the use of inns for the quartering of troops.² These developments suggest that the state was taking on more direct responsibilities, and relying less on private and local interests. The move to higher levels of direct taxation and reduced dependence on borrowing in the French Revolutionary War can be seen in the same light. Partnerships, in other words, were in some respects less important to the British war effort in 1793–1815 than they had been in 1739–63. Seen in the context of the experience of other European belligerents in the midcentury wars, we can see that this reliance on the assistance of private and local interests was far from unusual. Everywhere the state worked in partnership with private individuals and corporate bodies to mobilize resources and manpower for war. Dependence in Britain and Ireland on the recruiting efforts of nobles and landowners was matched by the influence of nobles on military recruiting in many continental European countries. This worked on two levels. Grandees could raise whole regiments, such as the noblemen’s corps formed in Britain in both mid-century wars, and the units raised on the authority of Hungarian magnates to help the beleaguered Maria Theresa in 1741–2. More importantly, perhaps, junior officers from landed backgrounds used their local influence to fill the ranks of their regiments. As M. S. Anderson comments, ‘the persisting strength of quasi-feudal ties’ ensured that officers from gentry or aristocratic families were often able to bring with them into the army men who joined out of ‘personal loyalty or sense of obligation’.³ Similarly, Britain’s dependence on contractors to provide food and other vital supplies for its armed forces can be compared with the dependence of other European states on the expertise and experience of contracting agents. There were, to be sure, some differences. Confidence in the financial system probably meant that British merchants and financiers were rather more willing to engage in contracts to supply the armed forces with goods or ² For barrack building in the period 1793–1815, see Sir John Fortescue, A History of the British Army (5 vols., London, 1899–1910), iv. 903–7. ³ M. S. Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748 (Harlow, 1995), 32.


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services than were some of their counterparts in places like Austria, where there was considerably less faith in the state’s financial strength. In many European powers, state officials and military officers therefore played a larger role in supply than they did in Britain.⁴ Even so, contracting was common to all the belligerents, as it was beyond the capacity of any state to provide all that the armies of the time required without employing the specialized knowledge and credit facilities of merchants and financiers. When the Spanish army was ordered to invade Portugal in December 1761, the army’s own service corps sent comisarios de guerra to purchase meat, rice, vegetables, and firewood for the troops; however, the provision of grains was entrusted to the experienced Francisco de Mendinueta, who had been acting as a military contractor since 1744.⁵ If in Britain there was no army transport corps until 1784, in Austria, likewise, the military transport service remained largely in civilian hands until the creation of the Militärfuhrwesenkorps in 1771.⁶ However, despite this partnership with private contractors and other individuals, the personnel of the state increased greatly in all the belligerent countries during the mid-century wars. As indicated in Tables 3 and 4 later, the regular armed forces were expanded in all of those powers involved in the wars. Even France, which supported a very large peacetime army, considerably increased the number of troops in its service in both wars. The quantity of non-military servants of the state also increased in many places, especially (and unsurprisingly) those in revenuerelated posts. In Austria, for instance, there were some 4,000 royal officials in 1740, and around 6,000 by 1763.⁷ Brewer suggests that the growth of bureaucracy in Britain outstripped that in most of the other European powers; the Dutch fiscal administration remained tiny by comparison, and even in Prussia, so often seen as the bureaucratic state par excellence, there were only about 3,000 officials in the middle of the century, of whom around 250 worked in the central administration. France, on the face of it, had a much larger number of civil officers, but a good number of these were employed not by the state itself, but by private tax farmers who had been delegated the task of collecting taxes. If one tries to compare like with like—by no means easy—it seems that the French fiscal bureaucracy was no larger than Britain’s, and quite possibly smaller.⁸ However, numbers, as already noted, are not everything. We need to know whether there was an increase in professionalism and efficiency in other European ⁴ See Gordon Elder Bannerman, ‘British Army Contracts and Domestic Supply, 1739–1763’, unpublished London Ph.D. Dissertation, 2005, 19, 66. ⁵ Agustín González Enisco, ‘Mobilizing Resources for War: The 1762 Conflict with Portugal’, unpublished paper, delivered at conference on ‘Mobilizing Money and Resources for War: European States at Work 1689–1815’, Universidad de Navarra, Sept. 2004. ⁶ Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 304. ⁷ H. M. Scott, ‘Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740–90’, in Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (London, 1990), 158. ⁸ John Brewer, ‘The Eighteenth-Century British State: Contexts and Issues’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), 59–60.

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polities comparable to that in Britain. In Spain, the Marquis de la Ensenada embarked on a programme of reform from the moment he took control of national finances in 1743, though his efforts were concentrated in the period after the ending of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748. Spain had been largely successful in the war, especially in Italy. Nonetheless, the conflict had exposed the weaknesses in Spanish public finances and the inadequacies of the Spanish administrative structures. Ensenada supervised the gathering of a vast corpus of statistical information as preparation for the introduction of a new single tax on income. His single-tax scheme had to be dropped in the face of resistance from the nobility and Church, but in other areas Ensenada was more successful: he was able to reform the customs, improve tax collection procedures, and tighten up accounting practices, all of which helped to increase the revenue at the disposal of the Government.⁹ The Austrian monarchy, which emerged in 1748 as the loser in its struggle with Prussia, was particularly determined to increase effectiveness. This ambition took the Austrian state into new areas of activity, such as the direct ownership of the woollen fabrics factory at Linz, and the establishment of a military cloth warehouse in Vienna.¹⁰ More obviously, it involved overhaul of the Austrian armed forces. Shortly after the close of the War of the Austrian Succession, the Habsurgs’ army started a process of modernization, with a military academy opening at Weiner Neustadt in 1752. By 1758, the Austrian forces, which had looked oldfashioned and poorly organized by comparison with Frederick the Great’s troops, were beginning to innovate rather than merely to catch up. In that year, Lt. Gen. Franz Moritz Lacy created the first modern staff, designed to improve communication, and especially the transmission of orders, to collections of hitherto largely discreet military units. Lacy also became the first Austrian quartermaster general.¹¹ The Austrian army did not attain a level of capability that enabled it to transform its fortunes, but it did inflict defeats on the Prussians in the Seven Years War that demonstrated an improvement in performance. Military reforms were matched by a commitment to political and bureaucratic advance: an institution for the training of civil servants was established in 1749, and this was followed up in 1754 by the creation of an academy to prepare Habsburg diplomats. Under Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz, first minister from 1749, the new Directorium in Publicis et Cameralibus brought together different government departments and sought to coordinate internal policy; from 1761, the Staatsrat, or Council of State, established by Prince Wenzel Anton Kaunitz, endeavoured to realize the same aim by a different route. In both cases, ⁹ Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000), 235. ¹⁰ Herman Freudenberger, Lost Momentum: Austrian Economic Development 1750s–1830s (Vienna, 2003), 100, 121. ¹¹ Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (Ware, 1998 edn.), 180; Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 307.


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central government’s primary objective was to wrest control from the provincial estates, particularly over taxation. Although the provincial estates successfully resisted the attempts to take taxation away from them altogether, their role was circumscribed and subject to oversight by new local officials directly answerable to the central authorities.¹² In France, military professionalism was encouraged by the establishment of the École de Mézières, to train the engineers, which began to admit students in 1749. Two years later, the École Militaire was opened in Paris. But the French army had performed creditably during the Austrian war—especially in the Low Countries under Marshal de Saxe—so there was no great pressure to improve. The same was not true of the navy, which had very obviously lost control of the seas to the British fleet. The main emphasis, accordingly, was on increasing the capacity of the French maritime forces. In 1748, it was decided to abolish the galley fleet, and concentrate resources on the building of modern ships-of-the-line. Four years later, the Académie de la Marine opened at Brest to introduce officers to the scientific study of naval matters. The defeats inflicted on the French forces—on land and at sea—during the Seven Years War brought forth a more thoroughgoing commitment to change.¹³ A school for training army staff officers was established at Grenoble in1764, and in 1766 the first steps were taken to create a permanent French general staff.¹⁴ More fundamentally, the army’s regiments were reformed and standardized, and the period of enlistment was fixed at eight years, with a bounty for all who re-enlisted. In 1775, Lord Lewisham, a young English aristocrat, was able to report home on his very favourable impressions of the new model French army: ‘they are really a very noble body of men’, he told his father.¹⁵ The reformed French navy was no less praised. When it went into action against the Royal Navy at Ushant in 1778, one of its British opponents conceded that ‘It is agreed by every body that no fleet could go thro’ the different motions better than what the French did, that they were even superior to the British in that point’.¹⁶ There was no comparable administrative overhaul in French civil government, but, as in the Habsburg lands and Spain, there were various attempts to increase ¹² Scott, ‘Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy’, esp. 152–7; Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, esp. 268 and 282. See, also, P. D. G. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia (2 vols., Oxford, 1987), and Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism 1753–1780 (Cambridge, 1994). For the success of the Austrians in introducing tax reform into one of their Italian provinces, see Daniel M. Klang, Tax Reform in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy (New York, 1971). ¹³ Colin Jones, ‘The Military Revolution and the Professionalisation of the French Army under the Ancien Régime’, in Michael Duffy (ed.), The Military Revolution and the State 1500–1800 (Exeter, 1980), esp. 45. ¹⁴ Richard Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare 1650–1830 (London, 1999), 204; Jean Meyer, ‘States, Roads, War, and Organization of Space’, in Philippe Contamine (ed.), The Organization of the Modern State in Europe: War and Competition between States (Oxford, 2000), 112–13; Duffy, Military Experience in the Age of Reason, 181. ¹⁵ HMC, Dartmouth MSS (3 vols., London, 1887–96), iii. 219. ¹⁶ NAS, Logan Home of Edrom Muniments, GD 1/384/6/30.

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tax yields. During the Austrian war, as in the War of the Spanish Succession, the dixième, a tax on incomes, had been introduced to supplement existing taxes. At the end of the war, as before, it was withdrawn. But in 1749, Machault d’Arnouville, the controller-general of finances, decided to introduce a new peacetime tax on incomes, the vingtième. Despite the Church’s securing an exemption, the new tax put French finances onto a relatively firm footing until the Seven Years War, with its enormous demands for men and money, threw the whole system into crisis. Large-scale borrowing was employed at first, and then ever increasing taxes and the steady erosion of exemptions. Resistance increased accordingly—especially when Controller-General Bertin tried to continue some of the wartime taxes after 1763 to service the bloated debt. In 1770, a new controller-general, Abbé Terray, successfully tried a new tactic—consolidating repayments and reducing interest rates. When he followed this up with a plan to reassess land values, there was a predictable storm of protest, but this time the King stood firm and abolished the parlements, replacing them with new royal courts. Notwithstanding the decision in 1774 of the new monarch, Louis XVI, to reinstate the obstreperous parlements, we can say that from 1749 there were serious efforts to address the weaknesses in French public finances, including the exemptions.¹⁷

MOBILIZ ATION If we consider the mobilization of British and Irish manpower in the historical perspective of previous and subsequent eighteenth-century armed struggles, it should be noted that the Austrian war brought fewer men into the regular armed forces than the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the century, but that the Seven Years War began a pattern of substantial wartime growth of the army and navy.¹⁸ Indeed, the Seven Years War saw a rate of mobilization only marginally smaller than in the American war. While the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars expanded the armed forces much more dramatically, that expansion, seen in the context of eighteenth-century developments, seems less like a revolution in itself, and more like an intensification of a trend towards greater mobilization of manpower that had been gaining momentum since the Seven Years War.¹⁹ ¹⁷ James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1995), 201–4, 230–4. Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge, 2000), stresses the erosion of noble exemptions and the successful imposition of direct taxes on the privileged classes, especially after the Seven Years War. ¹⁸ See Brewer, Sinews of Power, 30 (table 2.1), which provides indicative figures up to and including the American war. For the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 286–7. ¹⁹ For an earlier comparative endeavour, see my piece on ‘British Mobilization in the War of American Independence’, Historical Research, 72 (1999), esp. 66.

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Comparisons Historical and Geographical Table 3. European Navies Compared (Measured in Thousands of Tons) Year

Britain

France

Spain

Netherlands

1740 1745 1750 1755 1760

195 235 276 277 375

91 98 115 162 156

91 55 41 113 137

65 65 62 58 62

Source: Jan Glete, Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America 1500–1860 (2 vols., Stockholm, 1993), i. 263 (table 23.6).

Table 4. Armies in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Europe Compared Year

British

French

Dutch

Prussian

Austrian

1740 1745 1756 1760/1

40,800 53,100 47,500 99,000

201,000 345,000 290,000 347,000

30,000 90,000 — 36,000

77,000 135,000 137,000 130,000

108,000 200,000 156,000 201,000

Source: Peter Wilson, ‘Warfare in the Old Regime 1648–1789’, in Jeremy Black, (ed.), European Warfare 1453–1815 (London, 1999), 80 (table 3.1). These figures should be seen as approximations and must be regarded only as indicative.

The growth of the British armed forces between 1739 and 1763 stands out as unusual when placed in European context. There was nothing to compare with the Royal Navy, in terms of number of personnel or number of ships. The British navy enjoyed a consistent superiority over its enemies. It expanded considerably in both mid-century conflicts, especially the Seven Years War, maintaining its advantage even while its rivals endeavoured to increase their naval power. Indeed, for much of our period the Royal Navy was larger than all of the other major European navies combined (see Table 3). The army, however, looks less impressive in European context. It increased in size during both mid-century conflicts, modestly in the Austrian struggle and more spectacularly in the Seven Years War. However, it appears to have remained only medium-sized by continental European standards (see Table 4). The regular British army was much smaller than the Austrian and Prussian armies, and was dwarfed by the enormous number of regular troops that the French were able to deploy. France, to be sure, had a much larger population—roughly double that of Britain and Ireland combined—but the same could not be said of Prussia, which had about a quarter as many people as Britain.²⁰ ²⁰ John Childs, ‘The Army and the State in Britain and Germany during the Eighteenth Century’, in John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (eds.), Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany (Oxford, 1999), 55.

