History of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, Vol. 1

His Lieutenant-General, Sir Henry Tichborne, has a hard place of it at this time. With so energetic a Master at the Board, his work hitherto has been of the lightest, and his head seems now to reel under the change. For a few weeks he holds out, but by the end of November in that eventful year matters came to a crisis with poor Sir Henry. He can no longer attend the meetings of the Board; a violent fit of the gout prevents him, which he carefully warns his colleagues will, in all likelihood, continue some time: and with a piteous prayer that, out of the small sum in hand, the Board will pay the salaries of the "poor gunners, as subsisting but from day to day," Sir Henry's name disappears from the Board's proceedings, and the History of the Ordnance knows him no more.

After this time the Honourable Board seems, when its Master was absent, to have enacted the part of the Unjust Steward, for we find various debts remitted to creditors who could not pay, and not a small issue of debentures to those whose friendship it was desirable to retain. All through the records of their proceedings at this time is to be traced, like a monotonous accompaniment in music, the work of that immovable being the permanent clerk. From the dull offices in the Tower issue the same solemn Warrants, appointing this man an Ordnance labourer at six-and-twenty pounds a year, and that man a gunner at twelve-pence a day, just as if no Revolution were at hand, and no foreign foe were menacing the very existence of their King and Honourable Board together. Lord Dartmouth may be guilty of curt and feverish memoranda, but the permanent clerk never moves out of his groove, nor shall posterity ever trace any uneasiness in his formal work.

And then comes the sudden gap in all the books; the blank pages more eloquent than words; the disappearance of the familiar signature of Dartmouth; and the student takes up a fresh set of books where England took up a fresh King.

The duties of the Master-General, and the various members and servants of the Board of Ordnance, were first reduced to a systematic form in Charles II.'s reign, while Lord Dartmouth was in office. The Warrant defining these was confirmed by James II. on the 4th February, 1686; by William III., on the 8th March, 1689; by Queen Anne, on the 30th June, 1702; by George I., on the 30th July, 1715; and by George II., on the 17th June, 1727.

Although some alterations were made by George III., they were very slight, and rendered necessary by the occasional absence of the Master-General and by the creation of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich – the Cadets attending that institution being placed in a very special manner under the care and superintendence of the Master and Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance. The orders under which the Board worked up to the beginning of this century were, therefore, practically those instituted during Lord Dartmouth's term of office; and in examining them, one cannot fail to be struck with their exhaustive anticipation of every circumstance which might arise for consideration.

The Master of the Ordnance, as he was originally called – sometimes also termed the Captain-General of the Artillery – received, in 1604, the title of Master-General; and was considered one of the most important personages in the realm. Since the great Marlborough held the office, it has seldom been given to any one not already possessed of the highest military rank: but this was not always the case. Lord Dartmouth was plain Colonel Legge when first appointed, and the social, as well as military rank of his predecessors, was sometimes far from exalted. It became, therefore, necessary to attach to the office some relative military status: and accordingly we find a Warrant issued by James II., bearing date the 13th May, 1686, directing that the Master-General of the Ordnance should always have "the rank, as well as the respect, due to our youngest Lieutenant-General: and that our will and pleasure is, that he command in our Garrisons as formerly, but do not take upon him the charge or command as a Lieutenant-General in the field, without our especial commission or appointment." The command in the Garrisons referred to in the Warrant is in allusion to the Master-Gunners and Gunners of the various Garrisons, whose allegiance to the Board of Ordnance, as being, in fact, custodians of the Ordnance Stores, was always insisted on.

