This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war.
Richard II, II, i, 45–46
IT WAS A BLEAK, TREELESS PLACE, SOME FIVE HUNDRED FEET ABOVE SEA level. A cold east wind of sleet and rain blew into the faces of the prince's men drawn up on the west side of the moor on 16 April 1746. They were tired, very tired, having marched as far south as Derby, in an impossible quest to place James II's son on the throne. Here, 130 miles from London, they turned back north, to be harassed as they trudged the 450 miles almost to home. At Culloden, five miles east of Inverness, their leader decided to make his stand. Facing him was the royal army, commanded by the duke of Cumberland, George II's third son, a veteran soldier, with a military record distinguished more for brutality than brilliance. After half an hour's artillery bombardment, Prince Charles ordered his Highlanders to charge. They managed to sweep through the first line of the king's troops, but could not break the second. ‘In their rage they could not make any impression,’ Cumberland reported, ‘they threw stones at them for at least a minute or two before the total rout began.’ Massed volley fire from the king's forces broke the Highlanders into a panic fear. Steadily the royalists advanced, bayoneting enemy wounded. ‘I never saw such dreadful slaughter as we had made,’ Colonel George Stanhope told his brother, ‘and our men gave no quarter.’1 (See ill.24.)
Cumberland's army of English and Lowland Scots killed 1,500 rebels, and murdered half as many prisoners in cold blood. Immediately after the battle Private Alexander Taylor, a Lowlander in the Royal Scots, wrote to his ‘loving spouse’ that ‘I never saw a small field thicker of dead.’2 Of some 3,400 prisoners taken after they had fled the field, 120 were tried and executed (40 of them as deserters from the royal army), while 1,142 were transported to the New World. In the ensuing weeks thousands of Highlanders were hunted down and butchered. After torching seven thousand crofts, the English general Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley reported ‘There's still so many houses to burn, and I hope still more to be put to death.’3 The lairds who had coerced them into fighting for Prince Charles later forced many Highlanders off their lands. Many emigrated to North Carolina, and, cognizant of the cost of opposing the king, fought for George III, only to find another Culloden on 27 February 1776, at the Battle of Moore's Creek. As they shouted their battle cry ‘King George and Broadswords’, the patriots mowed them down.
9. Battle of Culloden, 16 April 1746.
Looking Forward
In the century after Culloden—the last of many battles between the English and the Scots or Irish, and the last battle ever on British soil—the British Isles experienced tremendous changes, such as the Industrial Revolution, defeat in the American War of Independence, victory over Napoleon, and parliamentary reform.4 During this period a sense of Britishness became dominant, and British culture emerged, which ‘largely defined itself through fighting’. War and religion both played a critical role in the formation of a British state.5 But there was nothing inevitable about the emergence of a United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Indeed, in view of their past histories of incessant, even brutal conflict, there is something surprising about their ability to work together. Neither was the great success of three kingdoms (and a principality) as a world military power predestined. If the shotgun of war brought the nations of the British Isles to the marriage bed, economics made their liaisons last. Membership of a British state and British empire gave the Scots and Irish immense financial opportunities: they could make a decent living as British soldiers and sailors, as traders protected by the Royal Navy, as imperial administrators, or they could emigrate to English-speaking colonies.
These opportunities for Scots within the British state and empire became wide open immediately after Culloden. In spite of the traumatic experience of their defeat and of being cleared off their lands, Highlanders both in the old country and in North Carolina in particular displayed an amazing loyalty to the British crown. King George was only too happy to employ their broadswords. It was said that in 1794 the duchess of Gordon promised to kiss every man who enlisted in her husband's regiment, the Gordon Highlanders. Such incentives were not really necessary. Scotsmen were willing enough to accept the king's shilling without an aristocratic embrace. Ten of the eleven Scots regiments raised to fight in the Seven Years War (1756–63) were from the Highlands.6 Between 1759 and 1793 twenty infantry regiments were raised from the Highlands, and from a population of 300,000, 74,000 men served in the British Army. In 1757, 31.5 per cent of the officers fighting in North America were Scots, as compared to 31 per cent Irish and only 24.5 per cent English.7 The Royal Navy also provided employment for educated Scots. Tobias Smollett, the novelist who served as a surgeon in the navy after qualifying from the University of Glasgow, had his alter ego, Roderick Random, report that when he took his exams to be admitted as a surgeon's mate, the examiner told him, ‘we have scarce any other countrymen to examine here: you Scotchmen have overcome us of late as the locusts did Egypt.’8
‘The Scots,’ concluded Professor Thomas Devine, ‘were at the cutting edge of British global expansion.’ In that expansion Highlanders did much of the dirty work, clearing, shooting and killing those who stood in the way. ‘They served with fidelity,’ declared Prime Minister William Pitt, ‘as they fought with valour.’9 Helped by their own military courage—and a nudge or two from Sir Walter Scott and Queen Victoria—they became the most popular figures in the British Army. The English came to perceive the Scots as a ‘martial race’, and in their turn the Scots came to define themselves as a military nation. Robert Burns boasted that ‘our Scottish name’ was ‘so famed in martial story’.10
In many ways this was too limited a characterization, since the half century after Culloden saw the Scottish Enlightenment, graced by such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, Robert Burns, James Watt and Sir Walter Scott. Much of the magnificent architecture of Glasgow and Edinburgh was built in this period. For two and a half centuries until after the Second World War, Scotland benefited greatly from membership of the British Empire.11 Ironically, today the wheel seems to have turned full circle. It is no accident that the end of empire and the decline in the size of the British armed forces (as well as the development of the European Union) have done much to loosen the bonds between the two nations.