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Yet it would be wrong to assume that there was only limited commitment to building up British military (as opposed to naval) capability. In both midcentury wars, according to Patrick O’Brien’s calculations, more money was actually spent on the land forces than on the sea forces.²¹ About a fifth of the money allocated to the British army between 1739 and 1763 was devoted to the hiring of foreign troops.²² These auxiliaries were not part of the army proper, any more than were the locally raised and European forces of the East India Company, or the American provincial regiments. But they unquestionably added to the military clout of the British state. The relatively modest size of the regular British army is therefore misleading. Continental European armies, in contrast to the British army, included foreign regiments as permanent components. Around a fifth of the French infantry, for instance, comprised foreign corps—mainly Irish, Swiss, and German. Even if we accept, as we must, that some of these corps were less foreign than they appeared on paper (the Irish brigade increasingly made up its numbers with Frenchmen, and many of the German regiments recruited in French Alsace as well as in the German states proper),²³ it remains the case that the foreign contribution was large enough to ease the burden on the male population of France itself. Similarly, the ability of Prussia to support an army that, in relation to its own population, seems unsustainably large needs to be seen in the light not only of its well-known cantonal system of recruitment, but also of the practice of enlisting as many men as possible from other parts of Germany. Perhaps between a third and a half of Frederick the Great’s army comprised non-Prussians.²⁴ The Habsburgs’ military forces also drew heavily on men recruited from beyond the monarchy’s own lands, particularly from the other German states.²⁵ The Dutch probably depended to an even greater extent on foreigners: besides having a Scots Brigade, still officered by Scots and with a significant Scottish presence in the ranks,²⁶ the army of the United Provinces employed large numbers of German troops.²⁷ However, we should remember that in many instances the foreign ²¹ Unpublished paper by Patrick O’Brien. I am grateful to Professor O’Brien for sharing this information with me. ²² Brewer, Sinews of Power, 32. ²³ Lee Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Military Organization and Administration (Durham, N.C., 1967), 74–5. See, however, Harman Murtagh, ‘Irish Soldiers Abroad, 1600–1800’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds.), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), 312, for the view that in 1745 the rank and file of the Irish brigade was still very largely Irish-born. ²⁴ See Willard R. Fann, ‘Foreigners in the Prussian Army, 1713–56: Some Statistical and Interpretive Problems’, Central European History, 23 (1990), 76–85. ²⁵ Christopher Duffy, The Austrian Army in the Seven Years War, i. Instrument of War (Rosemount, Ill., 2000), 195. Peter H. Wilson, ‘The Politics of Military Recruitment in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, English Historical Review, 117 (2002), 567, believes that Austria took more men from other German states than did Prussia. ²⁶ See James Ferguson (ed.), Papers Illustrating the History of the Scots Brigade, ii, 1698–1782 (Scottish History Society, xxxv, Edinburgh, 1899). ²⁷ Peter H. Wilson, German Armies: War and German Politics, 1648–1806 (London, 1998), 259 (table 7.1).


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contribution was not significantly larger than that for the British. The difference principally lay in the way in which the foreign element was organized: in the British case foreign corps served as auxiliaries, separate from the army itself, whereas in the continental case foreign troops were usually incorporated into the army and became part of its establishment strength. We have seen that British and Irish mobilization, particularly during the Seven Years War, brought into the armed forces, official and unofficial, men from a wide variety of social backgrounds.²⁸ The officers in the army, navy, and militia were by no means drawn exclusively, or even predominantly, from the nobility. The rank and file was not made up merely of criminals, paupers, and the unemployed. Comparisons with continental European armies are again tricky, but interesting. Take the officer corps. In 1758 there were 181 general officers employed in the French army in Germany, every single one of whom was a noble of one description or another.²⁹ On the eve of the War of the Austrian Succession, the Prussian army was hardly less noble-dominated: all sixty-three of its generals were aristocrats, as were fifty-six out of fifty-seven colonels, forty-four out of forty-six lieutenant colonels, and 100 out of 108 majors.³⁰ These examples would seem to bear out the familiar picture of the officer class as an aristocratic preserve. However, a direct comparison with the apparently much less noble-dominated British army officer corps can be misleading, for the simple reason that the titled nobility was much larger and less exclusive in most European states than it was in Britain and Ireland; if British and Irish officers from untitled gentry backgrounds were re-categorized as equivalents of continental aristocrats, the disparity would be less marked. If we consider the lower officer posts, it seems that the French army, not yet affected by the famous Ségur Law of 1781, which insisted on proof of the nobility of all four of an officer’s grandparents, had many bourgeois entrants, especially but not only in corps such as the artillery and engineers, where a measure of technical competence was required. Indeed, the Ségur Law can be seen as an official sop to the resentment of the traditional nobility at the successful penetration of the lower reaches of the officer corps by the wealthy middle classes, who were believed to lack the required martial qualities.³¹ Besides a significant bourgeois presence— perhaps a third of the junior officers were from the middle classes—there were also, as in the British army, some promotions from the ranks.³² The Austrian officer ranks contained remarkably few members of the Austrian and Bohemian nobility: in 1740 it was reckoned that around half the officers in the ‘German’ regiments were commoners. Rather than nobility being a qualification for a commission, ²⁸ See Ch. 3. ²⁹ Kennett, French Armies, 57. ³⁰ Christopher Storrs and H. M. Scott, ‘The Military Revolution and the European Nobility, c.1600–1800’, War in History, 3 (1996), 15. ³¹ David Bien, ‘The Army in the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction and Revolution’, Past and Present, no. 85 (1979), 68–98. See also, Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army 1750–1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (Manchester, 2002), ch. 1. ³² Kennett, French Armies, 57–9.

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possession of a commission became a route to nobility. In 1757 commoners who had served without a blemish for thirty years could apply to acquire noble status.³³ Turn to the ordinary soldiers, and the British armed forces again appear less than unusual. True, the British army probably relied less on convict and pauper recruitment than some other European armies. Artisans and craftsmen were more likely to be found in the British army than in Frederick the Great’s regiments: the Prussian cantonal system expressly protected such skilled workers from military service.³⁴ The French army, like the British, recruited disproportionately from the urban centres; even so, Louis XV’s soldiers were overwhelmingly drawn from the rural areas—much more so than in the British case. But notwithstanding these differences, the similarities are striking. All European armies had their share of pardoned convicts, paupers, and the destitute in the ranks. Most European armies also contained significant numbers of artisans and skilled workmen. Many soldiers were recruited from peasant families, where a period of military service was considered an appropriate option for one or more of the sons.³⁵ Everywhere, landowner influence was an important factor in recruitment.³⁶

ECONOMIC IMPACT The scale of military effort had a direct connection with the extent of taxation and borrowing and with the size of the stimulus provided by government spending. In both the mid-century wars, as we have just seen, there was a lesser mobilization of British and Irish manpower and shipping than that in the American war, and very noticeably lesser mobilization than that in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It was surely indicative of the relatively modest impact of the Austrian Succession struggle that it was the only war of the century in which the excise duty on beer and porter did not increase.³⁷ In the Seven Years War, as we have seen, a significant portion of the greatly increased government expenditure on the armed forces was spent abroad.³⁸ There were some benefits for agriculture and industry in Britain and Ireland, but rather less than those in the American war, when the British army serving in the rebel colonies drew most of its supplies from the British Isles.³⁹ In neither of the mid-century conflicts, it should be ³³ Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 305–6. ³⁴ See Denis E. Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996), 21–3. ³⁵ For an analysis of the rank and file of the Austrian army, see Duffy, The Austrian Army in the Seven Years War, i. Instrument of War, 203. ³⁶ M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618–1789 (London, 1988), 122. ³⁷ Anderson, War of the Austrian Succession, 50. ³⁸ See Ch. 4. ³⁹ See Norman Baker, Government and Contractors (London, 1971), ch. 3; R. A. Bowler, Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in North America (Princeton, 1975), chs. 3 and 4.


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added, was there a sustained decline in overseas trade that could be compared with the dramatic fall in the American war.⁴⁰ Even so, there were some special features of the Austrian and Seven Years Wars worthy of note. The credit crisis of 1745–6, caused primarily by the Jacobite uprising, affected both government finances and the general economy; at its height it threatened to bring both Britain and Ireland to their knees. It was shorter than the credit crisis of 1778–82, but arguably sharper and more destabilizing. In the Seven Years War, the acquisition of new territories meant the creation of new or larger markets and access to new or cheaper sources of raw materials. The result was a substantial stimulation to overseas trade in the later years of the war. If the American contest was notable for the decline in the volume and value of external commerce, especially in 1778–81, the Seven Years War was no less notable for the great surge of exports in 1759–60.⁴¹ In this sense, the Seven Years War resembled the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when access was secured to the Iberian markets of Spain and Portugal, and through them to the Spanish and Portuguese empires in America, leading to a significant growth in English exports in the period 1700–40.⁴² Comparisons with continental Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century suggest that in some areas of enquiry the impact on Britain and Ireland was much less significant, in others that there was a broad similarity, and in still others that Britain and Ireland were more profoundly affected. So far as destruction and waste is concerned, it seems clear that Britain and Ireland fared much less badly than did many parts of continental Europe. On land, the Jacobite uprising and its suppression caused damage, but if we look at the period as a whole there was little to compare with the experience of areas subject to the unwelcome attentions of contesting bodies of soldiers for a longer time. In the early spring of 1746, Lord Pitsligo worried that military operations near Inverness were going to disrupt planting crops for the coming year.⁴³ However, this area was subjected to the demands of the rival armies for just a few weeks—many areas on the Continent had to endure much more prolonged campaigning. A year later, in the spring of 1747, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote from Brescia that the ‘part of Italy I pass’d in comeing hither has suffer’d so much by the War that it is quite different from when I left it’.⁴⁴ Great swathes of Germany were exploited or even ravaged ⁴⁰ See Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), 58–70. ⁴¹ See N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985), 131 (table 6.6), for comparisons of exports as a proportion of national output. ⁴² See D. W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford, 1988). ⁴³ NLS, Fettercairn Papers, Acc. 4796, Box 101, bundle 6, [Pitsligo] to Sir Thomas Sheridan, 8 April 1746. ⁴⁴ Robert Halsband (ed.), The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (3 vols., Oxford, 1965–7), ii. 382.

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by armies in both the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War.⁴⁵ Similarly, the Basse–Meuse region of the Low Countries was a regular scene of operations and military marches; in 1746–8 it was subject to heavy foraging by the French and allied armies.⁴⁶ When nearby Bergen-op-Zoom was stormed in September 1747, the pillage and destruction (not to mention the loss of life) were so great that they seemed to horrify even some of those involved in the assault: ‘far from depicting it, I want to forget it for ever’, wrote one French officer.⁴⁷ No town in the British Isles suffered in this way. Even France, which avoided major military operations on its own soil, endured short-lived invasions of its frontier provinces in the Austrian war,⁴⁸ the occupation of Belle Isle at the end of the Seven Years War, and destructive coastal raids in both conflicts. The attack on St Malo in June 1758 resulted in the burning not only of two French naval vessels and twenty-four privateers, but also of some seventy merchant ships and about forty smaller craft.⁴⁹ No British or Irish port experienced such destruction in either of the wars of our period. The contrast is less marked when we turn to seaborne losses, but even here British and Irish merchants were probably less deleteriously affected than the French, at least in the Seven Years War. The demographic impact of armed conflict was similarly more obvious in parts of continental Europe than in Britain and Ireland. British manpower losses, while impossible to calculate with any precision, seem to pale into insignificance besides the catastrophic casualties experienced in the worst affected states. Prussia fought for its very existence in the later stages of the Seven Years War, and the consequences for its population were correspondingly dramatic. Frederick the Great’s army lost in the region of 180,000 men all told, and in some of the Prussian provinces the mortality rate at this time was staggering— Pomerania saw about a fifth of its people perish, and the Neumark of Brandenburg as many as a quarter.⁵⁰ Even areas not subject to concerted devastation experienced ⁴⁵ See, e.g., Stephen Wood (ed.), By Dint of Labour and Perseverance . . . A Journal Recording Two Months in Northern Germany Kept by Lieutenant-Colonel James Adolphus Oughton (Society for Army Historical Research, Special Publication no. 14, Chippenham, 1997), 50; NAM, 6807-260, Orderbook, 3rd Foot Guards, 1 May 1762. ⁴⁶ Myron P. Gutmann, War and Rural Life in the Early Modern Low Countries (Princeton, 1980), esp. 78–9. In Jan. 1748, an intelligence report from Namur, just to the west of the area studied in great detail by Gutmann, suggested that the French had cut down 18,000 trees to construct floating batteries on the Meuse: East Suffolk RO, Albemarle Papers, HA 67/461/58. ⁴⁷ Anderson, War of the Austrian Succession, 173–4. ⁴⁸ See, e.g., Herefordshire RO, Dunne of Gatley Park Papers, F76/G/23, Journal of Edmund Cox, July 1744; [Anon.,] An Account of the State and Condition of the Southern Maritime Provinces of France, representing the Distress they were Reduced to at the Conclusion of the Last War in 1748; And in what Manner they may be Distressed in the Present War ([London,] 1760), esp. 3, 25–6. For the impact of the Austrian war on a Provençal community, see Thomas F. Sheppard, Lourmarin in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of a French Village (Baltimore, 1971), 79–80, 91, 107. ⁴⁹ See the letter of the British commander, the Duke of Marlborough, to his wife, 12 June 1758 (BL, Blenheim Papers, Add. MS 61,667, fo. 16). See also, NAM, 5902/46, Sergt. John Porter’s Account of operation on the coast of France, 1758. ⁵⁰ Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 180.


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heavy casualties through the diseases spread by the military camps and marching troops. We have seen that something like this probably happened in Britain, especially when significant bodies of soldiers were on the move during the ’Forty-five Rebellion; however, the civilian losses seem to have been small scale compared with those in areas much fought over by considerably larger armies. Mortality rates increased noticeably in those parts of Germany subject to much military activity during the Austrian war.⁵¹ In the Low Countries, there was a serious outbreak of dysentery in the autumn of 1747 that seems to have started in the allied encampments and then spread to ‘the Country People, many of whom dies’.⁵² Once again, the advantage of not being the scene of major military operations is obvious. When Britain and Ireland’s overseas trade is placed in contemporary European context, it initially seems that France fared disastrously, at least in the Seven Years War, and that Britain and Ireland benefited correspondingly. Closer inspection, however, suggests that the outcome was not that different. True, La Rochelle, on the French Atlantic coast, suffered acutely from shipping losses and trade dislocations during both mid-century wars, and went into sharp decline following France’s giving up of Canada and Louisiana.⁵³ However, La Rochelle’s fate was not shared by all of France’s western ports, any more than Bristol’s decline—which owed something, we have seen, to wartime exposure to enemy attacks on its shipping—was shared by Liverpool or Glasgow.⁵⁴ It needs to be recognized that so far as overseas trade is concerned, the experience of Britain and Ireland on the one hand, and that of France on the other, were broadly similar in the Austrian Succession struggle, in that both sides suffered major shipping losses and trade disruption. Even when we turn to the Seven Years War and its aftermath, the contrast in the fortunes of the principal protagonists should not be overstated. James Riley argues that France did not fare as badly as is often suggested. He points out that stockpiling in anticipation of hostilities, and increased landward trade with Germany and Spain, did much to cushion the blow. Nor should we forget that French overseas trade was largely transferred to neutral Dutch carriers. This did not immunize French seaborne commerce from losses, but at least it allowed it to continue.⁵⁵ Looking beyond the Seven Years War, we can see that French commerce recovered rapidly from its wartime constraints. This no doubt seems odd when one considers that Britain emerged victorious from the Seven Years War, ⁵¹ John D. Post, Food Shortage, Climatic Variability, and Epidemic Disease in Preindustrial Europe: The Mortality Peak in the Early 1740s (Ithica, N.Y., 1985), 251–2, 266–7. ⁵² Nottingham University Library, Newcastle of Clumber MSS, NeC 225. See also Gutmann, War and Rural Life, 165. ⁵³ John G. Clark, La Rochelle and the Atlantic Economy during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1981), 150–1. ⁵⁴ See Ch. 4. ⁵⁵ James C. Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton, 1986), 224–5. See also Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: Fifteenth–Eighteenth Century, iii. The Perpesctive of the World, trans. Siân Reynolds (London, 1984), 269.

