The British Way in Warfare 1688 - 2000 (Routledge Revivals)

David French

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317598978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

First published in 1990, this title examines British defence policy from 1688 onwards; the year in which Britain was successfully invaded for the final time, and which marked a generation of warfare that lasted until 1714, during which Britain came to be known as a major European power. David French considers the strategic alliances that formed and changed throughout the period, and tests his hypotheses in light of the varying paradigms of war, and British wartime and peacetime practices. The ways in which the needs of both the army and the navy have been balanced over time are analysed, with particular attention paid to how parliament allotted money and resources to each. Wars under discussion include the American War of Independence, and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. A detailed and critical title, this reissue will be of great value to history students studying Early Modern diplomacy, with a particular emphasis on the strategic development of British warfare and policy, and the place of Britain within the European power structure.

1 The Emergence of a Great Power, 1688–1714

Almost from the moment he became king in 1661 Louis XIV wished to expand France’s borders. By acquiring territory in north-west Italy, western Germany and the Netherlands he hoped to add glory to his reputation and to be able to erect a barrier of fortresses around France to protect her from invasion. His ambitions provoked a series of protracted wars which continued intermittently until almost the end of his reign in 1715. The English were drawn into this struggle in November 1688 when the Stadholder of the United Provinces, William III, invaded England. William came because he had been invited by a group of Protestant nobles who feared that James II meant to Catholicize England, because he wanted to safeguard the inheritance of his wife, James’s daughter Mary, and because he wanted to use English resources in his struggle against Louis.

European observers in the 1680s recognized the existence of five great powers, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs, Sweden and the United Provinces. The England of James II was numbered amongst the powers of the second rank, together with states like Portugal, Bavaria and Savoy. They only had sufficient power to play an independent role intermittently. States acquired their position in this hierarchy because of their size, location, population, natural resources and the ability of their governments to mobilize their wealth and use it to raise powerful armed forces. On all of those counts Louis XIV’s France was Europe’s predominant great power in 1688. England was to emerge as a great power during the generation of almost continuous war against France which she fought between 1689 and 1714.

The Glorious Revolution reversed thirty years of pro-French policy in England. Earlier in the century England had fought three wars against Holland but they were intended to destroy Dutch shipping and trade, not to alter the political configuration of the continent. Before 1688 England had demonstrated that she was a considerable naval power but her military interventions on the continent in the seventeenth century had been brief and sporadic and her armed forces were not supported by the complex infrastructure of barracks, fortifications and dockyards that other powers, notably France, had developed, to enable them regularly to project their naval and military power beyond their own borders. But after 1688 England for the first time began to display a sustained interest in determining the political configuration of the continent and to develop the logistical potential that enabled her to rival her great power neighbours. This transformation was due to three factors: William was a Dutchman and a statesman with a European-wide vision; the English were ambitious to further their trade; but, most important of all, it was due to the determination of most Englishmen to maintain England as a Protestant state.

Under William the English did not seek to crush France, merely to curb her power. Rather than trying to annihilate their enemy’s armed forces in battle and to occupy his capital, the English tried to achieve their aims by a process of attrition. To the twentieth-century observer that might suggest that they sought to wreck their enemies’ economies by blockade and to exhaust their manpower in a series of great battles. Such concepts were anachronistic in the late seventeenth-century. Wars had a comparatively small impact on the fundamentally agrarian economies of Europe where the harvest remained the most important economic event. A naval blockade might be able to disrupt a nation’s overseas trade and exacerbate local famines by interrupting the movement of food around the coast, but it could not reduce a nation as rich as France to starvation. The enlistment in wartime of considerable numbers of underemployed farm labourers had only a small disruptive impact on levels of agricultural production.

In the face of the immense problems and costs involved in raising, equipping and maintaining armies and navies, late seventeenth century rulers were reluctant to hazard them in battle unless they were nearly certain of victory. The path to success in war lay through bankrupting the enemy’s treasury. Rather than attempt the impossible and starve their enemies into submission or kill so many of their troops that their armies disintegrated, the English tried to force their enemies to consume their resources on land and at sea faster than they could replace them. This strategy was facilitated by the fact that all belligerents accepted that war should impinge as little as possible on the civil economy. Once a state’s supply of specie were exhausted, once it had reached the narrow limits within which the money supply could safely be inflated and once its opportunities to borrow had run dry, it had no option other than to make peace. If it chose to continue fighting beyond that point it risked wrecking the things it was trying to protect, the political and economic fabric of its society. England’s objective was to reduce her enemies to the point at which they were so short of money that their armies were melting away because their troops were unpaid and their ships and crews were rotting at their moorings because there was no money to victual or repair them. When they were reduced to that position they could either continue the war and face total collapse or they could negotiate peace before calamity overtook them. As long as the English were ready to offer them even half reasonable terms, they chose the second course.

