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1660-1750 Hannah Smith

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Armies and Political Change in Britain,
1660–1750
Armies and Political
Change in Britain,
1660–1750
HANNAH SMITH
1
3
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the assistance and encouragement that I have received while
researching and writing this book. I acknowledge with thanks the financial
support that I have received from The Leverhulme Trust through the award of a
Philip Leverhulme Prize; the Henry Huntington Library, San Marino through the
award of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship; the British Academy for a
Small Research Grant; the John Fell OUP Research Fund, University of Oxford for
the award of a grant to assist with teaching replacement costs while I held the
Philip Leverhulme Prize; the University of Hull for appointing me to an RCUK
Academic Fellowship and Lectureship in History; and St Hilda’s College, Oxford
for assistance with research costs.
I would like to thank Erica Charters, Oliver Cox, Julie Farguson, Gabriel
Glickman, Mark Goldie, Aaron Graham, Holger Hoock, Dominic Ingram, Clyve
Jones, Max Kaufman, Niall MacKenzie, Matthew McCormack, Eve Rosenhaft,
Michael Schaich, William Tatum, and Stephen Taylor for their help at various
stages of the project. I would similarly like to thank Peter Grieder and David
Omissi at the University of Hull, colleagues at the History Faculty, University of
Oxford, and colleagues at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, especially Katherine Clarke,
Janet Howarth, Ruth Percy, Catherine Schenk, and Selina Todd.
Early chapters of this book were presented at seminars and conferences at the
University of Oxford; German Historical Institute, London; National Army
Museum, London; University of Leicester; University of Northampton; Birkbeck
College, University of London; University of Leeds; and Ecole Normale
Supérieure-Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Lyon Université Lumière Lyon 2.
I would like to thank the participants for their constructive comments and
questions which helped me to develop my arguments. I am particularly grateful
to the anonymous readers for OUP who provided insightful feedback at critical
points. My thanks are also due to my editors at OUP, Katie Bishop, Stephanie
Ireland, Cathryn Steele, and Christina Wipf Perry.
I am much indebted to the staff of the libraries and archives cited in the
Bibliography. I would particularly like to thank Gaye Morgan at the Codrington
Library, All Souls College, Oxford; Mark Bainbridge at Worcester College Library,
Oxford; Anna Riggs at Bath Abbey; Mark Forrest at Wimborne St Giles; Anna
McEvoy, House Custodian, Stowe House Preservation Trust; Chris Bennett at
Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies; the staff of the Special Collections
Reading Rooms, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford; and Samantha Smart at the
National Records of Scotland.
vi 
I thank and acknowledge the permission of the Syndics of Cambridge

University Library to cite from SPCK MS and Walpole (Houghton) MSS, Ch
(H) Pol. Papers; Bedfordshire Archives Service to cite L30/9a/1 page 117 and L30/
9a/4/181–182; the University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections
to cite from the Portland and Mellish collections; the Provost and Fellows of
Worcester College, Oxford for permission to cite from the Clarke Papers, MS 75
and MS 81; the Earl De La Warr to cite from the correspondence of John West,
Lord De La Warr; Lord Walpole to cite from the correspondence of Horatio
Walpole, Baron Walpole; Jim Lowther and the Lowther Estate Trust to cite from
the Lonsdale papers; and the Cumbria Archive Centre, Carlisle for their assistance.
Material from the Goodwood Archives is cited by courtesy of the Trustees of the
Goodwood Collections and with acknowledgements to the West Sussex Record
Office. Material held at the National Records of Scotland, GD 18 Clerk of
Penicuik, is included by permission of Sir Robert M. Clerk of Penicuik, Bt., and
GD 220 from the Montrose muniments is included by the permission of the duke
of Montrose. U1590 O142/9, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury to Benjamin Furley, Kent
Archives, is published with the permission of the 12th earl of Shaftesbury.
Chapter 6 is based on Hannah Smith, ‘The Hanoverian Succession and the
Politicisation of the British Army’, in The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics
and Monarchical Culture, edited by Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 207–226 and is included by permission of Taylor
and Francis Group.
I wish to record my gratitude and thanks to my family who lived with this book
for many years. I would like to thank my mother, Brenda Smith, for proofreading
chapters. Matthew Greenwood has been constantly supportive and has assisted in
so many ways. This book is dedicated to him.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1. The Restoration of Crown and Church, 1660–70 12
I The Creation of the King’s Army 16
II Conventiclers and Catholics 25
III The King’s General 31
2. Popery, Arbitrary Government, and War, 1670–8 38
I The Problems of War 39
II The Problem of Parliament 45
III The Problem of France 48
3. The Disputed Succession, 1678–85 54
I The Military Dimensions to the Exclusion Crisis 55
II The Crown’s Power and the Crown’s Army 63
III The Rival Heirs 70
4. Revolutions, 1685–9 81
I The King and His Army 86
II Divided by the Sword 94
III Popery on Parade? 102
IV Downfall 107
5. War and Peace, 1689–1702 124
I Constructing William III’s Army 128
II The Price of an Army 146
III Crown and Parliament 155
IV The Standing Army Debates 165
6. The War of Succession, 1702–14 173
I The War of the Spanish Succession and the Rage of Party 175
II The Age of Anne, the Age of Marlborough 182
III Whose Army? Anne versus Marlborough 187
IV The Problem of the Captain-General 194
V Desperate Measures 208
viii 
7. Defending and Disputing the Rival Kings, 1714–50 218

I Peace, Wars, and Party Politics 221
II The Creation of a Georgian Army 226
III Georgian Loyalism 238
IV The Army and National Identities 245
8. Oligarchy and Opposition, 1714–50 251
I The Standing Army Debates 252
II The Army in Parliament 263
III Old Soldiers 275
IV Constitutional Queries 284
Conclusion 297
Bibliography 301
Index 335
List of Illustrations
Front Cover. Queen Anne Presenting the Plans of Blenheim to Military Merit
by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1708 © Blenheim Palace
1.1 Charles ye II by the Grace of God King of England Scotland France
and Ireland Defender of the Faith published by Robert Walton,
circa 1660–2 © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 13
1.2 Charles II, the royal family and George Monck, 1st duke of Albemarle
published by Robert Walton, circa 1660–70 © The Trustees of the
British Museum. All rights reserved 33
3.1 James Scott, duke of Monmouth by Peter Vandrebanc after Godfrey
Kneller, circa 1675–85 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
All rights reserved 71
3.2 Henry FitzRoy, 1st duke of Grafton by Isaac Beckett, circa 1683
© National Portrait Gallery, London 78
4.1 The Camp on Hounslow-Heath published by George Croom, 1686
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 105
4.2 The Portsmouth Captains by Robert White, 1688 © National Portrait
Gallery, London 112
5.1 William of Orange published by Richard Tompson after Sir Peter Lely,
circa 1678–9 © National Portrait Gallery, London 125
6.1 Blenheim House published by John Hinton, circa 1750 © Private collection 196
6.2 Marlborough House in St. James’s Park by Sutton Nicholls and
published by John Bowles, circa 1725 © The Trustees of the British
Museum. All rights reserved 203
6.3 Thomas Butler, earl of Ossory by Peter Vandrebanc after Sir Peter Lely,
circa 1678 © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 206
7.1 William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, blue tin-glazed earthenware plate,
Bristol, circa 1746 © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 223
8.1 Excise in Triumph, 1733 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
8.2 Monument to James Stanhope, 1st Earl Stanhope by William Kent
and John Michael Rysbrack, 1733 © Copyright: Dean and Chapter
of Westminster 269
8.3 Lord Cobham presented with the sword of Mars © Courtesy of SHPT/The
Bard Graduate Center Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture,
New York 280
x   
8.4 William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, blue tin-glazed earthenware mug,

Lambeth, 1748 © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 285
8.5 William Augustus, duke of Cumberland published by Thomas Jefferys
after Thomas Hudson, 1746 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
List of Abbreviations
BL The British Library, London