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with a vastly expanded empire, and France was obliged to cede territory on a large scale. However, we should remember that the French colonies given up in 1763 were perhaps the least economically valuable (Canada was a liability rather than an asset) and that the colonies returned to France at the peace (particularly Guadeloupe and Martinique) were important complements to St Domingue, the pearl of the Antilles, which remained firmly in French hands for all but a brief period at the close of the Austrian war. French sugar continued to be produced more cheaply than British sugar, and so continued to dominate European markets. Bordeaux, the greatest of the French western ports, continued to grow vigorously on the back of this profitable West Indian trade, despite wartime setbacks. The trade of the city increased exponentially between 1717 and 1787, rising from some 13 million livres to little short of 250 million livres, the equivalent, in 1757 values, of growth from £0.6 million to £11.4 million.⁵⁶ French defeat in India seems likewise to have been less than disastrous in its consequences for French overseas commerce. It led, one could argue, to the demise of the Compagnie des Indes, which lost its monopoly in 1769. But this was not necessarily a negative development, for thereafter the value of French trade with India increased, at least until the American war years.⁵⁷ It might reasonably be suggested that British imperial expansion in the Seven Years War was one of the reasons for the growth in overseas trade that was so strong in the early 1770s. However, France, which experienced imperial contraction rather than expansion, saw its overseas trade grow no less significantly than Britain’s. In real terms, French overseas trade was five times larger in 1784–8 than it had been in 1716–20,⁵⁸ while Britain’s overseas commodity trade was about 4.6 times larger in 1797–8 than England’s had been in 1700–1.⁵⁹ Turn to war finance, and Britain emerges as profoundly affected. Of course, all belligerent states experienced tax rises and increased indebtedness in this period. In the Habsburg monarchy, tax revenues increased markedly after 1749, with many provinces paying twice as much Kontribution, or military tax, as in 1740. In other provinces, the increase was considerably larger: Styria paid four times as much, and Carinthia five times as much. The Austrian state debt increased from 118 million florins (or nearly £14 million) in 1756 to 285 million florins (about £33.5 million) in 1763.⁶⁰ To service this debt, interest rates of between 4 and 6 per cent were required, with most of the loans paying 5 or 6 per cent.⁶¹ ⁵⁶ See François Crouzet, ‘La Croissance Économique’, in François-Georges Pariset (ed.), Bourdeaux au XVIIIe siècle (Bordeaux, 1968), 195–6. ⁵⁷ See Arvind Sinha, The Politics of Trade: Anglo-French Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1763–1793 (New Delhi, 2002), esp. 222 (appendix II). ⁵⁸ Joël Félix, ‘The Economy’, trans. David Bell, in William Doyle (ed.), Old Regime France (Oxford, 2001), 26. ⁵⁹ R. P. Thomas and D. N. McCloskey, ‘Overseas Trade and Empire 1700–1860’, in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (eds.), The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1981), i. 91 (table 5.1). ⁶⁰ Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 283, 285. ⁶¹ Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia, ii. 26, 32, 39.


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The Austrian debt, in other words, while much smaller than the British, was serviced at a higher rate than the British (British loans, as we have seen, generally earned between 3 and 4 per cent interest, though there were times when the rate was nearer to 5 per cent). The Dutch were already obliged to support high levels of taxation to service debts contracted during the great struggles against Louis XIV between 1689 and 1714. The Austrian Succession conflict made matters appreciably worse. Not the least of the arguments for Dutch non-intervention in the Seven Years War was the perceived impossibility of adding further to a seemingly crushing burden. In Holland, the most heavily taxed of the republic’s provinces, the per capita tax take had risen during the War of the Austrian Succession from 26.33 guilders in 1740–5 to 32.95 guilders in 1746–8. In the years that followed, it had fallen back but only to 28.10 guilders.⁶² At the same time, however, interest rates in the Dutch republic were not high by European standards, and can be compared with those offered in Britain: in Overijssel they were reduced from 3.5 to 3 per cent in 1744.⁶³ As for France, Riley, who, as we have seen, is generally cautious about the impact of the Seven Years War, has no doubt that French public finances were seriously affected. He notes that before 1756, about 30 per cent of French Government revenue was absorbed in servicing the debt; after 1763 this rose to an alarming 60 per cent. This enormous increase owed much to the structure rather than the size of the French debt, which necessitated rates of interest markedly higher than those operated in either Britain or the Netherlands. From the 1730s, the French Government offered life annuities, which ended the state’s obligations on the death of the purchaser, but carried rates of interest of between 6.66 and 12 per cent. These rentes viagères, as they were called, became an increasingly important component of the French public debt, with the inevitable consequence that the overall sums required to pay the interest rose substantially. In the long term, Riley argues, mounting taxes and a growing sense of debt crisis in France combined to undermine confidence in the old order.⁶⁴ Yet it appears that the tax burden in Britain was much greater than that in Austria and France, and perhaps even greater than that in the Dutch United Provinces. Michel Morineau’s calculations suggest that in per capita terms, the English were paying twice as much tax as the French in the early eighteenth century, and that the gap widened to nearly three times as much by the 1780s.⁶⁵ ⁶² Jan De Vries and Ad Van Der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, 1997), 97 (table 4.3). ⁶³ Wantje Fritschy and René Van Der Voort, ‘From Fragmentation to Unification: Public Finance, 1700–1914’, in Marjolein ’t Hart, Joost Jonker, and Jan Luiten Van Zanden (eds.), A Financial History of the Netherlands (Cambridge, 1997), 72. ⁶⁴ Riley, Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France, esp. 228–31. See also the same author’s essay on ‘French Finances, 1727–1768’, Journal of Modern History, 59 (1987), esp. 229 (table 3). ⁶⁵ Michel Morineau, ‘Les budgets d’état et gestion des finances royale en France aux dix-huitieme siècle’, Revue historique, no. 536 (1980), 259–336. See also Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, ‘Taxation in Britain and France, 1715–1810: A Comparison of the Social and Economic Incidence of Taxes Collected for the Central Governments’, Journal of European Economic History, 5 (1976), 601–50.

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Greatly increased government spending—the flip side of more taxes and borrowing—was not, of course, unique to Britain. However, there are good reasons for believing that it had a more beneficial effect on economic development in Britain and Ireland than did, say, French Government spending in the territories of Louis XV. Scale of spending was obviously important. At the height of the Seven Years War, British expenditure far outstripped French. In 1760 the French state allocated the equivalent of some £7.5 million to its army and navy, while the British armed forces received nearly £13.5 million.⁶⁶ But the direction of the expenditure was almost as important as its size. Armies deployed in other countries provided less of a stimulus to domestic production than did navies. True, armies needed weapons, equipment, and uniforms, and these were largely supplied by their own national producers. However, foodstuffs tended to be mainly drawn from the countries where the armies were operating—probably more so in the French case than in the British.⁶⁷ Navies, by contrast, called primarily on domestic food supplies to provision their fleets. Naval expenditure, furthermore, included shipbuilding and repair, which arguably had a greater multiplier effect than any form of production for the army. Naval dockyards, as we have seen, represented the largest single employers of labour at this time, and they called on the resources of a vast array of people who worked away from the yards. An important consideration, then, was the split between military and naval spending. Here again the evidence points to a much greater advantage for the British and Irish economies than for the French. Louis XV’s navy was progressively run-down to the extent that by 1760 it received only about £0.5 million (nine million livres). In the same year the Royal Navy was allocated £4.5 million, and by 1762 this had risen to nearly £6 million.

WAR AND SOCIET Y As most of the protagonists in the mid-century wars experienced significant levels of mobilization of manpower, it seems likely that women on the Continent were affected in much the same way as in Britain and Ireland.⁶⁸ In some cases, the manpower shortage caused by military mobilization was acute. A commissary ⁶⁶ Michael Duffy, ‘The Foundations of British Naval Power’, in Duffy (ed.), The Military Revolution and the State, 80, 85n. These figures are again used for the comparison of French and British naval expenditure later in this paragraph. The proportion of national income taken up in government spending (the vast majority of which was war-related) was noticeably greater in Britain than in France in both mid-century conflicts: see Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 220 (table 4). ⁶⁷ Riley, Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France, 225, stresses that any stimulus given to grain prices in France by the mobilization of a large army was limited by the fact that for most of the time the bulk of the army was deployed in Germany and fed from local sources. ⁶⁸ See Ch. 5.


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serving with the allied army in Germany wrote from Hanover in August 1758 that it was impossible to find any men to act as drivers for his wagons, as ‘thro’ the whole Extent of the Country there are nothing else but Women to be Seen’.⁶⁹ In such instances, work opportunities would surely have emerged in areas dominated by men in peaceful times, particularly in agriculture. Wartime crises, as in Britain, also appear to have affected marriage rates: the number of marriages in Wandre, in Basse–Meuse in modern-day Belgium, fell noticeably in the difficult years 1745–7, and only picked up appreciably with the coming of the peace in 1748.⁷⁰ Social tensions were also observable in other European countries, though these could take a somewhat different form to those in Britain. Criticism levelled at men who had done well out of supplying the armed forces with their needs, or in organizing the purchase of such supplies, or in helping to arrange the finance required to fund the war effort, commonly employed the language of class distinction. In Britain, the emphasis—often, as we have seen, mistakenly—was on the lowly background of the chief beneficiaries. In France, however, there was a clear difference between attitudes towards commissaries and contractors, who were similarly viewed as upstarts who were acquiring wealth by dubious means, and the great financiers who underpinned the debt. The noble status of most of this second and very exclusive group meant that criticism of their opulence and their power tended to take the form of bourgeois condemnation of aristocratic oligarchy rather than resentment at the nouveaux riches.⁷¹ Britain was not alone in trying to remedy perceived deficiencies in its social system in the aftermath of the wars. In fact, some of the continental European states were much more committed to an interventionist approach in this area. Frederick the Great appears to have been influenced by the needs of the army when he decided, during his campaign of 1759, to embark on a programme of educational improvement for his subjects. In 1763, on the conclusion of the war, primary schooling was made compulsory for Protestant children in the rural areas of Prussia. While war-making capacity was not the only consideration, Frederick may well have been concerned about the difficulty in securing appropriate noncommissioned officers, who needed to be literate.⁷² The proposals of the French Government in 1764 to encourage parishes to establish charities to help the poor, and supplement this with a specific local tax if necessary, could also be seen as a war-related development, given that France, like Britain and all other belligerents in the Seven Years War, experienced considerable demobilization at the close of the conflict and similar concerns about the problems created by casting so many ⁶⁹ BL, Letter-book of David Mendes da Costa, 1757–9, Egerton MS 2227, fo. 71. ⁷⁰ Gutmann, War and Rural Life, 189 (table 8.5). ⁷¹ Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: Fifteenth–Eighteenth Century, ii. The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds (London, 1982), 537–41. ⁷² James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge, 1988), esp. 172–3.

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men out of the armed forces into the labour market.⁷³ However, in France the process of demobilization was less pronounced than in Britain—France’s peacetime standing army remained formidably large—and, partly as a consequence, perhaps, the emphasis was less on social reform, and more on fiscal overhaul. The same could be said of the Habsburg lands, where fiscal and administrative measures were pursued first, and educational reform was not seriously considered until the late 1760s—and then apparently in response to fears about the decline in the hold of the Catholic Church, rather than a desire to produce a better educated army.⁷⁴ Reform of the labour system took longer still, and did not come until the mid-1770s; however, it seems that the attempts to limit the unpaid labour obligations of the peasantry were at least partly influenced by the desire to avoid jeopardizing the taxpaying ability of such a numerically important section of the monarchy’s subjects, and also by the fear that too-oppressive a labour regime would produce peasants that were unfit for military service.⁷⁵

POLITICS The temptation to view British political developments in the mid-eighteenth century as unique should be resisted. The divisions over what kind of war to fight, over where to fight it, and over when it should be concluded were no more obvious than those in earlier and later conflicts. The bitter contest between Whigs and Tories in Queen Anne’s reign revolved, to a considerable extent, around warrelated issues, as did the no-less-acrimonious struggle between Lord North’s supporters and opponents between 1775 and 1782.⁷⁶ Indeed, if there was a feature of the politics of the mid-century wars that contemporaries noted as distinctive, it was probably the relative harmony and unity of the years of Pitt’s dominance in the Seven Years War. Lord Barrington, nervously considering the political state of the country at the beginning of the American war, looked back nostalgically on the political stability of ‘the years 1757 and 1758, when there was not the least difference of opinion in politics, within doors or without’.⁷⁷ Comparisons with the Continent might seem singularly inappropriate, if one accepts that British politics was qualitatively different from politics elsewhere in Europe. We might note that Walpole’s fall from power in 1742, as a direct consequence of his supposed mishandling of the war with Spain, is curiously mirrored ⁷³ See Joanna Innes, ‘The State and the Poor: Eighteenth-Century England in European Perspective’, in Brewer and Hellmuth (eds.), Rethinking Leviathan, 241. ⁷⁴ Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling, 200. ⁷⁵ Scott, ‘Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy’, esp. 179. ⁷⁶ See Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1987 edn.), ch. 2; Conway, British Isles and the War of American Independence, ch. 4. ⁷⁷ Shute Barrington, The Political Life of William Wildman, Viscount Barrington (London, 1814), 154.


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by the decline in the authority in France of the almost equally long-serving Cardinal Fleury, who died at the beginning of 1743. Fleury, like Walpole, was pacifically inclined, and Fleury, like Walpole again, was outmanoeuvred by domestic opponents who used the coming of war to undermine the first minister’s position.⁷⁸ But there the similarity between Britain and the Continent might be thought to end. High politics in Britain, it could be argued, was dominated by parties divided on ideological grounds, whereas high politics in most European states was merely a tussle for power waged between factions attached to a particular minister. In Britain, moreover, the entrenched position of Parliament and the growing importance of ‘public opinion’ could be seen as giving a more open and less oligarchical flavour to politics. But these apparently distinctive features of British political life turn out, on closer inspection, to be rather less important, or rather less peculiarly British, than they at first seem. High politics everywhere depended upon the favour of the monarch. He, or she, was the key to political power. Despite Parliament, this was true in Britain as well as on the Continent. Occasionally, a minister might force himself on a reluctant monarch by virtue of his reputation—either in Parliament or in the country at large. Pitt is the prime example of this phenomenon. But Pitt was unusual. Political office was more often the result of royal selection and support. Walpole owed his political longevity not just to his parliamentary skills, but also to his careful cultivation of the Crown.⁷⁹ Opponents of Walpole, and indeed of all ministers of this time, often looked to the heir to the throne to give them legitimacy. Leicester House, the London residence of the Prince of Wales, was the headquarters of opposition for a significant part of the period studied here.⁸⁰ Britain’s political parties, it might also be argued, were not as important as they had once been, and were less obviously ideologically divided than they had been in previous generations. The bitter party struggles of the time of the War of Spanish Succession had been followed by many years when political rancour was less clearly based on party distinctions. Walpole’s long period in office had blurred the differences between Whigs and Tories, as opponents of the minister rallied around the ‘country’ platform of resistance to excessive government power. Party politics might have been revived by the Jacobite rebellion, but the Seven Years War, as we have seen, did much to end the traditional conflict between Whigs and Tories,⁸¹ and by the time of the closing stages of that war, high politics had become much more factionalized and resembled, in some respects, the struggle for power and influence fought out between political groupings in other European states. ⁷⁸ Peter R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France 1720–1745 (London, 1996), ch. 7. ⁷⁹ See Jeremy Black, Robert Walpole and the Nature of Politics in Early Eighteenth Century England (Basingstoke, 1990), ch. 3. ⁸⁰ See Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), esp. 325, and, for a detailed look at part of our period, Aubrey Newman, ‘Leicester House Politics, 1748–1751’, English Historical Review, 76 (1961), 577–89. ⁸¹ See Ch. 6.