The relative rank awarded to the Master-General entitled him, when passing through any Camp or Garrison, to a guard of 1 officer, 1 sergeant, and 20 men; the guards were compelled to turn out to him and the drums to beat a march; and the officers and soldiers of the Regiments he passed had to turn out at the head of their respective camps. In the old pre-regimental days, when the Master-General took the field in time of war, in his official capacity, he was attended by a Chancellor, thirty gentlemen of the Ordnance, thirty harquebusiers on horseback, with eight halberdiers for his guard, two or three interpreters, a minister or preacher, a physician, a master-surgeon and his attendant, a trumpeter, kettledrums, and chariot with six white horses, two or three engineers, or more if required, and two or three refiners of gunpowder. These kettledrums do not seem to have been used in the field after 1748. They were used by the train of Artillery employed in Ireland in 1689, and the cost of the drums and their carriage on that occasion, was estimated at 158l. 9s. As the reader comes to compare the wages of the drummer and his coachman – 4s. and 3s. per diem respectively – with the pay given to other by no means unimportant members of an Artillery train, he will realize what a prominent position these officials were supposed to hold. The drummer's suit of clothes cost 50l., while a gunner's was valued at 5l. 6s. 4d. Even the coachman could not be clad under 15l.– nearly three times the cost of a gunner's clothes.

Prior to the date of King Charles's Warrant, the pay of the Master-General had been very fluctuating, being considerably affected by fees, and even by sales of places in the department. By that Warrant, however, it was fixed at a certain sum, inclusive of all perquisites, and the amount would appear to have been 1500l. per annum. This remained unchanged until the formation of the Cadet Company, when the annual sum of 474l. 10s. was added to the Master-General's salary, in his capacity as Captain of the Company, and charged in the Regimental accounts of the Royal Artillery. Considerable strides in the direction of further augmentation were afterwards made, more especially in 1801, until we find Lord Chatham, in 1809, drawing no less than 3709l. per annum as Master-General of the Ordnance.

There was an order forbidding any increase to the establishment of the Ordnance without the King's sign-manual, but it speedily became a dead letter; and changes were frequently made without authority, involving additional expense, and covered by something akin to supplementary estimates. In fact, the Parliamentary Commission which sat in 1810 to inquire into the various departments of the Ordnance ascertained that both in matters of personnel and matériel the power of the Master-General in his own department was simply unfettered. That it was not more frequently abused speaks well for the honesty of the department, and the honour of its chief officers.

The Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance at the meetings of the Board was like the Deputy-Chairman of a Company. His powers were in abeyance when the Master was present: although there were one or two cases in which his signature was required as one of the quorum necessary to legalize the business transacted. His office was created by Henry VIII., the designation of General being added subsequently. Until the days of Sir Christopher Musgrave he had an official residence in the Minories; and on its being taken from him he received in lieu the annual allowance of 300l. Another perquisite of the Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance was the ground called, as the old deed expresses it, "Ye old Artillery Garden situate near ye Spitle in ye parish of St. Buttolph, Bishopsgate: " but this also being taken away from him, he was allowed, in March, 1683, the large manor-house and grounds commonly known as the Tower Place at Woolwich, together with the Warren, &c., where the Royal Arsenal now stands, a name given on the occasion of the visit paid to it by George III. in the spring of 1805. The use of this property by the Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance was, however, trammelled by the following conditions: – "That the proving of great guns should go on as heretofore in Woolwich: that the Government should have full control over all wharves, magazines, cranes, &c., and that a dwelling for the Master-Gunner of England should be allowed in the said Mansion-house, and lodging for ten fee'd gunners in the adjoining houses, and also for such Ordnance labourers as might be necessary."

The proper salary of the Lieutenant-General at first was 800l. per annum, supplemented, as mentioned above, by 300l. in lieu of a house; but rising like the pay of the other officers of the Board, we find in 1810, that it amounted to 1525l., besides an allowance for stationery. The Parliamentary Committee which sat in 1810 and 1811 suggested the abolition of the office of Lieutenant-General – a suggestion which was ultimately carried out in 1831. It was revived for a short time during the Crimean war, Sir Hew Ross holding the appointment during the absence at the seat of war of the Master-General, Lord Raglan; but this was a contingency which the Committee had foreseen, and was prepared to meet.