CJ Commons Journal
Cobbett ed. PH Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest
Period to the Year 1803
CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic
CSPV Calendar of State Papers Venetian
CUL Cambridge University Library, Cambridge
EHR English Historical Review
GM Gentleman’s Magazine
Grey’s Debates Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the
Year 1694: Collected by the Honble Anchitell Grey
HHL Henry Huntington Library, San Marino
HJ Historical Journal
HoC www.historyofparliamentonline.org
HoL The House of Lords 1660–1715
JBS Journal of British Studies
JSAHR Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research
KHLC Kent History and Library Centre
LJ Lords Journal
Morrice, Entring Book The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, 1677–1691
NLS National Library of Scotland
NRS National Records of Scotland
OxDNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
P&P Past and Present
POAS Poems on Affairs of State
TNA The National Archives, Kew
WCL Worcester College Library, Oxford
Introduction
In the freezing winter of 1659–60 an army marched south from Scotland. Under
the command of General George Monck, its men made ‘their Beds upon the Ice’
and travelled ‘over Mountains of Snow, to redeem their Countrey’.¹ In England
the republican regime that had existed for over a decade since Charles I’s execu-
tion was in crisis. Oliver Cromwell, the man who had held the regime together,
was dead and his son and successor, Richard, had failed to unite the different
political and military groupings who were striving for power. Monck, the regime’s
military commander in Scotland, decided to intervene and set out on the long
journey to London. Monck’s arrival in the English capital with his soldiers proved
pivotal to the republic’s demise and led to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy
in May 1660. Monck’s military strength, based on his careful management of his
army’s interests, enabled him to bring about a pro-monarchist parliament, who
invited the exiled Charles II to return to England as king.
Nearly ninety years later, troops from a successor to Monck’s army moved
north through England in the autumn and winter of 1745–6 in equally bitter
weather to preserve a regime. They were bent on crushing the Jacobite rebels who
wished to dethrone the incumbent monarch, George II, and restore the once again
exiled Stuart dynasty. Under the command of George II’s son, William Augustus,
duke of Cumberland, troops defeated the rebels at the battle of Culloden, near
Inverness, and secured the political settlement established by the Revolution of
1688–9.
In the years between 1660 and 1750 armies exerted a profound influence on the
course and outcome of political events in the British Isles. Monck’s forces helped
to set Charles II on the throne. James VII and II’s army routed the rebels who
aimed to dethrone him in 1685, but the defection and paralysis of his army in the
face of William of Orange’s forces was crucial to the success of the Revolution of
1688–9, which knocked him off his thrones and replaced him with William of
Orange and James’s daughter, Mary. Twenty-five years later, elements within
Queen Anne’s army contemplated military intervention at the end of her reign
to ensure the Protestant Succession of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1714. George I’s
and George II’s armies defended them during the ’15 and ’45 Rebellions.
¹ Thomas Gumble, The Life of General Monck, Duke of Albemarle, &c. with Remarks upon His
Actions (London, 1671), p. 190.
Armies and Political Change in Britain, 1660–1750. Hannah Smith, Oxford University Press. © Hannah Smith 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198851998.003.0001
2      , –
The threat or hope of the army’s intervention animated the period. 1660–1 saw
the foundation of the first royal army in peacetime, its very existence controversial
and disputed. Armies were politically engaged, sometimes at a personal level, or as
Crown servants enforcing divisive, repressive policies. Would a monarch employ
troops to establish arbitrary government and popery? Could an army determine
the succession to the throne? Might an ambitious general use armed force to
achieve supreme power? These questions troubled successive generations of men
and women. The history of Britain between 1660 and 1750 was shaped by the
actions, apathies, and fears of armies.
There once existed a view that the British army was apolitical, or apolitical in
comparison to other national armies. Such a perception was buttressed by the
strident claims of early twentieth-century British army officers who combined the
notion that the army as an institution existed beyond the ‘mire of party politics’
with a deep distaste for politicians.² Hew Strachan’s The Politics of the British
Army, which focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, challenged this
opinion. As Strachan remarked, the argument that the army was apolitical was
itself a political statement, and he concluded that ‘the behaviour of the British
army is as inherently political as that of other armies’.³
Earlier historians had acknowledged that the British army’s opening years were
marked by political involvement. After all, the intervention of groups within the
army in the Revolution of 1688–9 could scarcely be passed over. But such
intrusions were viewed through the same prism of apoliticism; unsurprising,
given the prevailing maxim that military history should be written, could only
be written, by the military. Sir John Fortescue opened his monumental history of
the British army, first published in 1899, with an apology that ‘the civilian who
attempts to write a military history is of necessity guilty of an act of presumption’.⁴
A fifth son, Fortescue had wanted to join the army like his older brothers.
However, holding a commission in the late nineteenth-century British army was
a costly business, principally owing to the extraordinary outlay on uniforms and
horses and the equally extraordinary social life—the young Winston Churchill
had to sponge off relatives to pay for his military career. Fortescue’s father could
not afford it. Perhaps Fortescue wrote like the archetypal peppery old colonel by
way of recompense.⁵ Fortescue’s predecessors in the field, General Viscount
² Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford, 1997), pp. 6–7.
³ Strachan, Politics, pp. 7, 263. See also David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British
Aristocracy (New Haven, CT, 1990), p. 271.
⁴ J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. 1 (1899; London, 1910), p. v.
⁵ Oxford DNB, ‘John Fortescue’; Cannadine, Decline and Fall, p. 270.
 3
Wolseley and Col. Clifford Walton, were army officers (although Walton, at least,
was much less fiery).⁶
Fortescue was interested in sketching ‘the political relations between the Army
and the country’. But in practice, his endeavours to write the ‘political not less
than the military aspect of the Army’s history . . . at the sacrifice sometimes of
purely military matters’ meant that apart from the events of 1688, he confined
himself to charting and castigating parliamentary responses to the army when not
describing military campaigns.⁷ He was especially vehement when dealing with
the military disbandment of the late 1690s, which he denounced as ‘an act of
criminal imbecility, the most mischievous work of the most mischievous
Parliament that has ever sat at Westminster’.⁸ He expressed fury at the conduct
of ‘[Robert] Harley and his gang’ in seeking the removal of Queen Anne’s captain-
general, the duke of Marlborough, from military command and holding furtive
peace negotiations with Louis XIV, which ‘must not be forgotten in the history of
the relations of the House of Commons towards the Army’.⁹ And he rather
extraordinarily observed, when commenting on the mutiny among British troops
in Flanders towards the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, ‘Fortunate it
was that the outbreak took place while the troops were still abroad, or the House of
Commons might have learned by a second bitter experience [a glance at military
intervention during the Civil Wars and Interregnum] that the patience of the
British soldier, though very great is not inexhaustible’.¹⁰ In essence, politics was
meted out by meddling ‘civilian’ politicians to long-suffering soldiers.¹¹
Admittedly, Fortescue encountered major practical research difficulties in
attempting to shift the spotlight beyond operational history, among which should
be included his pecuniary troubles. His project was partly sponsored by his
redoubtable wife Winifred’s fashion retail business.¹²
Subsequent shifts in the fields of history and the social sciences have provided
scholars with new frameworks with which to analyse the politics of the late
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century armies. Military history’s re-orientation
away from regimental histories and narratives of campaigns to consider the
⁶ Viscount Wolseley, The Life of John Churchill Duke of Marlborough (London, 1894); Clifford
Walton, History of the British Standing Army A.D. 1660 to 1700 (London, 1894). As might be expected,
both these studies focus on campaigns and aspects of the army’s institutional history, although
Wolseley analysed whether John Churchill’s behaviour in 1688 was justifiable and declared that ‘the
Government or the General who counts upon the British soldier to fight well in an unrighteous and
unjust cause, relies for support upon a reed that will pierce the hand which leans upon it’: Wolseley,
Life, vol. 2, p. 85. Walton noted the army’s role in 1688.
⁷ Fortescue, History, vol. 1, pp. vii, 304–309; Strachan, Politics, p. 6.
⁸ Fortescue, History, vol. 1, p. 389. ⁹ Fortescue, History, vol. 1, p. 541.
¹⁰ Fortescue, History, vol. 1, pp. 553–554.
¹¹ Fortescue developed the theme in the post-1713 period too. See Fortescue, History, vol. 2,
pp. 24–27.
¹² Fortescue, History, vol. 1, p. vii; Oxford DNB, ‘Winifred Fortescue’. Lieut.-Col. J. S. Omond provided
a brief overview of the relations between the Crown, parliament, and the army in Parliament and the
Army, 1642–1904 (Cambridge, 1933) to mitigate the dearth of literature on the topic.
4      , –
relationship between war and societies has enabled armies to be placed within the
context of ‘the world they belong to’, as Geoffrey Best expressed it.¹³ Meanwhile,
in the 1950s and 1960s, political scientists became interested in theorizing military
intervention, albeit in historically insensitive ways. Without doubt some of their
preoccupations, for instance the debate over whether professional armies were
more or less likely to be involved in politics, had much less relevance for the pre-
modern era, not least because their prime concerns were related to the United
States military in the shadow of the atomic bomb.¹⁴
By the 1970s and 1980s the history of the late seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century British armies, and with it the political activities of their
members, was at last coming under serious academic scrutiny. John Childs
undertook a detailed consideration of the political function and outlook of the
armies of Charles II, James VII and II, and Mary II and William III within his
seminal trilogy on their military composition, size, and function.¹⁵ Childs’s valu-
able work highlighted the impact of wider political developments on staffing
armies: the royalist influx into Charles II’s new army in the early 1660s; the
purging of Whig army officers during the Exclusion Crisis and those who chal-
lenged James VII and II’s pro-Catholic policies in the mid-1680s; and William
III’s restructuring of the British army after the Revolution of 1688–9 to remove
Jacobite sympathizers. Childs also analysed how the Stuart kings deployed their
armies at key political moments, notably at the time of the Oxford Parliament in
1681 and between 1685 and 1688.¹⁶ Childs’s studies were complemented by John
Miller’s work on Catholic officers in Charles II’s and James VII and II’s armies and
the militia in James’s reign.¹⁷ The political history of Queen Anne’s army took a
different trajectory. R. E. Scouller published its detailed institutional history in the
1960s but did not engage with the politics of the army.¹⁸ It was left to historians of
the duke of Marlborough and his political world to analyse how the age of party
had an impact on the army of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13).¹⁹ The
armies of the first two Georges have likewise been subject to detailed scrutiny,
¹³ See Best’s ‘Editor’s Preface’, in M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime,
1618–1789 (Leicester, 1988), p. 9.
¹⁴ Strachan, Politics, pp. 10–15; Ian F. W. Beckett, A Guide to British Military History: The Subject
and the Sources (Barnsley, 2016), pp. 51–52; Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and
Political Portrait (New York, 1960), preface; S. E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military
in Politics (1962, 2nd edn 1981, London, 1988).
¹⁵ John Childs, The Army of Charles II (London, 1976); The Army, James II and the Glorious
Revolution (New York, 1980); The British Army of William III, 1689–1702 (Manchester, 1987).
¹⁶ John Childs, ‘The Army and the Oxford Parliament of 1681’, English Historical Review 94, no. 372
(1979): pp. 580–587.
¹⁷ John Miller, ‘Catholic Officers in the Later Stuart Army’, EHR 88, no. 346 (1973): pp. 35–53; John
Miller, ‘The Militia and the Army in the Reign of James II’, HJ 16, no. 4 (1973): pp. 659–679.
¹⁸ R. E. Scouller, The Armies of Queen Anne (Oxford, 1966).
¹⁹ Henry L. Snyder, ‘The Duke of Marlborough’s Request of His Captain-Generalcy for Life: A Re-
examination’, JSAHR 45, no. 182 (1967): pp. 67–83; Ivor F. Burton, The Captain-General: The Career of
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough from 1702 to 1711 (London, 1968).
 5
although the focus of such studies has been on their function and operation and
their evolution as fighting forces rather than their politics as such.²⁰ In addition to
these studies, the army lists published by Charles Dalton between 1892 and 1904
and the History of Parliament and the Office-Holders in Modern Britain volumes
brought into focus the political preoccupations of army officers who were MPs or
peers or held office at the royal court.²¹ This has emphasized that a number of
army officers were deeply entrenched in partisan, courtly, and parliamentary
politics or had notably close ties to the Crown in an era when the monarch was
still a powerful politician as well as the army’s supreme commander.
Although the monarch governed from London, he or she was the sovereign of
Ireland and Scotland as well as England and Wales. How they ruled in one
kingdom had an indelible impact on the others.²² This has distinct implications
when writing the political history of armies in Britain. While England provides the
main focus and perspective for this study, this book also considers the wider
British Isles contexts, and Anglo-Scottish relations in particular. Contemporaries
were concerned by the Crown’s ability to use the military power it enjoyed in one
kingdom over its subjects elsewhere. The Scottish parliament passed several acts in
the 1660s which permitted the Scottish militia to be deployed outside of Scotland,
thus causing considerable English parliamentary unease. The Scots, too, had
grounds for alarm at the military resources of the English Crown. Charles II
defeated the Conventicler rebellion of 1679 at Bothwell Brig, Lanarkshire by
dispatching English troops to Scotland. In 1706–7 Queen Anne stationed
English army regiments on the Anglo-Scottish border to deter Scottish opposition
to the Act of Union of 1707 between England and Scotland. Regiments raised in
England were sent to fight against Scottish Jacobite forces in 1715 and 1745–6.
A British context existed within the army too. Armies were microcosms of
national tensions that could be found more widely within the British Isles, with
rivalries existing between troops from different countries. There was no British
army until 1707; each kingdom had its own army. After 1707, the English and
Scottish armies became a British army and Ireland had a separate army until the
Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801. Yet English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh
men could serve in these national armies, particularly at the rank of commissioned
officer. Indeed, by the early eighteenth century, Irish regiments were recruited in
England to prevent Irish Catholics enlisting as soldiers. The Irish Protestant elites
welcomed troops as defence against the Catholic population, thus providing the
²⁰ Alan J. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army
1714–63 (Manchester, 1985); J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army,
1715–1795 (Oxford, 1981).
²¹ Charles Dalton, English Army Lists and Commission Registers, 1661–1714 (London, 1892–1904);
and in particular, Office-Holders in Modern Britain: Volume 11 (Revised), Court Officers, 1660–1837, ed.
R. O. Bucholz (London, 2006), British History Online, www.british-history.ac.uk/office-holders/vol11
[accessed 15 September 2020].
²² For instance, see Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms (2005; London, 2006).
6      , –
English government with useful storage space for regiments that it wished to
retain but could not quarter in England without a political outcry.²³ The Crown
tended to view its national armies as one unit, and the separate military estab-
lishments as little more than an accounting measure which determined how each
army was financed.²⁴
The evolution of a vibrant and brash public sphere in this period also has
important implications for the political history of the armies. Popular opinion was
instrumental in shaping politics and gained a controversial legitimacy of its own.
Monarchs were forced to engage with and persuade their subjects using the press
as well as through older forms of communication.²⁵ The political parties that
emerged in the later Stuart period had to woo voters using a cacophony of
techniques. Partisan politics were articulated outside the elite institutions of the
royal court and parliament through a strident print culture, organized street
demonstrations and processions, bell-ringing, bonfires, and feasting. Alehouses
and coffee houses were important locations for the exchange of political opin-
ions.²⁶ The army, like the Crown’s other subjects, was part of this highly visible,
inclusive, engaging, and ubiquitous political culture. Army officers were drawn
from aristocratic, gentry, and gentlemanly backgrounds. They and their families
and friends might be enmeshed in national and local politics. The most well
connected also held posts at the royal court or served in parliament.
Political participation, however, extended beyond the social elites, and beyond
those who could vote in parliamentary or corporation elections. In 1696, after
the government discovered a Jacobite plot to assassinate William III, all adult
males in some communities subscribed to an oath to support the Williamite
regime.²⁷ This is an important reminder when exploring the politics of those
whom contemporaries termed as ‘the common soldier’. The elites, for the most
part, viewed ‘common soldiers’, like the social groups from which they originated,
as incapable of profound thought, reason, or feeling; the historian would be
unwise to do so too.²⁸
²³ Terence Denman, ‘ “Hibernia Officina Militum”: Irish Recruitment to the British Regular Army,
1660–1815’, The Irish Sword 20 (1996–7): pp. 148–166.
²⁴ Childs, Charles II, p. 196.
²⁵ Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New
Haven, CT, 2013); Tim Harris, ‘ “Venerating the Honesty of a Tinker”: The King’s Friends and the
Battle for the Allegiance of the Common People in Restoration England’, in The Politics of the Excluded,
c. 1500–1850, edited by Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 195–232.
²⁶ See Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994); Tim Harris,
London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the
Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987); Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later
Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (2005; Oxford, 2006).
²⁷ David Cressy, ‘Binding the Nation: The Bonds of Association, 1584 and 1696’, in Tudor Rule and
Revolution: Essays for G. R. Elton from His American Friends, edited by Delloyd J. Guth and John
W. McKenna (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 230–233.
²⁸ Yuval Noah Harari, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern
War Culture, 1450–2000 (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 160–161; Houlding, Fit for Service, pp. 267–268.
 7
Information about those who served in the ranks is sparse for most of this
period. The social composition of non-commissioned officers and soldiers varied
depending on the regiment and time period. Those serving in the ranks of elite
regiments were drawn from semi-genteel backgrounds. By contrast, during the
years when impressment was in operation, men who were forcibly recruited into
the army frequently came from the bottom of the social hierarchy. More generally,
though, private soldiers came from a variety of trades, most notably labourers but
also weavers, husbandmen, shoemakers, and tailors, as well as many others.²⁹
A few women illicitly enlisted as soldiers. Christian Davies and Hannah Snell are
among those who achieved some fame for their military service.³⁰
The ‘common soldier’ cannot be assumed to be politically indifferent, too
economically or socially marginal or subordinated by military service to hold
independent political opinions or a due sense of his rights.³¹ Soldiers were
quartered in alehouses, spaces for political discussion, and freely mixed within
local communities. In London, where the Foot Guards were quartered, the Guards
took on other forms of paid labour, such as dock or agricultural work.³² Soldiers
had ready access to political discussion and, as servants of the Crown, were called
upon to enforce Crown policy. It is unlikely they did so unthinkingly or were
politically uninformed. Over the course of the period, it was increasingly possible
that some soldiers could read. Male literacy rates in Essex and Suffolk in the 1690s
have been estimated at around 46 per cent, while a sample taken from northern
England across the 1720s to 1740s suggests that, among the occupational groups
from which soldiers were recruited, 37 per cent of labourers, 33 per cent of
servants, and 72 per cent of craftsmen were literate. In 1720s London, 99 per
cent of tradesmen and craftsmen may have been literate.³³ A few soldiers were
eligible to vote in their home communities or had relatives who did, which gave
them some form of personal political influence.³⁴ The period saw the continued
expansion of the electorate, with the growth in the number of those who qualified
as 40-shilling freeholders in county seats and in the creation of freemen and the
division of burgages in boroughs. It has been calculated that 4.3 per cent of the
²⁹ Andrew Cormack, ‘These Meritorious Objects of the Royal Bounty’: The Chelsea Out-Pensioners in
the Early Eighteenth Century (London, 2017), pp. 334–344; Childs, William III, pp. 116–117.
³⁰ For Davies and Snell see Fraser Easton, ‘Gender’s Two Bodies: Women Warriors, Female
Husbands and Plebeian Life’, P&P 180 (2003): pp. 142–146; John A. Lynn II, Women, Armies, and
Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 66–67.
³¹ Ilya Berkovich, Motivation in War: The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe
(Cambridge, 2017), pp. 96, 228–229. For the politics of late seventeenth-century sailors see J. D. Davies,
Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy (Oxford, 1991), pp. 85–86.
For a later period see Nick Mansfield, Soldiers as Workers: Class, Employment, Conflict and the
Nineteenth-Century Military (Liverpool, 2016), pp. 157–158.
³² Cormack, These Meritorious Objects, pp. 160, 282.
³³ David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England
(Cambridge, 1980), pp. 99–100; R. A. Houston, ‘The Development of Literacy: Northern England,
1640–1750’, The Economic History Review 35, no. 2 (1982): pp. 206, 213.
³⁴ Cormack, These Meritorious Objects, p. 293.
8      , –
population in England and Wales held the right to vote by 1715, the largest
number of voters before the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832. Voters were not
necessarily wealthy and, in some boroughs, followed relatively low-status trades
and occupations.³⁵
Soldiers’ political opinions were rarely recorded. However, prosecutions for
seditious words and comments made by observers provide suggestive indications,
especially for the period after 1714. These records illuminate a world of deep
political conviction and complex political thinking and act as a reminder of the
insights lost for earlier periods. Contemporaries may have been dismissive about
the politics of the ‘common soldier’. Nevertheless, ‘common soldiers’—as trained
and armed fighting men—were recognized as having forms of political agency.
The extent to which the regiment as an entity shaped political identities is more
debatable. A lack of surviving material makes it difficult to assess whether
regiments, or companies within them, had their own distinctive political outlook.
Since army officers and soldiers were quartered in relatively small units in inns
and alehouses rather than in larger groups in barracks, a likely effect was the
weakening of a sense of regimental identity, in peacetime at least. Absenteeism of
army officers from their designated quarters, a regular problem during the period,
meant that they may have spent as much time with non-army associates and
relatives as with their regimental colleagues. The purchase system, whereby army
officers bought their commission, rendered it harder for a colonel to shape the
political complexion of his regiment. Some regiments did have a reputation for a
particular partisan standpoint on controversial issues, for instance during the
Exclusion Crisis, in 1688, or in Queen Anne’s reign. Other regiments, though,
appear to have contained a variety of views, which could lead to verbal and
physical altercations over politics. The world beyond the regiment rather than
the regiment itself seems to have been far more important in influencing the
politics of individual officers and soldiers.
II
This book analyses the relationship between politics and armies in Britain from
the foundation of a permanent peacetime army in 1660–1 to the aftermath of the
’45 Rebellion and the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. The study has
two objectives. It writes a history of the years between 1660 and 1750 that
approaches key political episodes from a different perspective than is usually
encountered by centring the focus of discussion on the army. Through exploring
events from this standpoint, the book demonstrates how the political history of
³⁵ W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies, 1701–1715 (London, 1970),
pp. 13–18, 20–21.
 9
the period was shaped by the looming presence of the army and, on occasion, by
the active interventions of army officers and soldiers. Moreover, within this
framework, the book engages with a series of questions to probe the impact of
the army at important political moments and as the political, constitutional, and
military environment changed after 1689.
This is a book about the army rather than the armed forces. Armies were not
the only branch of the military to be politically involved and act as agents of
constitutional change. The navy was a similarly politicized institution and the
allegiance of the fleet could be crucial to the survival of a regime in repelling
invasion. This was made clear in the autumn of 1688 when the apparent inability
of James II’s navy to intercept or fight William of Orange’s fleet allowed William
to land his army and overthrow James. Nevertheless, navies were less politically
dangerous than armies since navies were sea-based rather than land-based forces.
Unlike navies, armies could crush both external and internal threats to a regime
on land and it was in the latter, potentially constitutionally devastating, capacity
that they were feared. The perception of armies as political game-changers only
increased over the period, as the events of 1659–60, 1688, 1715, and 1745–6
demonstrated to contemporaries. No one feared a ‘standing navy’ except, perhaps,
the taxpayer; even then, taxpayers were readily willing to fund a colossally
expensive fleet. Indeed, making the comparison between a constitutionally dan-
gerous army and a patriotically virtuous navy was an important characteristic of
anti-army sentiment.
The first three chapters of this book focus on Charles II’s twenty-five-year reign.
During this period Charles considered the possibility of using his newly created
army to enforce his authority in his ongoing contest with parliament over religious
toleration, royal prerogative power, foreign policy, and, ultimately, the succession
to his throne. Yet who could Charles trust to command his army? His brother and
heir presumptive, James, duke of York and Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, James,
duke of Monmouth, at bitter odds with each other, had their own political agenda;
this was inseparable from their military experience, military reputations, and
following within Charles II’s army. Since both York and Monmouth laid claim
to being successor to Charles II’s thrones, the Exclusion Crisis, in which those
claims were debated, occurred within a context in which a military solution was
not inconceivable.
The duke of York succeeded as James VII of Scotland and II of England on
Charles II’s death in 1685. James was a military man, deeply interested in armies.
Chapter 4 analyses James’s plans for and relationship with his army as he
embarked on a scheme of religious reform to entrench Catholicism. The chapter
explores the civil–military tensions that James’s policies generated, both in par-
liament and, more widely, on the streets. It also considers the conspiracy within
James’s army which resulted in the defections of some army officers and soldiers
to William of Orange in 1688, while others remained committed to James.
10      , –
Contemporaries feared James’s military power and how he might use troops to
overawe his subjects. But how much control did James actually have over
his army?
On obtaining the Crown in 1689, William III immediately launched Britain
into the Nine Years’ War with France. Chapter 5 examines how William remod-
elled the army to purge it of James VII and II’s supporters and fight the war. Yet
William was never certain of his new army’s political loyalties, nor did he trust its
senior officers, some of whom, such as John Churchill, the future duke of
Marlborough, had been key players in the conspiracy to desert to William in
1688 but had soon become alienated from him. Jacobites saw military support
from within the army as important to any attempt to restore the exiled James to
his thrones. Furthermore, the later years of William III’s reign were dominated by
intense parliamentary debate about the perils of peacetime standing armies. The
Revolution of 1688–9 and the war with France had fundamentally changed the
relationship between the Crown and its subjects. But this was not fully apparent in
the 1690s and contemporaries remained beset by fears over the army’s politics and
the Crown’s intentions.
Chapter 6 explores the politics of Queen Anne’s army as successive ministries,
with the Crown’s backing, attempted to ‘model’ the army to bolster their own
position and aims. These initiatives were not novel. Every regime since 1660 had
paid careful attention to the political loyalties of the army. Nor was political
division within the army a new phenomenon. But Anne’s reign, and the last
four years of it in particular, represent a singular period in the political history
of the British army that reflect the tensions unique to the reign of the last Stuart.
These were heightened by the activities of Anne’s captain-general, the duke of
Marlborough, the object of both adulation and profound suspicion. Never again
would the army be so riven by party politics. The succession to the throne was
contested between a Protestant Hanoverian claimant and a Jacobite Stuart one.
Indeed, in the spring and summer of 1714, a civil war, accompanied by a foreign
invasion, was widely feared, fuelled by memories of how military action had
helped secure a particular political and dynastic outcome in 1660 and 1688–9.
While Anne’s Protestant heir, George I, succeeded peacefully to the throne after
the queen’s death in 1714, within a year of his accession he faced the Jacobite
Rebellion of 1715. Chapter 7 examines dynastic allegiance within the early
Georgian army. George I purged his army of suspected Jacobites. But Jacobites
still hoped that the army would intervene to restore James VII and II’s son. Such
hopes were misplaced, for the army played an energetic and sometimes divisive
role in policing communities with a reputation for disaffection. Chapter 8 exam-
ines relations between the Crown, its ministers, parliament, and the army in the
age of the Whig Oligarchy. Fears of standing armies continued to form an
important part of opposition discourse, as did concern over the power of a
military commander. In particular, George II’s son and captain-general, the
 11
duke of Cumberland, was accused of aiming at military governance in the late

