The Armed Forces and British Society, c.1650–1790
Monday 7 July 2008, St. Hilda’s College, Oxford
Centre for Early Modern British and Irish History, University of Oxford, and Eighteenth-Century Worlds Research Centre, University of Liverpool
The aim of the workshop was to provide a forum to explore and debate recent research developments in the field of civilian-military relations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and establish a network of researchers working in this area. All papers were pre-circulated and speakers were given five minutes to summarise the thrust of their research. As might be expected, the discussions raised more questions than conclusions. Two issues appeared to be especially striking. Firstly, in the light of papers about representations of the army and military life, there followed considerable discussion as to how more literary-based approaches could be integrated with historical research on material conditions and practices, and the possible interfaces between the two. Secondly, the question was debated as to how we should go about periodising military history, and in particular, how early modernists and modernists might learn from each other.
We will return to debating some of these issues in the three–day conference at the University of Liverpool on 18–20 June 2009, entitled ‘Civilians and war in Europe, c.1640–1815’. By extending the scope in terms of chronology, geography and methodology, this conference will explore the impact of war and violence on civilian populations, the transition between peace and war, and the multiple configurations and mutations of civilian-military identity during the early modern and modern period. However, since the format of a one-day workshop with pre-circulated papers and a strong graduate involvement appears to have considerable utility and meet a need, we hope to organise another event along these lines in the near future.
Abstracts of workshop papers are given below.
The administration of war: Chair: Mark Harrison (Oxford)
Geoff Hudson (Northern Ontario School of Medicine):
Nursing, war and the state in eighteenth-century Britain
In this paper I use a rich, hitherto untapped, set of records from the Greenwich Hospital for disabled naval ex-servicemen to examine the nature and development of nursing, and its broader social and medical significance, for the period 1705-1790. Although institutional care provided work for large numbers of female nurses in the eighteenth century their experience and its import has not been examined to any great extent by scholars. One reason for this gap in the literature is the perceived paucity of archival material. The Greenwich Hospital’s records are very useful for this purpose however, containing complete registers of nurses, and a wide variety of materials that provide detailed insight into the social and medical life of the institution.
From these records I am able to track the careers of the over 800 nurses and matrons in the period, including their work related practice and regulation. Nurses, usually war widows, were given considerable responsibility for the care of their disabled charges and paid wages and, upon retirement, pensions. They were also punished, sometimes severely, for infractions of discipline such as having sex with their patients (in a set of stocks for example). In sum, my aim is to analyse the impact of war on the changing work of eighteenth century nurses, within the broader contexts of the history of health care as well as contemporary social and gender relations. I intend to thereby contribute to the ongoing scholarly debates, including the degree to which nursing had already developed high standards of care prior to the creation of a scientific profession in the late nineteenth century.
Gareth Cole (Exeter):
The organisation of the Office of Ordnance in the eighteenth century
For the Eighteenth Century, the forgotten branch of the British armed services has been the Office of Ordnance. Responsible for the supply of "warlike stores" to both the army and the navy, as well as commanding the Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery, its importance should not be underestimated. The paper will briefly examine the administrative structure, and growth, of the Office. The Ordnance was unique as far as government departments were concerned in so far as it had, effectively, two heads: the Master General and the Board of Ordnance. This paper will show how this system operated throughout the eighteenth century and how, even with Master Generals absent or not appointed, the Office still functioned effectively. The paper will also demonstrate the administrative changes, particularly those after the American War of Independence. Perhaps the most important of these was the increasing reliance on, and power of, ‘Military Inspectorates’, of which the Inspectorate of Artillery and the Office of the Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory are perhaps the best known. By the Great Wars of 1793–1815, other inspectorates had been added to aid, and improve, the supply of stores to the army and navy. In addition to these changes, during the Great Wars of 1793–1815, the central organisation of the Office was also altered to enable it to cope with the demands of an all encompassing war. These changes mainly affected the Office of the Surveyor General and the Office of the Secretary to the Board; two of the busiest sub-offices. The paper will argue that for all of the bad press that the Office has received, both from historians and from contemporaries, the diverse, almost decentralised, nature of the Ordnance’s structure meant that it was able to cope with the demands of the Great Wars more effectively than it otherwise would have been able to do.