In examining the individual, apart from the collective, duties of the principal officers of the Ordnance, we find that the Lieutenant-General had the supervision of the military branch, and acted as a sort of Adjutant to the Master, who looked to him for all information connected with the various trains of artillery at the Tower and elsewhere. These he was bound always to have fit and ready to march: he had to direct and superintend the practice of the Master-Gunner of England, Firemaster and his mates, Fireworkers and Gunners, and acquaint the Master with their proficiencies; and also to see that all officials connected with the Department did their several duties.

The other four principal officers of the Ordnance were the Surveyor-General, the Clerk of the Ordnance, the Storekeeper, and the Clerk of the Deliveries, any three of whom formed a quorum. At the beginning of the present century the salaries of these officials were respectively 1225l., 825l., 725l., and 1000l. with a further annual sum of 200l. to the Clerk of the Deliveries during war. The whole of the principal officers were allowed 25l. a year for stationery, besides certain patent fees varying from 54l. 15s. in the case of the principal Storekeeper, to 18l. 5s. in that of the Clerk of the Deliveries. The departmental expenses were swollen by an army of public and private secretaries, clerks, and attendants.

As the work of the Lieutenant-General lay with the personnel, so that of the Surveyor-General lay with the matériel. On him lay the responsibility of superintending all stores, taking remains, and noting all issues and receipts.

The Clerk of the Ordnance had, in addition to the ordinary correspondence of the department, to look after salaries, debts, debentures, and bills falling due, and generally to perform, on a large scale, the duties of a modern book-keeper. If we may judge by the correspondence on financial matters which is to be found among the Ordnance Records, there must have been many a Clerk of the Ordnance whose days and nights were haunted by visions of bills falling due which could not be paid. During the times of the Stuarts, the poverty of the office was sometimes as terrible as the shifts to which the Board had recourse were pitiable.

Money seems to have been more plentiful during the reign of William III.; but when Queen Anne came to the throne, England's continental wars drained the Ordnance exchequer wofully; and while most of their debts were only paid in part, many were never paid at all. An amusing incident of the Board's impecuniosity occurred in 1713. An expedition to Canada having taken place, the gunners and matrosses employed were found after a time to be sadly in want of clothing. The Commissary of the Ordnance on the spot, being without funds, drew a bill on the Honourable Board for 140l., which instead of selling as usual to the merchants, he disposed of to one of the gunners, apparently a man of means, and destined ever after to be immortal, Mr. Frederick Price.

The bill, in due course, reached the Tower, but only two-thirds of the amount were paid. Mr. Price naturally remonstrated; but as the proceeding seems not to have been unusual, the Board took no notice. So the injured gunner petitioned the Queen, and a courteous letter from the Treasury speedily reached the Tower, in which a nice distinction was drawn between Mr. Price's case and that of the merchants, who had been similarly treated, "who had been great gainers as well by the exchange as by the stores and provisions which they had sold." The Board admitted the force of the reasoning, and the creditor got his own again.

The duties of the storekeeper are expressed by his title, and involved close and frequent personal inspection of stores, as well as great clerical labour.

The Clerk of the Deliveries had to draw all proportions for delivering any stores, and to keep copies of all orders or warrants for the proportions, and journals vouched by the persons who indented for them. He had to compare monthly the indents taken for all deliveries of stores with the Storekeeper's proportions; and had to attend, either in person or represented by one of his sworn clerks, at all deliveries of stores, and when taking remains of ships.

The Treasurer of the Ordnance, who had to find heavy personal securities, was one of the most important of the remaining officers attached to the Board.

