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History of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, Vol. 1
Francis Duncan
History of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, Vol. 1 / Compiled from the Original Records
PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION
A further reorganization of the Royal Artillery, involving alterations in the nomenclature of Batteries, having taken place since the publication of the Second Edition, the Author has deemed it desirable to issue a Third, with tables added to Appendix C, in the Second Volume, which will enable the reader to keep up the continuity.
These frequent changes are embarrassing to the student of history, but in the present instance the change has been distinctly advantageous in an administrative point of view.
Woolwich.October, 1879.PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
The unexpected favour accorded to the first edition of this work having already rendered a second necessary, the author has taken the opportunity of making many corrections and additions, and of embodying the indices of both volumes in one. The history, as it now stands, represents the services of the Corps in detail as far as the year 1815, and gives a summary of the services of those batteries now in existence, which represent the troops and companies of the old Royal Horse Artillery, and of the nine senior battalions of the Royal Artillery. The tables at the end of both volumes will also assist the reader in tracing the antecedents of every battery in the Regiment.
The author takes this opportunity of expressing his gratitude to his brother officers for the cordial sympathy and encouragement which he has received from them during his labours, and his hope that the noble narrative commenced by him will not long remain unfinished. The importance of completing the record of the Corps' services in the Crimea and India, while the officers who served in these campaigns are yet alive, is very apparent; and the author would respectfully suggest that any documents throwing light upon these services, which are in the possession of any one belonging to, or interested in the Corps, should be deposited for safe keeping, and for reference, in the Regimental Record Office at Woolwich.
March 2, 1874.PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
Among the uneducated, discipline is created by fear, and confirmed by habit. Among the educated, the agency at work is more complicated. Sympathy with the machine of which the individual finds himself a part, and a reasoning apprehension of the necessity of discipline, are mingled with a strong feeling of responsibility; and, as in the former case, habit steps in to cement the whole. Of all these agents, the noblest is undoubtedly the sense of responsibility, and the highest duty of a military commander is to awaken this sense where it does not exist, and to confirm and strengthen it where it does.
Two means may be employed to ensure this end. First: let the importance of his duty be impressed on the individual, and let the value in a military sense of what might seem at first sight trivial be carefully demonstrated. Let it be explained that neglect of some seemingly slight duty may disarrange the whole machine; and that for this reason no duty, in a soldier's eyes, should appear slight or trivial. Second: let an esprit de corps be fostered, such as shall make a man feel it a shame to be negligent or unworthy.
History has a power to awaken this esprit, which it is impossible to overrate. Its power reaches the educated and the uneducated alike; it begets a sympathy with the past, which is a sure agent in creating cohesion in the present; for the interest which binds us to our predecessors binds us also to one another. In this cohesion and sympathy is to be found the most sublime form of true discipline.
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
In the summer of 1682, for the space of nearly three months, an old man might have been seen pacing daily up and down near the Ordnance Offices in the Tower of London, growing shabbier day by day, more hopeless and purposeless in his gait, yet seeming bound to the place either by expectation or command.
At last with trembling hand he prepared for the Honourable Board of Ordnance the following quaint petition: —
"The humble Petition of John Hawling, Master Gunner of
His Majesty's Castle of Chester."
"Sheweth: —
"That ye Petitioner being commanded up by special order from the office hath remained here ye space of 13 weeks to his great cost and charges, he being a very poor and ancient man, not having wherewithal to subsist in so chargeable a place.
"He therefor most humbly implores yr Honrs to take his sad condition into your Honours' consideration, and to restore him to his place again, yt he may return to his habitation with such commands as your Honrs shall think fitt to lay upon him.
"And your Petitioner as in duty bound shall ever pray."
To which Petition the Honourable Board returned the following peremptory answer: —
"Let ye Petitioner return back to Chester Castle, and there submit himself to Sir Jeoffrey Shakerley, Governor, in ye presence of Sir Peter Pindar and Mr. Anderton, and obey ye orders of ye Governor and Lieut. – Governor of ye said castle, and upon his said submission and obedience, let him continue and enjoy his former employment of Master Gunner there, so long as he shall so behave himselfe accordingly."