1740s and early 1750s. Despite this, though, the tenor of the debate over armies
had changed, not only as a result of constitutional developments but also because
of military ones. The army’s victories in the War of the Spanish Succession against
the French had enhanced both its military and political reputation, with the result
that army officers and soldiers could be convincingly viewed as defenders rather
than destroyers of political liberties.
1
The Restoration of Crown and Church,
1660–70
On 3 September 1651 the founder of the British army gained an enduring victory
at the battle of Worcester. Oliver Cromwell, commanding the parliamentary
forces, destroyed the much smaller Anglo-Scottish royalist army, led by Charles
II and holed up in the city of Worcester. An estimated 10,000 royalists were
eventually captured and 2,000 killed. Charles, however, escaped to spend the next
six weeks on the run and in hiding, including up an oak tree at Boscobel while
enemy soldiers searched beneath its branches. With supreme good fortune, he
managed to reach the port of Shoreham in Sussex and cross over the sea to safety
in France.¹ The restoration of the monarchy, and Charles II’s return to England in
May 1660, immortalized the battle of Worcester and its aftermath. The battle was
swiftly transformed from a parliamentary victory to a day when God demon-
strated his supreme care of Charles and his cause. The ‘royal oak’ at Boscobel
became indelibly associated with the restored king as a symbol of this divine
protection.² Charles himself played an active part in the creation of the cult of the
royal survivor.³ Some generals snatch victory from the jaws of defeat; so did
Charles Stuart, after a fashion (see Fig. 1.1).
In the spring days of 1660 much was rumoured of the new king—his piety,
sobriety, chastity, and military valour.⁴ Not all of this was misinformed. Charles
had proved a courageous and committed soldier. His father, Charles I, had
invested in his military education throughout the 1640s. As prince of Wales, the
¹ Malcolm Wanklyn, The Warrior Generals: Winning the British Civil Wars (New Haven, CT, 2010),
pp. 223–226.
² Thomas Rugg, The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg 1659–1661, ed. William L. Sachse, Camden Society
Third Series 91 (London, 1961), p. 110; Philip Jenkins, ‘Wales and the Order of the Royal Oak’, The
National Library of Wales Journal 24, no. 3 (1986): pp. 339–351; Matthew Jenkinson, Culture and
Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Woodbridge, 2010), p. 59.
³ William Matthews, Charles II’s Escape from Worcester: A Collection of Narratives Assembled by
Samuel Pepys (London, 1967); Oliver Millar, The Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian Pictures in the
Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, vol. 1 (London, 1963), pp. 137–138.
⁴ For example, Giles Fleming, Stemma Sacrum: The Royal Progeny (London, 1660), p. 6; Margaret
M. Verney, ed., Memoirs of the Verney Family from the Restoration to the Revolution, 1660 to 1696, vol.
4 (London, 1899), p. 9. For military representations of Charles II from this period see Laura Lunger
Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge, 2000),
pp. 170–172.
Armies and Political Change in Britain, 1660–1750. Hannah Smith, Oxford University Press. © Hannah Smith 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198851998.003.0002
     , – 13
Fig. 1.1 Charles ye II by the Grace of God King of England Scotland France and Ireland
Defender of the Faith published by Robert Walton, circa 1660–2 © The Trustees of the
British Museum. All rights reserved.
twelve-year-old Charles had been at the first battle of the Civil Wars, at Edgehill in
1642, and Charles I appointed him honorary captain of the First Troop of Horse
Guards. When Charles II was briefly king of Scots in the final stages of the Civil
Wars in 1650–1, he reviewed troops and inspected fortifications. At the battle of
Worcester he acted with reckless courage, and he soldiered on the continent in the
14      , –
late 1650s, fighting with the Spanish army against the English and French.⁵ After
1660 the king and his advisors made expedient use of this military experience.
When Charles’s first lord chancellor, Edward Hyde, praised the New Model Army
in September 1660 ahead of it being disbanded, he presented Charles and his
younger brothers, the dukes of York and Gloucester, as discerning military men
who had ‘engaged in the Midst of these Troops, in the Heat and Rage of Battle . . .
and admired, and loved, the Courage of this Army, when they were the worse
for it’.⁶
One of Charles’s earliest actions as king was to establish his own professional
army. Chapter 1 analyses the struggle in the 1660s between parliament and the
king over the existence of the Crown’s new professional army and Charles’s
possible uses of it. This was played out against a backdrop of war with the
Dutch, revolt and rebellion in England and Scotland, and the English parliament’s
proscription of religious dissent. Between 1661 and 1665 the enthusiastically
Anglican parliament at Westminster passed a series of laws—the Corporation
Act (1661), the Quaker Act (1662), the Act of Uniformity (1662), the Conventicles
Act (1664), and the Five Mile Act (1665)—designed to buttress the newly re-
established Church of England by deterring and prohibiting religious worship
outside it. In doing so, parliament believed that it was also strengthening the newly
restored monarchy as well as the episcopal Church, so closely did their fates
appear entwined. But from Charles’s perspective, such legislation was deeply
problematic. The policy was incompatible with his own inclination for religious
toleration and his personal empathy with the Catholic faith. So, in December
1662, the king attempted to derail the legislation that imposed an Anglican
monopoly on religious worship by making his ‘Declaration of Indulgence’ which
permitted Protestant Dissenters and Catholics to meet to practise their faith. His
initiative was short-lived, however. Three months later, he had to abandon it in
the face of intense parliamentary opposition.
The king’s deeply frustrating inability to impose his own religious policy and
his increasingly unworkable relationship with the Commons made governance
without parliament an attractive option for him. As the chapter demonstrates, the
1660s saw Charles deliberating over whether to back up his authority with military
force and employ troops to make those who objected to his policies comply with
them. Yet this was a potentially dangerous course of action, as Charles must have
been aware. After the experience of the large and expensive Interregnum army,
which was used to enforce obedience and crush unrest in the 1650s, there was
considerable and widespread hostility to the existence and financial cost of a
⁵ Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), pp. 6–7,
51–52, 61, 66, 110.
⁶ LJ, vol. 11, 13 September 1660.
     , – 15
permanent professional army among Charles’s subjects. Charles’s regime would

be severely destabilized if he relied on troops to enforce unpopular policies.
Moreover, Charles was repeatedly faced with the disturbing question: to what
extent could he trust his army? He had quickly ordered the disbandment of the
Interregnum army, but groups within his new army were soon suspected of
treason. This situation was compounded by the nature of Charles’s interaction
with his army. He undoubtedly retained a practical interest in land armies. He
reviewed troops and inspected fortifications and garrisons.⁷ He founded the
military hospitals for aged and infirm soldiers at Kilmainham, outside Dublin,
in 1679 and Chelsea, outside London, in 1681, which were modelled on Louis
XIV’s hospital for veteran soldiers, the Hôtel des Invalides of 1671.⁸ Charles had
opinions on military practice and was characteristically in favour of French army
drill.⁹ Some of the most socially prestigious members of his royal household were
men with military experience.¹⁰ Of the thirty peers who held office as gentlemen of
the bedchamber during his reign, few had no military connection. They included
professional soldiers, such as the 1st duke of Albemarle, the earl of Ossory, or the
20th earl of Oxford, or those with more fleeting or nominal military careers, like
the 3rd duke of Richmond, 2nd earl of Sunderland, and Lord Buckhurst during
the Anglo-Dutch wars. Other gentlemen of the bedchamber acted as military
governors.
However, although Charles fulfilled a number of the duties of military kingship,
there was one vital aspect that he chose not to take on, and that was direct
command of his troops at sea and on land. Charles was acutely aware of the
force of armies, having been kept from and returned to the Crown by a formidable
one. He knew well the power that military backing provided to an ambitious man;
the support of an army had led to his predecessor, a Huntingdon farmer, becom-
ing ruler of the British Isles. He was familiar, and impressed, with the ceremonial
and military functions of royal guards, especially those of his cousin Louis XIV,
with whom he had a rather resentful relationship. Direct military command was a
prerogative of the Crown, and Charles was fiercely defensive of the Crown’s
⁷ Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 4, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews
(London, 1971), pp. 216–217, vol. 8, p. 84; Edward Hyde, Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, vol. 2
(Oxford, 1857), pp. 370, 415; Cyril Hughes Hartmann, Charles II and Madame (London, 1934), p. 168;
W. D. Christie, ed., Letters Addressed from London to Sir Joseph Williamson while Plenipotentiary at the
Congress of Cologne in the Years 1673 and 1674, vol. 1, Camden Society (London, 1874), pp. 24, 60,
106–107; John Cordy Jeaffreson, ed., A Young Squire of the Seventeenth Century from the Papers (A.D.
1676–1686) of Christopher Jeaffreson, vol. 2 (London, 1878), p. 143; Eric Gruber von Arni, Hospital
Care and the British Standing Army, 1660–1714 (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 37–38.
⁸ Christine Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence: British Hospital and Asylum Architecture,
1660–1815 (New Haven, CT, 2000), pp. 47, 50, 56, 67–68.
⁹ Edward Maunde Thompson, ed., Correspondence of the Family of Hatton Being Chiefly Letters
Addressed to Christopher, First Viscount Hatton AD. 1601–1704, vol. 1, Camden Society, n.s. (London,
1878), p. 99.
¹⁰ Roger B. Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms (Oxford, 2003), p. 55.
16      , –
prerogatives. But unlike his younger brother, James, duke of York, Charles had no
deep-seated military interests or ambitions. Nor did he care for paperwork. For
much of his reign, Charles attempted to balance the need to retain an army and
maintain control over it, without the tedium of expending hours in managing its
business and the physical discomforts and dangers of leading it on campaign.
The king came up with a solution but it was fraught with risk. The final part of
the chapter explores how Charles delegated command of his army to suitably
prestigious dependents with a strong stake in the success of his regime. In July
1660 the king ennobled General George Monck to the royal dukedom of
Albemarle, an extraordinary rise in status for a man who came from an impov-
erished gentry family, and made him lord-general of the army to accommodate
the kingmaker, and his clients.¹¹ In the same year, the duke of York was appointed
as lord high admiral, and was given other military commands, including the
important garrison at Portsmouth in 1661.¹² However, Charles’s calculated strat-
egy became increasingly difficult to maintain as the events of his reign tested the
loyalties of the king and his commanders.
I The Creation of the King’s Army
In 1660 Charles, his ministers, and parliament were firmly in agreement that the
Interregnum army had to go. The army had been divided in its support for the
restoration of the Stuart monarchy, and even before Charles had arrived in
England in May 1660, several soldiers had been apprehended for threatening to
kill him.¹³ The army was very large, having risen sharply in the previous year from
around 14,400 men in April 1659 to 39,000 by February 1660, and was therefore
very expensive. Parliament agreed to disband it in September 1660, and it was paid
off at great cost.¹⁴
There was much less alarm about the Interregnum navy, whose allegiances, in
some cases, were equally suspect. Despite the king’s appointment of ‘Cavalier’
naval officers in the 1660s, there remained a sizeable number of commissioned
naval officers who had served during the previous decade and many non-
commissioned officers may well have been religious nonconformists. The regime’s
decision here was pragmatic. Experienced seamen were essential to an operational
navy, especially during wartime, and the king could not be too fussy about the
¹¹ Monck’s appointment disobliged another contender, Charles’s youngest brother, Henry, duke of
Gloucester, although Gloucester’s death in September 1660 ended this particular tension.
¹² Osmund Airy, ed., Burnet’s History of My Own Time: Part I: The Reign of Charles the Second, vol.
1 (Oxford, 1897), p. 299; Pepys, Diary, vol. 2, p. 199.
¹³ F. J. Routledge, ed., Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers Preserved in the Bodleian Library: Vol.
5 1660–1726 (Oxford, 1970), p. 30.
¹⁴ Henry Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2013), p. 23; Childs,
Charles II, pp. 9–10.
     , – 17
politics and religion of those manning the fleet until he could replace them with
those who were professionally competent. Moreover, while a navy could abet an
invader, it could hardly seize control of the government. Professional ambition
provided another safeguard. Commissioned naval officers, at least, had to appear
to conform to the Church of England if they wished to be promoted by the
Crown.¹⁵
To the surprise of contemporaries, ex-soldiers appeared to successfully reinte-
grate into civil society. As it was remarked in November 1663, ‘Of all the old army
now, you cannot see a man begging about the street. But what? You shall have this
Captain turned a shoemaker; the lieutenant, a Baker; this, a brewer; that, a
haberdasher; this common soldier, a porter’.¹⁶ For the government, however,
there remained the continual worry: what were these former officers and soldiers
up to when they were not making, baking, cobbling, and brewing? The early 1660s
were dominated by rumours of plots to destroy the king, the Crown, and the
Church of England by ex-army men.¹⁷ In November 1660 a disaffected
Yorkshireman claimed that disbanded soldiers were heading north to join the
Scots against Charles II.¹⁸ Alleged plotting by ex-army officers and soldiers led to
extensive government searches and arrests. Former officers and soldiers were
banned from entering a twenty-mile radius of London at times of heightened
political concern, an inconvenience which could hardly have reconciled them to
Stuart rule. Fears over their seditious activities resulted in some anxious head-
counting by the government’s supporters. In the summer of 1662 thirty-two
former soldiers who had served in Chepstow’s garrison during the Interregnum
were reported as being still in the area, while in Staffordshire, 1,329 men were
identified as former military opponents of the Stuarts.¹⁹
From very early on, it was clear to Charles and his advisors that a new,
permanent, paid peacetime military force was required to defend the
Restoration regime. This was an innovation for monarchical government.
Charles’s royal predecessors had relied on militias, composed of part-time ama-
teurs and raised troops specifically for particular military engagements rather than
on a permanent basis.²⁰ By contrast, the Interregnum regimes had retained a
¹⁵ Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, pp. 35, 108–111, 130–132, 135.