Manu Sehgal (Exeter):
‘Authority derived by war and parchment’: organising warfare and diplomacy in Western India, 1778-83
This paper examines the tensions engendered by the stationing of military forces, as contingents from the Bengal army serving under the Bombay presidency, during the Second Anglo-Maratha War (1778-1782). The ‘Detachment’ of military forces from one presidency to another played a critical role in connecting distinct and often distant theatres of operations, thereby enabling projects of colonial expansion to be mounted on ever wider scales of territorial contest. Besides highlighting the increasingly interdependent character of colonial expansion, a study of such detached forces further explicates the political and financial means by which hierarchies of political decision making within the nascent Company state came to be negotiated and reinforced. The civilian-military tensions that resulted from the disputed status of this detachment provides for a nuanced analysis of the nature of state formation in early colonial South Asia. As exigencies of war strained the nominal conciliar authority of the Bombay Select Committee, Bombay’s increasing dependence on Bengal for money and troops enabled an innovative recasting of the nature of military command as exercised by Brigadier General Thomas Goddard.
Prescribing the practice of combat: Chair: John Childs (Leeds)
Aaron Graham (Oxford):
‘War is now like the Gospel; man must be set apart for it’: The Standing Army Controversy and the Creation of the ‘Gentleman-Professional’ Officer
The Standing Army Controversy of 1697 to 1699 was one of the most intensive examinations of the intellectual and ideological foundations of the standing army and military professionalism to occur during the Early Modern period. It represented a clash between competing political ideologies, between civilian and military attitudes, and between differing views over the role of the army and its officer corps in British political life. While Schwoerer has emphasized its importance in the development of radical Whig political attitudes and ideologies, I suggested in my paper that its military implications have been overlooked. The ferocity of the debate crystallized civilian attitudes towards military professionalism, and determined the character of the professional army officer during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I argued that although Schwoerer was correct to note the strength of ideological conflict, she has overlooked the startling degree of overlap between pamphleteers over the political and constitutional role of the professional officer. Both sides agreed that officers should be gentlemen, with all the implications for political and social reliability that this implied. Moreover, both sides agreed that a certain degree of training and experience - even professionalism - was an essential quality in army officers; writers such as Trenchard who argued that military proficiency was as much gained in the closet as in the field’ were in a distinct minority. The main cause of disagreement was merely over the relative priorities that were to be attached to these two separate qualities.
The eventual result was a compromise, the creation of the archetype of the ‘gentleman-professional’ army officer, who combined the political and social reliability of the gentleman with the military proficiency of the professional. He was as familiar with the hunting field as the battlefield, and therefore acceptable to both sides. Indeed, such was the ideological appeal of the ‘gentleman professional’ officer that the archetype lasted virtually unchanged into the nineteenth century. My paper therefore argued that the evolution of the British army during this period was ultimately shaped by civilian imperatives and concerns, and that military history must be integrated with relevant political, social and cultural historiographies in order to be effective.
Cai Marshall (Oxford):
Fighting, fornication, and gentlemanly instructions? The memoir of Sergeant Donald McBane
Donald McBane’s 1729 Expert Sword-man’s Companion is an anomalous combination of military memoir and instructional treatise. His memoir propels the reader through an unmitigated tale of fighting and fornication, tracing McBane’s career as a common soldier from his enlistment after a violent quarrel, through his experiences fighting under Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession (during which he pursued a lucrative sideline as a pimp and fencing master), to his discharge into Chelsea hospital, and finally his career as a publican and prizefighter. To this are appended two treatises on the arts of fencing and gunnery. McBane’s memoir has been commonly accepted as be a true, if edited, account. Taken as such, it supplies a valuable insight into the common soldier’s experience of life on campaign at the turn of the eighteenth century, both of combat itself, but also of the minutia of daily life. In particular, McBane supplies an extremely rich description of the infrastructures of recreation and vice that developed on campaign. The treatise’s unusual combination of entertainment and edification begs the obvious questions of its purpose, intended audience and authorship. To begin to address this, I intend to discuss two aspects of McBane’s treatise.