Between 1688 and 1714 William and his successors and their subjects fought the French for three reasons. The Glorious Revolution marked the point at which England began to exhibit a continuous interest in the preservation of a balance of power in Europe. William contributed to this by trying to preserve the liberty of the European states threatened by French aggrandizement because he believed that the Protestant religion would not be safe in a state system dominated by Catholic France. The treaty by which England acceded to the Grand Alliance of 1701 contained no mention of the need to preserve a European ‘balance’, but it did warn of the danger that if Spain and France were united under one throne they might be sufficiently powerful to dominate the whole of Europe. William’s subjects were quicker to discern that the easiest way to check French aggrandizement was by creating a force to balance it. In 1697 the Commons thanked William for giving England ‘the honour … of holding the Balance of Europe’. In 1713 the government claimed for itself ‘the same principle … [which is] to preserve the equilibrium in Europe’.¹ But there remained three questions. What exactly was the balance of power (because few of the men who used the phrase so glibly bothered to define it with any rigour); how to determine if it was threatened; and how should Britain act to maintain it? They were to beset policy-makers for a long time after 1714.

Whatever the precise answers to these questions, the fact that the pursuit of the balance of power was a major policy goal limited the way in which the English used their armed forces to secure their objectives. The need to secure a more stable balance implied that they were seeking to reduce their enemies’ power, not that they were trying to destroy them completely. Had Britain, as she may be called after the Union between England and Scotland in 1707, achieved the total overthrow of Bourbon France between 1689 and 1714, she would only have succeeded in creating another set of problems. Other powers would have become as suspicious of an over-mighty Britain as they had been of an over-mighty France. Britain might have found herself the victim of a hostile coalition determined to reduce her power in much the same way that she had helped to create two coalitions to check Louis’s ambitions.

The second reason why the English fought France was to further their overseas trade. In the century after 1660 economic thinkers believed that wealth and state power were synonymous. A favourable balance of trade was welcomed because it increased England’s stocks of precious metals and her ability to pay for her wars. In 1651, 1660 and 1662 Parliament passed Navigation Acts in an effort to undermine the role of the Dutch as the world’s carrier, to foster England’s merchant marine and increase the basis of England’s naval power. Henceforth England’s trade with her colonies could only be carried in English-owned ships manned by English sailors. Colonies were coveted because they provided a secure source of raw materials and foodstuffs which did not drain precious specie out of the English economy. After 1660 the French began to replace the Dutch in the minds of English merchants as their major competitors. In 1674 a group of London cloth merchants, incensed that French tariff policies discriminated against the export of English cloth, drew up the Scheme of Trade. Its statistics were almost pure invention. They purported to show that England was suffering from an annual deficit of nearly £1,000,000 on direct trade with France. For the rest of the seventeenth century and into the next, the Scheme was one of the staples of anti-French polemicists who never tired of pointing to the connection between France’s burgeoning overseas trade and her naval and military power. Ministers could never be deaf to the interests of overseas merchants for they produced income which could readily be taxed. But the emphasis which the English placed on trade again served to limit the ways in which they used their military power. It meant that victory or defeat could be calculated according to the number and profitability of the colonies or ships lost or won.

The third reason why the English fought France made her an exception to the generalization that after the Thirty Years’ War religious rancour was no longer a motivating force in the European great power system. In 1688 William and his wife Mary, the daughter of James II, were invited to invade England because a significant part of the English political nation feared that James II was determined to impose Catholicism on his Protestant subjects. James fled to France where the Catholic Louis XIV, whose revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had caused consternation amongst Protestant Englishmen, promised support to regain him his throne. Louis’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the new English monarchy and the armed support which he gave to the Jacobite cause, was one reason for the enmity in Anglo-French relations which marked this period. Although French support for Jacobitism waned after Louis’s death in 1715 it did not disappear. It re-emerged, albeit in an attenuated form during the War of the Austrian Succession, and at times other states, notably Sweden and Spain, were willing to support the Jacobites. An outright French victory in any one of the wars which she waged against Britain down to 1763 would have threatened the Protestant succession. It was the need to preserve the Protestant regime which, more than anything else, persuaded Englishmen who might otherwise have been reluctant to become involved in expensive European wars that they had little choice in the matter.