¹⁶ Pepys, Diary, vol. 4, p. 373.
¹⁷ Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663
(Oxford, 1986), p. 35; Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 14, 106–107, 110–111, 147; Andrew Hopper, ‘The Farnley Wood Plot and the
Memory of the Civil Wars in Yorkshire’, HJ 45, no. 2 (2002): pp. 281–303.
¹⁸ Depositions from the Castle of York, Relating to Offences Committed in the Northern Counties in
the Seventeenth Century, Surtees Society, vol. 40 (1861), p. 86.
¹⁹ Greaves, Deliver Us, pp. 9, 23, 35–40, 69–70; TNA, SP 29/276/132, SP 46/131/67.
²⁰ Stephen J. Stearns, ‘Conscription and English Society in the 1620s’, JBS 11, no. 2 (1972): pp. 1–23;
Thomas Garden Barnes, ‘Deputies Not Principals, Lieutenants not Captains: The Institutional Failure
of Lieutenancy in the 1620s’, in War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650, edited by Mark Charles
Fissel (Manchester, 1991), pp. 58–86.
18      , –
sizeable standing army which fluctuated between around 11,000 and 15,000 men
in England.²¹ Cromwell owed much of his power to the army’s backing. The
army’s influence frequently shaped the political and religious course that he took,
and the army’s presence enabled the regime to implement its policies and stay in
power.
Within a month of Charles’s return to England, various proposals for perman-
ent troops were circulating. A project for 1,200 horse guards emerged in June 1660
but was then set aside. By September it was rumoured that a new army would be
created of 6,000 to 8,000 men, which may have originated from the king himself.²²
Speculation was further strengthened by the parliamentary Act in September that
disbanded the Commonwealth’s army, ‘except such of them or any other his
Majestye shall think fit otherwise to dispose and provide for at his owne charge’.²³
Charles now had legal sanction to maintain troops and he promptly set about
doing so. In November, the king appointed Col. John Russell, a royalist military
veteran and younger son of the 4th earl of Bedford, to raise 1,200 men. By
December, the king wanted more soldiers and asked parliament for financial
assistance to pay them. Despite the Cavalier Parliament’s loyalist fervour, it
declined to do so. Nevertheless, talk still continued of raising troops, such as a
special regiment of Guards to protect the king.²⁴
But a radical uprising right in the centre of Charles’s English capital in January
1661 transformed the debate. With their battle-cry of ‘King Jesus’, Thomas
Venner and his Fifth Monarchist adherents fought to establish a radical godly
commonwealth. Although few in number, Venner and his followers made con-
siderable progress. At one point they even captured St Paul’s Cathedral before they
were crushed by the duke of Albemarle’s as yet to be disbanded troops. Such
tangible evidence of treasonable activity provided Charles with the justification to
expand his army. In mid-February the king disbanded Albemarle’s foot regiment
and then immediately raised it again under Albemarle’s command as the 2nd Foot
Guards. Charles then ordered the creation of two regiments of horse: the Life
Guards, which was divided into three troops, the King’s Own, the duke of York’s,
and the lord-general’s; and the Royal Horse Guards commanded by the veteran
soldier and royalist, Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford. These troops were
complemented by the units who staffed the twenty-eight forts and garrisons.²⁵ The
duke of York claimed some credit for counselling his brother to pursue this
²¹ Reece, Army, pp. 23–24.

²² John Miller, Charles II (London, 1991), p. 65; Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the
Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 24.
²³ Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies!’: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England
(Baltimore, MD, 1974), p. 76.
²⁴ Miller, Charles II, p. 65; Childs, Charles II, p. 15; CSPV, 1659–61, vol. 32, p. 231.
²⁵ Childs, Charles II, pp. 16–17.
     , – 19
scheme.²⁶ At the same time, the French also pressed Charles to create a larger
army.²⁷
Over the next two years, events both abroad and at home meant that the Crown
continued to require troops. In June 1661 Charles agreed to marry the Portuguese
princess, Catherine of Braganza, and ally England with Portugal. As part of
Catherine’s massive dowry, Portugal’s north African colony of Tangier came
under English authority. Charles had great hopes for the colony’s commercial
success, but it was regularly threatened by Moroccan armies and had to be
defended by a garrison which on paper stood at 2,000 soldiers but was often
considerably fewer. The Anglo-Portuguese alliance also obliged the king to send
troops to fight with the Portuguese against the Spanish, and initially 3,000 men
were allocated to the peninsula.²⁸ In the wake of plots against the regime, it was
rumoured in January 1662 that a new army would be established under the duke
of York’s command.²⁹ In December 1663, after the discovery of an alleged plot in
Yorkshire against the Crown, the king informed his sister, Henriette Anne,
duchess of Orléans and Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, that he was considering raising
two regiments of horse, ‘one to lye in the north and the other in the west, which
will I doute not for the future prevent all plotting’.³⁰ However, the king’s finances
were such that he was in no position to raise more troops in peacetime, as he
complained to the French.³¹
But how loyal was the king’s army? An alleged conspiracy within the army
in the autumn of 1661 was reported to have led to the arrest of a number of
army officers, some from Albemarle’s own regiment. Non-commissioned offi-
cers in another regiment were described as disaffected and liaising with former
republican soldiers. Members of the Dunkirk garrison, who included those who
had served the Interregnum regimes, were also rumoured to be disloyal. In the
summer of 1662, with fears of rebellion in the west and north of England, the
allegiance of the deputy governor of Tynemouth’s garrison was under scrutiny
since he had retained the old Protectorate chaplain and many of the soldiers.³²
Possibly by way of response, in September Charles raised three regiments of
horse commanded by the 3rd earl of Northampton, earl of Cleveland, and 2nd
earl of Lindsey, all former royalist officers. According to one foreign observer,
the regiments were to be ‘entirely composed of faithful veteran officers’ since
the regime could not rely on the existing army ‘because of the diversity of faiths
²⁶ J. S. Clarke, ed., The Life of James the Second, King of England, vol. 1 (London, 1816), pp. 390–391;
Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 23.
²⁷ Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 24. ²⁸ Childs, Charles II, pp. 115–118, 163.
²⁹ CSPV, 1661–4, vol. 33, p. 91. ³⁰ Hartmann, Charles II and Madame, p. 89.
³¹ Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 141.
³² CSPV, 1661–4, vol. 33, pp. 63–64; Greaves, Deliver Us, pp. 70–72, 89–90, 101–102; TNA, SP 29/
57/62.
20      , –
in it’.³³ The king also raised two foot regiments, whose colonels were the ultra-
loyalist William, 1st earl of Craven and Sir William Killigrew.³⁴ Rumours
continued to circulate about plots involving Albemarle’s regiment.³⁵
A month later, in October 1662, news broke of the ‘Tong Plot’, another reputed
design against the Restoration regime which was believed to have military dimen-
sions. The conspirators allegedly aimed to seize Windsor Castle, with the assist-
ance of several soldiers. The plotters’ attack on Whitehall palace would also be
facilitated by two soldiers who had previously served in the Interregnum army,
while soldiers from the Tower of London’s garrison would be bribed to open a gate
to the fortress. The latter were likely to be in need of the money and resentful of
their commanding officers since the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Robinson,
was embezzling their pay. It was rumoured that the conspirators had envisaged
shooting Charles II while he was reviewing the Tower’s garrison or, alternatively,
that some of the soldiers would shoot the king while he was reviewing them.³⁶ By
mid-November yet another conspiracy was being reported among soldiers who
were supposed to be plotting to murder the king, Albemarle, and York.³⁷
The government was also concerned about the loyalties of the king’s Irish and
Scottish armies, which stood at around 7,500 and 1,200 men respectively.³⁸ In the
early 1660s the Irish army had to be sifted of men who had served during the
Interregnum and were considered politically unreliable. Some of these were
replaced by men recruited in England, and so deemed to be loyal to the Crown,
although a considerable number remained. The loyalties of the Irish army
remained strained since their pay was frequently in long-term arrears.³⁹
Clarendon feared that the army in Scotland, which still included troops that had
served the Interregnum regimes, was so disaffected that it might join forces with
English and Scottish malcontents. A plan to send these troops to Portugal as part
of the British contingent to fight the Spanish was met with some enthusiasm in
government circles and they were duly shipped abroad.⁴⁰
However, not all of the king’s advisors welcomed the expansion of the royal
guards. The growth of a professional army appeared to present a threat to civil
government and its administrators. The lord treasurer, the 4th earl of
Southampton, reportedly complained to Clarendon that the country had experi-
enced militarised government ‘though sober and religious, in Cromwell’s army: he
³³ CSPV, 1661–4, vol. 33, pp. 187–188; Childs, Charles II, p. 19; HoL, vol. 2, pp. 233, 654, vol. 4,
pp. 839–840.
³⁴ Childs, Charles II, p. 19. ³⁵ Greaves, Deliver Us, p. 112.
³⁶ Greaves, Deliver Us, pp. 116–123, 249; Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage, pp. 147–149; Childs,
Charles II, p. 107; Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N. H. Keeble
(London, 2000), pp. 306–307, 315–316.
³⁷ CSPV, 33, 1661–4, pp. 211–212.
³⁸ Greaves, Deliver Us, pp. 151–152; Childs, Charles II, pp. 197, 204.
³⁹ Childs, Charles II, pp. 203–206; S. J. Connolly, ‘The Defence of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760’, in
A Military History of Ireland, edited by Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (Cambridge, 1996), p. 235.
⁴⁰ Hyde, Life, vol. 2, p. 35; Childs, Charles II, pp. 163–164.
     , – 21
believed vicious and dissolute troops would be much worse: the king would grow
fond of them, and they would quickly become insolent and ungovernable: and
then such men as he was must be only instruments to serve their ends’. In
response, Clarendon promised to ‘divert the king from any other force than
what might be decent to make a shew with, and what might serve to disperse
unruly multitudes’.⁴¹ In April 1662 the ultra-loyalist Roger L’Estrange pointed out
the dangers of an army to the Crown and nation. ‘A Standing Army may promote
a Faction, but ’tis the Law preserves the Publique, and consequently the King’.
L’Estrange went on to warn Charles that ‘it is not safe for a Monarch, at any time,
to entrust the Chief Officer of an Army, with so much Power, for fear of a Sedition,
as may enable him to move a Rebellion’.⁴²
Southampton’s concerns were echoed within the English parliament in the
early 1660s. MPs and peers were well aware of the arbitrary and costly nature of
military rule, having suffered it throughout the 1640s and 1650s and more
recently, with particular intensity, in the final days of the Interregnum.⁴³ What
scenario, then, did contemporaries envisage when they feared that the king would
rule with the assistance of a permanent professional army? They may have looked
to France and the French Crown’s use of troops to enforce tax collection on those
who had not paid, which subjected communities to military abuse and exactions.
It is likely, though, that the recent experience of the Interregnum army was
uppermost in their thoughts, as Southampton’s remark suggests. The army did
not replace civil government in the 1650s. Rather, it provided an unpopular
regime with a trusted policing force that quashed riots, supported tax collectors,
and monitored and repressed political and religious dissent against the regime
(including enforcing Sabbatarianism). Moreover, senior army officers were closely
involved in the administration of regional civil government, thus displacing the
county gentry. Some army officers served as Justices of the Peace to support the
regime’s policies in a legal capacity. In towns and cities where there were military
garrisons, the garrison’s governor was concerned in local administration and
appointments to local office.⁴⁴ In this situation, where did the balance of power
lie? Southampton foresaw the growth of a state of affairs where ultimately civil
government remained but only to rubberstamp military diktats. In this scenario,
parliament’s political independence would be irrevocably compromised. Awful as
this was, for the strongly monarchist parliament another alarming outcome was
likely. The Crown’s authority and agency would also be compromised, with the
monarch either becoming a cipher to the army’s demands or, as L’Estrange
suggested, being deposed by a military commander.
⁴¹ Airy, ed., Burnet’s History, vol. 1, pp. 279–280; Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 21–22.
⁴² Roger L’Estrange, A Memento: Directed to All Those that Truly Reverence the Memory of King
Charles the Martyr. The First Part (London, 1662), pp. 82, 116.
⁴³ Reece, Army, pp. 178–179. ⁴⁴ Reece, Army, pp. 139–169.
22      , –
Two fundamental questions were at issue for parliament when considering

military arrangements: what was the legal status of England’s armed forces and
who controlled them? Much of parliament’s discussion focused on the amateur,
part-time militia rather than paid, fulltime, professional soldiers. In the minds of
contemporaries, however, both types of military establishment were intrinsically
linked since both were under royal control. Despite legal uncertainty surrounding
the Crown’s claim to authority over the militia, the king made the first move in
early June 1660 when the Privy Council issued commissions for militia officers.
This was followed by a bill in November, which the Commons queried, and
discussion continued into May the next year. The exact content of the bill of
May 1661 is obscure and may have had much in common with the ordinance of
1659 and the Militia Bill passed in 1662. At any rate, the proposed bill continued
to be controversial. Ahead of the summer parliamentary recess, parliament agreed
to pass a temporary bill in July 1661.⁴⁵
Parliament returned to its task of settling the militia in December 1661 in the
wake of the alleged plots against the regime. The king’s ministers made much of
the threat of insurrection in attempts to shore up royal power and ensure a
politically reliable militia. A joint committee of peers and MPs met over the
Christmas recess to continue to work out how best to defend the regime.⁴⁶ MPs
viewed these developments with deep suspicion, especially when the committee
was populated with the ministry’s followers, who were alleged to be advocating the
creation of a standing army commanded by the duke of York. On 22 January 1662
Samuel Pepys heard that ‘the House did in very open tearmes say they were grown
too wise to be fooled again into another army; and said they have found how the
man that hath the command of an army is not beholden to anybody to make him
King’.⁴⁷
Ministers then changed tack and handed the matter back to parliament. The
Commons attempted to make headway by proposing that extra troops were raised
from the militia before then deciding to revisit the Militia Bill discussed in May
1661. The Lords suggested that individuals who were obliged to find a soldier,
horse, and arms under the militia scheme could opt to make a monetary payment
in their place. The Commons took alarm at this proposal which appeared to
permit the creation of a standing army by stealth. After further wrangling,
parliament finally passed the Second Militia Act in May 1662, which emphasized
that the militia and other armed forces were under royal and not parliamentary
control. The Act allowed the Crown to raise up to £70,000 a year for three years
over and above the agreed militia rates. Controversially, the bill stipulated that
⁴⁵ Miller, Charles II, pp. 64–65; Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 142.

