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.
George got the army in motion by daybreak the following
morning, leading with his own cavalry, followed by that of the Austrians, and
then the British and the Austrian infantry, with his best troops – the Guards
and Hanoverians – as rearguard, followed by the artillery and baggage. By seven
o’clock the advance guard had reached Klein Ostheim, 4 miles west of
Aschaffenburg and halfway to Dettingen. Beyond the village the cavalry halted
to let the infantry catch up, but the French batteries south of the Main opened
a raking fire from which there was little shelter. Sam Davies, a major’s
servant in the 3rd Dragoons, recounts in a letter to a tapster friend at the
White Hart in Colchester how he was sent to the rear with the other servants
and led horses:
We stayed there till the balls came flying all round us. We
see first a horse with baggage fall close to us. Then seven horses fell apace,
then I began to stare about me, the balls came whistling about my ears. Then I
saw the Oysterenns [Austrians] dip and look about them for they dodge the balls
as a cock does a stick, they are so used to them. Then we servants began to get
off into a wood for safety, which was about four hundred yards from where we
stood. When we got into the wood we placed ourselves against the largest trees,
just as I had placed myself, a 12-pounder came, puts a large bough of the tree
upon my head, the ball came within two yards of me, indeed it was the size of
one of your light puddings, but a great deal heavier.
By now the souricière was discovered, and the earl of Stair,
stung by George’s assumption of command and dismayed by his tactical
ineptitude, decided that, in his words, ‘it was time to meddle’. He began
deploying the army in three lines: the front line with British and Austrian
troops, the support line British and Hanoverian, and the Guards in the reserve
line on higher ground to the rear. But it took all of three hours – as long as
it had taken the Royalist infantry to form up at Edgehill. Marlborough’s
regiments would probably have managed it in a quarter of the time.
At midday Marshal Gramont, thinking the allied main body
must have eluded him and that he was facing instead the rearguard, advanced
across the Beck stream and likewise drew up in two lines and a reserve. George,
brave as ever, if lacking an eye for the tactical situation, began urging his
men forward, waving his sword and shouting encouragement in his thick German
accent, doubtless to mystifying effect all round. With the enfilading fire of
the French artillery south of the river, and no proper order, the advance was
uneven. And then when the infantry opened fire on the Maison du Roi (the French
Household brigade) it was dangerously premature, ragged and wholly ineffectual
– except, it seems, for the effect on some of the allies’ horses: George’s in
particular, which suddenly took hold of its bit and bolted rearwards, its rider
only managing to pull up in a grove of oak trees where a company of the 22nd
Foot (later the Cheshire Regiment) was sheltering. Evidently the unexpected
royal visit went well, for regimental legend has it that George rewarded them
for their warm reception with a sprig of oak leaves, which in time became their
cap badge.
The infantry of the Maison du Roi now advanced, Marshal
Gramont believing he had the advantage. By this time, however, the allied
regimental officers had got their battalions in hand, and the front line was
soon volleying by platoons in the old Marlburian drill. The Garde Française
staggered to a halt, and then hastily withdrew behind the cavalry of the Maison,
who in turn charged the allied left. However, they had the misfortune of
falling on the 23rd Foot (later the Royal Welch Fusiliers), one of the
regiments kept in being after Utrecht, and better drilled than most. The
cavalry of the Maison du Roi were seen off rudely by a volley and a hedge of
bayonets.
‘Our men were eager to come into action,’ one of the 23rd’s
officers wrote afterwards:
We attacked the Regiment of Navarre, one of their prime regiments. Our people imitated their predecessors in the last war gloriously, marching in close order, as firm as a wall, and did not fire until we came within sixty paces, and still kept advancing; for, when the smoak blew off a little, instead of being amongst their living we found the dead in heaps by us.
During the following charge of the 3rd (King’s Own) Dragoons
against a great mass of French horse, the duke of Cumberland was severely
wounded in the leg. Some said that his mount, like his father’s, bolted, though
towards the French not away, but this seems unfair: few riders in a cavalry
charge, then as later, would have been wholly in control. A typical charge
would start calmly enough at the walk, the riders knee-to-knee. The trumpeter
would sound ‘Trot’ once the line had cleared its own side’s guns and pickets,
and then ‘Gallop’, when the line would buckle and bow as riders struggled to
keep the ‘dressing’. Finally the commanding officer would point his sword and
cry ‘Charge!’, from which point all semblance of control would be lost for the
final 50 yards, the noise of pounding hooves so great as to drown all shouted
commands, trumpet calls and even the sound of firing.