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There is no denying that Parliament and the role of public opinion gave an especially participatory element to British politics, which wartime crises and triumphs brought into sharp relief. The outcry—in Parliament and the country— over the loss of Minorca, and the failure of British arms in North America, played a crucial part in Newcastle’s fall in 1756. No other European state, with the possible exception of Sweden, had a national representative body as strong and well entrenched as the British Parliament; however, there were lesser assemblies and collectives that caused difficulties for rulers in many parts of Europe—notably the parlements and estates in France, provincial estates in the Habsburg lands, and various local bodies in the different principalities of the Holy Roman Empire.⁸² The growing importance of public opinion, it should be added, was not a peculiarly British development. Throughout Europe, there was an expanding reading public that took an interest in political developments, particularly in wartime, and a burgeoning newspaper and periodical press that catered for this interest.⁸³ Even in France, there was a growth in the newspaper press: circulation of the Gazette de France increased from perhaps as little as 6,800 in 1749 to around 15,000 in 1758.⁸⁴ Almost everywhere, plays, paintings, and prints reflected—and stimulated—an increasing interest in topical events and challenged, even if only subtly, the authority of those in positions of power.⁸⁵ In post-Seven Years War France, for instance, Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy’s Siège de Calais (1765) used the historical setting of the Anglo-French Hundred Years War to deliver implied criticism of the present monarchy as well as make an appeal to patriotism.⁸⁶

RELIGION In the aftermath of the Seven Years War religious changes began in Britain and Ireland that the American and French Revolutionary Wars carried forward: from the 1760s restrictions on Catholics were gradually relaxed, and eventually dismantled, while Protestant disunity grew. If in Britain and Ireland the mid-century ⁸² See, e.g., John Rogister, Louis XV and the Parlement of Paris, 1737–1755 (Cambridge, 1995); Julian Swann, Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754–1774 (Cambridge, 1995), and Provincial Power and Absolute Monarch: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge, 2003); Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia, i. ch. 11; Peter H. Wilson, War, State and Society in Württemberg, 1677–1793 (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 248–9; and Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘The State in Germany: A Non-Prussian View’, in Brewer and Hellmuth (eds.), Rethinking Leviathan, 167–202. ⁸³ See, e.g., the essays on the Netherlands, by Nicolaas van Sas, and Germany, by Eckhart Hellmuth and Wolfgang Piereth, in Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (eds.), Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2002). ⁸⁴ Jack R. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1994), 215 (appendix 1). ⁸⁵ See James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001). ⁸⁶ T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002), 394–9.


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wars had important effects on religion and religious attitudes, they appear to have had no less profound an impact elsewhere in Europe. War with the Catholic powers of France and Spain, as we have seen, had the immediate effect of encouraging and intensifying hostility to popery amongst British and Irish Protestants, not least because British and Irish Catholics were seen as a domestic ‘fifth column’ ready and willing to help their invading co-religionists.⁸⁷ A parallel process was at work in the Catholic states of Europe, where Protestant minorities suffered as a result of war with Protestant rivals.⁸⁸ It was no coincidence, surely, that the notorious trial and execution of Jean Calas, a Toulouse Protestant, occurred in 1762, in the closing stages of a war that had inspired much anti-Protestant feeling amongst French Catholics.⁸⁹ Repression of Protestants tended to be at its most intense, however, in the brief gap between the mid-century armed conflicts; drives forcibly to convert heretics were generally too costly and too demanding of military resources to be an option in wartime itself. In France, there were serious attempts to pressure Protestants in the run-up to the Seven Years War, and in the Habsburg monarchy, a similar campaign was observable immediately after the end of the Austrian Succession struggle.⁹⁰ The alliance between Britain and the Habsburgs in the Austrian war, as already noted, made it difficult (though by no means impossible) to interpret the conflict primarily in religious terms. But the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, which joined together the Austrians and the French, and pitted them against the British and their new Prussian allies, brought a decidedly religious flavour to the Seven Years War. The idea of a beleaguered ‘Protestant Interest’ was not just a device to persuade reluctant Britons to support subsidies and military assistance to sustain Frederick the Great; it seems to have reflected popular sentiment. That sentiment appears to have been shared by Protestants beyond Britain and Ireland. From far away India, a Scandinavian missionary wrote in 1757 that ‘Quite surprising Schemes are lay’d for the total routing out of the Protestant Religion’.⁹¹ Meanwhile, the Lutherans of French Alsace were said to be unable to disguise their pleasure at the victories of Frederick of Prussia and Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick.⁹² Yet, once the war was over, the religious consequences of this long-awaited confrontation between Catholicism and Protestantism were somewhat different ⁸⁷ See Ch. 7. ⁸⁸ John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, ii. The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion (Oxford, 1998), 611. ⁸⁹ See David D. Bien, The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse (Princeton, 1960), esp. 72. ⁹⁰ W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime 1648–1789 (Cambridge, 1999), 62–3, 195. See, also, Brian E. Strayer, Huguenots and Camisards as Aliens in France 1598–1789: The Struggle for Religious Toleration (Lampeter, 2001), 403–10. ⁹¹ OIOL, Clive Papers, MSS Eur. G.37/Box 23, ‘Extract of a Letter from Mr Kiermander’, 30 July 1757. I am grateful to Peter Marshall for information on Kiermander. ⁹² McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, ii. 626.

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from what might have been predicted. In the aftermath of the conflict, hostility between Catholics and Protestants became more muted rather than more intense. Tobias Smollett, after visiting Montpellier in November 1763, wrote in his famous Travels through France and Italy that the Protestants of southern France were ‘no longer molested’, contrasting this new situation with the execution of a Protestant minister at Montauban in 1762.⁹³ In part this was perhaps because so much venom had been expended during the war itself that there was not much left to sustain the bitterness. It might also have owed something to the greater diffusion, from the mid-century onwards, of enlightened ideas. But probably more important was the sense that the contest had ended as a clear victory for the Protestant powers, and for Britain in particular. Symbolic of this generally perceived outcome was the Pope’s refusal to acknowledge the Young Pretender as the legitimate monarch of Britain and Ireland following his father’s death in January 1766; however, even before this momentous shift, Clement XIII had effectively recognized that the outcome of the Seven Years War meant that there was no real alternative to George III. The war had seen France and Spain humbled, while Austria had failed to regain Silesia—Maria Theresa’s main objective. Amongst Protestants in Britain and Ireland, as we have seen, the realization that popery was no longer such a potent threat gradually led to a falling away of Protestant unity and the emergence of greater denominational tensions between established churches and Protestant Dissenters. In Catholic countries, meanwhile, defeat had the similar effect of promoting introspection and therefore concentration on the divisions between the different tendencies within the Catholic communion. The hold of the Jesuits, the advance guard of the Counter-Reformation, was everywhere broken; the order was expelled from France in 1764 and from Spain in 1766. Even in Austria, Maria Theresa came reluctantly to the conclusion that the Jesuits were a barrier to necessary reform and that their dominance of higher education must end: in 1763 Joseph von Sonnenfels, a champion of enlightened ideas, was appointed to the new chair of administration and commerce at the University of Vienna.⁹⁴

NATIONAL IDENTIT Y It used to be assumed that ‘the nation’ became an important concept in Europe only with the coming of the French Revolution and its wars. The creation of a ‘nation in arms’ in revolutionary France, with the famous levée en masse of 1793, has been depicted as the start of a process of popular identification with the nation, which was exported to the enemies of the French republic as they were ⁹³ Smollett, Travels through France and Italy [1766], ed. Frank Felsenstein (Oxford, 1981), 103. ⁹⁴ Ernst Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement 1700–1800 (London, 1973), 80, 131–3.


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obliged in turn to mobilize large parts of their own manpower.⁹⁵ However, modern scholarship has recognized that national sentiment was developing in many countries—not just in Britain⁹⁶—much earlier in the eighteenth century. It might seem odd to suggest that the mid-century wars played a part in developing identification with the nation in Germany, as both conflicts pitted Prussia against Austria, and involved other German states fighting each other. This dimension of the struggles might make it seem more appropriate to view them as a protracted German civil war, rather than as agents of national consciousness. Yet Frederick the Great’s victories between 1740 and 1762—but especially in the Seven Years War, when Louis XV was his enemy—did much to stimulate a sense of German-ness, not least because the enhanced reputation of Prussia and its army helped to overcome the long-standing German inferiority complex regarding the French. Perhaps pivotal to this psychological shift was Frederick’s comprehensive vanquishing of French arms at the battle of Rossbach in November 1757, when the Prussians won despite the French and their allies outnumbering them nearly two to one. There is surely a connection between Prussia’s triumphs and the flowering of a distinctive German literature that used its own language rather than French as its medium of expression.⁹⁷ If military success, especially in the Seven Years War over the French, contributed to a greater sense of German pride, military defeats seem to have helped to promote a stronger identification with the nation in France. Rossbach in particular was a humiliation that shattered the reputation of the once-mighty French army. In the second-half of the Seven Years War, and still more in its aftermath, there was a patriotic surge in reaction to such tangible indications of national decline. In 1758 the Académie Français decided that the ‘the great men of the nation’ would be the theme of its annual competitions in oratory, and the first subject chosen by the Académie was Maurice de Saxe, the hero of the Austrian Succession war. Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, the French officer killed in controversial circumstances in the first clash in the Ohio Valley in May 1754, also became something of a cult figure in metropolitan France. He was celebrated in a sixty-page epic poem, written by Antoine-Léonard Thomas and published in Paris in 1759, which seems to have been designed to inspire patriotic effort and increase hostility towards the British.⁹⁸ Another hero whose gallant end was commemorated and mythologized was Montcalm; Louis-Joseph Watteau’s fanciful depiction of the Mort du Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon can be seen as the French ⁹⁵ See, e.g., Linda Colley, ‘The Reach of the State, the Appeal of the Nation’, in Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War, 165–84, and J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), for the situation in Britain at this time. See also Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron (eds.), The People in Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2003), a set of essays that takes as its starting point the levée en masse of Aug. 1793. ⁹⁶ See Ch. 8. ⁹⁷ Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture, 52, 229, 240. ⁹⁸ David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 11, 78–91, 112.

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equivalent of Benjamin West’s more famous Death of General Wolfe.⁹⁹ But perhaps one of the clearest signs of the desire for national revival was the public subscription launched in 1763 to rebuild the shattered French navy. The subscription raised some thirteen million livres, which paid for the construction of fifteen ships of the line.¹⁰⁰

EMPIRE The expansion of the British Empire in and at the close of the Seven Years War was unprecedented in scale; even the Peace of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, had not conferred upon Britain such extensive territories—Nova Scotia, Minorca and Gibraltar, and St Kitts seem modest gains in comparison with the whole of inland North America from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, Canada, further West Indian islands, a new colony in West Africa, and, from 1765, effective control over Bengal, and its neighbouring provinces. However, looking ahead to the victorious conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, the imperial growth at the end of the Seven Years War appears less spectacular. In 1815, Britain emerged with further islands in the Caribbean, a much strengthened position in India, control over Ceylon, a southern African foothold in the form of the old Dutch colony at the Cape, and Dutch possessions in the East Indies at its disposal.¹⁰¹ Even after the return of the Dutch East and West Indies (to sustain the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands—a reminder of the continuing importance of European considerations in British decision-making),¹⁰² there were many more people under British authority than at any previous time. Comparisons with other European powers in the middle of the eighteenth century might seem singularly inappropriate, given that the British Empire clearly grew in size and importance as a result of the Seven Years War, while its principal rival experienced diminution and decline. Yet, as we have seen with the case of imperial trade, which expanded for France after 1763, as well as for Britain, the contrast is not as stark as one might imagine. Just as there was a surge in migration to the British North American colonies after the war, there was a significant movement of French people to the West Indies, and Saint Domingue particularly, ⁹⁹ Versions of the two pictures are helpfully reproduced side-by-side in Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), 366–7. ¹⁰⁰ Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 202. ¹⁰¹ The importance of the acquisitions between 1793 and 1815 is brought out in C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989). See, also, Michael Duffy, ‘World-Wide War and British Expansion, 1793–1815’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 184–207. ¹⁰² N. A. M. Rodger, ‘Seapower and Empire: Cause and Effect?’, in Bob Moore and Henk Van Nierop (eds.), Colonial Empires Compared: Britain and the Netherlands, 1750–1850 (Aldershot, 2003), 110.


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where the white population nearly doubled between 1764 and 1775. Consider also the reforming efforts made by British ministers after the Seven Years War.¹⁰³ There is an interesting parallel between Grenville’s attempts to extract parliamentary taxes from the British North American colonies to pay for a British regular garrison and the Duc de Choiseul’s project to defend the French West Indian islands with regular troops supported by local taxation. Grenville’s initiative famously provoked colonial resistance and compelled the repeal of his hated stamp duties, but no less noteworthy is Saint-Domingue’s rebellion in 1768–9, which was caused by Choiseul’s equally unpopular measures.¹⁰⁴ Rather more successful was the nearly simultaneous attempt of the Spanish Crown, in the aftermath of a disastrous showing in the Seven Years War, to reorganize its American territories. More emphasis was placed on the need for strong regular army garrisons, greater taxation was extracted from the colonies, the production of precious metals was increased, and new administrative posts were created.¹⁰⁵ In short, the British state’s post-Seven Years War drive for greater control over the colonies, and its attempts to collect a revenue to support the costs of imperial defence, should be seen as part of a broader pattern of concern amongst the European imperial powers to ensure that the value of their overseas possessions was fully realized and properly protected.¹⁰⁶ BRITISH EXCEPTIONALISM? So, how unusual was the British and Irish experience of war between 1739 and 1763? If we adopt an historical perspective, and compare the wars of this period with earlier and later eighteenth-century wars, then the answer would probably have to be not very unusual: many of the developments associated with the mid-century conflicts had been anticipated in the War of the League of Augsburg and the War of the Spanish Succession or were to be features of the American and French Revolutionary Wars. There were, of course, differences of degree, depending on the number of men and the volume of money and materials mobilized. But in all the eighteenth-century wars there was an impact on the economy, on society and what we might describe as social policies, on empire and imperial attitudes, on religion, on political practice and political structures, and on the growth of the machinery of the state. Broadly speaking, that impact increased in intensity from the mid-century, reaching a crescendo in the great wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. ¹⁰³ See Chs. 2 and 9. ¹⁰⁴ Pierre H. Boulle and D. Gillian Thompson, ‘France Overseas’, in Doyle (ed.), Old Regime France, 133, 134; Paul Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises XVIIe–XXe siècle (Paris, 2002), 140–1. ¹⁰⁵ D. A. Brading, ‘Bourbon Spain and its American Empire’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, i. Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, 1984), 397–409. ¹⁰⁶ P. J. Marshall, ‘Europe and the Rest of the World’, in T. C. W. Blanning (ed.), The Short Oxford History of Europe: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), 226–7.