⁴⁶ Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 143–146; Molly McClain, Beaufort: The Duke and His Duchess,
1657–1715 (New Haven, CT, 2001), p. 79.
⁴⁷ Pepys, Diary, vol. 3, p. 15.
     , – 23
militia officers and soldiers had to acknowledge that it was unlawful to take up
arms against the Crown or its commissioned officers.⁴⁸ Despite all this, however,
the government viewed the new Act as unsatisfactory, especially when further
plots against the regime came to light in the second half of 1662. Early April 1663
saw a bill to amend the Militia Act, which parliament passed in July. This provided
greater funding for the militia, and permitted troops to be raised and trained for
longer, although rumours persisted that the king would ‘alter the present militia
and bring all to a flying army’.⁴⁹
Notwithstanding the government’s misgivings, the militia was demonstrating
its utility by suppressing those reckoned to be a threat to the Restoration regime,
such as Protestant Dissenting congregations.⁵⁰ In Norfolk, for instance, the
county’s lord lieutenant acted on the instructions of the Privy Council and
quartered militia soldiers in Wymondham’s hostelries for ten days in November
1663 while they suppressed an illegal conventicle in the town. In November 1666,
Norfolk militia soldiers were commanded to disarm some of the county’s
Catholics.⁵¹ Indeed, the militia permitted a more comprehensive geographical
coverage than Charles’s professional army, who were limited to forays from
garrisons, such as those at Chester, Dover, Hull, and York, or temporary quarters,
at Great Yarmouth and Leeds, to get at Dissenters.⁵²
The debates about the merits of militias over professional troops continued as
English diplomatic relations with the United Provinces deteriorated throughout
1664. Both king and parliament planned outright war against the Dutch, which
was declared in March 1665. The Dutch were joined by the French the next year.
This was the second time in thirteen years that the English had fought the Dutch.
In 1652 the Commonwealth had gone to war with the Dutch Republic and the
English navy had been remarkably successful, notably under general-at-sea,
George Monck. The naval victories of the Interregnum regime soon stood in
⁴⁸ Caroline Robbins, ‘Five Speeches, 1661–3, By Sir John Holland, M.P.’, Bulletin of the Institute of
Historical Research 28, no. 78 (1955): pp. 196–200; Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 146–148; Miller,
Charles II, pp. 74–75.
⁴⁹ Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 149–150; Pepys, Diary, vol. 5, p. 56.
⁵⁰ Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, CT,
1986), pp. 318–319; John Miller, Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns
1660–1722 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 45–46; P. J. Norrey, ‘The Restoration Regime in Action: The
Relationship between Central and Local Government in Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, 1660–1678’,
HJ 31, no. 4 (1988): pp. 792, 804; P. R. Seddon, ed., The Letter Book of Sir Anthony Oldfield, 1662–1667,
Lincoln Record Society, 91 (2004), pp. xxv, xxvii–xxx; W. J. Smith, ed., Herbert Correspondence: The
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Letters of the Herberts of Chirbury (Cardiff, 1963), pp. 161–165,
172–173; McClain, Beaufort, pp. 40–41, 72.
⁵¹ Richard Minta Dunn, ed., Norfolk Lieutenancy Journal, 1660–1676, Norfolk Record Society 45
(Norwich, 1977), pp. 10–11, 37, 97.
⁵² TNA, SP 29/94/57, SP 29/275/233, SP 29/276/155, SP 29/278/95; Dunn, ed., Norfolk Lieutenancy
Journal, p. 12; John Reresby, Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. Andrew Browning, Mary K. Geiter, and
W. A. Speck, 2nd ed. (London, 1991), p. 61; Miller, Cities Divided, p. 153; Satoshi Tsujimoto,
‘Restoration Garrisons, 1660–1688: The English Army in National and Local Context’, PhD thesis,
University of Cambridge (2009), pp. 95–106, 175.
24      , –
stark contrast to the failures of its Stuart successor in the Second Anglo-Dutch
War, as contemporaries observed. The English navy, led at various times by
Albemarle, the duke of York, the 1st earl of Sandwich, and Prince Rupert of the
Palatinate, the king’s cousin, enjoyed some success at the battle of Lowestoft in
June 1665 and North Foreland in July 1666, and eventually managed to hold off a
French takeover of the English West Indies. But the government was humiliat-
ingly defeated after the Dutch fleet sailed up the river Medway to Chatham in June
1667 and destroyed English warships and captured the flagship, ‘The Royal
Charles’. The Peace of Breda of July 1667 concluded the war on terms unfavour-
able to England.
The Second Anglo-Dutch War was primarily a naval one but the government’s
fear of a Dutch invasion alerted them to the need for troops on land. The East
Anglian militias were raised to defend their coastline.⁵³ The king recalled his
English and Scottish subjects who were serving the Dutch in the long-established
Anglo-Dutch Brigade.⁵⁴ Charles also issued commissions for raising regiments to
protect the kingdom after invasion scares. A number of courtiers and ambitious
politicians had already put themselves forward to serve in the navy and they
enthusiastically seized these opportunities within the king’s army.⁵⁵ Charles’s
childhood associate and intermittent favourite, George Villiers, 2nd duke of
Buckingham, raised a troop of horse in June 1666. Less successfully, Sir Thomas
Osborne, the future earl of Danby and the king’s most prominent minister in the
1670s, attempted and failed to gain a commission.⁵⁶ The Crown financed the
army’s expansion from funds raised under the Militia Act, which it justified in the
interests of national security. Nevertheless, the government expediently disbanded
the soldiers before parliament met.⁵⁷
The government’s wariness did not deflect parliamentary ire or suspicions
about royal intentions. On 4 October 1666 Pepys discussed the tense state of
Crown–parliamentary relations with Sir George Carteret, a privy councillor, MP,
and fellow naval administrator and the possibility that the king could threaten to
intimidate parliament with troops.⁵⁸ Such blustering had little effect. The
Commons continued to be very unhappy about the conduct of military affairs
and when the criminal behaviour of the constable of Windsor Castle came to MPs’
attention, they vigorously asserted their displeasure. The constable, John,
Viscount Mordaunt, had been accused of the attempted rape of the daughter of
one of his subordinates. He had then commanded his soldiers to imprison the
⁵³ Seddon, ed., Letter Book, pp. xxvii–xxx; Dunn, ed., Norfolk Lieutenancy Journal, pp. 11–13, 79, 81;
Fletcher, Reform, p. 284.
⁵⁴ Childs, Charles II, p. 171. ⁵⁵ Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, p. 103.
⁵⁶ Andrew Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds 1632–1712, vol. 1
(Glasgow, 1951), p. 39.
⁵⁷ Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 238; Reresby, Memoirs, p. 61.
⁵⁸ Pepys, Diary, vol. 7, p. 307.
     , – 25
man for twenty weeks in the Castle. This shocking behaviour by one of the king’s
army officers appeared a harbinger of further military abuses. The Commons
made clear that such behaviour was unacceptable and impeached Mordaunt, thus
asserting the primacy of civil government. In retaliation, the king emphasized the
Crown’s ultimate authority and pardoned him.⁵⁹
II Conventiclers and Catholics
Although Charles II was facing political difficulties in England, they were brought
into rugged relief by the downward spiral of events in Scotland, which led him to
use troops to enforce his government’s policies. Charles had endured a very
unhappy visit to Scotland in 1650–1 when the Scots had crowned him their
king and forced him to adhere to the Covenanting cause, and he had little interest
in the kingdom beyond ensuring its political obedience. Military force was
essential to this aim. In January 1661 the Scottish Parliament had passed a
Militia Act which gave the Scottish Crown control over the armed forces, although
with the prudent caveat that only parliament or the Convention of the Estates
could insist that Scots paid for them. However, the king of Scots could not afford
much by way of troops. Since Charles’s Scottish army stood at a mere 1,200 men,
he was heavily reliant on the militia and, in the Highlands, the Independent
Companies, who were raised by influential magnates with royal permission. In
September 1663 a further Militia Act restated that the Crown controlled the
military and also permitted 22,000 Scottish militia soldiers to be used elsewhere
in Charles II’s kingdoms for defence or to suppress internal disorder.⁶⁰
In a bid to strengthen royal authority, in 1661–2 Charles II’s Scottish parlia-
ment banned Presbyterian church government, which was indelibly associated
with rebellion and viewed as an anathema to monarchy. Episcopalianism was
established in its place, and the royal supremacy in religious matters. This process
was fraught from the outset. Presbyterianism enjoyed widespread support in
Scotland, particularly in the south-west, but the Scottish parliament had limited
room for manoeuvre on the issue. An English army had been occupying Scotland
since the Interregnum and episcopacy was the price paid for its departure. From
the spring of 1663 the Scottish Privy Council, itself factionalized over how to deal
with Presbyterian nonconformity, deployed military force to ensure compliance
with Episcopalian worship. The government quartered troops on recalcitrant
communities in the south-west and soldiers made arrests and collected fines.
⁵⁹ Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 286–287; HoL, vol. 3, pp. 952–954.

⁶⁰ Harris, Restoration, pp. 107–108, 112; Childs, Charles II, p. 197; Allan I. Macinnes, Clanship,
Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996), pp. 131–132; Bruce P. Lenman,
‘Militia, Fencible Men, and Home Defence, 1660–1797’, in Scotland and War AD 79–1918, edited by
Norman MacDougall (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 171–176.
26      , –
Presbyterian defiance was apparently not unwelcome to the Scottish lord chan-
cellor, the 8th earl of Glencairn and his associates, who reaped the financial benefit
of the whirlwind by raising extra soldiers, generously paid for by an unsuspecting
government.⁶¹
By early 1666 the policy had become especially repressive, particularly since
Scottish nonconformists were feared to be in league with the Dutch enemy. The
government raised extra troops, authorized free quarter, and permitted fines at a
much higher rate than was laid down by law. Under this intense pressure, in mid-
November 1666 a band of armed Presbyterians, often described as Conventiclers,
rose in rebellion. In a dramatic gesture, they kidnapped Sir James Turner, the
commander of the Crown’s soldiers and especially associated with the brutal
military repression, and marched on the capital. The Conventiclers were defeated
by Charles’s troops on 28 November at Rullion Green in the Pentland Hills, just
outside of Edinburgh. To crush any remnants of rebellion, the Crown’s
commander-in-chief, General Thomas Dalyell of Binns, and 3,000 foot soldiers
and eight troops of horse occupied south-west Scotland. Here they deployed free
quarter, torture, and physical violence against suspected rebels and rebel commu-
nities. Meanwhile, a nervous English government made preparations to send up
English forces under the duke of York’s command.⁶²
The army’s vicious conduct caused consternation in a politically divided
Scotland. In May 1667 the 2nd earl of Tweeddale, a member of the Scottish
government, complained to the Scottish secretary of state, John Maitland, earl of
Lauderdale, that the impact of free quarter and plundering was such that ‘the
country will be undone befor a formal complaint be mead, for the peopell say how
can it reach his [the king’s] ears’, since many of the troops were commanded by
Scottish privy councillors.⁶³ Deputy secretary of state, Sir Robert Moray, who was
strongly opposed to the army’s actions, informed Lauderdale in early July that
those who held military office were attempting to entrench their position by
spreading rumours of insurrections, therefore justifying the need for ‘a constant
great military force’. But ‘the worst is . . . their making themselves judges, their
threatening and ill-usage of complainers, and asseiling or parlying the officers
and sogers that are complained of, seems to render all redress impossible’.⁶⁴ On
19 September Moray passed on to Lauderdale a report that soldiers were being
ordered by their commanders, Dalyell and William Drummond, to extract pay-
ments from those who did not attend the established church. In turn, Drummond
complained to Lauderdale that Dalyell and himself had been exposed ‘to some
people’s ill will, who have searchd with great industrie to have found some ground
⁶¹ Julia Buckroyd, Church and State in Scotland, 1660–1681 (Edinburgh, 1980), pp. 38, 40, 52–53;
Osmund Airy, ed., The Lauderdale Papers, vol. 1, Camden Society (London, 1884), p. 88.
⁶² Buckroyd, Church and State, p. 65; Harris, Restoration, pp. 118–119; Pepys, Diary, vol. 7, p. 395.
⁶³ Airy, ed., Lauderdale Papers, vol. 1, p. 282.
⁶⁴ Airy, ed., Lauderdale Papers, vol. 2, pp. 13–14.
     , – 27
of callumating us and hes served edicts at all the kirk doors in thes parts’.⁶⁵ As
government policy drew back from repression, Dalyell and Drummond were
dismissed, as were many of their soldiers.
While Charles II’s Scottish ministers were waging war on religious Dissenters,
in London the king was dealing with the political repercussions of the Anglo-
Dutch War. After the Dutch attack on Chatham in June 1667 the king hurriedly
issued further commissions for more troops to fight the Dutch and raised twelve
new foot regiments, although he was now in dire financial straits. But calling the
English parliament to beg for money would be disastrous at a time of public fury
over Chatham. Clarendon, for one, had no wish to face a parliament that blamed
him personally for this national humiliation and he suggested that, at this time of
political emergency, an army could be financed through free quarter and a forced
loan.⁶⁶ Such inner debates were not marked by secrecy. On 7 July it was reported
that the ‘discontented Parliament-men are fearful that the next sitting the King
will put for a general Excize, by which to raise him money, and then to fling off the
Parliament, and raise a land-army and keep them all down like slaves’.⁶⁷ On 12
July there was a rumour that the duke of York was ‘hot’ for a design ‘to have a land
army, and so to make the government like that of France’.⁶⁸ It was probably to
scotch such speculations that on 2 July Sir William Coventry, a member of the
Treasury and a privy councillor, explained to Sir George Savile, who had been
commissioned to raise troops after the attack on Chatham, that the £100 that
Savile appears to have received from the government was for the prompt payment
of quarters so that troops ‘might not bee upon free quarter, or the suspicion of it’.⁶⁹
When the English parliament convened, it was predictably furious about the
expansion of the king’s army and the Commons voted that the new troops should
be disbanded. Charles responded by telling parliament on 29 July that he would
disband the new troops and demanded ‘what One Thing He had done since His
coming into England, to persuade any sober Person that He did intend to govern
by a Standing Army; . . . He was more an Englishman than so’.⁷⁰ This did little to
quell fears. After all, Charles was half French through his unpopular mother,
Henrietta Maria. On the eve of the Peace of Breda, rumours continued to circulate
that the king, York, and Clarendon were working to enlarge the army.⁷¹
The king disbanded the new troops but parliament continued to be in an angry
mood. The Crown’s seeming enthusiasm for an army became tightly enmeshed
with the drive amongst Clarendon’s political enemies in court and parliament to
⁶⁵ Airy, ed., Lauderdale Papers, vol. 2, pp. 65–68.