John Hawling, this poor and ancient man, was one of the small class of Master Gunners, and Gunners of Garrisons, who with the few fee'd Gunners at the Tower, represented the only permanent force of Artillery in those days in England. Their scientific attainments as Artillerists were small, and their sense of discipline was feeble. To take a very superficial charge of Ordnance Stores, and to resent any military interference, such as at Chester seems to have driven John Hawling into mutiny, but at the same time to cringe to the Board, which was the source of their annual income, represented in their minds the sum and substance of their duties. And taking into consideration John Hawling's offence, his advanced years, and his petition, we do not err in taking him as a representative man.
In the House of Commons, on the 22nd of February, 1872, the Secretary of State for War rose to move the Army Estimates for the ensuing year. These included provision for a Regiment of Artillery, numbering – including those serving in India – 34,943 officers, non-commissioned officers, and men.
Although divided into Horse, Field, and Garrison Artillery, and including no less than twenty-nine Brigades, besides a large Depôt, this large force, representing the permanent Artillery Force of Great Britain, was one vast regiment – the Royal Regiment of Artillery.
To trace the growth, from so small an acorn, of so noble a tree, is a task which would inspire the boldest author with diffidence: and when the duty is undertaken by one who has had no experience in historical writing, he is bound to justify himself to his readers for his temerity.
When the writer of the following pages assumed, in January, 1871, the duties of Superintendent of the Royal Artillery Regimental Records, he found a method and order established by his predecessor, Major R. Oldfield, R.A., all the more remarkable when compared with the chaos too often prevailing in Record offices. The idea immediately occurred to him that if ever a History of the Regiment were to be written – a book greatly wanted, and yet becoming every day more difficult to write – here, in this office, could it most easily be done. This feeling became so strong in his mind, that it overcame the reluctance he felt to step into an arena for which he had received no special training.
The unwillingness felt by him was increased by the knowledge that there was in the Regiment an officer, Colonel F. Miller, V.C., who was eminently qualified for writing such a History. Other and more pressing duties had, however, prevented that officer from undertaking a work which he had once contemplated; but of the many documents and books which the author of the following pages has made use of for his purpose, none has been more valuable than an exhaustive pamphlet published some years ago by Colonel Miller for private circulation, and his recent edition of Kane's list of Artillery officers, with its comprehensive Appendix.
It has been said above that the writing of this History has been every year becoming more difficult. The statement requires explanation, as the difficulty is not caused so much by the accumulation – continually going on – of modern records, which might bury the old ones out of sight, as by a change in the organization of the Regiment which took place some years ago, and which sadly dislocated its history, although possibly improving its efficiency. In the year 1859, the old system which divided the Regiment into Companies and Battalions, with permanent Battalion Headquarters at Woolwich, was abolished; and Companies serving in different parts of the Empire were linked together in Brigades, on grounds of Geography, instead of History. Companies of different Battalions serving on the same station were christened Batteries of the same Brigade, and the old Battalion staff at Woolwich became the staff, at various stations, of the Brigades newly created. The old Companies, in donning their new titles, lost their old history and began their life anew. Every year as it passed made the wall which had been built between the present and the past of the Regiment more nearly approach the student's horizon, and the day seemed imminent when it would be impossible to make the existing Batteries know and realize that the glorious History of the old Companies was their own legitimate property.
The evil of such a state can hardly be described. The importance of maintaining the esprit of Batteries cannot be overrated. And esprit feeds and flourishes upon history.