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If the comparison is with the experience of continental European countries between 1739 and 1763, a somewhat different answer is appropriate. While mobilization in Britain and Ireland produced an army that still seemed smaller than those of the great continental European military powers, appearances were deceptive, as large foreign components were incorporated into continental armies, whereas Britain’s foreign auxiliaries remained separate and distinct from the regular army. Moreover, Britain’s navy was larger than that of any other country. The commitment of resources to the navy meant a different pattern of economic stimulus, as the construction and maintenance of warships, and the supply of fleets, provided work for a much wider range of producers and manufacturers in Britain and Ireland than would have been the case if the land forces had been the overwhelmingly dominant armed instrument of the British state. Britain and Ireland also benefited enormously from not being the scene of large-scale military operations. Apart from the ’Fortyfive Rebellion, and Thurot’s brief occupation of Carrickfergus, the shooting part of the wars occurred elsewhere. The result was a much diminished destructive impact. The importance of the Royal Navy and the avoidance of invasion are bound to be familiar themes in any story that seeks to emphasize British exceptionalism, or distinctiveness from continental Europe. Another feature of British experience that has been highlighted by historians was the centralized British fiscal system, which was responsible for extracting ever-increasing quantities of taxation and borrowing to support Britain’s war effort. Patrick O’Brien attributes this success to the lack of resistance to ‘policies designed to widen and deepen fiscal bases for taxation and loans’, which distinguished Britain from other European powers, where resistance was much more marked. Whereas in Britain tax collection and loan-raising was relatively unimpeded, O’Brien argues, in such places as Spain, Austria, and France the whole tax system was more decentralized and raising taxation required almost endless negotiation with entrenched and privileged institutions and groups.¹⁰⁷ The Whig historiographical tradition stresses the role of Parliament as a check on arbitrary power, and the contrast with unchecked continental monarchs. O’Brien turns this on its head, maintaining that apparently ‘absolute’ monarchs were obliged to compromise and concede to secure taxation, whereas the British state, which effectively controlled Parliament, was able to obtain the required taxes without serious opposition. However, the contrast with continental Europe can easily be overdrawn. In all polities some degree of partnership and cooperation between rulers and representative institutions was necessary if manpower and money were to be mobilized. O’Brien, it might be said, overstates the ability of British Governments to manage Parliament. Although there were few instances in our period of taxes being refused, we have seen already that ministers could not always be confident of getting ¹⁰⁷ P. K. O’Brien, ‘Fiscal Exceptionalism: Great Britain and its Rivals from Civil War to Triumph at Trafalgar and Waterloo’, in Donald Winch and Patrick O’Brien (eds.), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002), 254. See also, for comparisons with continental Europe, Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe 1200–1800 (Oxford, 1999).


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their own way. Fear of refusal deflected governments from some taxation schemes, and obliged them to pursue others that they believed would be less likely to provoke resistance.¹⁰⁸ The British Parliament, in other words, might have been more amenable to government control than many historians have acknowledged, but it was not as supine as O’Brien seems to suggest. In Austria, in Spain, and in France, meanwhile, concerted efforts were made to impose a more uniform and centralized fiscal system, and to reduce the resistance and privileges of entrenched interests. The difference between Britain and many of the continental powers, then, was narrowing rather then widening, especially by the end of the period considered here. Everywhere, governments were obliged to work with groups and institutions that they could not completely control. Everywhere, there was some form of partnership. The balance of power within that partnership might vary from country to country and from time to time, but it remained a partnership none the less. This broad similarity was not the only one that we should note. In all belligerent powers, war, especially unsuccessful or even inconclusive war, promoted reform. Everywhere, attempts were made to impose a more professional approach on armed forces in order to place them more firmly under state control and to improve their efficiency. However, reform of armies and navies was only part of the picture of war-inspired overhaul. Administrative systems were re-examined, and efforts made to increase tax revenues. To further war-waging effectiveness, the state intervened more widely, and more often, in different areas of the economy and society, promoting activities that would help to increase national wealth, and therefore benefit public finances, and to improve the quantity and standard of recruits for the armed forces. In Britain, this involved emphasizing moral regeneration, husbanding manpower, and encouraging employment opportunities suitable for soldiers and particularly for sailors; in Austria, on limiting labour obligations imposed on the peasantry; in Prussia, on educational provision. But whatever form it took, in all European powers involved in the mid-century wars, there was a commitment to wide-ranging improvement and preparation for the next conflict. This was particularly obvious in Britain after the Austrian Succession struggle, and in France after the Seven Years War. In Austria, it was detectable both after 1748 and after 1763. In short, many of the developments observable in Britain and Ireland during the mid-century wars were far from unique to these islands. The War of the Austrian Succession, and still more the Seven Years War, imposed enormous demands, and created considerable challenges for all of the belligerent powers. The precise consequences for different polities varied greatly, but the mobilization of manpower and resources everywhere left its mark on the machinery of government and administration, on politics, on economic development, on society, and on religion. Armed conflicts—even the supposedly ‘limited’ wars of the middle of the eighteenth century—were great engines of change, affecting all the countries and peoples involved in them in multifarious and often profound ways. ¹⁰⁸ See Chs. 2 and 9.

Conclusions ‘War declar’d in London against France’, James Alexander wrote on 18 May 1756. Thereafter, his diary suggests that he paid little attention to the conflict. He was much more interested in happenings at Cambridge University, and his own financial affairs.¹ It would be easy to conclude from reading the pages of Alexander’s diary that the mid-century wars had only very limited impact on Britain and Ireland. Indeed, it would be no difficult task to present such a case. The partnerships explored in this book—between the state and private and local interests; between Whigs and Tories at the height of the Seven Years War; between the different Protestant denominations; between the different nations of Britain and Ireland; between Britain and its North American colonies; and between Britain and its continental allies to check the French in Europe—nearly all weakened, or even broke down completely, once the wars ended, and especially once the Seven Years War was over. The state needed private and local interests much less when, in the post-war period, it had a smaller army and navy to maintain, and no foreign subsidies to pay. Tory support for Whig ministries was more problematic once Pitt left office. Protestant unity was replaced by an increasing tension between established churches and Dissenters in Ireland, Scotland, and especially in England and Wales and the colonies. British unity was also less obvious in the aftermath of the Seven Years War; it was perhaps no coincidence that as soon as the centripetal forces associated with conflict against the Bourbons slackened, anti-Scots feeling became more virulent in England, and Irish Protestant patriotism, hostile to encroachments from London, began to gain in strength. Relations with the colonies also deteriorated, again partly because the partnerships forged in war seemed less necessary in peace, when, from the perspective of British Governments, changed imperial circumstances required a different approach. Wartime alliances withered, too, as both the British and their continental allies needed each other less. All of this suggests that the impact of the wars of 1739–63 was of short duration, and so limited. Similar conclusions about the limited impression made by these wars on Britain and Ireland might arise from considering again other areas explored in earlier chapters. The British state apparatus grew in strength and importance in our period, but that growth was not wholly attributable to war: incremental bureaucratic improvement would probably have occurred without the stimulus of the ¹ Wellcome Library, MS 3012, Diary of James Alexander. It should be said that some of Alexander’s financial concerns were apparently connected with wartime public finance: see entries of 30 Sept. 1755 and 26 Oct. 1759.

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demands of armed conflict. Judging by estimates of national income, and trade figures, the overall trajectories of the British and Irish economies were unaffected by the wars of this period. As the general trend was upwards, other factors might reasonably be said to have played a larger part in determining the scale of economic growth. Many of the social developments of the time would probably have occurred if there had been no armed conflicts between 1739 and 1763. War confirmed rather than transformed assumptions about the role of men and women, while social mobility and social conflict would almost certainly have been features of these decades without the tensions, pressures, and opportunities created by war. It could also be said that social policies designed to impose greater control over potentially troublesome people would probably have developed in response to perceived dangers to the social order even if this had been a time of unbroken peace. Equally, parliamentary politics in Britain and Ireland might have followed a broadly similar path even if there had been no armed struggles to divide or unite contending parties: the peaceful years of Walpole’s prime had hardly been devoid of political rancour, but they also provided signs that the hold of the old polarity of Whig versus Tory was slackening. The impact of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War on religion and religious attitudes in Britain and Ireland was certainly less important than the last phase of the long Catholic Counter-Reformation in continental Europe, which only ended around the middle of the century; the rise of Protestant Evangelicalism; and even, perhaps, the growing influence, from about this time, of Enlightenment rationalism. The idea of a British nation, which might incorporate all the peoples of Britain and Ireland, made only fitful progress in capturing hearts and minds, and that progress almost certainly owed much to influences other than war, such as improved communications, the growth of the press, urbanization, and the development of an increasingly integrated market economy. The secession of thirteen of Britain’s American colonies in 1776, it could be said, owed more to the mishandling of the legacy of the Seven Years War by British politicians than to the Seven Years War itself. But if overstatement of war’s impact would be wrong, understatement would be no less so. That wartime partnerships—between the state and local and private individuals and bodies, between Whigs and Tories, between different types of Protestants, between the nations of the home islands, between Britain and the colonies, and between Britain and its European allies—either weakened or even collapsed with the coming of peace is not a reason to regard them as of only minor significance. It might be said that war’s importance is in a way confirmed, rather then diminished, by the post-war fate of many of the partnerships. War made extraordinary and enormous demands, which required or promoted partnerships that could not be sustained, or no longer seemed necessary, in more peaceful times. We should also note that, even when partnerships broke down completely, there was no simple reversion to the pre-war situation. Whigs and Tories did not go back to the old party conflicts of earlier in the century; instead, the old polarity

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largely disappeared, to be replaced by a more fragmented form of politics, with some Tories supporting successive governments, and others siding with opposition groups. The Protestant denominations did not move back to a pre-war level of animosity, but forward to a new and heightened hostility. Relationships with the colonies deteriorated sharply after 1763, and were much worse in the 1760s and early 1770s than they had been before the Seven Years War. Formal connections with Prussia were severed from 1762, but the British and Protestant Irish public remained fascinated by Frederick the Great, and with continental European affairs generally, for many years afterwards. More broadly, we can say that the case for arguing that war was a major shaping influence does not rest on proving it to have been the only or even the dominant influence in all respects. In every area studied in this book, we can see that the armed conflicts of the time left their imprint. The British state machine might have become more efficient without the demands of war, but that improvement would have been much slower and far less impressive. Furthermore, many of those improvements in efficiency that did take place in peacetime were conditioned by the widespread desire to control expenditure and maximize revenue returns at a time of anxiety about the continuation of high levels of taxation. That taxation was high even in peacetime because it was needed to support a National Debt inflated by the costs of armed conflict. The seemingly untroubled rise of the British and Irish economies in the eighteenth century is largely illusory. War caused enormous disruptions and forced big adjustments; if the overall effect was broadly neutral, that should not be allowed to obscure the significant changes occurring below the macro level. Social tensions might be a feature of all times, but the mid-eighteenth-century wars intensified dissatisfactions and resentments, and at the same time accelerated movement both up and down the social scale. Social policies intended to reduce the threat of disaffection and attacks on property were often a direct response to problems created by post-war demobilization of the armed forces, and projects to improve the manners and morals of the common people cannot properly be understood if we fail to recognize the importance attached after the Austrian Succession struggle to preparing for the next conflict with France. British and Irish politics were certainly influenced by the wars of our period, which introduced a new instability and led to a broadening of political participation, the consequences of which were to be felt for long afterwards. Likewise, religious developments cannot be comprehended fully if we leave war out of the reckoning. The fact that the international conflicts of this period, and especially the Seven Years War, were widely seen in Britain and Ireland as contests between Protestantism and Catholicism cannot be ignored, nor can the impact of the expansion of empire on religious attitudes—an expansion of empire that was a direct consequence of success in war. Identification with Britain might have advanced only slowly in our period, but it does seem to have advanced, and while that forward movement can be attributed to many different causes, it would be perverse in the extreme not to recognize the importance of the mobilization of

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manpower and resources for war, and the unifying force of the perceived French threat. The loss of most of the mainland North American colonies was not an inevitable result of the Seven Years War; a different approach by post-war British politicians might have led to a very different outcome. However, we should not forget that the attitudes and policies of British politicians in the 1760s and early 1770s were shaped, in great measure, by the experience of that war and the imperial expansion that it produced. War, in short, should not be denied its place in our understanding of the history of mid-eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. It would be foolish to claim that the conflicts of 1739–63 had more of an impact than Britain’s other eighteenth-century wars. In some respects, the struggles against Louis XIV between 1689 and 1713 had more obviously profound effects. British public finance, after all, was revolutionized in the 1690s, making possible the prosecution of subsequent wars. The long struggle against revolutionary and Napoleonic France was certainly more important than the wars of the mid-eighteenth century in its consequences for the British and Irish economies, for society and politics, for religion, and probably even for changing imperial attitudes. Yet it would surely be mistaken to see the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War as unimportant compared with the great contests at the beginning and the end of the long eighteenth century. Better to view the conflicts of 1739–63 not as some kind of intermezzo between two periods of fortissimo, but rather as the opening of a new symphony, which itself increased in tempo and volume as it reached its crescendo. More than a quarter of a century of nearly undisturbed peace separated the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 and the outbreak of hostilities with Spain in 1739. Thereafter the gaps between major conflicts became smaller, even if we believe (somewhat fancifully) that they were all genuine periods of peace. Twelve years after the end of the Seven Years War, the American war began. Ten years after the American war finished, Britain and France were again engaged in open conflict. But it was not just that wars were becoming more frequent, they were also becoming more demanding. From the Seven Years War onwards there was a considerable and steadily mounting commitment of manpower and resources to the waging of armed conflicts, and a corresponding increase in the breadth and profundity of the effects on life in Britain and Ireland. Those who immerse themselves in the history of a particular country are naturally inclined to believe that it was distinct and different from other countries. British history has perhaps been particularly prone to this approach. The British and Irish experience of war in the mid-eighteenth century might be viewed as providing support for the concept of British exceptionalism. What emerges clearly is the advantages Britain (and Ireland) enjoyed in not being the scene of major military operations—the destructive face of war was for the most part a calamity experienced elsewhere. Similarly, the importance of the Royal Navy is impossible to deny. Larger than all its rivals, it gave a special character to British mobilization of manpower and resources for war, with benefits for the British and Irish economies

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that almost certainly exceeded those that would have been associated with a war effort based solely or even largely on an expanded army. Britain’s system of public finance also stands out as distinctive—no other European power was able to raise so much money for war-waging purposes. Yet the contrast with other European states was not as great as these examples of distinctiveness might suggest. All European belligerents mobilized enormous quantities of manpower and resources for war in this period. Everywhere states entered into partnerships with private and local interests to secure the necessary manpower and money. Everywhere war promoted reform—particularly of armed forces and state apparatus, but also more broadly in society and the economy, as governments sought to maximize the human and material resources available for the next conflict. Different though Britain and Ireland undoubtedly were in many respects from the continental powers, only the most purblind of isolationists would claim that the experience of these islands was in all regards unique. The wars of the mid-eighteenth century left their mark on every country engaged in them. Everywhere war acted as a dynamic force.

