Annual Booklist 2022 : Dr John Houlding
J.A. Houlding is a private scholar who lives with his wife in a village near Nürnberg, in Germany. He read European History as an undergraduate in Canada, followed by a doctorate in War Studies at King’s College London, and is currently writing a book on the officers of the 18th-century British Army. He is the author of Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715-1795 (1981).
It has to be said that it’s the 18th-century Royal Navy, rather than the Army, that’s attracted the most scholarly attention these thirty years or more, and so if the historian of the army were to be cast on a desert island he has less to carry in his haversack than might, once, have been hoped. One cannot go so far as to say, with General Wolfe in mind, that “our cares are totally neglected”, but nevertheless in picking the four best books on the army your reviewer is left like Wolfe with “a quarrel with my toothpick”, and finds it necessary to go back a good way.
Before picking a “best four”, three works with a larger view of the period and of very considerable scholarship and inspiration for the student need to be noted, as it’s within them that the history of the 18th-century army must be set. John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power. War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (1989) had a considerable impact at its publication and has continued to do so, but there has more recently been some important modification and redrawing of the period in which the “Brewer thesis” was set in Anthony Page’s Britain and the Seventy Years’ War, 1744-1815: Enlightenment, Revolution and Empire (2015), so that both need to be read together. To these one might add Hannah Smith’s Armies & Political Change in Britain, 1660-1750 (2021), where the place of the army within the political and constitutional structure of later Stuart and earlier Georgian England (and Britain) is admirably well-covered, with the Revolution Settlement and Queen Anne’s War at its centre.
It is not difficult to settle on the four books that can be most recommended to the student of the old army, although each of them deals with its own special area. There is much more to be learned than might be supposed, at first blush, in Tony Hayter’s edited collection, published by the Army Records Society in 1988 as An Eighteenth-Century Secretary at War. The Papers of William, Viscount Barrington. Barrington, who was at the War Office during November 1755 to March 1761 and July 1765 to December 1778, was a capable and conscientious man at the main office in the army’s administration. Hayter lays out the business of the War Office in chapters devoted to the several areas that concerned it; the book is so well structured, the chapters so informatively written and the editor’s selection of supporting documents so deftly done that any student of the mid-century army will come away from it with a wide understanding not only of its administration, but of the army’s service generally.
A most influential work is Matthew H. Spring’s With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775–1783 (2008), on the face of it a detailed discussion of operational and tactical adaptation in the campaigns in the Americas during 1776-83, and ground-breaking enough in that regard. Its great value is implicit, however, in that it demonstrates a remarkable adaptability and understanding of their business among the army’s officers at all levels – not a theme much evident, previously, in the historiography; and, equally important for our understanding of the army, it shows and that the regimental officers had confidence in their men to carry out a loose, dynamic, and aggressive system in which they hadn’t previously been trained, and which required of them an initiative which it has been thought, previously, only to be found in the light infantry regiments of the Napoleonic Wars. This insight offers exciting prospects for the reinterpretation of the army during all of 1755-1815.
All historians of the old army will be acquainted with Alan J. Guy’s work and so it will come as no surprise to find short-listed here his Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army, 1714-63 (1985). The book addresses the complexities of regimental finance and interior economy, the pay and dividends of the regimental officers and their colonels, and the increasing grip of the central authority and growing bureaucracy in controlling army finance. The role of the Hanoverian kings, of successive royal warrants, of the Board of General Officers, of commissaries of musters and of reviewing general officers are stressed, with the suggestion that the declining dividends and rising expenses of regimental soldiering during Guy’s period led to a change in the character of the officer corps, squeezing out the impecunious for the wealthier and better-connected and substituting a more leisurely and gentlemanly avocation for the older proprietary careerism. Guy’s topic is a complicated one, but such is his written style that the reader can only have confidence in his understanding of the 18th-century army, not least because his scholarship is worn lightly.
