King George II, who succeeded his father to the British throne and to the electorate of Hanover in 1727, had three passions: the Queen, music, and the army. Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach was probably the most intelligent woman a British king has ever had the fortune to marry. By relentlessly championing Robert Walpole as ‘prime minister’ she played no small part in consolidating both the Hanoverian succession – which in spite of the ghastly Stuart alternatives was by no means universally popular – and constitutional monarchy itself. Nor was she merely a power behind the throne: when the King was away on state business in Germany, as he frequently was, Caroline had vice-regal authority. A contemporary verse ran:
You may strut, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain,
We all know ’tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign.
They had eight children, and despite – perhaps even because of – his several mistresses, George was devoted to her. When she was dying, in 1737, she urged him to take another wife. ‘Non,’ he replied resolutely: ‘j’aurai des maîtresses!’ And he had a pair of matching coffins made with removable sides, so that when he followed her to the grave (twenty-three years later) they could lie together again.
George inherited his passion for music from his father, whose protégé Handel he continued to champion: he is famously credited with the custom of standing during the ‘Hallelujah chorus’, and Handel composed the anthems for Caroline’s funeral, as he had for the coronation. But like his cousin Frederick William I of Prussia (der Soldaten-König), George believed the army to be the first and noblest occupation of a king. He certainly took little interest in government, which was ably if corruptly (in modern eyes; the eighteenth century was on the whole more tolerant) conducted by Walpole. It all worked rather well.
George was also physically brave. He had fought at Oudenarde, the third of Marlborough’s great ‘quadrilateral’ of battles (alongside Blenheim, Ramillies and Malplaquet), and would sometimes parade in his old battle coat. ‘And the people laughed, but kindly, at the odd old garment, for bravery never goes out of fashion,’ wrote Thackeray a century later.
Whenever George dealt with army business he took off his habitual Court brown to put on more military red. He put on red as much as he possibly could, indeed, loving to interfere in the army’s business, although he scarcely considered it interference, for despite the measures enacted by Parliament after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ the limit of the royal prerogative was still unclear. Like his father, George laboured manfully to standardize drill – what Wolfe, the hero of Quebec (1759), complained of as ‘the variety of steps in our infantry and the feebleness and disorderly floating of our lines’ – though it would be many years before there was a truly common system. He championed the Royal Military Academy, which opened at Woolwich in 1741 to teach gunnery and engineering (a permanent corps of artillery had been formed at Marlborough’s urging in 1716, becoming the Royal Regiment of Artillery in 1727). He regulated the price of commissions, abolished the trade in the regimental proprietor-colonelcies and sought to advance able officers, keeping a book in which he made notes on their capabilities and appointments. If he had had his way, he might also – like his cousin Frederick William – have introduced compulsory military service. It was not surprising that when in 1743 the army found itself once more in Marlborough’s old stamping ground, Bavaria, George insisted on taking to the field at its head.
Britain had in fact been at war with Spain since October 1739. By the Treaty of Seville ten years earlier, Britain had agreed not to trade with Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and South America, and to verify the working of the treaty the Spanish were permitted to search British vessels. While boarding the Rebecca in 1731, the Spanish coast guard severed the ear of her captain, Robert Jenkins, or so it was claimed. British merchants, determined to penetrate the Atlantic trade, used the incident as a casus belli against Spain in the Caribbean (though tardily to say the least, hostilities not beginning for a full seven years). Jenkins exhibited his pickled ear to the House of Commons, and the entirely predictable outrage forced a reluctant Walpole to declare war. Thus began an episode of Caribbean skirmishing – the ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear’ – that yielded very mixed results.
The gravest unintended consequence of the skirmishing was the slide into the much greater affair of the War of the Austrian Succession. In 1740 Emperor Charles VI died, leaving the crown to his daughter Maria Theresa. Frederick II – later ‘Frederick the Great’ – had succeeded to the throne of Prussia earlier the same year, and had lost no time in exploiting the questionable legitimacy of female succession by invading Silesia, defeating the Austrians at the battle of Mollwitz. He was joined by Charles Albert of Bavaria, rival claimant to the Habsburg lands, and almost as a matter of course by France. Britain – or rather George, for Walpole was against a continental entanglement – backed the old ally, Austria, fearful that Prussia would not stop at the borders of Hanover. Britain and France came to blows not by declaring war, therefore, but as auxiliaries of their respective German allies. With Spain taking France’s side, the war quickly began to look like a continuance of the War of the Spanish Succession – an affair as old as King George’s Oudenarde coat.