In the two centuries after Culloden the British armed forces and empire provided bountiful job opportunities for the Irish. As its splendid Georgian squares reveal, Dublin, at least, benefited from the British connection. By the 1770s large numbers of Catholics were being covertly recruited into the Marines and East India Company Army. At the same time Irish Protestants provided about a third of the British Army's officer corps that was to produce Wellington, Alexander and Montgomery. The Revolutionary Wars finally ended Irish mercenary service in the French Army, thus freeing tens of thousands to fight in the British. During the Napoleonic Wars, when a third of the rank and file were Irish, Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, acknowledged that they ‘turned the scale’.12 By 1830 Irish-born soldiers constituted 42.2 per cent of the British Army and over half that of the East India Company. In the 1870s, 38 per cent of the Indian Medical Service were Irish, as were 65 per cent of the Palestinian Police in the mid-1920s. Seventy thousand men from the Irish Free State volunteered to fight in the British Army during the Second World War.
Looking Back
This book argues that it is the legitimate killing of our fellow creatures that makes war special and decisive. Thus, it would be logical to assume that there is a relationship between the numbers of those who died directly and indirectly as a result of war and the impact of wars upon the history of the British Isles. Table 7 estimates the number of war dead from Bosworth Field to Culloden.
These figures should be treated with the utmost caution, but they may be the best that the surviving data permit. Several conclusions may be drawn from them. Even if the figure of 1,218,587 people who died directly or indirectly as a result of war in the British Isles between 1485 and 1746 is an approximation, based on incomplete evidence and—it must be confessed—the occasional guess, the total does suggest that a very large number of people died as a result of war in early modern Britain, particularly when compared to the dead in ensuing world wars. During the American War of Independence 44,000 Britons died; the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars killed 311,806; while 765,339 and 418,500 Britons perished in the First and Second World Wars respectively.
| English | Scots/Irish | |
|---|---|---|
| 1485 Bosworth Field | 1,100 | |
| 1487 Simnel Revolt | 4,000 | |
| 1497 Warbeck Revolt | 500 | |
| 1497 Cornish Rebellion | 2,500 | |
| 1513 Flodden | 4,000 | 10,000 |
| 1513 French campaign | 1,000 | |
| 1520s French expeditions | 1,000 | |
| 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace | 300 | |
| 1540s French expedition | 2,000 | |
| 1542 Solway Moss | 700 | 300 |
| 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion | 4,000 | |
| 1549 Kett's Rebellion | 3,000 | |
| 1485–1560 Anglo-Scots Border | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| 1545 Ancrum Moor | 600 | |
| 1547 Pinkie | 600 | 7,000 |
| 1558–85 Elizabeth's wars | 11,000 | 1,000 |
| 1586–1603 Elizabeth's wars | 88,285 | 50,000 |
| 1620s expeditions | 30,000 | 10,000 |
| 1620–49 Mercenaries | 60,000 | 60,000 |
| 1638–60 British Civil Wars | 230,441 | 417,751 |
| 1660–84 Tangier/Portugal/France | 5,000 | 1,000 |
| 1679 Dumclog and Bothwell Bridge | 60 | 1,000 |
| 1685 Monmouth Rebellion | 2,000 | |
| 1688 Glorious Revolution | 150 | 110,000 |
| 1688–97 Nine Years War | 10,000 | 10,000 |
| 1691–1746 Mercenaries | 5,000 | 20,000 |
| 1701–14 War of the Spanish Succession | 16,000 | 16,000 |
| 1715 Rebellion | 200 | 1,000 |
| 1718–20, War of the Quadruple Alliance | 1,600 | 1,000 |
| 1745–46 Rebellion | 1,000 | 10,000 |
| Total | 487,036 | 727,051 |
| Total British Isles | 1,214,087 | |
More important than the raw numbers is an analysis comparing them over time, and within the British Isles. It shows that the dead are grouped into four distinct periods. The first, from Bosworth Field to 1585 (just before the Armada), was a fairly peaceful period, in which 37,300 Englishmen died (7.6 per cent of the total English dead of 487,036 from 1485 to 1746). Of those who perished in this period, 34.8 per cent did so as foreign mercenaries during the first third of Elizabeth's reign, 8.7 per cent fighting the French, 22.6 per cent the Scots and 40 per cent suppressing revolts and rebellions. The latter figure shows how much effort the Tudor regime had to use to keep itself in power. In the Anglo-Scots wars the English lost 7,200 and the Scots 18,300, which suggests that the former's dominance began in the sixteenth century, being completed in the seventeenth. In the second period, from 1586 to 1602, 88,285 English died (18.1 per cent of the English total), mainly on the continent, at sea or in Ireland. During the last third of Elizabeth's reign over half of English males saw some form of military service. The third and bloodiest period was that of the British Civil Wars. Proportionately, this was the deadliest conflict in the islands’ history, in which 652,692 Britons died, 54 per cent of the deaths in our period. With their brutal conquests of Scotland and Ireland, the British Civil Wars laid the foundations for the British state. The fourth peak took place as a result of the Revolution of 1688, which committed Britain to two world wars, the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession, in total producing 189,750 dead (15.6 per cent of the total). In this period the formation of a British state was virtually completed.