The first is the nature of the interpersonal violence described in McBane’s memoir. McBane’s account of his life on campaign revolves around fighting and violence – as much in the pursuit of his military duties as in his personal relations and business pursuits as a pimp and fencing master. It is the latter that I wish to begin to discuss here. What I find fascinating is the extent to which the violence is contained within unspoken but clear bounds, and its successful function in business and social relationships as a means of conflict resolution, which facilitates continued relations. I wish also to briefly consider the way in which this violence is described. McBane was in no way a gentleman, either by birth, or occupation; despite this, he frequently describes his combats using the rhetoric of the duel – a form of violence theoretically reserved to gentleman. Why does McBane do this? Is he framing his combats using linguistic formulas that he believes will be familiar to his readership; or is this symptomatic of the aspirational nature of honour codes and their inherent problem of creeping obsolescence as their formulas are appropriated and refashioned by those lower down the social scale?
Bethan Jenkins (Oxford):
Thomas Page’s ‘The use of the Highlander broadsword’- a personal or a military response to the Jacobite threat?
Thomas Page, an ironmonger, general metalwork store keeper, and member of his local militia, wrote in 1746 a sword manual intended for instruction in Scottish swordplay - subtitled "The True Method of Fighting with that Weapon as it is now in Use among the Highlanders; deduc’d from the Use of the Scymitar; with every Throw, Cut, Guard, and Disarm." Published less than a year after the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the work has since been taken and studied as an authentic manual of the methods of fighting of the Highlanders at the time. I wish to argue in the course of this paper, however, that what is presented to us is a composite text, with early examples of both primitivist and Orientalist discourse, influenced by methods other than those potentially in use amongst the Highlanders of Page’s day. In this paper I wish to explore the purported efficacy of the text as a manual for single combat within military engagement, questions of the authenticity of the "Highland" combat techniques contained therewith, and whether its role as a social tool, an advertisement for Page’s shop, or anti-Highland propaganda were more or less important than its swordplay techniques.
The army and civilian life: Chair: Hannah Smith (Oxford)
Satoshi Tsujimoto (Cambridge):
Between the Crown and the locality: Hull garrison, 1660-1688
The garrisons in Restoration England have attracted amazingly little attention from historians. Although we have had a small number of important works on the Restoration army, including the comprehensive research of Clifford Walton and John Childs, and they have without doubt enriched our knowledge about it in many respects, nevertheless they have discussed very little about the forces in the provinces. In fact, apart from a few short articles, there is no historical study that has fully explored the army’s activities in localities in this period. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap in historiography through a scrupulous research on the garrison at Hull between 1660 and 1688. In this paper, special attention will be devoted to the garrison’s unique position between the crown and the locality. On the one hand, it was an institution for the monarch. Not only did it serve to guard the king’s realm, but it was also the king’s faithful agent which executed his orders of various kinds. On the other hand, the garrison was a part of the local community where it existed. It had great presence there not merely in military matters but also in local politics, administration and economy. Such strong connections with the host community often made the garrison play a role as a representative of local interests. I will study these two aspects of the garrison in detail, and also examine how and to what extent the garrison reconciled its dual relationships with the crown and the locality over the Restoration period. A wide variety of primary sources are scrutinised for this paper. Besides official records of the central government, such as war office papers and state papers, an abundance of local materials deposited in the Hull City Archives, including the minutes of the corporation assembly, mayors’ correspondence and other municipal records, are also investigated. This extensive use of available sources, I believe, will make it possible to discuss the garrison both from national and local perspectives, and lead to our full understanding of the important functions the garrison performed between its master and the host community.