Where Guy specialises in finance, an area not much touched in the army’s historiography, so Andrew Cormack has addressed a topic on which little has been said before, that is the thousands of soldiers who were invalided or worn out in the service, and their subsequent fates. His ‘These Meritorious Objects of the Royal Bounty’. The Chelsea Out-Pensioners in the Early Eighteenth Century (2017) is a work of the deepest archival research, as is clear not only from the text but in the many tables and appendices that support his conclusions. The study is not only a detailed discussion of the origin and development of the out-pension system, but a social history of the common soldiers who suffered in the many wars of the period and, importantly, of the early bureaucratic state’s efforts to begin to alleviate the burden that the wars would otherwise have left them to carry.
There is other work to recommend beyond these “best four”. In an earlier review at this site, in 2019-20, Mark Shearwood observed that “it would be possible to fill my Christmas list” with books by John Childs alone, so monumental is that body of work published over the thirty years from 1976 to 2007. Childs’s five studies of the history and the evolution of the army under the later Stuarts, which span the years 1660 to 1702, are the modern groundwork upon which any student of the 18th-century army under Queen Anne and the first two Georges must base his research.
While he has concentrated on the period of the mid-century and the American War, and although his books have been as much about the political and social setting in which the army found itself as about the army itself, Stephen Conway’s work is grounded in deep research among the primary sources and has been deservedly influential. His War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (2006), and The British Isles and the American War of Independence (2000), can be highlighted, while his many articles in learned journals on aspects of the old army itself, notably on its officers, are particularly valuable.
Stephen Brumwell’s two books on the 18th-century army must be recommended. One is a well-received biography – Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe (2006) – but most important on the old army itself is his Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755-1763 (2002). Redcoats explores the social background of officers and soldiers, their lives on campaign, and the development of tactics in a difficult theatre. Their growing experience gave rise to a “learning curve” which he shows to have reached its peak in the sheer soldierly skill-at-arms that all ranks displayed in the West Indies operations late in the Seven Years’ War.
The actual command of general officers and their staffs on campaign and in battle have very seldom been given much consideration in our period, not least because the appropriate papers and memoirs have seemed to be rare, but Stewart Stansfield’s excellent Early Modern Systems of Command (2016), which concentrates on the British forces in the Low Countries and Germany during 1702-1711, has now shown what can and ought to be done.
Among his several publications on the old army, Don Hagist’s two most recent, well-researched books both deal with the army’s often hard and fast-moving service in America -- Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution (2020), and These Distinguished Corps: British Grenadier and Light Infantry Battalions in the American Revolution (2022). While the latter work takes up the unit makeup and operations of the ad hoc battalions of flank companies, the former essays a variety of topics like recruiting and training at home and in America, and is at its most interesting on the difficult conditions that the army had to endure during its operations in the field, notably the supply of provisions, the bivouacs, tenting, hutments and encampments. Both works demonstrate the generally high level of morale among the Other Ranks throughout the war.
One must recommend, finally, three important specialist studies of military firearms during our period, each of them expert. De Witt Bailey’s Small Arms of the British Forces in America, 1664-1815 (2009), and his British Military Flintlock Rifles, 1740-1810 (2002), are among the most detailed, well-illustrated, and essential of his books, while the word “definitive” seems hardly enough to describe David Harding’s massive, four-volume work of research, his Smallarms of the East India Company, 1660-1865 (1997). There is no greater study of military firearms during the black-powder era than Harding’s, and despite its concentration on the HEIC – which of course shared many variants on the British Army’s weapons -- every student of the 18th-century military must read it.
There remain, still, many fields that have been little-touched and that ought to be ploughed, of which two come to mind. One is the guns, equipment, and ordnance parks of the Royal Artillery, on which very little has been done since Adrian Caruana’s day, leaving a gap that is difficult to overcome by anyone attempting to write a history of the land forces, or of individual campaigns and battles. We need, too, detailed studies of the administration of the army during the century, a vast subject on which a major work has always wanting, while sections in Part 2 of Roger Knight’s Britain Against Napoleon (2013) suggests the path to be followed.