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Index Note: This is an index of the text of the Introduction, chapters, and conclusion. It excludes material in the preface, footnotes, and bibliography. Abercorn, James Hamilton, 8th Earl of 80, 102 Abercromby, James 27, 91, 233 Aberdeen 261 Abingdon 267, 268, 269 Abree, George 80 Acts of the British and Irish Parliaments: Act of Settlement (1701) 150 Acts of Trade and Navigation 50, 247 Acts of Union: (1707) 36, 50, 198, 205; (1800) 4 American Declaratory Act (1766) 36, 248–9, 250 Annexing Act (1752) 138 Currency Act (1751) 230, 249 Disarming Act (1746) 137 Gin Act (1751) 136 Heritable Jurisdictions Act (1747) 137–8 Iron Act (1750) 230 Irish Declaratory Act (1720) 36, 37, 248 Irish Test Act (1704) 80, 179, 181, 255 Militia Act (1757) 78, 79, 132, 158, 195, 271 Murder Act (1752) 134 Quebec Act (1774) 184, 189, 239 Recruiting Acts 46, 51, 69, 70, 71, 77, 156, 263, 271 Revenue Act (1764) 244 Revenue (Plantation Duties) Act (1766) 250 Stamp Act (1765) 206, 243, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252 Test Acts 182 Vagrancy Act (1744) 69, 70, 77 Admiralty 39, 53, 90, 139 Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of (1748) 6, 22, 162, 231 Albany (New York) 25 Plan of Union (1754) 23 Albemarle, George Keppel, 3rd Earl of 91, 129 Albemarle, William Keppel, 2nd Earl of 87, 265 Alexander, James 302 Alexander, William 266 Alloway, Nathaniel 88 Alsace 17, 282, 295

American Board of Customs Commissioners 50 American Independence, War of (1775–83) 1, 2, 5, 70, 78, 84, 185, 188, 193, 207, 225, 275, 280, 284, 285, 292, 294, 299, 305 Amherst, Jeffery 8, 27, 29, 41, 129, 184, 223, 236, 237, 239 Amherst, William 31 Amsterdam 276 Amyand, George 122 Anderson, Andrew 117 Anderson, M. S. 276 Anderson, William 220 Anne, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland 275, 292 Anson, Elizabeth, Lady 116, 232 Anson, George (later 1st Baron Anson) 15, 116, 140, 212, 213, 228 Antwerp 19 Appleford, farmer 273 Arcot, captured by Robert Clive (1751) 22 Argyll, Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of 156, 266, 267, 273 Argyll, John Campbell, 2nd Duke of 155, 261 Armagh 89 Army, British 13, 14, 15, 27, 53–4, 57–61, 62, 63, 65, 67–75, 82, 92, 94, 100–1, 113, 115, 117, 120–1, 124–5, 132, 140–1, 142, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 167, 170, 171, 178, 182, 188, 189, 196, 201, 202, 207, 208, 210, 212, 225, 226, 243, 258, 263, 264, 272, 281, 282, 283, 284, 300 Arni, battle of (1751) 22 Artis, William 77 Ashbourne 19 Ashbury 268 Ashton, T. S. 83, 112 Aston, Sir Willoughby 270 Austria (Austrians) 1, 5, 7, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 27, 30, 31, 97, 145, 146, 147, 157, 162, 177, 220, 223, 224, 277, 278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284, 288, 289, 292, 294, 295, 296, 297, 300, 301 Austrian Netherlands 16, 18, 19, 85, 157, 160, 162, 177, 224, 229

336 Bagshawe, Samuel 63 Bahur, battle of (1752) 22 Baker, John 69 Baker, William 234 Ball, John 44 Ball, Nathaniel 172 Bampfylde, Sir Richard 196 Bank of England 48 Barnsley, Thomas 69 Barré, Isaac 68 Barrett, Bryant 98 Barrington, William Wildman Barrington, 2nd Viscount 71–2, 156, 292 Barton, Thomas 191 Basse-Meuse 286, 291 Bavaria (Bavarians) 13, 16, 17, 220 Bearhaven 88 Beawes, Wyndham 105 Bedara, battle of (1759) 28 Bedford, John Russell, 4th Duke of 75, 143, 145, 187, 231, 271 Bedford 180 Bedfordshire 132, 271 Beekman, Gerard 241 Belfast 89 Belle Isle 30, 31, 59, 147, 269, 286 Belloy, Pierre-Laurent Buirette de 294 Bengal (Bengalis) 237, 238 see also Diwani Benkulen 88 Bergen-op-Zoom 21, 171, 286 Berkshire 10, 253, 261, 267–73 Bertin, Henri-Léonard de 280 Berwick-on-Tweed 13, 58, 140 Binfield 269 Birmingham 72 Blacker, Samuel 217 Blackstone, Sir William 246 Blakeney, William 200, 206, 213 Blenheim, battle of (1704) 17 Board of General Officers 43 Board of Trade 39, 40, 51, 230, 248, 249 Bohemia 17, 283 Bond, Edmund 73 Bonnell, Robert 161 Bordeaux 208, 288 Boscawen, Edward 21–2, 29, 75, 208 Boston (Massachusetts) 59, 107 Bow Street Runners 135 Bowen, Huw 98 Braddock, Edward 23, 24, 25, 27, 130, 157, 204, 223, 232 Bradfield 268 Bradford-on-Avon 118 Bradshaw, Richard 257 Bradstreet, John 27, 68–9

Index Breadalbane, John Campbell, 3rd Earl of 90, 168 Brearley, John 112 Bremen 110 Breslau, Treaty of (1742) 17 Brest 52, 279 Brewer, John 33, 34, 52, 277 Brighton 218 Bristol 72, 88–9, 95, 117, 209, 211, 255, 272, 287 British Herring Fishery 135 Broomhill, John 78 Brown, John 127 Brown, Philip 220 Bruce, Thomas Bruce, 3rd Baron 273 Brussels 19, 148 Buckinghamshire 95, 121 Buckle, Mathew 107 Burgh, James 175 Burke, Edmund 158, 248, 250 Burkersdorf, battle of (1762) 31 Burrell, Sir William 265 Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of 45, 123, 163, 182, 206, 267 Byng, John 24–5, 75, 130–1, 132, 206, 213 Cadiz 16 Calais 203 Calas, Jean 295 Callanan, Owen 200 Cameron of Lochiel, Donald 87 Campbell, James Mure 68 Campbell, John 215 Caner, Henry 190 Canterbury 114 Canton 15 Cape Breton 18, 147, 162, 212, 223, 229 Cape Colony 298 Cape Finisterre, 1st and 2nd battles of (1747) 21, 76, 205, 212 Caribbean (West Indies) 1, 4, 6, 13, 14, 18, 29, 30, 52, 53, 56, 60, 84, 91, 102, 104, 105, 110, 119, 137, 142, 184, 216, 222, 227, 228, 229, 233, 236, 250, 255, 259, 298, 299 Carinthia 288 Carlisle 19, 86, 197 Carlyle, Alexander 266 Carnac, Ann 118 Carnac, John 118 Carr, Isabella 124, 199 Carrickfergus, attacked (1760) 30, 86, 128, 159, 166, 183, 300 Carron works 112 Cartagena 14, 15, 52, 118, 229, 262 Carter, John 118

Index Carter, Mary 118 Catholic Association 183 Catholics (Catholicism) 3, 9, 81, 127–8, 148, 155, 170, 172, 176–85, 187–9, 192, 200, 201, 202, 207, 208, 209, 216, 219, 226, 238, 239, 241, 242, 254, 255, 258, 260, 292, 294, 295, 296, 303, 304 Central America 1, 15, 56, 60, 216, 227, 228, 229 Ceylon 298 Chanda Sahib 22 Chandernagore 26 Channel Islands 106 Charlemont, James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of 201 Charles (or Karl) VI, Holy Roman Emperor 16 Charles, Prince, of Lorraine 17 Charles Edward Stuart (Prince Charles, the Young Pretender) 18, 19, 62, 63, 86, 148, 152, 164, 170, 178, 179, 181, 182, 198, 199, 204, 258, 261, 262, 264, 266, 296 Charlton, Job Staunton 215 Chatham 111, 153 Chelsea 118 Cherbourg, attacked (1758) 27, 147 Cheshire 86, 95, 118 Chester 95 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of 183, 188, 204, 218, 221, 223 Choiseul, Etienne-François de Stainville, Duc de 299 Cholmondeley, George Cholmondeley, 3rd Earl of 43–4, 174 Clark, Jonathan 165 Clark, Thomas 80 Clausewitz, Carl von 2 Clegg, James 11, 174, 215 Clement XIII, Pope 296 Clerk, Sir John, of Penicuik 219, 220 Clive, Robert 22, 26, 28, 41, 232, 236 Clonmel 128 Cobbold, John 211 Cockings, George 141 Colchester 77, 212 Colden, Alexander 217 Coles, Benjamin 177 Colley, Linda 9, 193–4, 198, 206–7 Collier, John 129 Colonies, North American (colonists, North American) 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23–4, 25, 26, 27, 36, 40–1, 45, 48, 49–50, 51, 54–5, 56, 60, 70, 71, 87, 92, 94, 95, 97, 105, 107, 109, 110, 125–6, 142, 145, 157, 158, 160, 170, 173, 176, 184, 186, 189, 190–1, 194, 201, 202, 206, 209, 210, 214, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227,

337

229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 255, 256, 259, 282, 294, 298, 299, 302, 303, 305 Assemblies of 38–9, 40, 49, 54–5, 186, 230, 236, 244, 245 Plans to create episcopacy in 190–1 Commissioners for Sick and Wounded 53 Commissioners for the Annexed Estates 74, 135, 138 Condé, Louis-Jospeh de Bourbon, Prince de 27 Congreve, William 175 Connecticut 243, 246 Connolly, Sean 4 Continental versus colonial and maritime warfare 146–9, 150, 157, 160, 162, 167, 222 Contractors and commissaries, unpopularity of 122–3, 291 Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland 233 Conway, Henry Seymour 68, 141, 248, 250 Conybeare, John 172 Cookson, J. E. 34 Coote, Eyre 30 Cope, Sir John 18, 24, 63, 203, 261, 262 Cork 10, 90, 102, 111, 211, 253–60, 261, 262, 273 Cornwall 195, 208 Court, Thomas 210–11 Coutt, James 267 Coutter, Andrew 125 Cowper, Spencer 215 Cox, Sir Richard 257 Coxheath camp 111, 153 Cranston, William 148 Craufurd, Patrick 159 Crime and war 133–5 Crisis of 1756–7 129–33 Culloden, battle of (1746) 19, 62, 87, 91, 114, 137, 152, 170, 174, 180, 181, 213, 265, 269 Cumberland, William Augustus, Duke of 18, 19, 21, 25, 41, 62, 120, 135, 137, 140, 148, 152, 164, 174, 178, 180, 197, 204, 212, 213, 265, 269 Cunningham, Waddell 47 Cust, Peregrine 122 Cutler, John 234 Dailey, Charles 69 Dashwood, Sir Francis 148, 222 Daun, Leopold von 25 Davenport, Richard 85, 86 Davies, Hugh 208 Davies, Samuel 241

338

Index

Dawson, John 140 Deane, Sir Matthew 256 Delaval, Francis Drake 139 Demobilization, at end of wars 9, 90, 92, 115, 128–9, 133–5, 291 Dempster, George 74, 139, 156 Denmark 102 Depopulation, fears of 93 Derby 19, 86 Derbyshire 270 Destruction and loss caused by wars 85–9, 285–6, 305 Dettingen, battle of (1743) 17, 21, 118, 149, 202, 212, 221, 222 Devon 134 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 3rd Duke of 188, 209 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 4th Duke of 188 Dewhirst, Benjamin 63 Dickson, Peter 33, 98 Dieskau, Jean-Armand, Baron de 24 Diplomatic Revolution (1756) 157, 224, 295 Diwani (right to collect revenue and administer justice in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa) 32, 227, 236 Dodd, John 270 Dodington, George Bubb 90, 149 Dominica 30 Dominion of New England 247 Doncaster 211 Donston, Stokeham 88 Douglas, Sir James 64 Dowdeswell, William 250 Dowlais furnace 112 Drake, Francis 213 Drake, Francis William 75 Draper, William 32, 41 Drummond, Lord John 87 Dublin 6, 72, 94, 118, 158, 165, 200, 216, 219 Dulany, Daniel 248 Dunbar 262 Dundas, Lawrence 122–3 Dunkirk 19, 146, 215 Dupleix, Joseph 22 Durham 92, 117 Dutch (Dutch Republic or United Provinces) 5, 16, 28, 57, 65, 91, 92, 97–8, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 146, 162, 171, 172, 221, 223, 224, 277, 281, 282, 287, 289, 298 East Grinstead 118 East Hendred 269 East India Company (British) 6, 21, 22, 26, 28, 32, 41, 48, 56, 62, 65, 66, 88, 202, 227, 229, 231, 238, 282

East India Company (Dutch) 28, 91 East India Company (French) 19, 21, 30, 288 Economy, war and 8, 83–114, 130–1, 284–90, 301, 303, 306 Edinburgh 10, 18, 63, 81, 86, 159, 203, 253, 260–7, 273 Edward, Prince (son of Frederick, Prince of Wales) 151 effeminacy, fear of 120, 127, 139 Egremont, Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of 184, 238, 239 Elcho, David Wemyss, Lord 117 Eld, Francis 215 Elizabeth, Empress of Russia 21, 30–1 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 120 Elliot, Gilbert 154 Elliot, John 199 Elliott, Thomas 69 embargoes 47, 49, 102, 104–5, 256–7, 259 Empire 9, 163, 189, 227–52, 298–9 England (English) 202–7, 208, 210, 214, 216, 217, 218, 222, 226, 240, 246, 253, 256, 259, 261, 262, 266, 302 Ensenada, Cenon de Somodevilla, Marquis de la 278 Esk, river 19 Essex 133 Europe 1, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 22, 24, 25, 27, 136, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 157, 158, 162, 176, 199, 216, 219, 224, 242, 275–301, 305–6 European allies and auxiliaries of Britain 3, 5, 9, 11, 48, 94, 97, 108, 145, 146, 153, 157, 163, 164, 167, 219–23, 226, 274, 282, 283, 286, 300, 302 Evangelicalism 176, 192, 303 Evans, John 76–7 Exeter 77, 81, 117 Falkirk, battle of (1746) 19, 97, 119 Falmouth 107, 116 family allowances 80, 95, 119, 132 Farringdon 270 Faversham 43 Fayle, C. E. 107 Ferdinand of Brunswick, Prince 27, 28, 30, 31, 295 Fielding, Henry 8, 61, 134, 135 Findlater, James Ogilvy, 5th Earl of 87 Finlay, Richard 198 Fiscal bureaucracy 39, 52, 275 ‘fiscal-military state’ 33 Fitz, Thomas 80 Flanders 11, 17, 45, 64, 67, 70, 147, 175, 202, 204, 212, 221 Fletcher, Isaac 173