Kathleen Middleton (Trinity College Dublin):
‘Sons of Belial’, scourges of popery: Presbyterians and the army in southwest Scotland and Ulster, 1689-1715
The Lowland presbyterians who made up a large part of the population of Ulster and of the south and west of Scotland had conflicting views of the Revolution regime’s army. On the one hand, a strong martial tradition could be channeled into service against popery, whether in the form of the Catholic and Irish troops of James II and VII, Jacobite Highlanders, or the forces of Louis XIV. The Cameronian regiment epitomised this response among some former Scottish covenanters. In Ulster during Anne’s reign, the fact that the sacramental test technically excluded conscientious dissenters from military careers was advertised as a grievance, even though this regulation may not have been enforced consistently in the ranks.
On the other hand, country-party-style suspicion of standing armies had a special resonance within Scottish presbyterian culture. In Scotland the depredations of the so-called Highland host were still within living memory. After the Revolution professional and especially ‘foreign’ forces were associated with perceived English designs against Scottish sovereignty. In Ulster William III’s army had undoubtedly rescued the Protestants. However, after what some saw as the rather dilatory relief of Londonderry, local units and officers resented being replaced by better-trained outsiders.
Everyday experience in both regions did little to endear soldiers to the ‘godly’. Session records from this period show local communities complaining about the profane behaviour of garrisons, trying to provide for illegitimate children whose alleged fathers have vanished into Flanders, and doling out ‘poor money’ to disabled veterans and military widows. The disbandment of 1697-9 coincided with the severe
Scottish famine of 1695-9, thus complicating an already serious social crisis and generating further streams of vagrants, some of whom spilled over into Ulster.
Both church and civil authorities, especially in towns like Glasgow, found their attempts to reform morals and to keep order frustrated by the presence of military populations who were not subject to their jurisdiction. Likewise Alexander Shields, the former Cameronian chaplain, wrote from Panama that the ex-military element sent to the Scots colony were sabotaging the moral purpose of the New Caledonia project by corrupting rather than enlightening the natives. The army could be seen as partly to blame for a disappointing lack of progress in ‘the work of reformation’ which the Revolution had seemed miraculously to revive.
John Miller (QML):
The military presence in England under George I
With the possible exception of James II, George I had the largest English peacetime standing army to date. His regime was accused of military oppression and at times soldiers undoubtedly used violence against civilians: after the Riot Act, soldiers could lawfully fire at crowds who failed to disperse after due warning. However, unlike the mug-houses and artillery companies, which were ostensibly independent of government, the army was governed by detailed regulations; successive secretaries at war were very conscious of the need to answer complaints against the military in Parliament, especially when the time came for voting the army estimates or a new mutiny act. After allowing soldiers a relatively free rein in 1715-16 - especially in Oxford - secretaries at war were careful to investigate complaints against soldiers - sometimes to the annoyance of their officers - and to advise against conduct that was unduly provocative. They raised no objection to the military taking over civic celebrations. Royal birthdays in particular became demonstrations of Whig loyalty and military firepower, with ordinary townspeople reduced to spectators and Tory members of corporations conspicuous by their absence. This was not exactly a ‘passive police presence’, in the words of one military historian, but nor was the army in England an instrument of military repression. The army in Ireland was more likely to have performed such a function, but it is far from clear that it did, despite occasional violent clashes. It seems more likely that it was the simple presence of the military which helped to keep the Catholic Irish majority quiet, notably in 1715.
From civilians to soldiers – to heroes? Chair: Stephen Conway (UCL)
John Donoghue (Loyola University Chicago):
‘Cromwell’s bloody slaughterhouse’: commonwealth principles, impressment, and the imperial state, 1654-1661
For the past two decades, scholars of the English Revolution have become increasingly interested in the nexus between republican opposition to the Cromwellian Protectorate and popular discontent stemming from the failure of the western design, the revolutionary state’s failed attempt to conquer the Spanish Caribbean. Their work has illuminated, often impressively, the opposition’s religious language, providential thinking, and commonwealth principles as it coalesced in the midst of what David Armitage has called the revolution’s “imperial moment”.
Unfortunately, however, historians have paid little attention to the military labor history that shaped the politics of the opposition's most miltant factions, which included former Levellers, seamen, and soldiers affiliated with London's millenarian press gangs as well as their republican political beliefs and millenarian religious convictions, the Fifth Monarchists opposed the state's large-scale impressment of soldiers and seamen for the western design and subsequent efforts to man England's Caribbean fleet and garrisons.