Nor can Battery esprit be created by a general Regimental history. The particular satisfies the appetite which refuses to be nourished upon the general. The memory which will gloat over the stories of Minden, Gibraltar, or Waterloo, will look coldly on the Regimental Motto "Ubique." Therefore, he who would make the influence of history most surely felt by an Artilleryman must spare no labour in tracing the links which connect the Batteries of the present with the Companies of the past. For the Battery is the unit of Artillery: all other organization is accidental. Whether the administrative web, which encloses a number of Batteries, be called a Battalion or a Brigade system, is a matter of secondary importance. It is by Batteries that Artillerymen make War; and it is by Batteries that their history should be traced.
With this feeling uppermost in his mind, the author of these pages has endeavoured on every occasion to revive the memories which will be dear to the officers and men of Batteries – memories which ran a risk of being lost with the introduction of a new nomenclature. On such memories an esprit de corps, which no legislation can create, will blossom easily and brilliantly; and no weapon for discipline in the hand of a commander will be found more true than the power of appealing to his men to remember the reputation which their predecessors earned with their lives.
This first volume will give the present designation, the past history, and the succession of Captains of the whole of the Companies of the seven Battalions formed during the last century and of the old troops of the Royal Horse Artillery. In the succeeding volumes, the same course will be pursued with regard to the later Battalions.
These stories will be all the more precious now, as the importance of the Battery as a tactical unit has been so distinctly recognized by His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge within the last few months, and its responsibility and value as a command have been so recently and generously marked by the present Secretary of State for War.
The author does not pretend to underrate the difficulties of the task which he has undertaken – difficulties which cannot be realized by those who see merely these inadequate results of his labours. Not the least was the difficulty of knowing where to begin. The Regimental organization is comparatively recent; and had he confined his labours to the last one hundred and sixty years, his task would have been greatly lessened, and yet he might have said with literal truth that he had written a History of the Royal Artillery. But surely in any History worthy of the name there were antecedent circumstances which could not be left unnoticed, such as the circumstances which brought about the birth of the Regiment, the blunders and failures which marked the old system in England as wrong and foolish, and the necessity, which gradually dawned, of having in the country a permanent, instead of a spasmodic force of Artillery.
Repudiating, therefore, the notion that the Regiment's History should commence with its first parade, how far was he to penetrate in his antiquarian researches? There was a danger of wearying his reader, which had to be avoided fully as carefully as the risk of omitting necessary information, for a history – to be useful in awakening esprit de corps– should be read, not shelved as a work of reference. It is in this part of his labours that the author has to appeal for the greatest indulgence, because writing, as he has generally done, with all his documents and authorities round him for reference, he may unconsciously have omitted some details most necessary to the reader; or with some picture clearly present to his own mind as he wrote, he may have given light and shade which had caught his own fancy, and omitted the outlines without which the picture will be almost unintelligible.
Of the many to whom he is indebted for assistance he feels called upon to mention specially the Secretary of State for War, by whose permission he had unlimited access to the Ordnance Library in the Tower; Colonel Middleton, C.B., Deputy Adjutant-General of the Royal Artillery; General McDowell, commanding the troops in New York; Lieutenant A. B. Gardner, of the United States Artillery; and the Committees of the Royal Artillery and United Service Institutions.
The works which the author has consulted are too numerous to mention, but among those which were most useful to him were Drinkwater's 'Siege of Gibraltar,' Murdoch's 'History of Nova Scotia,' Browne's 'England's Artillerymen,' Clode's 'Military Forces of the Crown,' the Reports of the House of Commons, the Records of the Royal Military Academy, Kirke's 'Conquest of Canada,' Rameau's 'La France aux Colonies,' Cust's 'Annals of the Wars.'
Among the mass of MSS. through which he had to wade, the valuable manuscript notes connected with the 'History of the Royal Artillery,' arranged by the late Colonel Cleaveland, deserve special mention. The skeleton of this work, however, was furnished by the old Record Books of the Battalions, deposited in the office of which the author is Superintendent.