Index Fleury, André-Hercule 228, 293 Fludyer, Sir Samuel and Thomas 112, 114 Fontenoy, battle of (1745) 18, 21, 145, 201, 210, 220, 221 Foote, Samuel 123, 238 Forbes, Duncan 137 Forbes, George Forbes, Viscount 62 Forbes, John 27 Fordyce, Elizabeth 174 Forrester, Alexander 266–7 Fort Beauséjour 23 Fort Duquesne 23, 24, 27 Fort Frontenac 27, 68, 237 Fort Gaspereau 23 Fort George 137 Fort Niagara 29 Fort Oswego 25, 26 Fort Prince George 23 Fort St David 21, 27 Fort St George 21, 27, 28, 229, 231 Fort St Louis de Sénégal 28, 105–6 Fort St Philip 25 Fort William 26 Fort William Henry 26, 232 ’Forty-five Rebellion (1745–6) 5, 9, 18–19, 41–2, 43–4, 50, 51, 53, 62, 63, 65, 73, 74, 81, 86–7, 95, 97, 101, 113, 115, 117, 120–1, 135, 136–7, 139, 142, 152, 157, 159, 164, 170, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 183, 196, 197, 198–9, 204–5, 217, 265, 269, 270, 271, 273, 285, 287, 300 Fothergill, John 132, 173 Fox, Lady Caroline 14, 174, 214, 219 France (French) 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57, 65, 74, 83, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 97, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 116, 117, 120, 125, 127, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 158, 161,162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 184, 185, 186, 192, 194, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 251, 252, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 264, 265, 268, 269, 270, 277, 279–80, 281, 282, 283, 284, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 301, 302, 304, 305 Franklin, Benjamin 240, 243 Frazer, Simon 74 Frederick, Prince of Hesse 263 Frederick, Prince of Wales 151

339

Frederick II (‘The Great’) King of Prussia 14, 16, 17, 18, 25, 27, 28, 30, 149, 163, 167, 173, 177, 219, 220, 221, 222, 241, 278, 282, 284, 286, 291, 295, 297, 304 Freke, Sir John Redmond 256 French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815) 1, 2, 5, 34, 84, 193, 194, 207, 275, 276, 280, 284, 294, 296, 299, 305 Fretwell, James 205 Frieberg, battle of (1762) 31 Fullagar and Todd 111 Fuller, John and Stephen 112, 114 ‘Fungus, Zachary’ 123 Galway 188 Gardiner, James 204 Garrick, David 141 Genoa 21 George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover 164 George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover 9, 18, 30, 32, 34, 35, 91, 150, 151, 152, 153, 158, 163, 164, 167, 181, 219, 221, 233, 258 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 150, 151, 163, 164, 165, 181–2, 184, 222, 233, 238, 239, 242, 296 Georgia 15, 227, 249 Germany (Germans) 11, 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 30, 31, 33, 56, 57, 60, 74, 97, 99, 109, 110, 121, 141, 142, 147, 148, 149, 152, 157, 158, 163, 167, 182, 189–90, 202, 210, 213, 214, 215, 220, 221, 222, 223, 241, 282, 283, 285–6, 287, 291, 297 Gibbon, Edward 145, 210 Gibraltar 16, 24, 25, 116, 298 Gideon, Sampson 97 Glasgow 71, 72, 89, 199, 233, 287 Gloucestershire 78, 94, 271 Goizen, Daniel 103 Goldsmith, Oliver 145, 234–5, 236 Gooch, William 229 Goodman, Levi 80 Gordon, Catherine Gordon, Duchess of 74 Gorée 13, 28 Gould, Eliga 224 Government spending 108–13, 290 Gower, John Leveson-Gower, 2nd Baron and 1st Earl 119 Grafton, Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3rd Duke of 211 Granby, John Manners, Marquis of 30, 67, 141, 181, 213 Gravenstein, battle of (1762) 31

340 Greene, Jack 248, 249 Greenwich Hospital 125 Grenada 30, 184, 189 Grenoble 279 Grenville, George 45, 136, 154, 231, 235, 243, 244, 248, 250, 299 Grünberg, battle of (1761) 30 Guadeloupe 29, 233, 234, 288 Guest, Joshua 262 Gurdon, Elizabeth 134 Gybbon, Phillips 154 Haddock, Nicholas 16, 116 Halifax, George Montague-Dunk, 5th Earl of 38, 51, 230, 244, 248, 249, 250 Halifax (Nova Scotia) 6 Hamilton, John 199 Hamilton, William 6 Handel, George Frederick 6, 152, 212 Hanover (Hanoverians) 4, 5, 9, 17, 18, 24, 25, 34–5, 57, 94, 99, 144, 148, 150–3, 164, 201, 215, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 291 Hanway, Jonas 234 Harbin, George 149 Hardwicke, Margaret, Lady 149, 204 Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, 1st Baron and 1st Earl of 42, 50, 138, 149, 155–6 Harris, Bob 51, 231, 265 Harris, Howell 219 Haslar, naval hospital 53 Hastenbeck, battle of (1757) 25 Hatton, Michael 123 Haugwitz, Count Friedrich Wilhelm von 278 Havana 21, 31, 32, 64, 91, 104, 125, 129, 206 Havant 81 Hawke, (Sir) Edward 29, 76, 88, 174, 205, 212, 216 Hawley, Henry 265 Haydon, Colin 178 Hayes, Gilbert 80 Hayman, Francis 236 Hearn, Maurice 208 ‘Hearts of Oak’ (Oakboys) 128 Heathcote, Lady Margaret 196 Hely-Hutchinson, John 256 Henry III, King of England 146 Henry VIII, King of England 197 Heraclitus 3 Herring, Thomas 92 Hervey, Augustus 125 Hessians 57, 151, 204, 215, 222, 263, 264 Hickling, Sarah 117

Index Highlands (Highlanders) 34, 42, 51, 62, 71, 74, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 95, 97, 101, 114, 115, 117, 136–9, 142, 155–6, 181, 189, 196, 206, 207, 208, 210, 214, 216, 261, 262, 264 see also Scotland Hinde, Richard 76 Hindley, Henry 107 Hintze, Otto 33, 34 Hoare’s bank 100 Hochkirch, battle of (1758) 27 Hogarth, William 120, 141, 203, 216 Hohenfriedberg, battle of (1745) 18 Holdernesse, Robert D’Arcy, 4th Earl of 174 Holland 289 see also Dutch Hollis, Thomas 189 Holy Roman Empire 172, 294 see also Germany hostility to British and Irish involvement in war 145–6 Houlding, John 58, 59, 65 Howe, George Augustus Howe, 1st Viscount 213 Hull (Kingston upon Hull) 35, 58, 106, 107, 113, 218 Hulst 199 Hulton, Henry 122–3 Humphreys, Richard 31 Hundred Years War 294 Hungerford 272 Hunt, William 77 Hurd, Richard 214 India 6, 7, 21–2, 26, 27–8, 30, 118, 218, 229, 231, 238, 241, 288, 295 invasion scares 17, 19, 24, 28, 74, 97, 127, 130, 131, 143, 149, 151, 153, 159, 166, 174, 178, 181, 185, 203, 214–16, 259, 263, 269, 270 Ireland (Irish) 36, 60, 62, 64, 65, 84–5, 89, 91, 93, 96, 104, 113, 118, 127–8, 155, 159, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172, 176, 177, 179, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 194, 196, 199, 200–2, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 216, 217, 218, 222, 226, 238, 243, 253, 254, 256, 259, 267, 282, 302 Irish Brigade (French army) 65, 66, 91, 201, 282 Irish rebellion (1798) 86 Irish subsistence crisis of 1740–1 93 Isle of Man 199 Isle of Wight 211, 229 Italy (Italian) 11, 16, 17, 18, 21, 152, 223, 278, 285

Index Jacobites (Jacobitism) 18–19, 21, 65–6, 91, 146, 150, 163, 164, 170, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 185, 187, 192, 195, 197, 198, 199, 207, 211, 212, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269, 270, 273, 285, 293 Jamaica 14, 21, 69, 229, 259 James II, King of Great Britain and Ireland 247 James Francis Edward Stuart (James III, the Old Pretender) 182, 296 James, Charles 111–12 Jefferys, Joseph 68 Jenkins, Robert 14 Jenyns, Soame 246 Jessop, Arthur 179, 195, 205, 211 Jesuits 296 John, A. H. 83 John, Thomas 125 Johnson, William 23 Jones, John 117 Jones, Peter 78 Jumonville, Joseph Coulon de Villiers de 297 Kaunitz, Prince Wenzel Anton 278 Kay, Richard 174, 180, 212 Kaye, Robert 77 Kenmare, Thomas Browne, 4th Viscount 183 Keppel, Augustus 64, 75, 104, 237 Ker, James 266, 267 Kerly, Anthony 77 Kerry, William FitzMaurice, 2nd Earl of 196 Kidd, Colin 199 Kilkenny 89, 202 King’s County (Ireland) 178, 209 Kingsland, Henry Benedict Barnewall, 4th Viscount Barnewall of 183 Kirk, Robert 71 Kirkham, Walter 75 Kloster Kamp, battle of (1760) 30, 174 Kloster-Zeven, convention of (1757) 25 Knight, Richard 88 Knowles, Charles 21, 213 Kolin, battle of (1757) 25 Krefeld, battle of (1758) 27 Kunersdorf, battle of (1759) 28 La Rochelle 287 Labour supply and pay rates, impact of wars on 89–93, 159 Lacy, Franz Moritz 278 Lagos, battle off (1759) 29, 104 Lake Champlain 23 Lake George 23 Lally, Thomas-Arthur, Comte de 27, 28, 30 Lancashire 210–11

341

land grants: Britain 135 colonies 46, 92, 125, 135 Langford, Paul 34, 36 Laufeldt, battle of (1747) 21 Lavit, Walter 257 Lawrence, Stringer 22 Le Havre, bombarded (1759) 29 League of Augsburg, War of the (1689–97) 5, 13, 275, 299 Lee, Charles 233 Lee, Robert 269 Leeds 72, 92 Leek 19, 86 Legge, Henry Bilson 148–9 Leghorn (Livorno) 107 Leicester 94, 117, 211, 215, 219 Leicester House (London residence of Prince of Wales) 151, 293 Leignitz, battle of (1760) 30 Leith 261 Lestock, Richard 16 Leuthen, battle of (1757) 25, 27 Levis, François-Gaston, Chevalier de 29 Lewis and Company 112 Lewisham, George Legge, Viscount 279 Lichfield 204 Lichfield, George Henry Lee, 3rd Earl of 232 Limerick 102, 111, 114 ‘limited war’ 2, 81 Lind, George 267 Lind, James 53, 136 Lindsay, Patrick 261 Linz 278 Lisbon 104 Liverpool 89, 94, 130, 197, 233, 287 Livingston, Robert 233 Lobositz, battle of (1756) 25 local loyalties 193–7, 226 London 6, 14, 19, 72, 81, 84, 90, 108, 134, 135, 144–5, 147, 149, 168, 178, 186, 191, 198, 199, 200, 206, 207, 214, 215, 218, 220, 236, 237, 238, 240, 255, 266, 269, 272 Lonsdale, Henry Lowther, 3rd Viscount 86 Lorient 19, 147 Lorne, John Campbell, Marquis of 68 Loudoun, John Campbell, 4th Earl of 25, 26, 27, 41, 49, 67, 124, 237 Louis XIV, King of France 33, 36, 275, 305 Louis XV, King of France 23, 157, 171, 280, 284, 290 Louis XVI, King of France 280 Louisbourg 18, 21, 25, 26, 27, 49, 56, 68, 152, 157, 200, 205, 221, 223, 224, 228, 229, 236, 237, 269

342 Louisiana 287 Lovat, Simon Fraser, 11th Lord 74 Low Countries 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 105, 109, 110, 135, 145, 147, 148, 162, 212, 220, 221, 224, 231, 279, 286, 287 Lucas, Charles 165–6, 200–1 luxury, fear of 120, 136, 175, 251–2 Maastricht 21 Macclesfield 19, 120 Macclesfield, George Parker, 5th Earl of 136 Machault d’Arnouville, Jean-Baptiste 280 Mackenzie, Frederick 68 Mackillop, Andrew 34, 139 Maclean, John 63, 199 McPherson, Ewan, of Cluny 138 Maidenhead 269, 272 Manchester 19, 72, 212 Manila 15, 32, 41, 57 Mansfield, William Murray, 1st Earl of 206, 246 Marchmont, Hugh Hume Campbell, 3rd Earl of 266 Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary 13, 16, 145, 147, 160, 177, 220, 221, 276, 296 Marlborough, Charles Spencer, 3rd Duke of 67, 118 Marlborough, Elizabeth Spencer, Duchess of 118 Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of 17, 276 marriage rates 116–17 Marshall, Peter (P. J.) 225 Martinique 29, 30, 91, 110, 119, 257, 288 Mary, Queen of England 176 Maryland 223, 242, 248 Massachusetts 18, 48, 68, 94, 241, 242, 247 Massie, Joseph 98, 160, 161 Mathews, Thomas 16 Mauduit, Israel 149, 222 Mayhew, Jonathan 241 Meath, County 178 Mendinueta, Francisco de 277 migration 92–3, 126, 189, 190 militarization, of Britain and Ireland 9, 139–42 Militia: English and Welsh 13, 45–6, 61, 63, 65, 78–80, 82, 94, 113, 117, 124, 132, 140, 156–8, 165, 195, 196, 207, 210, 224, 270, 271, 274, 283; Riots (1757) 132, 140, 271 Irish 62, 65, 66, 80–1, 82, 128, 140, 158, 159, 181, 259, 260, 274 Scottish, agitation for 159 Miller, James 129

Index Minden, battle of (1759) 28, 74, 174, 263, 265 Minorca 16, 24–5, 30, 130, 184–5, 200, 203, 205, 206, 213, 232, 294, 298 Mir Jafar 26 mobilization of manpower and resources for war 4, 5, 8, 33–55, 56–82, 138, 153–61, 263, 276, 280–4, 283, 284, 300, 301, 304–6 Molesworth, James 138 Mollwitz, battle of (1741) 16 Monckton, Robert 107 Monk Wearmouth 117 Monongahela River 23, 24, 204, 232 Montauban 296 Montcalm-Gozon de Saint-Véran, Louis-Joseph, Marquis de 25, 26, 29, 232, 297 Montpellier 296 Montreal 29, 30, 110, 173, 212, 241, 242 Mordaunt, John 220 Morell, Thomas 152 Morineau, Michel 289 Morris, Lewis 219 Morris, Staats Long 74 Morton, John 268 Mosquito Shore 15 Muhammad Ali 22 Munster 127, 255, 256, 260 Murray, James 29–30 Musilipatam, battle of (1759) 28 Mutiny by soldiers in North America (1763) 129 Nagapatam 28 Namier, (Sir) Lewis 36, 163 Naples (Neapolitan) 17, 107 nation (national sentiment etc), war and 9, 193–226, 296–8, 303 National Debt 96, 98, 108, 109, 160, 250, 304 Native Americans (Amerindians) 18, 22–3, 24, 26, 53, 56, 87, 186, 191–2, 214, 232, 234, 237, 241, 243 Navy, British (Royal Navy) and marines 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 26, 28–9, 40, 52–3, 57–61, 65, 75–8, 82, 85, 90, 94, 100, 104, 106, 108, 111, 112, 113, 117, 124–5, 130, 139, 141, 153, 154, 170, 182–3, 207–8, 215, 228–9, 243, 258, 263, 272, 279, 281, 282, 283, 290, 300, 305 Dockyards 42, 46–7, 53; Chatham 46; Plymouth 46; Portsmouth 46 Navy Board 43, 90, 103 Neal, Larry 84 Neumark of Brandenburg 286