While the cavalry were battling on the flanks, a hard
infantry fighting match had developed along the whole length of the line. Here
and there the sudden shout ‘Cavalry!’ would throw up a tight square of bayonets
until the danger was past and the volleying could resume. Riderless horses on
both sides barged through the ranks to add to the picture of chaos. And all the
while the French guns south of the Main kept up their raking fire, answered
hardly at all by the allied artillery, who found it extraordinarily difficult
to come into action in the growing confusion of ‘the mousetrap’, and even
harder to get up close to the infantry.
It had been thirty years and more since the British had
fought in formed lines against regular troops, and if the general officers were
rusty the infantry, as at the desperate fight at Steenkirk, were relearning
what the bayonet and resolution could do. But although it was the cavalry that
kept the French horse busy, and the bayonet that almost literally steeled the
infantry’s resolve, the day was won by dogged volleying, which grew steadier
with the practice. According to Lieutenant-Colonel Russell, commanding the 1st
Foot Guards,
excepting three or four of our generals, the rest of ’em
were of little service … our men and their regimental officers gained the day;
not in the manner of Hide Park discipline, but our Foot almost kneeled down by
whole ranks, and fired upon ’em a constant running fire, making almost every
ball take place; but for ten or twelve minutes ’twas doubtful which would
succeed, as they overpowered [outnumbered] us so much, and the bravery of their
maison du roy coming upon us eight or nine ranks deep.
Towards the middle of the afternoon, seeing they could make
no progress, the French began to quit the field, leaving behind 5,000 dead and
wounded. Pressed by the allied cavalry, their retreat soon turned into flight,
and many mousquetaires drowned in the press to get back across the bridge of
boats west of Dettingen, especially among the Garde Française, who had attacked
first and taken the most casualties, but who by all accounts tried to cross the
bridge with indecent haste. It is ever the fate of Guards regiments to incur
the scorn of those more workaday regiments of the line if they appear not to
live up to their advance billing: so many of the Garde fell into the river that
the line dubbed them ‘Les Canards du Main’.
But the allies, who had been under arms since the early
hours and were exhausted by the best part of a day’s fighting, failed to follow
up and turn defeat into rout. Besides, though Edgehill was a century behind
them, the fear of loosing the cavalry and regretting it was still strong. And
the French in their Gallic obstinacy might even now turn on them with renewed
vigour, for their artillery was still in place and protected by the waters of
the Main. Only the most seasoned battlefield commander could have judged it
aright – a Marlborough, or later a Wellington. Indeed, at the culmination of
Waterloo the ‘Iron Duke’ would throw all caution to the wind and urge the line
forward: ‘Go on, go on! They won’t stand!’ But King George, for all his
bravery, was no such judge. He flatly refused to pursue at all, even in the
days that followed. And so, while the allied army restocked its canteens and
cartridge cases at Hanau, Noailles limped back to France unmolested.
Dettingen, though a worthy feat of arms, was ultimately
therefore of no strategic significance. It blooded a good many green men and
subalterns, however, and reminded the field officers – if they had ever
forgotten it – that in a bruising fight they could prevail by superior
musketry. It showed George and his general officers that their military system
was lacking; and it would be the last time a British monarch commanded in the
field. But Dettingen, for all its insignificance in the strategy of the War of
the Austrian Succession, was seen increasingly as a model of British fighting
spirit, above all in the infantry. When at the end of the battle the King
playfully chided the commanding officer of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, Sir
Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw, for letting French cavalry break into his regiment’s
square, Agnew replied drily: ‘An it please Your Majesty, but they didna’ gang
oot again!’
‘Dettingen’ is a name habitually given to recruit platoons
in the Army still; and for as long as anyone can remember there has been a
Dettingen Company at Sandhurst, so prized is the occasion as an example to
officers. And the battle was something of a watershed in the making of the
army, for it had been a close-run thing – perhaps only a matter of ten or
twelve minutes, as Colonel Russell of the Foot Guards had reckoned: it would
not do in future to pit too many scratch troops against veteran Frenchmen, even
Frenchmen without the élan of Marlborough’s day. In London the battle was
celebrated as a famous victory, Handel promptly writing a Te Deum to mark it.
But the red-coated regiments had been lucky: the French had not been on form.
How long would it be before they regained it?
