There was also the Duke of Monmouth’s Royal English Regiment, an Irish regiment under Sir George Hamilton (replaced, when he was killed at Saverne in 1676, by Colonel Thomas Dongan), assorted cavalry, and further infantry battalions which were broken up, on their arrival in France, to reinforce existing units. We shall see more of this brigade later.25
The government’s policy of war against the Dutch in alliance with the French was not popular, not least because many Englishmen regarded the Dutch as good fellow-Protestants who were, into the bargain, the doughtiest of adversaries at sea. England pulled out of the Third Dutch War in 1674, and with the fall of the cabal soon afterwards the Earl of Danby, the king’s new chief minister, gradually redefined foreign policy so as to align England with Holland and against France. Charles was uneasy about the arrangement, but his sister Henriette’s untimely death removed what might have proved an insuperable obstacle. In 1677 the Dutch stadholder William of Orange, fast emerging as the chief obstacle to Louis’ ambitions, married the Duke of York’s daughter Mary. The jocular Charles was on hand to help the happy couple to their bridal bed, and as he drew the curtains around it he improved the tender moment with his expert advice: ‘Now, nephew, to your work! Hey! St George for England!’26
On 31 December 1677 England signed a treaty with the Dutch, agreeing to work towards a general peace on the basis of French surrender of key fortresses in the Low Countries, to recall British troops from French service, and to send men to fight alongside the Dutch and their allies the Spanish, who were, through most of the period covered by this book, de jure rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, that broad and often contested strip of territory between France and Holland. A further treaty was not ratified by the English, and Charles then characteristically attempted to avoid both breaking his agreement with France and actually entering the war on the other side. Eventually, in 1678, a force of almost 18,000 men was ready, part of it composed of regiments recalled from French service, and part from regiments newly raised for the war. The force was disbanded in 1679 without having been in action, but the experience of getting it to Flanders, sustaining it in the theatre of operations and bringing it back to England was useful for the future. In addition to this expeditionary force, genuinely part of the British army, there were also British troops, including a high proportion of Scots, in Dutch service too.
We can already discern, from the very beginning of John Churchill’s career, the second reason for Charles’s expansion of his army. He was besieged by Civil War royalists, many of them awash with extended families, who sought places for themselves and their adherents as a reward for past services and, by unspoken implication, a guarantee of future loyalty. Although in 1661 Parliament had undertaken to raise £60,000 to pay former officers of the royalist armies, there was precious little available for those who had served as junior officers. John Gwyn had been a captain in the Civil War and then a lieutenant in the royalist army in Flanders before the Restoration. After it he found himself on half-pay in Dunkirk, in a garrison full of ex-parliamentarians, and with two of his ‘familiar associates’ decided to visit the governor and offer to serve as private soldiers. At that stage infantry regiments contained both pikemen and musketeers, and a gentleman would naturally prefer, as Shakespeare had put it, to ‘trail the puissant pike’.
Then I went with them to the Governor, as he was marching at the head of fifteen hundred men, and told him they were officers of His Majesty’s Regiment of Guards, gentlemen, and brave fellows; and that they and myself would own it an honour to take our pikes upon our shoulders, and wait upon him that day. He returned as many grateful expressions unto us, as if it had been the highest obligation that was ever put upon him, and he would not take us from our command.27
By the time Gwyn wrote his memoirs, though, he was serving as a gentleman trooper in the King’s Troop of Life Guards, then commanded by the Duke of Monmouth. Although a trooper in the Life Guards received four shillings a day, compared to the 2s.6d paid to a trooper in a line cavalry regiment, it is clear that Gwyn hoped for promotion, and that the prefatory letters opening his memoirs were (apparently fruitless) pleas for assistance. He told Charles II that he had ‘faithfully spent my prime years in your service’, and evidently hoped for more than a billet in the Life Guards. There were thousands of John Gwyns in the England of the 1660s (one contemporary survey identified 5,353 former officers), all clamouring for jobs, and the expansion of the army could gratify at least some of them.
Much as they might have resented the comparison, army officers had at least something in common with the keeper of Newgate prison, for their offices, like his, were generally bought and sold. Indeed, one historian has suggested that the purchase of commissions ‘operated to its greatest extent’ in the Restoration army.28 Any appointment or promotion required royal permission, and an officer either joining for the first time or being promoted paid a set fee to the secretary at war and negotiated the price payable to the officer he replaced. Commissions in units raised for short conflicts like the 1677–78 expedition were cheap but a poor long-term investment, while, at the other extreme, colonelcies of well-established regiments were hugely expensive. Charles gave Colonel John Russell £5,100 for the 1st Foot Guards in 1672, and then presented the regiment to one of his illegitimate brood, the Duke of Grafton, who had no military experience at all but rather enjoyed being a colonel.
The rules governing the purchase of commissions changed from time to time, and in 1684 the whole practice was outlawed, but with or without official approval it clinked cheerfully on. There was no reason why young men needed to understand their profession before buying their way into it: some young officers could not ‘relieve a guard without arousing the merry glee of spectators’. Moreover, there were many gentlemen ‘whom nothing but captaincies would contest’, thus leaving a residue of subalterns who frequently saw ignorant men buy their way in above them. One of the disappointed tells us that:
the subaltern … let him be never so diligent, faithful and industrious; nay never so successful too; and although he has spent so much of his own money in carrying arms … or in small posts, as would have bought a company; yet if he has not the ready – he must be sure to find one that has put over his head; and too often one that neither is, nor ever will make a soldier.29
However, the system, such as it was, was in a state of evolution, and during John Churchill’s career there were attempts to prevent the worst abuses: for instance, the commissioning of youths and children was theoretically banned in 1705. Churchill, as we shall see, had his own firm views on the subject, and it was at least in part thanks to his efforts that, between the reigns of Charles II and George I, a career in the army came increasingly to offer genuine professional advancement rather than sporadic achievement based on money and patronage, inflated by wartime promotion but imperilled by peacetime reductions. Yet throughout the period many officers, especially those in the most recently raised regiments, which would be the first to go on the outbreak of peace, were uncomfortably aware that the spectre of compulsory retirement on half-pay always beckoned:
This week we shine in scarlet and in gold
The next, the cloak is pawned, the watch is sold.
None of this was yet of much concern to Ensign Churchill of the 1st Foot Guards, commissioned without purchase by the kindly intervention of James, Duke of York. He carried his company’s colour (until about 1690 each company of foot had a colour of its own, and thereafter most regiments had a royal colour and a colonel’s colour) and watched the pikemen and
