1775 (67 page)

By 1775, the acceptably small “political nation” approved by conservatives was losing acquiescence among middle-class Britons. The Englishmen pressing hardest against these closed Old World doors would have qualified for the franchise in many of the North American colonies, which may have encouraged some transatlantic empathy.

In sharp contrast to New Englanders or Virginians,
rage militaire
—the desire to shoulder muskets—was rare in workaday Englishmen. No such enthusiasm appeared until 1778, when French entry into the war made immediate the threat of invasion. New artillery emplacements in Cornwall and distant views of French warships off Devon or Sussex did the trick. In 1775, though, early Loyalist refugees arriving in England were “acutely dismayed
to find that the home country was not united in support of the American war. The war was very unpopular in many quarters, especially lower down the social scale.”
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These divisions in British opinion provide an essential context for recruitment and enlistment issues.
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Within England, support for the colonies was generally strongest in the major cities and in the eastern and southern counties—revealingly, an approximate geographic reiteration of where English Civil War support had been strongest for Parliament and Cromwell against King Charles.

Seventeen seventy-five found London and other major centers like Bristol, Newcastle, and Norwich generally on the side of conciliation. Nine out of twelve London-area parliamentary seats had elected members who were generally pro-American, including the flamboyant radical John Wilkes, who also served as Lord Mayor of London. To John Sainsbury, a British historian and expert on the period, “by denying to the king and Lord North’s administration the national unanimity that they sought in the face of colonial rebellion, the pro-Americans [of London] justified their own assertion that the American War of Independence was in fact a civil war.”
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Edmund Burke represented maritime Bristol in Parliament, and the considerable American sympathies of Newcastle and Norwich have been well established.
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Unsurprisingly, the southern and eastern English countryside most sympathetic to the colonies had been in the forefront of their initial seventeenth-century settlement. East Anglia—the right thumb (including Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge, and Middlesex) that juts out northeast of London—had been New England’s principal ancestral seedbed. Dozens of replicated East Anglian place-names leap out from a map of eastern Massachusetts. In 1775, on the heels of King George’s proclamation declaring the colonies in rebellion, five East Anglian counties and towns opposed coercion or petitioned the Crown for conciliation.
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By one account, East Anglia circa 1775 was as nearly “monolithic” for conciliation as Scotland was for king and coercion.
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Just west of London, Hampshire and Berkshire were as active as East Anglia.

Nonconforming Protestants—Presbyterians, Baptists, Independents (Congregationalists), Quakers, and others—made up just 5 to 7 percent of the English population in the 1770s. Even so, towns and districts where they concentrated were especially likely to display American sympathies. Dissenters were conspicuous in initiating conciliatory petitions in 1775.
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Studies of the procoercion addresses and proconciliation petitions sent to
London in 1775 also confirm clear economic and vocational differences. Whereas the belligerent addresses were signed by Anglican churchmen, government contractors and officials, lawyers, doctors, esquires, and gentry, sympathetic petitions typically attracted support from nonconformist clergy and laymen, artisans, shopkeepers and skilled craftsmen, tavern keepers, and coffeehouse owners, and the radicals among gentry and lawyers.
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One has to be careful describing Anglicans as particularly inclined to support coercion. Virtually all of the pro-Americans in Parliament were themselves Anglican simply because conforming to the Church of England was a precondition of holding office. Nevertheless, as described by one British specialist, “there was no doubt where the inclination of the Anglican clergy lay, and they made no secret of their desires to stoke the fires of anti-Americanism. In many parts of the country, the pulpit reinforced a national political campaign for the first time in many years.”
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Within England as a whole, support for coercion was greatest in the old Tory and Jacobite centers. Backing for the Crown, wrote American religious historian James Bradley, maximized in Lancashire, where residents sought to banish suspicions of their loyalty left from the days of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and in the West Midlands, “a traditional Tory stronghold and a prominent center of the Forty Five.”
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Political leaders in Scotland, committed to expunging North Britain’s erstwhile treason of 1745–1746 through militant enthusiasm for the war and the House of Hanover, brooked little opposition. No Scottish parliament existed, and a mere 3,000 voters chose the men that Scotland sent to Westminster. The principal power broker, Henry Dundas, managed the eighteenth-century equivalent of a machine—Chicago city hall in kilts. English Whigs harped on Scotland as incurably autocratic, but the larger Scottish motivation lay in the fast-flowing benefits and patronage of empire. Braw lads raised on cold oatmeal were now spooning sturgeon eggs. The imperial realm in general—and North America in particular—had become a cornucopia for Scottish soldiers, adventurers, lawyers, overseas administrators, merchants, tobacco factors, and bankers. The details are striking.
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Support in Scotland for the American cause was limited to a small fringe—some intellectuals, radicals bred in the tradition of Scotland’s Covenanter southwest, and adherents of the Popular Party of the Church of Scotland (admired in America but dismissed as “the wilds” by Edinburgh social arbiters). To raise Highland regiments to fight in America represented a coming of age for Scottish leadership.