⁶⁶ Childs, Charles II, p. 234; Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 307, 309–310.
⁶⁷ Pepys, Diary, vol. 8, p. 324. ⁶⁸ Pepys, Diary, vol. 8, p. 332.
⁶⁹ H. C. Foxcroft, The Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, Bart. First Marquis of Halifax (London,
1898), vol. 1, p. 51.
⁷⁰ LJ, vol. 12, 29 July 1667; John Milward, The Diary of John Milward, Esq., ed. Caroline Robbins
(Cambridge, 1938), p. 84; Schwoerer, No Standing Armies, pp. 91–92.
⁷¹ Pepys, Diary, vol. 8, p. 366.
28      , –
drive him from office. The king had little inclination to save him and he dismissed
his minister on 30 August. Impeachment proceedings began on 26 October and,
prompted by the king, Clarendon departed for exile in France a month later.
Anti-army feeling played a key part in Clarendon’s fall. MPs accused the lord
chancellor of advising the king to govern by a standing army, paid for by free
quarter and contributions, and manipulating fears about the regime’s security to
justify the army’s existence.⁷² Clarendon was in no way a military man, being a
lawyer by training and outlook, as MPs were well aware. ‘Strange! that the General
[Monck] set us right by an army—And a Chancellor [Clarendon] advise to govern
by one’, remarked an MP in November 1667.⁷³ But despite the incongruity of the
accusation, it formed the first article of Clarendon’s impeachment.⁷⁴ Clarendon
fiercely defended himself. He maintained that he had not attempted to create a
client base among army officers, who generally disliked him. Clarendon added
that he had tried to ensure that the army conformed to the rule of law, and
therefore ‘it could not be thought probable, that he should contribute his advice
for the raising of a standing army, and that the kingdom should be governed
thereby; when there were very few men so like to be destroyed by that army as
himself, who was so industriously rendered to be odious to it’.⁷⁵ Yet, as Paul
Seaward has noted, although Clarendon emphasized that soldiers were subject to
common law, he did not state that he was antagonistic to the existence of a
standing army.⁷⁶
Associating Clarendon with a standing army proved a remarkably effective
weapon for his enemies. It also prompted further challenges to the existence of
royal troops. York had married, as his first wife, Anne Hyde, Clarendon’s daugh-
ter, and his father-in-law’s fall did not leave him unscathed. York reported that
one of Clarendon’s critics, the anti-army 4th earl of Northumberland, demanded
that the Guards were disbanded, and thus forced York to argue once again that
they were necessary for security reasons.⁷⁷ York himself came under attack. The
duke of Buckingham, for one, suggested that York planned to use his influence
over the army to threaten the king.⁷⁸
Yet contemporaries were not only alarmed by the prospect of governance that
relied on an army per se. They were deeply concerned that this army included
Catholics, and the king’s sympathy for Catholics and Catholicism heightened such
unease. In July 1661 the Venetian ambassadors were under the impression that
many of the king’s guards were Catholic.⁷⁹ In 1663 Charles’s appointment of the
Catholic Andrew Rutherford, 1st earl of Teviot, as governor of Tangier gave
⁷² Milward, Diary, pp. 99, 113. ⁷³ Grey’s Debates, vol. 1, p. 28.

⁷⁴ Schwoerer, No Standing Armies, p. 93. ⁷⁵ Hyde, Life, vol. 2, pp. 528–529.
⁷⁶ Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 21.
⁷⁷ Clarke, ed., Life, vol. 1, pp. 426–427; HoL, vol. 4, p. 119.
⁷⁸ John Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (1978; London, 1989), pp. 52, 56.
⁷⁹ CSPV, 1661–4, vol. 33, p. 18.
     , – 29
particular concern, as did the Catholicism of many of the other army officers in
the colony. Rutherford’s successor, John, Lord Belasyse, who held the post
between 1665 and 1667, was also a Catholic.⁸⁰ However, Catholics do not appear
to have entered Charles’s army in sizeable numbers. John Miller has calculated
that twenty-seven commissions were issued to Catholics between 1661 and 1667,
six to serve overseas. Fourteen Catholics were commissioned between 1666 and
1667 when the king expanded the army during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.⁸¹
Nevertheless, increasingly alarm at the supposed growth of Catholicism and the
infiltration of Catholics into public office ensured that the Catholic presence
within the army came under intense scrutiny by the autumn of 1666.
Responding to political pressure, the king was forced to dismiss Catholic army
officers and soldiers in September 1667 for refusing to swear the oath of suprem-
acy. In the late autumn of 1667 a number of them petitioned for passes to go to
France or Flanders to enter foreign military service. Their sense of injustice was
palpable.⁸² Such a climate made army officers vulnerable to accusations of popery.
Captain Nathaniel Darrell at Landguard Fort in Suffolk complained to the secre-
tary of state, the earl of Arlington, in June 1667 that a prominent local
Presbyterian, Sir Samuel Barnardiston, had accused him of being a Catholic, as
well as presiding over a divided garrison. Darrell had to resort to disproving the
former allegation by providing evidence of his Anglican credentials from the
corporation and clergy at nearby Ipswich.⁸³
The idea of deploying troops to enforce royal power and decision-making
continued to attract some of Charles’s advisors. The Crown moved into furtive
alliance with France against the Dutch in early 1669, which resulted in the Secret
Treaty of Dover of 22 May 1670. The contents of the treaty were kept as
confidential as possible. For a start, the treaty planned for war against the
United Provinces, with whom England was allied by the terms of the Triple
Alliance of January 1668. Charles would provide soldiers to fight under the
French and put a navy to sea, financed by an annual French subsidy. The treaty
also contained Charles’s politically inflammatory promise to convert to
Catholicism at a suitable time in exchange for a further subsidy from Louis
XIV. Royal military strength would be crucial given the predictable parliamentary
backlash once the treaty’s contents became known. In late September 1669 the
duchess of Orléans, who acted as intermediary between Charles and Louis XIV in
the treaty’s negotiations, suggested to her brother that during the forthcoming
Dutch war he station troops outside England on the pretext of protecting con-
quests made against the Dutch. These troops would be composed of foreigners
and their proximity to England would give Charles II leverage over parliament.⁸⁴
⁸⁰ HoL, vol. 2, p. 103. ⁸¹ Miller, ‘Catholic Officers’, pp. 43–44.

⁸² Childs, Charles II, pp. 25–27; SP 29/223/47, 222–223. ⁸³ TNA, SP 29/207/125, 127.
⁸⁴ Hartmann, Charles II and Madame, pp. 279–280.
30      , –
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the passing of another Militia Act reaffirmed the

Crown’s entitlement to deploy the Scottish militia in Charles’s other kingdoms,
a right which continued to alarm the English. As Lauderdale flattered the king
from Edinburgh in mid-November 1669, ‘If you comand it, not only this Militia,
but all sensible men in Scotland, shall march when & where you shall please to
comand, for never was King soe absolute as you are in poor old Scotland’.⁸⁵
A fortnight later, Sir Robert Moray in London reported back to Lauderdale that
the king understandably thought it ‘no small advantage that 22,000 Scots are by
Act of parlt to march whither he pleases in his Dominions’.⁸⁶
In preparation of Charles’s public announcement of his conversion, Thomas
Clifford, an English privy councillor and lord of the Treasury, drew up an action
plan in the second half of 1670. Clifford’s military experience was modest. He had
held office in the Devonshire militia and had served as a volunteer in the Second
Anglo-Dutch War. But his commitment to the success of the Secret Treaty, and in
particular Charles’s public conversion, was serious. Clifford argued that Charles
should prioritize a massive construction and repair programme of fortifications,
building new ones at Gravesend, Yarmouth, the Isle of Wight, Great Yarmouth,
and Bristol, and repairing those at Pendennis, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Dover,
Sheerness, Harwich, the Tower of London, Windsor, York, Tynmouth, Berwick-
upon-Tweed, Carlisle, Chepstow, and Exeter. Most of these fortifications would
require arms and ammunition. The Guards would need to be reformed ‘as much
as may be without giving jealousy, principally that a confiding man be Collonell of
his Majesties owne Regiment: and that a good man be made constable of the tower
which will prevent the suspicion that the displacing of the Liftennent would beget’.
New regiments of foot would be required without causing alarm, and cheaply too.
Clifford suggested strengthening the garrisons with more companies and increas-
ing the numbers in each company in the guards and garrisons. The regiment
stationed in the colonial outpost of Barbados should return to England immedi-
ately. Thus strengthened, Charles could declare his Catholicism with impunity
since his subjects could do little to resist.⁸⁷
Clifford was not alone in making military preparations in anticipation of the
king’s conversion. According to the duke of York’s memoirs, the Irish Catholic
Col. John Fitzgerald, who had recently arrived from Tangier, was to be commis-
sioned to a new foot regiment. This would be staffed by suitably reliable officers
and quartered at Yarmouth, where Fitzgerald would be governor. The governors
of the strategically situated garrisons of Plymouth (the 1st earl of Bath), Hull (the
Catholic Lord Belasyse), and Berwick-upon-Tweed (the crypto-Catholic 2nd
Baron Widdrington) could be relied on to support the Crown, as could the navy
⁸⁵ Airy, ed., Lauderdale Papers, vol. 2, p. 164. ⁸⁶ Airy, ed., Lauderdale Papers, vol. 2, p. 166.
⁸⁷ Cyril Hughes Hartmann, Clifford of the Cabal: A Life of Thomas, First Lord Clifford of Chudleigh
(London, 1937), pp. 153–154.
     , – 31
and the Portsmouth garrison, which were under York’s command. The army had
been much reduced after the new troops had been disbanded at the end of the
Anglo-Dutch War. However, the soldiers were considered to be ‘well affected’, and
all their officers, except Col. John Russell, colonel of the 1st Regiment of Foot
Guards, would serve the Crown without ‘grumbleing’ or ‘asking questions’.⁸⁸
How to implement the Secret Treaty, and especially its inflammatory Catholic
clause, preoccupied those such as Clifford and York, who were Catholic converts
and deeply desired the king’s conversion too. The king, however, was more
attracted by the lure of Louis’s livres and he had far greater political sense than
to publicly apostatize to Rome. He had little need of Clifford’s plan, although
Clifford appears to have continued to elaborate it. In December 1671 a series of
rumours, possibly emanating from Clifford, alleged that the king was going to
expand the army under cover of the projected war against the Dutch and dismiss
parliament if it did not provide him with funds or pack it with army officers. The
Barbados regiment did return to England in late 1671 but, tellingly, it was
disbanded in 1674 after serving in the Third Anglo-Dutch War rather than
retained by the Crown.⁸⁹
III The King’s General
When the Crown was unable or unwilling to take command of its armies, the
monarch appointed a substitute who held the office of lord-general or captain-
general. Generalship, however, was the metier of the monarch and delegating it to
others was a problem for both the Crown and its subjects, as Charles soon
discovered. The events of the 1650s spelt out what might come to pass if a
successful general rose to power with the support of his army. Oliver Cromwell
became king in all but name; yet another influential general, George Monck,
named the king. At the Restoration, and for years afterwards, Cromwell’s name
was synonymous with military tyranny, although his military successes continued
to be grudgingly (or not so grudgingly) praised.⁹⁰
The danger presented by ambitious generals was also articulated in Restoration
descriptions of the power struggle between Generals John Lambert and George
Monck in 1659–60. Closely associated with military rule during the 1650s,
Lambert had been viewed as Cromwell’s likely successor. He played a key part
in the ceremony installing Cromwell as protector. He made visible display of his
newly acquired status and wealth with the acquisition of Wimbledon House and
⁸⁸ Clarke, ed., Life, vol. 1, p. 443. ⁸⁹ Miller, Charles II, p. 177; Childs, Charles II, pp. 156–157.
⁹⁰ Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, pp. 181, 192–193.
32      , –
Nonsuch, formerly owned by Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria.⁹¹ However,