The use of the phrase ‘the English’ in the preceding paragraphs is a convenient shorthand for those monarchs, courtiers, politicians, soldiers, sailors, diplomats and members of the political nation outside Whitehall and Westminster, who had some say in the making of defence policy or who aspired to have some influence over how it was made. All late Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs, with the possible exception of Queen Mary, were determined to rule as well as to reign. None could do so without the assistance of trusted ministers and all discovered that the structure of British domestic politics placed considerable limitations on their freedom to wage war when and how they chose. The ability of a number of competing elites, each of which was represented in Parliament, to influence the development of defence policy was the reason why that policy was apparently so inconsistent. No particular political or professional faction was ever able to exercise exclusive control over policy-making for more than a brief period. William III had a freer hand than any of his successors. Before 1688 England had not been a great power and few English politicians had sufficient experience of European affairs to assist the king. He relied upon Dutch and Huguenot advisers. But the war meant that for eight years William was almost an absentee king, and it gave some English ministers a practical education in statecraft and strategy.

After 1688 no monarch could make policy without some thought as to what the reaction would be in Parliament and the wider political nation. The discussion of defence policy could not be confined to choosing between strictly naval and military options because it almost always involved matters of political patronage and domestic politics. Late Stuart and Hanoverian England was governed by a small, cohesive territorial oligarchy and their clients. The aristocracy was not a closed caste but intermarriage, a common educational experience, shared political ideals, the ownership of a considerable proportion of the national wealth and, before about 1780, the paucity of new creations made it seem so. Only the aristocracy proper had the right to a seat in the House of Lords. Substantial members of the much larger class of landed gentry aspired to a seat in the Commons. These two groups exercised a virtual stranglehold not just on high political office, but also on high military and naval offices. The military and civil powers thus overlapped. Serving officers formed one of the largest professional groups in the eighteenth-century Commons. But land was not the only interest represented in Parliament. Many members of the Lords and the landed gentry also had commercial investments and by 1761 about one in nine MPs was a merchant or a lawyer. This interconnection between landed and mercantile wealth was important because it inclined the governing class to take a broad view of what constituted the national interest.

Each House was responsible for its own affairs but their joint approval was necessary for the passage of legislation. The Revolution Settlement placed no limits on the king’s power to dissolve the Commons, but the pressure of business caused by the wars against Louis XIV and the government’s need for money ensured that it met annually. Sessions usually began in the autumn at the end of the campaigning season and lasted for between four and five months. In wartime their main business was to vote supplies for the next campaign, a duty which fell upon the Commons for in 1671 and again in 1678 they had resolved that the Lords had no powers to reject or even to amend a money bill. In return for granting supplies, Parliament expected that the executive would keep them informed of their plans. Regular meetings of the two Houses gave MPs and peers the opportunity to press their own, sometimes ill-informed, strategic ideas upon the government.

William inherited a potentially powerful fleet but one which was in some respects badly prepared to fight France. Its main bases, on the Thames and Medway, had been developed in the wars against the Dutch. They were in the wrong place to support a navy which now had to counter the French based at Brest. The prevailing winds meant that Brest was to windward of the existing English dockyards. Until the English improved their facilities at Portsmouth and developed a new base at Plymouth in the 1690s, the French had the advantage of wind and geography. The Royal Navy was one of England’s largest importers of raw materials, employers of labour and biggest shipbuilders. It was controlled by the Board of Admiralty, presided over by the First Lord of the Admiralty. He and his colleagues were responsible for the conduct of naval policy. They were assisted by a number of subordinate boards. The Navy Board, managed by the Controller, was responsible for the general administration of the navy including the making of contracts for stores and the construction of ships and dockyards. Naval finances were the responsibility of the Treasurer of the Navy. In theory he was a member of the Navy Board, but in practice he was independent of it. The Victualling Board ensured, with a growing degree of success, that the fleet was fed, although during the Nine Years’ War some commanders were compelled to alter their plans because supplies failed to arrive. In 1689 a temporary Sick and Wounded board was established to tend the navy’s casualties.