Index New England (New Englanders) 17, 18, 23, 60, 147, 157, 189, 190, 223, 228, 237, 241, 242, 247 New Jersey 173 New Windsor 233, 268, 271, 272 New York 17, 18, 23, 47, 107, 218, 232, 241 Newark 180 Newbury 267, 269, 271, 272, 273 Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of 3, 6, 24, 25, 96, 123, 130, 149, 150, 164, 165, 173, 178, 180, 202, 204, 212, 232, 234, 248, 249, 250, 252, 294 Newcastle upon Tyne 19 Newdigate, Sir Roger 220 Newenham, Thomas 256 Newman, Gerald 127 newspapers and periodicals 11, 121, 143, 166–7, 229, 234, 236–7, 246, 264, 269, 294, 303 Newton, James 174 Niagara 233 Nisbet, Alexander 261 North, Frederick, Lord 163, 292 North Carolina 248 Northamptonshire 134 Nottingham 270 Nottinghamshire 197 Nova Scotia 18, 23, 24, 26, 68, 92, 224, 227, 249, 298 Nutt, Justinian 76 O’Brien, Patrick 300 O’Conor, Charles 182, 183 Ogg, David 66 Ogle, Sir Chaloner 116 Oglethorpe, James 15 Ohio Company 23 Ohio Valley 6, 23, 24, 224, 231, 297 Oldmixon, John 236 Ordnance Board 43, 47, 103, 112 Orrery, Charles Boyle, 5th Earl of 214, 221 Osborn, Henry 75 Ostend 221 Oswald, Richard 123 Overijssel 289 overseas trade 4, 100–8, 148, 260, 285, 287–8 Oxfordshire 174 Paita 15 Panama 15 Paris 17, 255, 279, 297 Peace of (1763) 32; British acquisitions under 32 Park, Edward 80

343

Parliament: British 33, 35–6, 38, 49, 50, 57, 58, 95–6, 143, 150, 159, 161, 225, 236, 243, 246, 247, 248, 251, 252, 293, 294, 300, 301 Irish 35, 37–8, 58, 95, 143, 165, 166, 181, 188, 255, 256 Parsons, Sir Lawrence 178 Partnership(s) 3, 8, 34, 54–5, 229–30, 244, 276, 301, 302, 303, 304, 306 Peace, negotiations for, and debates over 162–3 Peacock, Jeremiah 76 Pelham, Henry 44, 96, 97, 155, 161 Pennsylvania 18, 186, 191, 237, 245 Penny, Edward 213, 214 Penrith 87, 195 Perceval, John Perceval, Viscount 81 Peter III, Emperor of Russia 31 Philadelphia 103, 107 Philips, Charles 8 Philipps, (Sir) John 153, 197 Philippines 31 Piacenza, battle of (1746) 21, 97 Pickawillany 23 Piedmont-Sardinia (Piedmontese) 17, 18, 21, 97, 109, 221 Pigott, Emanuel 255 Piper, Edward 80 Pitsligo, Alexander Forbes, 4th Lord Forbes of 285 Pitt, William (later 1st Earl of Chatham) 51, 132, 143, 156, 158, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 200, 206, 213, 237, 239, 245, 250, 258, 293, 302 Plassey, battle of (1757) 26, 41, 232 Plymouth 211 Pocock, George 125 Pococke, Richard 253 Polish Succession, War of (1733–5) 1 politics and war 9, 143–69, 292–4, 303 Pomerania 286 Pondicherry 13, 22, 27, 30 Port Mahon (Minorca) 116 Porto Bello, capture of (1739) 14, 144, 174, 202, 203, 212, 213, 228 Portsmouth 207 Portugal (Portuguese) 31, 59, 110, 183, 216, 285 Postlethwayt, Malachy 151, 232, 235 Pownall, Thomas 235, 236 Pragmatic Sanction 16, 17 Prague 17 battle of (1757) 25 Pratt, Charles 156 Press gangs (pressing, impressment) 35, 46, 59, 70–1, 90, 104, 130, 140, 154, 156

344

Index

Prestonpans, battle of (1745) 18, 24, 63, 97, 195, 203, 204, 211, 262 Price, Richard 187 Priestley, Joseph 182, 187 Pringle, Sir John 136 Pritchard, ‘William’ 119 Privateers (privateering) 40, 88–9, 103–4, 106, 107, 108 Privy Council 35, 38, 40 Protestants (Protestantism) 3, 9, 60, 80, 83, 127–8, 137, 143, 144, 148, 152, 158, 164, 167, 170, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187–9, 190, 192, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 208, 209, 216, 219, 225, 238, 239, 241, 254, 255, 257, 258, 259, 260, 291, 294, 295, 296, 302, 303, 304 Protestant Dissenters 3, 80, 128, 170, 172, 174, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 201, 255, 296, 302 ‘Protestant Interest’ 148, 177, 181, 185, 295 Provence 21 providential views of war 85, 170, 173–5, 192 Prussia (Prussians) 1, 5, 11, 17, 18, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30–1, 139, 146, 149, 220, 241, 277, 278, 281, 282, 283, 284, 286, 291, 295, 297, 301, 304 public opinion 149, 165–9, 293, 294 Pulteney, William 102, 105, 147, 159 Pye, Henry 270 Quakers 173, 180, 186 Quebec (Canada) 13, 29, 90, 92, 171, 184, 185, 189, 190, 205, 231, 233, 234, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 245, 265, 287, 288, 298 Quiberon Bay, battle in (1759) 29, 104, 174, 202, 205, 215 Reading 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273 Reed, Joseph 131 Reily, John 258 religion 4, 9, 170–92, 294–6, 301, 304 Reynolds, Joshua 8, 139 Rhine, River 17, 146 Rhode Island 237, 245 Richmond, Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of 204 Ridpath, George 215, 217 Riga 109 Riley, James 287, 289 Roades, Thomas 91 Robertson, James 124 Robertson, William 199 Robinson, Isobel 117 Rochefort, raided (1757) 25, 43, 52, 103, 147, 167, 213

Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquis of 135, 248, 249, 250 Rocoux, battle of (1746) 19 Rodger, Nicholas 42, 65, 76, 90, 207 Rodney, George 29 Rogers, Sir John 78 Rome 152, 235 Roscommon, County 182 Ross, William 261 Rossbach, battle of (1757) 25, 27, 297 Ross-shire 99 Rotterdam 107 Russia (Russian) 11, 14, 21, 24, 25, 27, 28 Rutland 196 Ryder, James 35 Sackville, Lord George 28, 59, 67, 213, 215, 220, 223 St Albans, Charles Beauclerk, 2nd Duke of 270 Saint-Domingue 21, 229, 288, 298, 299 St Johns (Newfoundland) 31 St Kitts 298 St Lawrence River and Valley 13, 18, 22, 23, 27, 29, 243 St Lucia 30 St Malo, attacked (1758) 27, 103, 116, 118, 147, 286 St Vincent 30 San Agustín 15 San Sebastian 88 Sandys, Samuel 44 Santiago 14 Savile, Sir George 135 Savile, Gertrude 111, 116, 153, 178, 197 Saxe, Maurice de 18, 135, 221, 279, 297 Saxony 25 Scotland (Scots) 11, 15, 18, 19, 65, 71, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 101, 113, 121, 148, 152, 155–6, 159, 172, 179, 181, 192, 194, 196, 197, 198–200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 216, 217, 226, 253, 260, 282, 302 Episcopalians in 137–8, 179, 189 Seceders in 180–1 see also Highlands Scots Brigade (Dutch army) 65, 282 Seaford, John 118 Secker, Thomas 191 Serres, Dominic, the elder 8 Shebbeare, John 98–9, 109, 157, 160 Sheehy, Nicholas 128 Shelburne, William Petty, 3rd Earl of 239, 251 Shippen, William 153 Shirley, William 18, 25, 39, 68 Shottesbrooke 270

Index Shropshire 181, 208 Silesia 296 Siraj-ud-duala 26, 41, 232 Slaves (slavery, slave-trade) 28, 56, 89, 105 Smith, Adam 97 Smith, Charles 253, 255, 256, 259 Smith, Jeremiah 69 Smith, John 125 Smith, William 80 Smollet, Tobias 8, 123, 296 Smuggling (smugglers) 77, 100–1, 104 Smyrna (Izmir) 103 social conflict and war 126–33, 291, 303, 304 social mobility and war 121–6, 303 social policy and war 133–6, 142, 291–2, 301, 303, 304, 306 society and war 8, 115–42, 290–2, 301 Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights 165, 169 Solkin, David 214 Sonnenfels, Joseph von 296 Soor, battle of (1745) 18 South Carolina 15, 110 South Sea Company 1 Southwell, Edward 154 Spain (Spanish) 1, 3, 6, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 31, 32, 50, 78, 83, 88, 89, 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 116, 144, 145, 153, 159, 163, 166, 170, 176, 178, 192, 202, 205, 213, 216, 217, 227, 228, 229, 230, 233, 235, 252, 256, 258, 262, 271, 272, 277, 278, 279, 281, 285, 287, 292, 299, 300, 305 Spanish Succession, War of the (1702–13) 5, 13, 15, 84, 164, 218, 275, 276, 280, 285, 293, 298, 299, 305 Spavens, William 91 Speenhamland 272 Staffordshire 110, 133, 134 Stair, John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of 67, 202 Stannard and Taylor 103 State (British and continental) 3, 33–55, 93, 159, 170, 196, 207, 275–80, 302, 306 Sterne, Laurence 149 Steuart, James 104 Stewart, Archibald 261, 266 Stewart, John Roy 63 Stirling 263, 269 Stone, Andrew 6 Stone, George 185, 257 Stout, William 88, 99 Strabane 80 Strange, James Smith Stanley, Lord 79 Stuarts 15, 18, 164, 179, 182, 187, 201 Stukeley, William 13, 41, 42, 175 Styria 288

345

Suffolk 94, 205, 211 Surrey 133, 271 Swallowfield 270 Sweden (Swedes) 25, 294 Swiss (Switzerland) 56, 57, 59, 172, 282 Talbot, William Talbot, 2nd Baron 154 Taylor, Peter 123–4 taxation and public borrowing 94–100, 108, 159–61, 243–51, 288–9, 290, 301, 304 Terray, Joseph-Marie 280 Terrick, Richard 171 Ticonderoga, battle of (1758) 91, 206, 213, 233 Thomas, Antoine-Léonard 297 Thomas, William 72, 117, 195, 196, 211 Thomson, James 200, 214 Thornton, William 81 Thurot, François 30, 86, 128, 159, 166, 183, 199, 200, 300 Todd, William 71, 271 Torgau, battle of (1760) 30, 220 Tories 3, 9, 44, 144, 148, 156, 163–5, 219, 268, 270, 271, 292, 293, 302, 303, 304 Touchet, Samuel 122 Toulon 24 battle of (1744) 16, 21 Toulouse 295 Tournai, siege of (1745) 18 Townsend, Chauncy 122 Townshend, Charles 50, 245, 250–1 Townshend, George Towshend, 4th Viscount 38 trade with the enemy 237, 257, 259 Treasury 39, 40, 52, 94, 95, 123 Tregowith, John 76 Trichinopoly, siege of (1751) 22 Trumbull, William 269 Tucker, Josiah 231, 232 Turner, Daniel 269 Turner, Thomas 168, 203, 205, 212 Tyrawley, James O’Hara, 2nd Baron 178 Udney, George 103 ‘undertakers’ (Irish parliamentary managers) 37–8, 39 Ulster 62, 92, 127, 128, 186, 189, 191, 208, 209, 258 Ushant, Battle of (1778) 279 Utrecht, Treaty of (1713) 1, 298 Vandan, Martha 118 Vansittart, Arthur 270 Vattel, Emerich de 171 Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Pierre de Rigaud, Marquis of 29

346

Index

Velletri, battle of (1744) 17 Vellinghausen, battle of (1761) 30 Vernon, Edward 8, 14, 15, 141, 144, 166, 174, 202, 203, 212, 213, 214, 228 Victualling Board 43, 47, 103, 111 Vienna 278 Vigo 16 Villa Velha, battle of (1762) 31 Virginia 23, 190, 223, 241, 247 Virginia Water 135 Volunteers (volunteer corps) 40, 61–2, 65, 66, 81, 82 Vyner, Robert 154 Wade, George 221 Wagner, Anthony and George 112 Waldegrave, James Waldegrave, 2nd Earl 130, 151 Wales (Welsh) 119, 164, 170, 172, 197–8, 202, 208, 211, 226 Walpole, Richard 148 Walpole, Sir Robert 1, 14, 44, 105, 122, 126, 144, 147, 148, 154, 155, 164, 166, 177, 194, 213, 244, 248, 249, 261, 264, 292, 293, 303 Walpole, Thomas 122 Walter, John 80 Wandewash, battle of (1760) 30 Wansey, George 46, 90 Warburg, battle of (1760) 30 Ward, Robert 80 Warne, James 174 Warren, Peter 18 Warrington and Baldwin 43, 47 Washington, George 23 Waterford 111 Waterloo, battle of (1815) 1 Watson, Charles 26 Watson-Wentworth, Lady Charlotte 204 Watteau, Louis-Joseph 297 Way, Lewis and Benjamin 87–8 Way, Peter 129

Webb, Daniel 25 Weiner Neustadt 278 Welch, William 80 West, Benjamin 8, 214, 298 Whately, Thomas 225 Whigs 3, 9, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 156, 158, 163–5, 264, 266, 268, 270, 292, 293, 302, 303 ‘Whiteboys’ 127–8, 260 Wilhelmstahl, battle of (1762) 31 Wilkes, John 165, 168, 169, 207 Willes, Edward 92 William III, King of Great Britain and Ireland 275 Wilson, Kathleen 127, 228 Wilson, Mary 118 Wilson, William 111 Wiltshire 135 Wimbledon 117 Winchester 210 Windsor, see New Windsor Winter, Richard 78 Wokingham 267 Wolfe, James 24, 29, 72, 120, 141, 171, 205, 213, 214, 232, 298 Women, men, and war 115–21, 290–1, 303 Wood, James 69 Woodward, George 219 Woolwich, artillery and engineers trained at 53 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary 285 Wright, John 70 Wrigley, E. A. 97 Wynn, Sir Watkin Williams 197 Yarmouth 61 Yorke, Charles 250 Yorke, Joseph 120 Yorkshire 135, 195 Youghal 200 Young, Arthur 236 Zorndorf, battle of (1758) 14, 27

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