a mere 40 yards, one of the most destructive in military history, which stopped them in their tracks. The British fired one more volley and charged, unaware that their youthful commander – he was only 32 – was dying. Montcalm, too, was mortally wounded, and Quebec surrendered on 18 September.
But some other amphibious operations were disastrous. In August 1809 a fleet of 235 armed vessels, 58 of them men-of-war, under Admiral Sir Richard Strachan, escorted 44,000 troops under Major General Lord Chatham to the low-lying malarial Dutch island of Walcheren. The expedition had two aims: first, to capture Antwerp, described by Napoleon as ‘a pistol pointed at the heart of England’, and second, to provide a diversion by an offensive on the Danube by Britain’s Austrian allies. Chatham’s army, stuck fast on the island, lost 218 men in action, but 4,000 died of sickness and another 11,000 were ill when they were evacuated: many suffered from recurring fever for years. Ensign William Thornton Keep of the 77th Regiment told his father that Flushing, the island’s capital, was ‘a most diabolical place’. On 11 September 1809 he reported that ‘the increase of sick is beyond all precedent’: his regiment alone had 22 officers ill.
We hear of a change of the Ministry. It is to be expected after so disastrous a result of things…had the Ministers been informed of the unhealthiness of this place, different measures would doubtless have been adopted. It seems extraordinary that they were not, as it is proverbially the place of transport for the Military Delinquents of France, and they sent us here at the very time of year in which the fever prevails.
Keep became so ill that he had to resign from the army, though he recovered sufficiently to rejoin, becoming an ensign in the 28th Regiment in 1811.
Without sea power the American War of Independence simply could not have been fought at all, and at its close the Royal Navy’s strong grip weakened. It is a measure of the army’s understanding of the fundamental importance of seapower that Captain John Peebles of the 42nd Regiment, although only a junior regimental officer, clearly recognised how things stood on 6 October 1781.
The Fleet are busy making the necessary repairs, and completing their water and provisions, and are expected to be ready about the 12th inst., when the Troops will embark upon board the Ships of War agreeable to a distribution given out for that purpose, in order to make a Spirited exertion for the relief of Lord Cornwallis and on which probably depends the fate of America and the superiority of the Sea.11
His men boarded HMS London from their transports with the easy familiarity that came from having done the same thing half a dozen times before and with an unswerving Georgian regard for seniority: ‘the troops went on board by seniority of Companies, and were disposed on the middle and lower decks, six to a mess between the guns.’12 But on the 24th they took on board a Negro pilot who had escaped from Yorktown on the 18th. He reported that there had been an armistice that day, for Cornwallis had asked for terms. Peebles was to be proved right. Although the war rumbled on, the loss of Yorktown marked the end of major operations, and the Royal Navy’s loss of superiority off the Chesapeake that autumn was just as conclusive as Peebles had predicted.
Seapower underpinned the Peninsular War in the middle of the period and the Crimean at its end. In India it was decisive in enabling the British to seize the coastal bases upon which their future success was to depend: it was no accident that the three Presidencies comprising British India were governed from the ports of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Well might George Thomas write in 1756 that: ‘A fine harbour…in the hands of Europeans might defy the force of Asia.’13
Finally, the Royal Navy made its own distinctive contribution to war on land. Early in the Indian Mutiny, Lieutenant Arthur Moffat Lang of the Bengal Engineers welcomed the arrival of:
100 sailors of the Shannon with four 24-pounders. It was grand to see Jack Tars again, with their loose large-collared blue shirts, loose blue trousers, straw hats with white covers, black ribbons and ‘Shannon’ on the bands; they carry musket and bayonet. They seem strangely out of place. Rolling about up here, using their sea-language, cursing the niggers, driving bullock gharis and swearing because ‘she tacks about and backs and fills so.’14
In the same conflict Lieutenant William Alexander-Gordon of the 93rd Highlanders saw one of these 24-pounders breaching the walls of the Secunderbagh at Lucknow ‘with a fine fellow of a negro AB [able seaman]…doing the duty of two or three of the regulation number of gunners.’ The gun was manhandled forward under heavy fire, bullets hitting it ‘with a noise like that which a crowd of school boys might make throwing stones at an empty saucepan.’15 The soldiers who painted the globe the colour of their coats did so under the navy’s protecting wing.
TO FLANDERS, PORTUGAL AND SPAIN
DURING THE AGE OF BROWN BESS the British army took part in five major wars: the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), the American War of Independence (1775-83), the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and the Crimean War (1853-56). It fought the Seven Years’ War as an ally of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Operations against the French and their Indian allies in North America began in 1754, absorbed much of Britain’s military effort and helped initiate far-reaching tactical change. French possessions in Canada were snapped up, with Wolfe’s capture of Quebec in 1759 as the brightest star in a year of victories still remembered in the naval march ‘Heart of Oak,’ first heard in David Garrick’s play Harlequin’s Invasion
Come cheer up my boys ‘tis to glory we steer
to add something more to this wonderful year…
In India, too, there were successes, with Robert Clive’s defeat of the pro-French ruler of Bengal at Plassey in 1757 and Lieutenant General Sir Eyre Coote’s victory at Wandeswash in 1759 bringing much of India under the control of the British East India Company. On the continent of Europe, where the British always fought as part of a coalition force, their fortunes were more mixed. The Duke of Cumberland, George II’s son, was badly beaten at Hastenbeck in 1757, but a British force played a notable part in the victory at Minden in the annus mirabilis of 1759.
It is worth pausing to consider just what these battles were like for the men who fought in them. At Minden, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick with 41,000 Anglo-German soldiers faced Marshal Contades with 51,000 Frenchmen. What made the battle unusual was that it was decided by an attack on a vastly superior force of French cavalry by six British regiments, launched as the result of a linguistic misunderstanding. Hospital Assistant William Fellowes of the 37th Foot wrote that:
The soldiers and others, this morning, who were not employed at the moment, began to strip off and wash their shirts, and I as eagerly as the rest. But while we were in this state, suddenly the drums began to beat to arms: and so insistent was the summons that without more ado we slip’t on the wet linen and buttoned the jackets over the soaking shirts, hurrying to form line lest our comrades should depart without us. There was a keen wind blowing at the time, and with my wet shirt and soaking coat, it was an hour or more before I could find any warmth in me. But the French warmed us up in good time; tho’ not, you may be sure, as much as we warmed them!16
Lieutenant Montgomery of the 12th Foot described the advance, with the redcoats stepping out to the rub-a-dub-dub-dub of the drums, and through:
a