These figures support two other conclusions. First, that the proportion of English to non-English dead, 487,036 to 727,051, shows that the burden of war was borne disproportionately by the Scots and Irish, who with 34.5 per cent of the population suffered 60.0 per cent of the dead.14 Second, from the reign of Elizabeth I at least 160,000 people, the majority of them Scots and Irish, died fighting as mercenaries for foreign governments. By the end of our period many of the huge manpower surplus who had been foreign mercenaries switched to service in the British Armed Forces and Empire. Until the last half century, for half a millennium very large numbers of young British males, usually of an adventurous, even a violent disposition, left the isles for foreign service. It is interesting to speculate about the effects of the return of this cohort. Does it have any connection with the growth of hooliganism, massive public drunkenness and concerns about antisocial behaviour?
Until the Revolution of 1688 English military power was basically inwardly directed, being used to form a British state: afterwards British military mastery became directed outwards, in order to exercise world hegemony. This experience is similar to that of the United States, today's superpower, which after winning independence used its military forces internally, and did not employ them on a world stage until 1917, or even 1941. Both nations employed sophisticated technologies to exercise world power. Both had extremely bloody Civil Wars, one of which helped create a United Kingdom and an empire while the other preserved the American Union.
Preaching to the Living
After the Battles of Blenheim and Malplaquet, Colonel Blackadder wrote of the dead preaching to the living. While both these battles were important events in the macro history of the British Isles, Blackadder was thinking in micro terms, about the individuals who were slaughtered, and about their families for whom things could never again be the same. For its victims war always ends badly. For a few, such as Blackadder, it provided a full, although, as he confessed in old age, ‘an odd unaccountable way of living’.15 Looking back on half a century as a soldier, Sergeant Donald McBane of the Royal Scots vowed to ‘repent for my former wickedness’.16 Elis Gruffudd, Henry VIII's veteran Welsh captain, described himself in virtuous retirement:17
Aha Sirs! Now we must listen to an old man of the king's with a red nose. Bring him a stool to sit on and a mug full of beer warmed up, and a piece of burnt toast to clear his throat so he can talk of his exploits in days gone by.
Of such a life a man could be proud! A few veterans lived to a ripe old age. Sergeant Donald MacLeod of the Royal Scots died in Inverness in 1791 aged 103.18 Even older (so the Derry Journal claimed) was Terrance Gallagher, born in 1659 and who served as a sergeant at the Boyne, and lived to be 116.19 Some veterans were lucky. Having lost a limb at the Siege of Leith in 1560, Sir Thomas Knyvett returned home to marry a rich heiress. Others were not so fortunate: after a lifetime sailing the seas, being captured, wounded and surviving many a fight and even more storms, Edward Barlow, aged sixty-six, was finally given command of a ship in 1706. Months later he was wrecked and drowned with his whole crew off Madagascar: all he left his wife and children were some silver dishes, a tankard, a pottinger, a dram cup, six tablespoons and four teaspoons.20
What then did all those who fought, and perhaps died, leave to us? To posterity? What do we hear the dead preach? What do those survivors, such as Barlow, Blackadder, MacLeod, Gallagher and Gruffudd, want us to learn. Some maintain that their true voices cannot be really heard, arguing like Walt Whitman, poet and American Civil War nurse, that ‘The real war will never get in the books.’21 Here I have tried my best to get it into a book by telling the story—as much as possible in their own words—of how during the early modern period war affected the people and nations of the British Isles. In doing so, I hope that I have shown how profoundly the hand of war has shaped this Seat of Mars.