The divisions in Ireland were more complicated. Enthusiasm for the thirteen colonies maximized among the 15 to 20 percent of Irish who were Protestants, but particularly among the 10 percent who were Presbyterians. Widely signed petitions for conciliation were sent to the king in 1775 by these communities of Dublin and Belfast. The Church of Ireland—transplanted Anglicanism, replete with bishops and British officialdom (“Dublin Castle”) as communicants—overwhelmingly sided with the king. But Ulster Presbyterians, the Scotch-Irish of the Old World, were more numerous and pro-Patriot. Even the English Lord Lieutenant, Earl Harcourt, described them as “in their hearts Americans.”
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Meanwhile, the Catholic nobility and gentry, together with a rising Catholic merchant and professional class in Cork and Dublin, somewhat paralleled their Gaelic cousins in Scotland by seeing and pursuing new commercial and military opportunities in the British Empire. Nor did Stuart claimants to the British throne continue to divert Catholic loyalties. In 1766, the Holy See had cut the cord, ending the Stuarts’ voice in the appointment of Irish bishops and senior clergy. Elements of the Irish Catholic hierarchy now dismissed the American Patriots as Calvinists, Presbyterians, and republicans. Since the 1970s, Irish historians have acknowledged the details.
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The willingness of George III to turn to Gaelic-speaking regions in military recruitment and enlistment did smack of Stuart-era predilections, even though the “autocratic” ideology visible in 1775 differed by
upholding
Parliament rather than dismissing or suspending it. Still, Rockingham, Shelburne, or a chronicler like Horace Walpole could have cited a famous mid-seventeenth-century portrait of Charles I. That monarch, too, was shown being prepared for the Battle of Worcester against the Puritans by an allegory of Scotland presenting a pistol and Ireland adjusting his armor.
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The Political and Ethnic Context of Britain’s 1775–1776 Mobilization

The dissimilar attitudes toward the war within the British Isles can be roughly framed: greater reluctance and disagreement in England; self-serving ardor in Scotland; and a duality in Ireland—the era’s prize turf for military recruitment—that substantially reflected religious divisions.

Within England, sheriffs and magistrates offering convicted criminals the alternative of joining the army were among the few successful recruiting
officers. In Hampshire, one local magistrate took pride in enabling the enlistment of a hundred convicts between December 1775 and June 1776. Just after Christmas, the Privy Council had also ordered local authorities to issue warrants for impressing vagrants.
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Enlistment in 1775, said one prominent historian, moved “almost imperceptibly in England, where hardly any enthusiasm for the war existed among the classes from whom soldiers were drawn.”
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A later scholar, detailing Scottish martial enthusiasm, counted England “almost comically barren as a recruiting ground.” Adjutant General Edward Harvey complained in December 1775 of “sad work everywhere in recruiting.”
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King George and Parliament could find pro-American views near at hand. The Radical Whigs who controlled municipal government in London openly withheld support from the war effort, and the wounded soldiers, orphans, and widows for whom Londoners first took up collections were
Americans.
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Berkshire’s county seat, Abingdon, was not far from Windsor Castle; the Earl of Abingdon opposed the war, and the town petitioned for conciliation.