The system worked if relations between the First Lord of the Admiralty and the heads of the subordinate boards were cordial and if the former had the inclination to master some of the intricate details of the civil administration of the navy. The weakest link in the chain of administration was the way in which ships were armed. The supply of cannon, powder and shot for both the army and the navy lay not with the services themselves, but with a separate organization, the Board of Ordnance. This division of responsibilities was a frequent source of friction. The Ordnance Board enjoyed a reputation for corruption and procrastination which was almost legendary. Some of it was undeserved for there were occasions when other government departments failed to tell the Board what their plans were so that it could place the necessary orders in good time.

Under the later Stuarts approximately a quarter of all government revenue was spent on the navy. The construction and repair of warships and the maintenance of dockyards accounted for about half of all naval spending. The largest dockyards, Chatham, Woolwich, Deptford, Sheerness and Portsmouth, were some of the largest industrial enterprises in the country. Warships were rated according to the number of guns they carried. First (90–100 guns), second (80–90 guns) and third (70–80 guns) were larger than most merchant ships and were usually constructed in one of the royal dockyards. But their building capacity was limited. In 1691 they could build no more than thirteen large vessels simultaneously and in wartime many of their berths were occupied by ships undergoing repairs. The Navy Board turned to private yards to construct the fourth-fifth- and sixth-raters the navy needed to protect commerce. But vessels built in private yards were frequently constructed to the wrong dimensions, were delivered late and were built from inferior materials. The use of the correct materials was crucial if ships were not to be in constant need of repair. Although the navy preferred to use English oak for hulls, most raw materials were imported from New England or, more usually, from the states bordering the Baltic. The fact that such a large proportion of the naval stores the Admiralty needed came from the Baltic gave the English an abiding strategic interest in the region. When the outbreak of the Great Northern War in 1700 threatened to interrupt this trade, the government tried to encourage the trade in naval stores with the North American colonies. But colonial supplies never replaced goods from the Baltic. This was a major strategic weakness. Britain either had to remain on good terms with the Baltic powers or she had to be able to deploy a powerful squadron in the Baltic to overawe them.

A well-constructed ship-of-the-line had a life expectancy of about fourteen years. Ships which had been hastily built with unseasoned timber, as many were in wartime, had a shorter life expectancy. These limits were not set by technological obsolescence. Changes in ship design happened only slowly. It was determined by the fact that wooden ships were liable to two forms of rot, which, if left unchecked could destroy the fleet. Dry rot ate away ships’ timbers from the inside just as sea-worms could bore into their timbers from the outside. No satisfactory remedy was ever found to eliminate dry rot. Attacks by sea-worms were particularly prevalent in the warm waters of the Mediterranean and Caribbean. The Royal Navy paid for its interest in those seas with the destruction of whole squadrons of ships until the application of copper sheathing to the hulls of vessels during the American War of Independence helped to reduce the depredations of sea-worms.

In peacetime the navy had little difficulty in attracting able-bodied seamen. In 1688 England’s total seafaring population numbered some 50,000 men and the fleet only needed 12,700 men. In peacetime naval pay rates did not lag far behind those in the merchant service. But in every major war until the mid-nineteenth century manning the fleet presented the Admiralty with constant problems. In wartime the wages of merchant seamen and the Admiralty’s demand for more hands both rose sharply. By 1695 the fleet needed 48,500 seamen and it could not hope to compete with the merchant service on the open market for labour. The navy could have employed almost every able-bodied merchant seaman in the kingdom. It usually applied the same remedies, offering bounties to attract trained seamen from the merchant marine. But such measures were insufficient and inevitably the navy resorted to the press-gang. Even though the press was only supposed to take up trai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Emergence of a Great Power, 1688–1714
• 2 War for Empire, 1714–63
• 3 The American War of Independence, 1763–83
• 4 The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
• 5 The Era of the ‘Pax Britannica’, c 1815–80
• 6 The Rise and Fall of the ‘Blue Water’ Policy
• 7 Deterrence and Dependence, 1917–42
• 8 The End of Empire, 1942–82
• Conclusion: From Thatcher to the Millennium
• Notes
• Guide to Further Reading
• Index