unlike Monck, Lambert had opposed the return of the Stuart dynasty. In
November 1659 he had tried and failed to intercept Monck on his march down
south and he sought to use military force to resist the Restoration in April 1660.
Lambert’s last-ditch attempt to save the republic was unsuccessful. His small army
was underpaid in comparison to Monck’s, and his men had little enthusiasm for
fighting. Lambert was captured and imprisoned until his death in 1684. While
radicals in the 1660s still viewed Lambert as a potential king, he was pilloried by
Charles II’s supporters and some of Cromwell’s republican opponents as a man of
boundless ambition who had aimed at nothing short of the Crown.⁹²
The existence of the office of lord-general or captain-general was divisive in
itself, as well as being alluring to the ambitious. In December 1664 Viscount
Fitzhardinge, York’s keeper of the Privy Purse and lieutenant-governor of
Portsmouth, was believed to be intent on being Albemarle’s successor as lord-
general. As a result, he was meant to loathe promoting able men who might
emerge as rivals.⁹³ The 2nd duke of Buckingham’s vaulting military pretensions
aroused considerable suspicion. In February 1667 Buckingham had a fall-out with
Charles, who unsuccessfully tried to arrest him; among the accusations levelled at
the duke was the charge that he had attempted to incite mutiny within the navy.
A year later, it was rumoured that Buckingham designed to return England to a
commonwealth and head up its army or make himself king.⁹⁴ The duke’s patron-
age of Cromwell’s former adherents fuelled the view that he had Cromwellian
ambitions. Buckingham himself believed that he had a title to the throne via his
mother’s Plantagenet forbears, a claim that the 1st earl of Shaftesbury was
supposed to have revived for Buckingham later in Charles’s reign during the
Exclusion Crisis.⁹⁵
Even those whom Charles chose to trust with high military command were
never wholly reliable. For a start, Albemarle was not unproblematic from the
king’s perspective. In early 1660, contemporaries feared that Monck would seize
⁹¹ David Farr, John Lambert, Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major-General, 1619–1684
(Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 126, 154–155.
⁹² Greaves, Deliver us from Evil, p. 28; Hutchinson, Memoirs, pp. 252, 257; Depositions from the
Castle of York, p. 93; A Phanatick Play. The First Part as it was Presented Before and by the Lord
Fleetwood, Sir Arthur Hasilrig, Sir Henry Vane, the Lord Lambert and Others Last Night with Master
Jester and Master Pudding (London, 1660); A Conference Held in the Tower of London Between Two
Aldermen of the City, Praise-God Lean-Bone and the Lord Lambert upon their Occasion of Visiting His
Lordship. Munday March the 13th 1660 (London, 1660); Thomas Flatman, Don Juan Lamberto: Or, a
Comical History of Our Late Times. The First Part (London, 1661); The Recantation and Confession of
John Lambert Esq. (London, 1660), pp. 5–6.
⁹³ Pepys, Diary, vol. 5, p. 345.
⁹⁴ Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 302–303; Pepys, Diary, vol. 9, p. 373.
⁹⁵ Harris, London Crowds, p. 115; Philip Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in Its
Contexts (Princeton, NJ, 1993), p. 142; Knights, Politics and Opinion, p. 221; POAS, vol. 2, p. 497.
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the distance between their respective situations in India had formed
an insuperable barrier against an acquaintance and intimacy there.
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Primrose as a matter of uncertainty, he had been very cautious of
exciting his daughter’s expectations. He had ventured to consider his
own approbation quite sufficient to allow of the correspondence
between his niece and Mr Robert Darnley, and had in his letters to
Mr Primrose simply mentioned the fact without stating particulars,
thinking that it would be time enough hereafter, should the mutual
affection of the young persons for each other continue and
strengthen. Mr Primrose had, in reply to that information, left Dr
Greendale quite at liberty to make such disposal of Penelope as he
might think proper; for the father was well aware that the uncle was,
both by discretion and affection, well qualified for the guardianship of
his child.
The vessels in which the two gentlemen sailed soon weighed
anchor and put to sea again. So the friends were parted for a time;
nor did they hold any farther communication on the course of their
voyage, for they had not left St Helena many days before the ship
parted company in a gale of wind. That vessel in which Mr Primrose
sailed first arrived in England, as we have already intimated.
CHAPTER XIV.
England appeared to Mr Primrose quite a new world. He had
sixteen years ago sailed down the river Thames, which presented on
its banks at that time quite as much picturesque beauty as now. But
he did not then observe these beauties. His heart was full of other
thoughts, and his mind was moved by widely different feelings. There
had not been in his soul the sentiment of moral beauty, nor was
there in his heart that repose of pleasure which could admit of
enjoying the external world in its manifestations of beauty or
sublimity. But on his return homewards his thoughts were far
different. He had left England in forlorn hope, but he was returning
under brighter auspices. He had sailed from his native land, bearing
a deeply felt burden of self-reproach; and though he could not forget
or forgive his former self, and though still there were painful scenes
to be witnessed, and melancholy information to be received, yet the
aspect of things was widely different from what it had been at his
departure. And he expressed himself delighted with all that he saw.
The little boats and the lighter craft upon the river spoke of bustle
and activity, and of human interest; and in them he saw the
flutterings of business and prosperity. Though it was winter, and the
trees on the rising grounds were leafless, and the fields had lost their
greenness, yet the very pattern and outline of what the scene had
been in summer, and of what it would be again in spring, were all
very charming to his eye, then active with imagination. His own
bright thoughts gave verdure to the trees and greenness to the
fields; and he thought that England indeed was a blessed land. And
as the vessel made her way up the river, and as at a distance a
dense black cloud was seen, he knew that that was a manifestation
of their vicinity to the great city, and that dark mass of floating
smoke, which rustic eloquence so glibly reprobates, was to his soul a
great refreshment and a most pleasing sight.
As soon as he disembarked, he first directed his steps to the office
of his agent in the city, to make enquiry respecting the speediest
mode of arriving at Smatterton: for he knew not that his daughter’s
residence was now in London. There is a great contrast between the
appearance of the banks of the Thames and the inside of a city
counting-house; but they are both very pleasant sights to those who
are glad to see them. Mr Primrose was indeed very glad to see his
native land, and to walk the streets of its busy metropolis; and with
very great cordiality did he shake hands with the principal in the
office, and very politely did the principal congratulate him on his
return to England. Mr Primrose did not notice the great contrast
between his own joy-expanded face and the business-looking aspect
of the agent; but he thought that all London looked as glad to see
him as he was to see London. After transacting at the office of his
agent such business as was immediately important, and without
waiting to observe what changes and improvements had taken place
in the great city since he had left it sixteen years ago, he made
enquiry after the readiest and quickest mode of reaching Smatterton,
and finding that the stage-coach was the most rapid conveyance, he
immediately directed his steps thitherward.
There are in the course of human life many strange and singular
coincidences. Now it happened that the very day on which Mr
Primrose was preparing to start for Smatterton, Mr Kipperson also
was going to travel the same road, and by the same conveyance.
Little did the former imagine that he was going away from his
daughter; little did he think that, in his way to the White Horse cellar
in Piccadilly, he had actually passed the house in which his beloved
child and only hope lay sick and ill. The days in December are very
short; and it was nearly dark when, at four o’clock in the afternoon,
Mr Primrose and Mr Kipperson, unknown to each other, took their
seats in the coach. They had the inside of the coach to themselves.
Mr Primrose, as we have said, was in good spirits. He certainly
had some cause for grief, and some source of concern; but the
feeling of satisfaction was most prominent. He had shed tears to the
memory of Dr Greendale, and he hoped that the worthy man had so
instructed the dependent one committed to his care, that no
permanent cause of uneasiness would be found in her. The
intelligence which he had received respecting her alleged and
supposed fickleness came from Mr Darnley, and the father,
therefore, knowing Mr Darnley to be a very severe and rigid kind of
man, and withal mighty positive, hoped that a premature judgment
had been formed, and trusted that, when all was explained, all would
be right. We must indeed do the father of Penelope the justice to say
that, with all his failings, he was sincere, candid, and downright. He
never suffered any misunderstanding to exist where it could possibly
be cleared up. He was plain and direct in all his conduct.
We need not say that Mr Kipperson was in good spirits. He always
was so. He was so very happy that by this last journey to London he
had saved the nation from being starved to death by a
superabundance of corn. What a fine thing it is to be the cleverest
man in the kingdom! What would become of us all were it not for
such men as Mr Kipperson starting up about once in a century, or
twice a-week, to rectify all the errors of all the rest of the world? And
what is the use of all the world beside, but to admire the wisdom of
such men as Mr Kipperson? Our only fear is that we may have too
many such profoundly wise men; and the consequence of an over
supply of wisdom would be to ruin the nation by folly.
Whether Mr Kipperson addressed Mr Primrose, or Mr Primrose
addressed Mr Kipperson, we know not; but in a very short time they
became mighty good friends. To some observation of Mr Primrose,
his fellow traveller replied:
“You have been abroad I suppose, sir?”
“I have, sir,” said Mr Primrose; “and that for a long while: it is now
upwards of sixteen years since I left England, and I am most happy
to return to it. Many changes have taken place since I went abroad,
and some, I hope, for the better.”
“Many improvements have indeed been made in the course of that
time. We have improved, for instance, in the rapidity with which we
travel; our roads are as smooth as a bowling-green. But our greatest
improvements of all are our intellectual improvements. We have
made wonderful strides in the march of intellect. England is now the
first country in the world for all that relates to science and art. The
cultivation of the understanding has advanced most astonishingly.
“I remember noticing when I was in India,” said Mr Primrose, “that
the number of publications seemed much increased. But many of
them appeared to be merely light reading.”
“Very likely, sir; but we have not merely light reading; we have a
most abundant supply of scientific publications: and these are read
with the utmost avidity by all classes of people, especially by the
lower classes. You have no doubt heard of the formation of the
mechanics’ institutes?”
“I have, sir,” replied Mr Primrose; “but I am not quite aware of the
precise nature of their constitution, or the object at which they aim.
Perhaps you can inform me?”
“That I can, sir,” said Mr Kipperson; “and I shall have great
pleasure in so doing; for to tell you the truth I am a very zealous
promoter of these institutions. The object of these institutions is to
give an opportunity to artisans, who are employed all day in manual
labour, to acquire a scientific knowledge, not only of the art by which
he lives and at which he works, but of everything else which can
possibly be known or become a subject of human inquiry or interest.”
“But surely,” interrupted Mr Primrose, “it is not designed to convert
mechanical into scientific men. That seems to my view rather a
contradiction to the general order of things.”
“I beg your pardon,” replied the other; “you are repeating, I
perceive, exploded objections. Is it possible, do you think, that a man
should do his work worse for understanding something of the
philosophy of it? Is it not far better, where it is practicable, that a man
should act as a rational reflecting creature, than as a piece of mere
machinery?”
“Very true, certainly, sir; you are right. Ay, ay, now I see: you
instruct all artisans in the philosophy of their several employments.
Most excellent. Then, I suppose, you teach architecture and read
lectures on Vitruvius to journey-men bricklayers?”
“Nay, nay, sir,” replied Mr Kipperson, “we do not carry it quite so far
as that.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” replied Mr Primrose, “I had not the
slightest idea that this was carrying your system too far. It might,
perhaps, be a little refinement on the scheme to suppose that you
would teach tailors anatomy; but after all I do not see why you
should start at carrying a matter of this kind too far. The poet says, ‘a
little knowledge is a dangerous thing;’ and, for my own part, I can
see no great liberality in this parsimonious and stinted mode of
dealing out knowledge; for unless you teach the lower classes all
that is to be taught, you make, or more properly speaking keep up,
the distinction.”
Mr Kipperson was not best pleased with these remarks; he saw
that his fellow-traveller was one of those narrow-minded aristocratic
people, who are desirous of keeping the mass of the people in gross
ignorance, in order that they may be the more easily governed and
imposed upon. Though in good truth it has been said, that the
ignorant are not so easily governed as the enlightened. The
ingenious and learned Mr Kipperson then replied:
“You may say what you please, sir, in disparagement of the system
of enlightening the public mind; but surely you must allow that it is far
better for a poor industrious mechanic to attend some lecture on a
subject of science or philosophy, than to spend his evenings in
drunkenness and intemperance.”
“Indeed, sir, I have no wish to disparage the system of
enlightening the public mind; and I am quite of your opinion, that it is
much more desirable that a labouring man”——
“Operative, if you please,” said Mr Kipperson; “we have no
labouring men.”
“Well,” pursued Mr Primrose, “operative; the term used to be
labouring or working when I was last in England: I will agree with
you, sir, that it is really better that an operative should study
philosophy, than that he should drink an inordinate quantity of beer.
But do you find, sir, that your system does absolutely and actually
produce such effects?”
“Do we?” exclaimed Mr Kipperson triumphantly: “That we certainly
and clearly do: it is clear to demonstration; for, since the
establishment of mechanics’ institutes, the excise has fallen off very
considerably. And what can that deficiency be owing to, if it be not to
the fact which I have stated, that the operatives find philosophy a far
more agreeable recreation after labour than drinking strong beer?”
“You may be right, sir, and I have no doubt you are; but, as I have
been so long out of England, it is not to be wondered at that my
ideas have not been able to keep pace with the rapid strides which
education has made in England during that time. I am very far from
wishing to throw any objection or obstacle in the way of human
improvement. You call these establishments ‘mechanics’ institutions:’
but pray, sir, do you not allow any but mechanics to enjoy the benefit
of them? Now there is a very numerous class of men, and women
too—for I should think that so enlightened an age would not exclude
women from the acquisition of knowledge;—there is, I say, a very
numerous class of men and women who have much leisure and little
learning—I mean the servants of the nobility and gentry at the west
end of the town. It would be charitable to instruct them also in the
sciences. How pleasant it must be now for the coachman and
footman, who are waiting at the door of a house for their master and
mistress, at or after midnight, instead of sleeping on the carriage, or
swearing and blaspheming as they too frequently do, to have a
knowledge of astronomy, and study the movements of the planets. Is
there no provision made for these poor people?”
“Certainly there is,” said Mr Kipperson. “There are cheap
publications which treat of all the arts and sciences, so that for the
small charge of sixpence, a gentleman’s coachman may, in the
course of a fortnight, become acquainted with all the Newtonian
theory.”
Mr Primrose was delighted and astonished at what Mr Kipperson
told him; he could hardly believe his senses; he began to imagine
that he must himself be the most ignorant and uninformed person in
his majesty’s dominions.
“But tell me, sir,” continued he, “if those persons, whose time and
attention is of necessity so much occupied, are become so well
informed; do others, who have greater leisure, keep pace with them;
or, I should say, do they keep as much in the advance as their
leisure and opportunity allow them? For, according to your account,
the very poorest of the community are better instructed now than
were the gentry when I lived in England.”
“Education, sir,” answered Mr Kipperson, with the tone of an
oracle, “is altogether upon the advance. The science of instruction
has reached a point of perfection, which was never anticipated; nay,
I may say, we are astonished at ourselves. The time is now arrived
when the only ignorant and uninformed persons are those who have
had the misfortune to be educated at our public schools and
universities: for in them there is no improvement. I have myself been
witness of the most shocking and egregious ignorance in those men
who call themselves masters of arts. They know nothing in the world
about agriculture, architecture, botany, ship building, navigation,
ornithology, political economy, icthyology, zoology, or any of the ten
thousand sciences with which all the rest of the world is intimate. I
have actually heard an Oxford student, as he called himself, when
looking over a manufactory at Birmingham, ask such questions as
shewed that he was totally ignorant even of the very first rudiments
of button-making.”
“Astonishing ignorance,” exclaimed Mr Primrose, who was rather
sleepy; “I dare say they make it a rule to teach nothing but ignorance
at the two universities.”
“I believe you are right, sir,” said Mr Kipperson, rubbing his hands
with cold and extacy; “those universities have been a dead weight on
the country for centuries, but their inanity and weakness will be
exposed, and the whole system exploded. There is not a common
boys’ school in the kingdom which does not teach ten times more
useful knowledge than both the universities put together, and all the
public schools into the bargain. Why, sir, if you send a boy to school
now, he does not spend, as he did formerly, ten or twelve years in
learning the Latin grammar, but now he learns Latin and Greek, and
French, German, Spanish, Italian, dancing, drawing, music,
mapping, the use of the globes, chemistry, history, botany,
mechanics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, hydrodynamics, astronomy,
geology, gymnastics, architecture, engineering, ballooning, and
many more useful and indispensable arts and sciences, so that he is
fitted for any station in life, from a prime minister down to a shoe-
black.”
Before this speech was finished, Mr Primrose was fast asleep; but
short is the sleep in a coach that travels by night. The coach stopped
and woke our foreigner from a frightful dream. We do not wish to
terrify our readers, but we must relate the dream in consequence of
its singularity. He dreamed then, that he was in the island of Laputa,
and that having provoked the indignation of some of the learned
professors by expressing a doubt as to the practicability of some of
their schemes, he was sentenced to be buried alive under a pyramid
of encyclopedias. Just as the cruel people were putting the sentence
into execution, he woke and found his coat-collar almost in his
mouth, and heard the word ‘ology’ from the lips of his fellow traveller.
He was very glad to find that matters were no worse.
CHAPTER XV.
Few indeed are the adventures now to be met with in travelling by
a stage coach, and few also, comparatively speaking, the accidents.
But our travellers were destined to meet both with accident and
adventure. The coach, as our observant readers have noticed, must
necessarily have travelled all night. The nights in December are long
and dark; and not unfrequently, during the long cold silence of a
December night, there gently falls upon the dank surface of the earth
a protecting and embellishing fleece of flaky snow. And the morning
snow as yet untrodden has a brilliant and even cheerful look beneath
a blue and brightly frosty sky; and when a wide expanse of country
variegated with venerably-aged trees, and new enclosures and old
open meadow lands, and adorned with here and there a mansion
surrounded with its appurtenances of larch, pine, and poplar, and
divided into unequal but gracefully undulating sections by means of a
quiet stream—when a scene like this bursts upon the morning eye of
a winter traveller, and shows itself set off and adorned with a mantle
of virgin snow, it is indeed a sight well worth looking at. Mr Primrose
had not seen snow for sixteen years, and the very sight of it warmed
his heart; for it was so much like home. It was one of those natural
peculiarities which distinguished the land of his birth from the land of
his exile. He expressed to his fellow traveller the delight which he felt
at the sight. Mr Kipperson coincided with him that the view was fine,
and proposed that, as they were both well clad, and as the scenery
was very magnificent, they should by way of a little variety seat
themselves on the outside of the coach. The proposal was readily
embraced, and they mounted the roof.
The carriage was proceeding at a tolerably rapid pace on high but
level ground; and the travellers enjoyed the brightness of the
morning, and the beauty of the valley which lay on their left hand.
Shortly they arrived at a steep descent which led into the valley
beneath, and there was no slacking of pace or locking of wheels,
which had been customary in going down hill when Mr Primrose was
last in England. He expressed, therefore, his surprise at the
boldness or carelessness of the coachman, and hinted that he was
fearful lest some accident might happen. But Mr Kipperson
immediately dissipated his fears, by telling him that this was the
usual practice now, and that the construction of stage-coaches, and
the art of driving, were so much improved, that it was now
considered a far safer and better plan to proceed in the usual pace
down hill as well as upon level ground. Mr Kipperson, in short, had
just proved to a demonstration that it was impossible that any
accident could happen, when down fell one of the horses, and
presently after down fell coach and all its company together.
Happily no lives were lost by the accident. But if Mr Kipperson’s
neck was not broken by the fall, his heart was almost broken by the
flat contradiction which the prostrate carriage gave to his theory, and
he lay as one bereft of life. Equally still and silent lay Mr Primrose;
for he was under the awkward difficulty of either denying his fellow
traveller’s correctness or doubting the testimony of his own senses.
The catastrophe took place near to a turnpike house; so that those of
the passengers, who had experienced any injury from the
overturning of the coach, could be speedily accommodated with all
needful assistance. All the passengers, however, except Mr
Primrose, were perfectly able, when the coach was put to rights
again, to resume their journey. Mr Primrose, as soon as he
recovered from the first shock of his fall, was very glad to take refuge
in the turnpike house, and he soon became sensible that it would not
be prudent for him then to pursue his journey. He had indeed
received a severe shock from the accident, and though he had no
bones broken he had suffered a violent concussion which might be
doctored into an illness.
As soon as possible medical assistance was procured. The
surgeon examined and interrogated the overturned gentleman with
great diligence and sagacity. From the examination, it appeared not
unlikely that the patient might promise himself the pleasure of a
speedy removal. The truth of the matter was, that the poor
gentleman was more frightened than hurt. Some cases there are,
and this was one of them, in which no time should be lost in sending
for the doctor, seeing that, if the doctor be not sent for immediately,
he may not be wanted at all. This is one of the reasons why
physicians keep carriages, and have their horses always in
readiness; for by using great expedition they frequently manage to
arrive before the patient recovers.
The surgeon who attended Mr Primrose thought proper to take
some blood from his patient, and to supply the place of the same by
as many draughts as could be conveniently taken, or be reasonably
given in the time. It was also recommended that the gentleman
should be put to bed.
The dwellings attached to turnpike gates are seldom so roomy and
so abundantly provided with accommodation as to admit of an
accidental visitor: but in the present case it so happened that there
was an apartment unoccupied and not unfurnished. The
gatekeeper’s wife, who was a notable and motherly kind of woman,
said, that if the gentleman could put up with a very small apartment,
and a coarse but clean bed, he might be accommodated, and he
need not fear that the bed was damp, for it had been occupied for
the last month, and had only been vacated the day before. Mr
Primrose readily accepted the offer, not being very particular as to
appearance.
“I suppose,” said he, “you keep a spare bed for the
accommodation of those who may be overturned in coming down
this hill? Your surgeon, I find, does not live far off. That is a good
contrivance. Pray can you tell me, within a dozen or two, how many
broken bones the stage coach supplies him with in the course of the
year?”
At this speech the good woman laughed, for it was uttered in such
a tone as intimated that the gentleman wished it to be laughed at;
and as he was a respectable looking man, and carried in his aspect
a promise to pay, the worthy wife of the gate-keeper laughed with
right good will.
“Oh dear no, sir,” said she, “there is not an accident happens here
hardly ever. The coachman what overturned you this morning, is one
of the most carefullest men in the world, only he had a new horse as
didn’t know the road.”
“A very great comfort is that,” said Mr Primrose, and he smiled,
and the gate-keeper’s wife smiled, and she thought Mr Primrose a
very funny man, that he should be able to joke when under the
doctor’s hands. There are some people who are very facetious when
they are sick, provided the sickness be not very acute; for it looks
like heroism to laugh amidst pain and trouble.
Mr Primrose then proceeded; “So you will assure me that the
person who occupied your spare bed last, was not an overturned
coach passenger?”
The poor woman did not smile at this observation, but on the
contrary looked very grave, and her eyes seemed to be filling with
tears, when she compressed her lips and shook her head mournfully.
With some effort, after a momentary silence, she said:
“No, sir, it was not any one that was overturned; but it was a coach
passenger. It was a young lady, poor dear soul! that seemed almost
dying of a broken heart. But had not you better go to bed, sir? The
doctor said you wanted rest.”
Mr Primrose was a nervous man, and tales of sorrow inartificially
told frequently depressed him, and excited his sympathy with greater
force than was consistent with poetical enjoyment. He therefore took
the considerate advice which the good woman gave him, and retired
to rest. To a person of such temperament as Mr Primrose, the very
mention of a young lady almost dying of a broken heart was quite
sufficient to set his imagination most painfully at work. Rapidly did
his thoughts run over the various causes of broken hearts. Very
angry did he become with those hardened ones, by whose follies
and vices so many of the gentler sex suffer the acutest pangs of the
spirit. He thought of his own dear and only child, and he almost
wrought himself up to a fever by the imagination that some villanous
coxcomb might have trifled with her affections, and have left her to
the mockery of the world. He then thought of the mother of his
Penelope, and that she had died of a broken heart, and that his
follies had brought her to an untimely grave. Then came there into
his mind thoughts of retributive justice, and there was an
indescribable apprehension in his soul that the sorrows which he had
occasioned to another might fall also to his own lot. He wondered
that there should be in the world so much cruelty, and such a wanton
sporting with each others’ sufferings. The powerful emotions which
had been raised in his mind from the first hour that he embarked for
England, were of a nature so mingled, and in their movements so
rapid, that he hardly knew whether they were pleasurable or painful.
There was so much pleasure in the pain, and so much pain in the
pleasure, that his mind was rendered quite unsteady by a constant
whirl and vortex of emotions. He felt a kind of childish vivacity and
womanly sensibility. His tears and his smiles were equally
involuntary; he had no power over them, and he had scarcely notice
of their approach. Something of this was natural to him; but present
circumstances more strongly and powerfully developed this
characteristic. The accident, from which he had received so sudden
a shock, tended still farther to increase the excitability of his mind.
When therefore he retired for the purpose of gaining a little rest, his
solitude opened a wider door to imagination and recollection; and
thereupon a confused multitude of images of the past, and of fancies
for the future, came rushing in upon him, and his mind was like a
feather in a storm.
The surgeon was very attentive to his patient, for he made a
second visit not above four hours after the first. The people at the
turnpike-house told him that the gentleman had, in pursuance of the
advice given him, retired to take a little rest. The medical man
commended that movement; but being desirous to see how his
patient rested, he opened the door of the apartment very gently, and
Mr Primrose, who was wide awake, and happy to see any one to
whom he could talk, called aloud to the surgeon to walk in.
“I am not asleep, sir; you may come in; I am very glad to see you; I
have felt very much relieved by the bleeding. I think I shall be quite
well enough to proceed to-morrow. Pray, sir, can you inform me how
far it is to Smatterton from this place?”
“About sixty miles,” replied the surgeon.
“Sixty miles!” echoed Mr Primrose; “at what a prodigious rate then
we must have travelled.” Thereupon the patient raised himself up in
the bed, and began, or attempted to begin, a long conversation with
his doctor. “Why, sir, when I was in England last, the coach used to
be nearly twice as long on the road. Is this the usual rate of
travelling?”
The medical man smiled, and said, “The coach by which you
travelled, is by no means a quick one, some coaches on this road
travel much faster.”
“And pray, sir, do these coaches ever arrive safely at their
journey’s end?”
The surgeon smiled again and said, “Oh yes, sir, accidents are
very rare.”
“Then I wish,” replied Mr Primrose; “that they had not indulged me
with so great a rarity just on my arrival in England. I have been in the
East Indies for the last sixteen or seventeen years, and during that
time—”
Few medical men whose business is worth following, have time to
listen to the history of a man’s life and adventures for sixteen or
seventeen years. Hindoostan is certainly a very interesting country,
but there is no country on the face of the earth so interesting as a
man’s own cupboard. The doctor therefore cut off his patient’s
speech, not in the midst, but at the very beginning; saying unto him,
with a smile, for there is much meaning in a smile; “Yes sir, certainly
sir, there is no doubt of it—very true; but, sir, I think it will be better
for you at present to be kept quiet; and if you can get a little sleep it
will be better for you. I think, sir, to-morrow, or the next day, you may
venture to proceed on your journey. I will send you a composing
draught as soon as I return home, and will see you again to-morrow,
early in the morning. But I would not recommend you to travel by the
stage coach.”
“Ay, ay, thank you for that recommendation, and you may take my
word I will follow it.”
The doctor very quickly took his leave, and Mr Primrose thought
him a very unmannerly cub, because he would not stop to talk. “A
composing draught!” thus soliloquized the patient; “a composing
draught! a composing fiddlestick! What does the fellow mean by
keeping me thus in bed and sending me in his villanous compounds.
Why, I think I am almost able to walk to Smatterton. I won’t take his
composing draught; I’ll leave it here for the next coach passenger
that may be overturned at the foot of this hill. I dare to say it will not
spoil with keeping.”
The word “coach-passenger” brought to Mr Primrose’s recollection
the melancholy look and sorrowful tone of the poor woman who
mentioned the young lady who seemed almost dying of a broken
heart. His curiosity was roused, his nerves were agitated. He kept
thinking of his poor Penelope. He recollected with an almost painful
vividness the features and voice of the pretty little innocent he had
left behind him when he quitted England. He recollected and painted
with imagination’s strongest lines and most glowing colours that
distracting and heart-rending scene, when after listening with tearful
silence to the kind admonitions of his brother-in-law, he snatched up
in his arms his dear little laughing Penelope, and he saw again as
pungently as in reality, the little arms that clasped him with an
eagerness of joy, and he recollected how his poor dear child in the
simplicity of her heart mistook the agitations and tremblings of grief
for the frolicsome wantonness of joy, and he saw again that
indescribably exquisite expression with which she first caught sight
of his tears; and then there came over his mind the impression
produced by the artless manner in which the poor thing said, “Good
night, papa, perhaps you won’t cry to-morrow.”
Now he thought of that Penelope as grown up to woman’s estate,
and he felt that he should be proud of his daughter: but oh what
fears and misgivings came upon him, and he kept muttering to
himself the words of the woman who had talked of the young lady
almost dying of a broken heart. It was well for the patient that the
doctor soon fulfilled his word and sent a composing draught. But the
very moment that his attentive nurse gently tapped at the door of his
room, he called out:
“Come in, come in, I am not asleep. Oh, what you have brought
me a composing draught! Nonsense, nonsense, keep it for the next
coach-passenger that is overturned, and give it to him with my
compliments. Well, but I say, good woman, you were telling me
something about a poor young lady who was almost dying with a
broken heart. Who is she? Where is she? What is her name? Where
is she gone to? Where did she come from? Who broke her heart?
Was she married, or was she single? Now tell me all about her.”
“Oh dear, sir, I am sure you had better take this physic what the
doctor has sent you, that will do you more good than a mallancolly
story. Indeed you’d better, sir; shall I pour it out into a cup?”
“Ay, ay, pour it out. But I say, good woman, tell me where did this
poor young lady come from?”
“Lord, sir, I never saw such a curious gentleman in my life. Why,
then if you must know, she came from a long way off, from a village
of the name of Smatterton, a little village where my Lord Smatterton
has a fine castle.”
While the good woman was speaking she kept her eyes fixed
upon the cup into which she was slowly pouring the medicine, and
therefore she did not perceive the effect produced upon the patient
by the mention of Smatterton; for, as soon as he heard the name he
started, turned pale, and was breathless and speechless for a
moment; and then recovering the use of his speech, he exclaimed,
“Smatterton! Smatterton! Good woman, are you in your senses?
What do you mean?”
Now it was very well for Mr Primrose and his composing draught
that the wife of the gate-keeper was not nervous; for had she been
nervous, that sudden and almost ridiculous exclamation, uttered as it
was, in a very high key, and with a very loud voice, would certainly
have upset the cup together with its contents. If ever a composing
draught was necessary, it clearly was so on this occasion. The good
woman however did not let the cup fall, but with the utmost
composure looked at the patient and said:
“Lawk-a-mercy, sir, don’t be in such a taking. I durst to say the
poor cretter wasn’t nobody as you know. She was a kind of a poor
young lady like. There now, sir, pray do take your physic, ’cause
you’ll never get well if you don’t.”
Mr Primrose was still in great agitation, and that more from
imagination than apprehension. His nervous sensibility had been
excited, and everything that at all touched his feelings did most
deeply move him. He therefore answered the poor woman in a
hurried manner:
“Come, come, good woman, I will swallow the medicine, if you will
have the goodness to tell me all you know about this poor young
lady.”
Now, as it was very little that the good woman did know, she
thought it might be for the patient’s advantage if he would take the
medicine even upon those terms. For she had so much respect for
the skill of the doctor, that it was her firm opinion that the draught
would have more power in composing, than her slender narrative in
disturbing, the gentleman’s mind. She very calmly then handed the
cup and said: “Well, sir, then if you will but take the physic, I will tell
you all I know about the matter.”
Mr Primrose complied with the condition, and took the medicine
with so much eagerness, that he seemed as if he were about to
swallow cup and all.
“There, sir,” said the good woman, mightily pleased at her own
management; “now I hope you will soon get better.”
“Well, now I have taken my medicine; so tell me all you know
about this young lady.”
“Why, sir, ’tisn’t much as I know: only, about two months ago, that
coach what you came by was going up to town, and it stopped, as it
always does, at our gate, and the coachman says to my husband,
says he, ‘Here’s a poor young lady in the coach so ill that she cannot
travel any farther; can you take her in for a day or two?’ And so I
went and handed the poor thing out of the coach, and I put her to
bed; and sure enough, poor thing, she was very ill. Then, sir, I sent
for the doctor; but, dear me, he could do her no good: and so then I
used to go and talk to the poor cretter, and all she would say to me
was, ‘Pray, let me die.’ But in a few days she grew a little better, and
began to talk about continuing her journey, and I found out, sir, that
the poor dear lady was broken-hearted.”
Here the narrator paused. But hitherto no definite information had
been conveyed to Mr Primrose, and he almost repented that he had
taken the trouble to swallow the medicine for such a meagre
narrative.
“And is that all you know, good woman? Did not you learn her
name?”
“Yes,” replied the informant: “her name was Fitzpatrick: and after
she was gone, I asked the coachman who brought her, and he told
me that that wicked young nobleman, Lord Spoonbill, had taken the
poor thing away from her friends, and had promised to make a fine
lady of her, but afterwards deserted her and sent her about her
business. And all because my lord was mighty sweet upon another
young lady what lives at Smatterton.”
Now came the truth into Mr Primrose’s mind, and he readily knew
that this other young lady was his Penelope. This corroborated the
letter which Mr Darnley had written to him on the decease of Dr
Greendale. Happy was it for the father of Penelope that he had no
suspicion of unworthy intentions towards his daughter on the part of
Lord Spoonbill; and well was it for the traveller that he had
swallowed the composing draught. He received the information with
tolerable calmness, and thanking the poor woman for indulging his
curiosity, he very quietly dismissed her. And as soon as she was
gone he muttered to himself:
“My child shall never marry a villain, though he may be a
nobleman.”
CHAPTER XVI.
Whether it was that the medicine which Mr Primrose had taken
possessed extraordinary composing powers, or whether his mind
had been quieted by its own outrageous agitations, we cannot say;
but to whatever cause it might be owing, it is a fact that, on the
following morning he was much more composed, and the medical
attendant pronounced that he might without any danger proceed on
his journey.
He was not slow in availing himself of this permission, and he also
followed the suggestion of his medical attendant in not travelling by
the stage-coach. After astonishing the gate-keeper and his wife, and
also the doctor, by his liberality for their attention to him, he started in
a post-chaise for Smatterton. No accident or interruption impeded his
progress, and at a late hour he arrived at Neverden, intending to pay
his first visit to Mr Darnley, and designing through him to
communicate to Penelope the knowledge of his arrival, and prepare
her for the meeting.
It was necessary for Mr Primrose to introduce himself to Mr
Darnley. The stately rector of Neverden was in his study. He was not
much of a reading man, he never had been; but still it was necessary
that he should keep up appearances, and therefore he occasionally
shut himself up in that room which he called his study; and there he
would read for an hour or two some papers of the Spectator, or some
old numbers of the Gentleman’s Magazine, or Blackstone’s
Commentaries, or any other book of equal reputation for sound
principles. There is a great advantage in reading those books that
everybody talks about and nobody reads. It was also very proper
that, if any of the parishioners called on the rector, it might be
necessary to send for him “out of the study.” Sometimes also Mr
Darnley gave audiences in his study, and then the unlearned
agriculturists thought him a most wonderful man to have so many
books, and so many large books too; some of them looking as big as