In the succeeding volumes, the advantage of being able to use the old letter-books of the head-quarter offices of the Royal Artillery will be apparent. But there was no head-quarter staff for the Regiment up to the time where this volume finishes; so that the student has, up to that date, to depend greatly on men like General James Pattison and Forbes Macbean, who placed on record, in their diaries and letter-books, valuable and interesting information connected with the Regiment during their service, which would otherwise have been hopelessly unattainable.
The value of such a History as this, if the writer has not utterly failed in his object, cannot be better shown than in some words addressed by one of our most distinguished Artillery officers (Sir E. C. Warde) to an audience at the Royal Artillery Institution a few months ago. The family affection which he urged as the model for Regimental esprit cannot be better fostered than by reviving the stories of our predecessors' gallant deeds and scientific excellence. As a Regiment, we are now large almost to unwieldiness, and conflicting interests and tastes tend to diminish the desired sympathy and cohesion. And, as in the crowded pit of a theatre before the performance commences, there is elbowing, and crowding, and wrangling for place, yet when the curtain rises all is hushed and quiet, – there is room for every one, – and the look of selfishness is exchanged for one of interest and pleasure, – so, among our great numbers, although there must be many and diverse interests and tastes, yet we all become as one as we gaze on the great dramas in which those of us have acted who have gone before.
The words used by Sir Edward Warde were as follows: – "It has ever been our pride, as a corps, to be regarded as one family; and if one member of it, in any remote part of the world, in any way distinguished himself, it was felt universally that he had reflected credit and honour on the whole corps. And so, vice versâ. Should we not, then, extend those feelings as they apply to private families, in which members embrace different professions? One becomes a soldier, another a sailor, a third enters the Church, a fourth goes up for the bar, and so on; and if any one gain honour and distinction, all equally feel that such honour and distinction is reflected upon the whole family, and all equally glory and rejoice in it. So should it be with us. Some of us take special interest in the personnel, as it is well known to you all that I have done throughout my career; but is that any reason why I should not take an interest – aye, and a warm interest – in the success of those brother officers who pursue scientific researches, and seek honour and distinction in the pursuit of literature, and in endeavouring to raise the character of our corps as one from which highly scientific attainments are expected? No, indeed; the very reverse should be our guiding rule; and I can conceive no position more honourable than that held for so many years by our highly distinguished brother officer, Sir Edward Sabine. Let us, then, feel that we are one family, and let us rejoice in the success of every one of its members, whether they are so fortunate as to gain distinction in the field, in the siege, or in literary and scientific pursuits; and by so doing may we hope, not only to maintain our present high reputation, but to increase it as time goes on."
CHAPTER I.
The Masters-General of the Ordnance and theirHonourable Board
There are many reasons why the Masters-General of the Ordnance must interest the student of the History of the Royal Artillery. In the days before the Regimental organization existed, all Artillery details came under the care and superintendence of the Masters-General; and to a distinguished one of their number does the Regiment owe its formation. The interest becomes deeper and closer after that date; for in addition to the general superintendence which had already existed, the Master-General had now a special interest in the Royal Artillery, in his ex officio capacity as its Colonel.
And whatever objections may be urged against the Board of Ordnance, the Royal Artillery, save in one particular, has always had abundant and special reason for regarding it with affection and gratitude. The almost fatherly care, even to the minutest details, which the Board showed to that corps over which their Master presided, was such as to awaken the jealousy of the other arms of the service. Had their government not been of that description which attempts to govern too much, not a word could be said by an Artilleryman, save in deprecation of the day when the Board of Ordnance was abolished. Unfortunately, like a parent who has failed to realize that his children have become men, the Board invariably interfered with the duties of the Artillery under whatever circumstances its officers might be situated. No amount of individual experience, no success, no distance from England, could save unhappy Artillerymen from perpetual worry and incessant legislation. The piteous protests and appeals which meet the student at every turn give some idea of the torture to which the miserable writers had been exposed. The way, also, in which the Board expressed its parental affection was often such as to neutralize its aim. It was rare indeed that any General Officer commanding an army on service made an appointment of however temporary or trivial a nature, which had to come under the approval of the Board, without having it peremptorily cancelled. Even in time of peace, the presence in every garrison of that band of conspirators, known as the Respective Officers – who represented the obstructive Board, and whose opinion carried far more weight than that of the General commanding – was enough to irritate that unhappy officer into detestation of the Honourable Board and all connected with it.