In contrast to the Protectorate’s concept that military and naval labor amounted to an imperial commodity owned by the state, Fifth Monarchists, citing various scriptural passages as well as the 1647 army-Leveller engagements, redefined this labor as the inalienable property of citizens. The Commonwealth’s soldiers and seamen could not be justly coerced into “mercenary armies” to serve “self-interested factions” in the government, who in the view of Fifth Monarchists, exercised arbitrary power at the expense of the public good to secure private fortunes in the West Indies. Thus, in shifting military and naval labor from unfree to free status, millenarian republicans opposed to the Protectorate sought to steer the revolution back from its imperial turn to restore the “free state.”
Ultimately, this paper argues that exploring labor history in conjunction with republican and religious political language can illuminate an intellectual history of commonwealth principles that rejected rather than affirmed the state’s practice of coercing military work in the interest of imperial expansion. By investing citizens with the sovereign power to serve or not to serve, Fifth Monarchists placed an innovative limitation on the power of the early modern state: in exercising its monopoly of violence abroad, the government could only do so legitimately through the instrument of a volunteer army and navy.
Stephen Minervino (LSE):
The British army and its civilian workforce in the American hinterland, 1756-1763
In 1758 British forces punctured the interior fort system of French North America at Pittsburg, gateway to the fecund Ohio Valley. Two years later Canada capitulated and British victory in the Seven Years’’ War yielded in North America the territory of New France, an acquisition the size of Europe to the Russian border. However, before the French could be dislodged, the military first had to clear the path. Roads, transport, provisions and the operation of backcountry society were necessary for the military to reach the American West. A year earlier, in 1757, William Pitt reversed Parliamentary policy and promised the crown would underwrite the cost of equipping and provisioning a provincial army to fight the French and their Indian allies. The policy had immediate effect and patriotism across the colonies surged. As the 1758 campaign season began, more than twenty three thousand provincial troops were mobilized and across the frontier road-cutters, boatmen, wagoners, armerors, artificers, agents, traders and sundry camp followers played the supporting role.
Yet, colonial society was no monolith uniformly grateful for military protection of its borders or the related spending. “While entering the city on horseback at the head of the battalion,” Col. Henry Bouquet wrote from Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1756: “a farmer rogue mounted on a nag lashed at me with his whip, which missed me, fortunately for him’. This was the third incident of this kind; yet what was the source of this backcountry vitriol? Surely backcountry society should have been grateful for the professional army that had come so far to protect its homes from the lethal incursions of Indians crossing the frontier. Was Bouquet’s farmer truly some “rogue,” or representative of some larger, organized and public questioning of British authority in the backcountry? Would the provincials who pulled, paddled, picketed and pointed the military through the backcountry someday lead the rebellion against their former paymasters? In this particular case, the military’s entrance into the American hinterland between 1756 and 1763, there is room for a fresh examination of the attitude of the military’s civilian workforce toward the use of British authority.
Matthew McCormack (Northampton):
Embodied militia: masculinity and military discipline in mid-Georgian England
Centre for Early Modern British and Irish HistoryThe reform of Britain’s ramshackle militia in the 1750s was a highly emotive issue. The institution had long had a prominent place in opposition political thought as it emphasised the power and vigilance of the ordinary citizen, and contributed to their critique of standing armies, executive power and continental foreign policies. As I have argued elsewhere, the creation of the ‘New Militia’ was also informed by a panic about the degeneracy of nation’s men during the disastrous start to the Seven Years War. In this paper I will shift my focus from the political debate that led up to the passing of the 1757 Militia Act to the period of its implementation, by concentrating on the ways in which the authorities sought to train balloted civilians for military service. I will focus in particular on the large number of prescriptive works published for the purpose, ranging from drill books to manuals of moral instruction, which sought to instil qualities such as ‘military spirit’ alongside the specifics of military expertise. If the militia had been promoted as an institution that would restore honour and masculine virtue to the civilian population, how far did this ideal inform its actual practice? And what techniques were employed to discipline and cultivate the body of the citizen soldier?