So much for the individual duties of the principal officers of the Ordnance, duties which, it must be admitted, were generally well and conscientiously performed. Their acts, in their collective capacity, are more open to criticism. Although the Master-General could act independently of the Board, when he chose, and had full power of dismissing or suspending any of the officers, reporting the same to the Sovereign, he generally worked by means of the Board and, with his consent, their acts were perfectly legal and binding without his presence. His personal influence appeared chiefly in matters of patronage and promotion, and, after the foundation of the Royal Military Academy, it appeared in a very marked way in all matters connected with its government. But, with these exceptions, the actions of the Board which were most public, and call for most comment, are those which are to be traced to it in its collective capacity; and, as we shall see in the course of this History, their joint acts were often characterized by a pettiness, a weakness, and a blindness worthy of the most wooden-headed vestry of the nineteenth century. It is marvellous how frequently men who, when acting by themselves, display the utmost zeal and the strongest sense of responsibility, lose both when associated with others for joint action, where their individuality is concealed. The zeal seems instantly to evaporate: their sense of justice gets blunted by the traditions of the Board of which they have become members; and even the most radical – after a few useless kicks and plunges – soon settles into the collar, and assists the team to drag on the lumbering vehicle of obstruction and unreason. The power over a Board which is exercised by its permanent clerks is not the less tyranny because it is adroitly exercised, or because the tyrants are necessary evils. If an individual is put at the head of a department, self-esteem assists a sense of duty in making him master the details, and ensure the proper working of the machine. But when he finds himself merely one of several shifting and shadowy units whose individualities are lost, and whose faults are visited upon an empty abstraction instead of on themselves, he speedily in mere sympathy becomes like them; and, like them, he bows to the customs and precedents quoted by the permanent officials with an ill-disguised contempt for those to whom these precedents are unfamiliar. Then follows the unresisting signature of documents placed before the Board by clerks who have no idea of anything beyond their office walls – who imagine the world was created for them, not they for the world, and who believe and almost say, that the very members of the Board are there merely to be the channels of their offensive and dictatorial opinions. There has been in all ages in this country an officialism which cannot look beyond the letter of the law, whose representatives decline to enter into argument, to consider the circumstances of a case, or to make allowance for emergencies: – whose minds prefer sinning in a groove to doing right out of it: and whose conduct would often appear malicious, were not malice too active a feeling to enter into their cold and contracted bosoms.

This officialism was often rampant in the Ordnance; nor with the extinction of that Honourable Board can it be said to have vanished from England's administration.

As in the history of every corporation, there were at the Ordnance fits of economy and extravagance. The extravagance always began at the Tower, the centre of the Board's official centre and kingdom; the economy away at the circumference, among poor gunners at distant stations, among decaying barracks and fortifications crying out loudly for repair. It seems destined to be the motto of departments in every age, "Charity begins at home: economy abroad." After the peace of Utrecht, there was a determined resolution on the part of the Government to retrench, – a wise and praiseworthy resolution, if the method to be adopted were judicious. The Treasury communicated with the Ordnance: and the Tower having made plausible promises to Whitehall, the Honourable Board met to see what could be done. Starting with the official postulate, so characteristic of English departments, that their own salaries were to be untouched, the field of their labour was in proportion contracted. Ultimately they decided to economize in Scotland: they reduced all the stores there; voted no money for the repair of the fortifications or barracks; and, regardless of past services, they reduced the gunners in various garrisons.

From the far north a plaintive appeal meets the student's eye. It is from one John Murray, who had been Master-Gunner of Fort William for nineteen years, and who in this fit of economy had been ruthlessly struck off the establishment. Verily, ere many months be over, honest John shall have his revenge!

From Scotland, the Board turned to the Colonies, and reminded them that they must pay for their own engineers and gunners, if they wished to keep them. A committee sat to inquire how the American dependencies could be made to pay for themselves, – the beginning of that official irritation which culminated in the blaze in which we lost them altogether; and in the mean time demands for stores were neglected. One unhappy Governor wrote that he had under his command a company of troops which for fifteen years had received no fresh bedding: and "many of the soldiers were very ill, and in ye winter ready to starve." A special messenger was sent to lay the matter before the Board; but, he having been recalled by domestic reasons before succeeding in his prayer, the Board adroitly pigeon-holed his petition for four years; and, in the language of a subsequent letter, "For want of bedding, many of ye soldiers have since perished."