Militarily, however, two things had changed. Prussia astounded everyone by the quality of its army – not so much the cavalry, which bolted at Mollwitz (Frederick’s reforms had yet to touch them), but the infantry, which could fire at the rate of five rounds to the Austrians’ three. The lesson was at once driven home to every prince in Europe: a standing army, albeit one made up of conscripts, would beat an improvised army even twice its size. By contrast, the French, who had remained a considerable power even after the run of defeats at Marlborough’s hands, were uncertain, even ponderous, in the field.
In 1742 the Prussians, having got what they wanted – Silesia – withdrew from the war. But two French armies had managed to reach Prague and Vienna, and a third was keeping watch on Hanover from east of the Rhine. The situation looked bad on the map, until all three French armies were obliged to retreat in the face of a revitalized Austro-Hungarian counter-offensive. To hasten their return to France, a British army assembled in Flanders comprising four troops of Household Cavalry, eight regiments of horse and dragoons, three battalions of Foot Guards and twelve of the line – some 16,000 men under the septuagenarian Field Marshal John Dalrymple, earl of Stair.
Stair was a true Marlburian, his age a measure more of experience than of disability. At nineteen he had fought at Steenkirk, and he had been in each of Marlborough’s four great battles. His campaign plan for the autumn of 1742 could indeed have been designed by Marlborough himself: he proposed to combine with the Austrians in a bold thrust towards Paris along the valley of the Moselle. George now demurred, however, reverting to the pretence that Britain was not at war with France as such. Nothing happened for months as the army watched the seasons change about them and felt the winter’s bite in their Flanders billets. But, unusually for troops confined for so long, they fared well. One of the effects of Walpole’s perpetual retrenchment had been the emergence of a corps of experienced junior officers, for since there were few regiments to command and consequently little promotion, there were a great many captains with long service and substantial know-how. These proved invaluable in the hastily expanded army, which emerged from winter quarters in uncommonly good health and spirits – or, as Stair put it, ‘with great modesty and good discipline’. Marlborough would certainly have approved. Indeed, he had set the standard.
Opposing forces abhor a vacuum. Notwithstanding the delusory state of non-war, as the three French armies resumed their retrograde march towards the Rhine the combined English – Hanoverian – Austrian army in Flanders, now 44,000 men, was drawn east across the Lower Rhine towards Frankfurt. In mid-June King George arrived – with a vast baggage train, including 600 horses (which severely clogged the roads), and his younger son, the 22-year-old Major-General the duke of Cumberland – intending to take personal command.
Though George had the advantage of ten years on the earl of Stair, and had fought in the same battle in his Oudenarde coat thirty-five years earlier, he did not, alas, have the old field marshal’s instinct for campaigning. Against Stair’s advice, he now posted his army on the north bank of the Main at Aschaffenburg, 30 miles upstream from Frankfurt, hemmed in by the Spessart Hills to the north. The French, even without La Gloire, were not ones to miss an opportunity and quickly cut his lines of communication, isolating the allied army from its magazines and depots at Hanau just east of Frankfurt. After a week the army was showing signs of starving, and George decided to withdraw north-west back to Hanau.
The French marshal, the duc de Noailles, was exactly midway between George and Stair in age (the three may well, indeed, hold the record for combined age in command). Withdrawing south around Frankfurt, Noailles was quick to see his chance, and despite enjoying only a 50 per cent numerical superiority he at once split his force, sending some 28,000 men under his nephew, the relatively youthful (54-year-old) marshal the duc de Gramont, to block the allied withdrawal in the bottleneck between the village of Dettingen and the Spessart Hills. Meanwhile, five brigades would hook south to cross the Main at Aschaffenburg and attack the allied rear, enabling the bulk of the French artillery to enfilade the allied main body from south of the river. On 26 June, with some justification, Noailles boasted that he would have the allies ‘dans une souricière’ – in a mousetrap.