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Armies and Political Change in Britain,

1660-1750 Hannah Smith

I thank and acknowledge the permission of the Syndics of Cambridge

7. Defending and Disputing the Rival Kings, 1714–50 218

8.4 William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, blue tin-glazed earthenware mug,

BL The British Library, London

2      , –

4      , –

6      , –

8      , –

10      , –

duke of Cumberland, was accused of aiming at military governance in the late

     , – 13

14      , –

     , – 15

permanent professional army among Charles’s subjects. Charles’s regime would

16      , –

I The Creation of the King’s Army

     , – 17

¹⁵ Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, pp. 35, 108–111, 130–132, 135.

18      , –

²¹ Reece, Army, pp. 23–24.

     , – 19

20      , –

     , – 21

22      , –

Two fundamental questions were at issue for parliament when considering

⁴⁵ Miller, Charles II, pp. 64–65; Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 142.

     , – 23

24      , –

     , – 25

II Conventiclers and Catholics

⁵⁹ Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 286–287; HoL, vol. 3, pp. 952–954.

26      , –

     , – 27

⁶⁵ Airy, ed., Lauderdale Papers, vol. 2, pp. 65–68.

28      , –

⁷² Milward, Diary, pp. 99, 113. ⁷³ Grey’s Debates, vol. 1, p. 28.

     , – 29

⁸⁰ HoL, vol. 2, p. 103. ⁸¹ Miller, ‘Catholic Ofﬁcers’, pp. 43–44.

30      , –

Meanwhile, in Scotland, the passing of another Militia Act reafﬁrmed the

     , – 31

III The King’s General

32      , –

Nonsuch, formerly owned by Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria.⁹¹ However,

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