But ere long came the inevitable swing in the other direction. Queen Anne died; King George had not yet landed at Greenwich; there was agitation and conspiracy among the adherents of the Stuarts, and Scotland was simmering with rebellion. Then did the fearful Privy Council send letter after letter to the Ordnance urging them to find arms for 10,000 men for Scotland, or for 5000, or even for 4000; but from their diminished stores even this small body could with difficulty be armed. A train of artillery was ordered to march, and could not: everything was starved, and in chaos; and its commander, Albert Borgard, wrote, "Things are in such confusion as cannot be described." Orders were sent to man and defend Fort William, the now desolate scene of John Murray's nineteen years; and General Maitland, on reaching it, reported that "the parapets want repairing: there are no palisadoes; without an engineer to help me, I can but make the best of a bad bargain." He had to advance the money himself: "Who pays me," he wrote, "I know not." By next messenger he asked for a little gunpowder, a few spades, pickaxes, and wheelbarrows, all rather useful articles in a fortification, but which had vanished under the breath of economy. There were no gunners, he wrote, to work the guns; and he requested that the hand-grenades which were coming from Edinburgh might be filled and fitted with fuzes before they should be sent to him, "for we have none here that understand this matter well." Of a truth, John Murray had his revenge!

The principal gate of the fortress was so rotten and shattered that it could not be made use of, and was of no defence at all. There never had been any gate, the General wrote, to the port of the ravelin; and unless the platform could be renewed, it would be impossible to work the guns. "And," he adds in a well-rounded period, "the old timber houses in which the officers of the Garrison are lodged, and also the old timber chapell, are all in such a shattered pitifull condition, that neither the first can be lodged in one, nor the Garrison attend divine service in the other without being exposed to the inconvenience of all weathers."

Nor was General Maitland singular. From Dumbarton Castle Lord Glencairn wrote to the Board, "We not only want in a manner everything, but we have not so much as a boat. And, besides, the Garrison wants near four months' pay." From Carlisle the Governor wrote that there were only four barrels of powder in the garrison, a deficiency of every species of stores, and only four gunners, "three of which are superannuated." Most of the gun-carriages were unserviceable, and the platforms wanted repairing. There was haste and panic at Portsmouth, as empty stores and unarmed ships warned the Board what work there was before them. And from Chester, Mr. Asheton, the zealous governor just appointed, reported, "The guns are all here, but not the carriages, so that the stores, &c., would be of service – not prejudice – to an enemy." The only men there who were capable of doing any work were forty invalids; and he therefore begged for assistance in men and stores, "in order" he wrote, "that I may be capable of doing my country service by maintaining the rights of our gracious Sovereign King George against all Popish Pretenders whatsoever."

As the guns of the Tower blazed out their welcome to the King, the smoke must have clouded over such an accumulation of testimony in the Ordnance offices hard by, proving that there may be an economy which is no economy at all, as might almost have penetrated the intelligence of a Board. This period in the history of the Ordnance is unsurpassed, even by the many blundering times which, in the course of these volumes, we shall have to examine, down to that day in the year of grace 1855 when, "from the first Cabinet at which Lord Palmerston ever sat as Premier, the Secretary at War brought home half a sheet of paper, containing a memorandum that the Ordnance – one of the oldest Constitutional departments of the Monarchy … was to be abolished."1

In the early days of the Ordnance Board, its relations with the navy were more intimate than in later years. The gunners of the ships were under its control, and had to answer to it for the expenditure of their stores. In this particular, as in most details of checking and audit, the Board was stern to a degree, and not unfrequently unreasonable. In 1712, the captain of a man-of-war, sent to Newfoundland in charge of a convoy, found the English inhabitants of the Island in a state of great danger and uneasiness, and almost unprotected. At their urgent request, he left with them much of his ordnance and stores before he returned to England. With the promptitude which characterized the Board's action towards any one who dared to think for himself, it refused to pass the captain's or gunner's accounts, nor would it authorize them to draw their pay. Remonstrance was useless; explanations were unattended to: the lesson had to be taught to its subordinates, however harshly and idiotically, that freewill did not belong to them, and that to assume any responsibility was to commit a grievous sin. It actually required a petition to the Queen and the Treasury before the unhappy men could get a hearing, and, as a natural consequence, an approval and confirmation of their conduct.