It has been declared – and by many well able to judge, including the Duke of Wellington himself – that in many respects the Board of Ordnance was an excellent national institution and a source of economy to the country. It may be admitted that in its civil capacity this was the case, and the recent tendency to revive in the army something like the Civil Branch of the Ordnance proves that this opinion is general. But, if we take a more liberal view than that of mere Artillerymen, we must see that the military division of its duties was only saved from exposure and disgrace by the fact that the bodies of troops over which it had control were generally small and scattered. The command of the Royal Artillery, now that it has attained its present numbers, could not have remained vested in the hands of a Board constituted as the Board of Ordnance was. What General Officer could have hoped to weld the three arms of his division into any homogeneous shape, while one of them could quote special privileges, special orders, and sometimes positive prohibition, from a body to which they owed a very special obedience? The Royal Artillery may indeed have lost in little comforts and perquisites by the abolition of the Board of Ordnance, but in a military point of view, in proficiency, and in popularity, the Regiment has decidedly been a gainer.
While admitting, however, the advantages, nay, the necessity of the change which has taken place, the long roll of distinguished soldiers and statesmen who have successively held the office of Master-General of the Ordnance is too precious an heirloom in the eyes of an Artilleryman to let pass without special notice and congratulation.
From 1483, the earliest date when we can trace one by name, down to the days of the Crimean war, when the last Master-General died in harness, the brave, gentle Lord Raglan, the list sparkles with the names of men who have been first in Court and field, and who have deserved well of England.
Their duties were by no means honorary in earlier times, although during the last fifty years of the Board's existence the chief work fell upon the permanent staff, and the visits of the Master-General were comparatively rare and ceremonious. If any one would learn what they had to do in the seventeenth century, let him go to the Tower, and examine the correspondence of Lord Dartmouth, the faithful friend and servant of Charles II., a professional Artilleryman and James II.'s skilled Master-General to the last. He created order out of chaos in the Department of the Ordnance, under Charles II., and so admirable were his arrangements, that on King William ascending the throne, he issued a warrant ratifying all previous orders, and leaving the details of the management of the Ordnance unaltered. In the autumn of 1688, Lord Dartmouth's office – never a sinecure – became laborious in the extreme. Daily and hourly requisitions reached him from the excited King and his Ministers, for the arming of the ships and the Regiments which were being raised in every direction. Authority was given to raise more gunners, as if experience could be created in a moment and the science of Artillery begotten in a man's mind, without previous study, for "twelve-pence by the day." To Chatham the Master-General hurries to superintend the fitting-out of the men-of-war, and next day, for the same purpose, to Sheerness, where he finds a despatch from the trembling Privy Council, ordering him to fill six merchant ships with fireworks to accompany the King's fleet, as fire-ships against the enemy. A terrible life did poor Lord Dartmouth lead at this time. Sometimes his letters are written from on board ship in the river, sometimes from his cabin in the 'Resolution,' at Portsmouth; very frequently from Windsor, where James anxiously kept him near his person, plying him now with questions and now with contradictory orders. Sometimes we find him writing at midnight, ordering his loving friends, the principal officers of the Ordnance, to meet him next day at the Cockpit, in Whitehall; at other times he swoops down unexpectedly on the bewildered officials in the Tower. In the old, quiet days, his correspondence was distinguished by an almost excessive courtesy; but now, in these days of fever and in the depth of his anxiety, it almost disappears; orders are issued like minute-guns; explanations of delay are fretfully demanded; and a bombardment is incessant of peremptory inquiries as to the state of His Majesty's ships and stores.