Abstract
‘By God, there’s no bearing this from such a Parcel of Scrubs,’ declared the old veteran John Smith to his associate Thomas Jones, as the two aired their complaints about the behaviour of the Hanoverian soldiers at the Battle of Dettingen in June 1743.1 One of the most popular and inflammatory pamphlets among a host of opposition publications that summer, A True Dialogue was purportedly a verbatim account of a discussion between two anonymous soldiers, one ‘lately return’d from Germany’, the other, a gruff old sergeant who could recall the same ignoble behaviour by the Hanoverian troops during his experiences in the War of Spanish Succession, more than 30 years earlier.2 After a long diatribe from his friend, Smith added his hopes that at the outset of the next campaign, ‘the English will fall upon them first, and thresh ’em well; and beat the Enemy afterwards.’3 It was a profoundly Jacobitical tract in its sympathies, and utilized the sentiments of disgruntled soldiers as a means of denouncing the army’s general, King George II, and simultaneously portrayed the relations between British and Hanoverian soldiers as consistently derisive, and no doubt irreparable. After listing a host of grievances, the cavalryman Thomas Jones declared: ‘but this I’m sure of, that ‘tis impossible for them and the English to make another Campaign together.’4 He was wrong. For some 30 out of the next 72 years, British and Hanoverian forces would serve alongside one another, and none of these campaigns would be nearly as contentious as that of 1743.
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Notes
Francis, Lord Rawdon, was both amused by the ‘very diverting’ pamphlet, and yet disturbed that ‘two hawkers very often have the impudence to rehearse [it] publicly by dialogue in the street.’ Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rawdon Hasting, esq., vol. III (London: 1934), p. 39.
Brendan Simms and Torsten Riotte (eds.), The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).
Frauke Geyken, Gentlemen auf Reisen: Das Britische Deutschlandbild im 18 Jahrhuntert (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2002).
Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London: Methuen, 1987)
Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London: Croom Helm, 1985)
Jeremy Black, The British Abroad, The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992).
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-18th Century (Oxford: OUP, 2002)
Bob Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (Oxford: OUP, 2003)
Bob Harris, ‘Hanover in the Public Sphere’, in Simms and Riotte, The Hanoverian Dimension; Nicholas Harding, Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2007).
Gert Brauer, Die Hannoversch-englischen Subsidienverträge, 1702–1748 (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1962)
Uriel Dann Hanover and Great Britain, 1740–1760: Diplomacy and Survival (London: Leicester University Press, 1991)
Hannah Smith, The Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge: CUP, 2006).
A good starting point is certainly Jeremy Black, ‘Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Age of Walpole, the Hessians’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), Knights Errant and True Englishmen (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1989), pp. 41–54
See also: Rodney Atwood, The Hessians: mercenaries from Hessen-Kassel (Cambridge: CUP, 1980)
For the use and significance of ‘British’ and ‘English’ in the writings of the soldiers themselves, see Stephen Conway, ‘War and National Identity in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Isles’, English Historical Review, 116 (September 2001), pp. 863–93.
For examples of said frustrations, see: Sir Harry Calvert, The Journals and Correspondence of General Sir Harry Calvert, Comprising the Campaigns in Flanders and Holland in 1793–4, edited by Sir Harry Verney (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853), pp. 348
Horace Walpole, Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, vol. III (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1906), p. 37.
F.L. Carsten, ‘British Diplomacy and the Giant Grenadiers of Frederick William I’, History Today, 1:11 (November 1951), pp. 55–60
J.M. Bulloch, ‘Scots Soldiers Under the Prussian Flag’, JSAHR, 3 (1924), pp. 108–9.
For published Hessian muster rolls, see: Eckhart G. Franz, Hessische Truppen im amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg, 6 vols. (Marburg: Archivschule, 1972–1987).
Stephen Conway has surveyed a number of British soldiers who had served in other European armies, but as a whole, the subject of Britons in German Armies awaits its monograph. See: Stephen Conway, Britain, Ireland and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Similarities, Connections, Identities (Oxford: OUP, 2011)
William Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula and the South of France, 6 vols. (London: T. & W. Boone, 1828–40).
Capt. George Carleton, Memoirs of an English Officer, Who Serv’d in the Dutch War in 1672 to the Peace of Utrecht, in 1713 (London: E. Symon, 1728).
William Thomson, Memoirs of the Life and Gallant Exploits of the Old Highland Soldier Serjeant Donald Macleod: 1688–1791 (London: Blackie & Son, 1933), pp. 76–7.
A number of useful articles and monographs exist pertaining to episodes of Anglo-German alliances and armies, with perhaps the greatest single contributor being C.T. Atkinson, whose work in the middle of the twentieth century has been a helpful gateway to archival resources and areas of inquiry. For an invaluable narrative of the British Army and its many partnerships with German allies, Sir John Fortescue’s extensive History of the British Army is particularly useful. More recently, Peter Wilson has made significant contributions to our knowledge of the militaries of the smaller absolutist states within the Holy Roman Empire. His comprehensive treatise on the subject, German Armies: War and German Politics, 1648–1806, is the best source for understanding this century-long relationship from the German perspective, especially given that other European powers were similarly engaged in hiring auxiliaries and subsidy troops from within the Reich, many of whom did so before the British. See: Sir John William Fortescue, History of the British Army, 14 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1899–1930)
Peter Wilson, German Armies: War and German Politics, 1648–1806 (London: UCL Press, 1999).
Francis Henry Skrine, Fontenoy and Britain’s Share in the War of Austrian Succession, 1741–1748 (London: Blackwood & Sons, 1906), p. 70.
Th. A. Fischer, The Scots in Germany: Being a Contribution towards the History of the Scot Abroad (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1902), pp. 76–117.
Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 91–8, 101–5.
The ‘English Army’ for much of this conflict was a mix of English and foreign. John Childs states that 10,000 British soldiers were sent to the Low Countries in 1689, and Fortescue places 23,000 Britons in Flanders in 1692, out of a total of 40,000 which were paid for by Parliament for the theatre. See Fortescue, History, vol. I, p. 360; John Childs, The British Army of William III, 1689–1702 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 30
John Childs, The Nine Years’ War and the British Army 1688–1697: Operations in the Low Countries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 73.
Fortescue, History, vol. II, p. 347, 486; Sir Reginald Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 117.
Peter Hofschröer, 1815: The Waterloo Campaign Vol. 2 — The German Victory (London: Greenhill Books, 1999).
For his conflicts with the British Naval commanders, see: A.D. Francis ‘Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt and the Plans for the Expedition to Spain of 1702’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 42 (1969), pp. 66–8.
T.H. McGuffie, The Siege of Gibraltar 1779–1783 (London: Batsford, 1965), pp. 45, 54.
See: Niedersächsische Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover (HSTAH), 325 Hann. 38 C. For a brief introduction of their service, see: Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi, ‘German Voices from India: Officers of the Hanoverian Regiments in East India Company Service’, South Asia, XXXII(2) (August 2009), pp. 189–90.
For the Germans in the rebellion in Ireland, see: Eva Ó Cathaoir, ‘German Mercenaries in Ireland, 1798–1807’, The Irish Sword, XXII(90) (2001), pp. 406–26.
As Alan Forrest and Peter Wilson point out, ‘prior to the Revolutionary War there was scarcely a war in which the King of France found himself with at least one German ally.’ Alan Forrest and Peter Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in Alan Forrest and Peter Wilson (eds.), The Bee and the Eagle: Napoleonic France and the End of the Holy Roman Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 2.
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Wishon, M. (2013). Introduction. In: German Forces and the British Army. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284013_1
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