In Nottingham, a Whig textile center represented in Parliament by William Howe, ministerial supporters complained that local authorities “do all in their power to hinder the service by preventing as much as possible the enlistment of soldiers.” Historian Edward Gibbon, only months from publishing his monumental
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
criticized dissenters in England and Ireland for impeding the army’s growth.
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Supporters of conciliation in Hampshire mocked the number of Anglican clerics (30) signing the county’s coercive address: Was the Church, they asked, planning to organize its own grenadier company?
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No new army regiments were organized in England in either 1775 or 1776, partly because King George preferred to concentrate on filling the many empty places in the existing units.
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This, as we will see, could best be accomplished by sending recruiting officers to Ireland and Germany. Logically enough, enrollment in England seems to have been concentrated in the North and the West Midlands, further confirming the judgment of British and American historians that Crown recruiters emphasized the old Jacobite and Stuart constituencies.
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Ineffective recruiting in most of England compelled these alternatives. Although the 7 million people in England and Wales dominated Britain’s population, their contribution to the army was small. In 1774, the scantily
manned British standing army had only 35,000 officers and men, probably two thirds English.
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Between September 1775 and September 1777, only 18,000 more were added to the British establishment [army], and of these, a majority came from Scotland and Ireland.
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As for Englishmen and Welshmen, even in mid-1776, the British Army may well have contained only 25,000 or so, including its fresh sprinkling of convicts and vagrants. Such was the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. By contrast, the German state of Hesse-Cassel, as of 1776, had squeezed an army of 22,000 from a population of just 400,000. By one calculation, had England and Wales raised a comparable ratio, 400,000 men would have been called to the colors.
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In Parliament’s February 1776 debates, the Earl of Shelburne, another prominent American sympathizer, offered a further contrast. During the 1756–1763 war, he said, the British government had drawn a total of 400,000 Britons to fight in both the army and the navy. The current regime, amid an unpopular conflict, was unable to raise one fifth of that number of natives without running to paltry German principalities for salvation.
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With Parliament still compliant, Lord North handily carried the vote on the treaties by nearly three to one in the House of Commons. If the German arrangements were obviously necessary, they also reflected outdated assumptions. In a war that many Englishmen shunned, using Continental mercenaries to suppress Whig colonists was an unwise undertaking.

The ministry’s decision to vastly increase its recruitment from the Scottish Highlands, by contrast, was imperially shrewd. A Scotland no longer swayable by Stuarts or Pretenders was a manpower tap waiting to be turned. Inverness-shire, the heartland of the 1745 rising, was calculated to have 12,000 “military effectives” ready to bear arms.
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King George did not favor raising new regiments in Sussex or Surrey, but he consented for Glen More and Glen Spean, where Simon Fraser, son of the Lord Lovat executed after the Forty Five, was eager to regain the family estates and titles. Thus, the one new British regiment authorized in 1775 was the 71st Foot: the Fraser Highlanders. Its company commanders represented a former-Jacobite muster roll: MacLeod of MacLeod, Chisholm, Cameron of Lochiel. By 1780, nine more Scottish regiments had been formed, led by the MacLeod, Argyll, MacDonnell, Athol, Seaforth, and Aberdeen Highlanders.
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Because a considerable minority of the new recruits were from Catholic glens and braes, Parliament’s Scottish Catholic Relief Act of 1778 was designed
in part to maintain the flow. The Popular Party of the Church of Scotland, however, helped to defeat the proposal by arguing that its motivation was to raise Catholic troops for use against fellow Protestants in America.
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The North ministry’s military and logistical courtship of Ireland was on a larger scale. Catholic disabilities were eased, Irish trade favored, and military contracts in Ireland expanded. Cork circa 1775 was playing a prominent new role as a British naval base; and its agricultural hinterland became a principal source of beef, bacon, and butter for the British Army and Royal Navy.
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Until 1771, the British Army had done little recruiting in Ireland, not least because Catholic enlistment was barred by the Irish Penal Code. In 1775, however,
connive
became the new byword. Recruiters were to “connive” in matters relating to oath taking and the Penal Code. From his perch in Dublin Castle, Lord Harcourt giddily envisioned not the 12,000 potential “military effectives” of Inverness-shire but “two millions of loyal, faithful and affectionate hearts and hands.” In the more sober words of British historian Stephen Conway, London had set its sights on “the great mass of under-exploited Catholic manpower in Ireland.”
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