John Forbes: Scotland, Flanders and the Seven Years’ War, 1707–1759 9781472511188, 9781474218962, 9781472514127

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John Forbes

John Forbes Scotland, Flanders and the Seven Years’ War, 1707–1759

John Oliphant

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © John Oliphant, 2015 John Oliphant has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-1118-8 PB: 978-1-3500-1954-6 ePDF: 978-1-4725-1412-7 ePub: 978-1-4725-1178-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oliphant, John. John Forbes : Scotland, Flanders and the Seven Years’ War, 1707-1759 / John Oliphant. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-1118-8 – ISBN 978-1-4725-1412-7 (PDF) – ISBN 978-1-4725-1178-2 (ePub) 1. Forbes, John, 1707-1759. 2. Generals–Great Britain–Biography. 3. Great Britain. Army–Officers–Biography. 4. Soldiers–Scotland–Biography. 5. Great Britain. Army. Dragoons, 2nd (Royal Scots Greys)–Surgeons–Biography. 6. Austrian Succession, War of, 1740-1748–Campaigns–Flanders. 7. United States–History–French and Indian War, 1754-1763–Campaigns. 8. Fort Duquesne (Pa.)–History, Military--18th century. 9. Great Britain–History, Military–18th century. 10. Military history, Modern–18th century. I. Title. DA67.1.F67O54 2015 973.2’6–dc23 2014049231 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents List of Illustrations Preface List of Abbreviations Maps and Figures Introduction: A Death in Philadelphia 1 ‘Merry pintle Cout’ 2 Grey Dragoon 3 Rumours of Wars 4 Dettingen 5 ‘In which We Fail’d …’ 6 The Dancers of Breda 7 ‘I know the other a mad sort of Fool’ 8 The Madness of Lord Charles Hay 9 ‘Am now a downright Leopard’: 1757–1758 10 ‘Necessity will turn me a Cherokee’ 11 Crossing Laurel Hill 12 The Fall of Fort Duquesne 13 ‘Brave without Ostentation’ Notes Bibliography Index

vi vii ix x 1 9 19 31 39 47 59 69 83 97 109 121 129 139 143 163 169

List of Illustrations Map 1 Great Britain and Ireland Map 2 The Low Countries in the War of the Austrian Succession Map 3 The 1743 Campaign Map 4 Eastern North America Map 5 The Hudson and Mohawk Valleys Map 6 Pennsylvania and Virginia Map 7 Forbes and Braddock Roads Figure 1 The Forbes Family of Pittencrieff Figure 2 The Culloden–Pittencrieff Forbes Connection Figure 3 The Forbes–Glen Connection Battle plan 1 Dettingen Battle plan 2 Fontenoy Battle plan 3 Rocoux Battle plan 4 Lauffeldt

x xi xii xiii xiv xv xvi xvii xviii xix 40 49 61 63

Preface This, the first full-length biography of John Forbes to be attempted anywhere, attempts to put Forbes’s life, and most particularly the famous campaign of 1758 into its professional, social, diplomatic and political context. My hope is that life and context may to some degree illuminate each other. Whether I have succeeded, and if so in what degree, I must leave to others to judge. In doing so, I have necessarily drawn upon the work of many other scholars. Indeed, writing this book has felt like tunnelling through a mountain of knowledge rich in veins of scholarly thought – imperial, Atlantic, British, English, Scottish, American, frontier, Native American, military and naval history to name only the more obvious ones – which one has inadequate time and space to exploit. The biographer’s problem is to determine how far these fields should be included without overburdening the life under consideration: in other worlds how wide and high the tunnel should be. In the early stages the tunnel has had to be widened considerably, for the dearth of direct evidence of Forbes’s early life had forced me to rely heavily upon context. In particular, I have not attempted to include a detailed study of the 1758 campaign, which has been done so often and so thoroughly by scholars with far greater expertise than I. Although I have devoted three chapters to that expedition, it has been with a view to the interactions between it and Forbes’s character and views, themes which are developed throughout the study. Most of the book is about his professional and personal development. Because the unpublished primary sources are scattered in repositories from London to Los Angeles, this work would not have been possible without the financial support of the Open University and the Scouloudi Foundation, both of which provided funds to support my research trips in Britain and the United States. The Council of Cambridge Tutors College generously gave me a Staff Development Bursary towards the cost of digitized copies of materials from the National Archives of Scotland, now the National Records of Scotland. I am also indebted to the encouragement and support of many fellow scholars, particularly Matthew Ward, Douglas Cubbison, Scott Stephenson, Stephen Brumwell and Walter Powell. In Dunfermline – amongst many other enthusiastic and kindly people – Frank Connelly was very helpful in ferreting out pieces of local information, supplied a splendid image of the window in Pittencrieff House and twice gave me a platform from which to test-drive my ideas before very kind audiences. At a very early stage Fiona Watson showed me around historic Dunfermline, shared ideas and notes and asked pertinent questions. Robert Cooper, Curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, provided information about the Forbes family’s links to Freemasonry.

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Preface

On Forbes’s health Dr. I.G. McNaughton, provided as expert an opinion as one can have about a patient some 260 years deceased; while Mr. Gregory Baginski offered a psychiatrist’s insight into the strange world of Lord Charles Hay’s mind. Some important sources have long been published and many are now available on the internet. However, others have been scattered on both sides of the Atlantic, and I have to express my gratitude to many librarians and archivists. I’m particularly grateful to the infinitely helpful staff at the National Records of Scotland, the impeccable professionalism of the staff of the National library of Scotland, to the delightful people at Mount Stuart House archive on the Isle of Bute and to Major Robin McClean at the Museum of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards in Edinburgh Castle. My editors at Bloomsbury have indulged me with infinite patience, occasional advice and essential help. And speaking of patience, my wife, who feels she has been living with Forbes for too many years, has contributed encouragement, chastisement and endless cups of coffee, as well as eliminating numerous errors through her conscientious proofreading. Any which remain are entirely my own responsibility.

List of Abbreviations AB BP 2 Bute LO GD 45 Huntington LO NLS NLS Culloden NLS LO NLS Yester NRS RH4/86 SP WO

Abercromby Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California The Papers of Henry Bouquet, volume 2 Loudoun papers, Bute Collection, Mount Stuart House Library Forbes Papers, Dalhousie Muniments, National Records of Scotland Loudoun Papers, Huntington Library National Library of Scotland Forbes of Culloden Papers, National Library of Scotland Loudoun Papers, Library of Scotland Yester Papers, National Library of Scotland National Records of Scotland John Forbes North American Papers, National Records of Scotland State Papers, British National Archives, Kew War Office Papers, British National Archives, Kew

Maps and Figures

100 km 60 mi

Culloden Aberdeen SCOTLAND (North Britain)

Inverness

FIFE

Dunfermline Glasgow Edinburgh AYRSHIRE

NORTHUMBERLAND DURHAM

YORKSHIRE

IRELAND

LANCASHIRE

Manchester

Dublin

LINCOLNSHIRE NORFOLK

ENGLAND

WALES

(South Britain)

SUFFOLK

Cork ESSEX

Bristol

London

WILTSHIRE DORSET HAMPSHIRE SUSSEX

CO RN

W AL

L

Portsmouth

Map 1 Great Britain and Ireland

DEVON

Chichester

KENT

Beachy Head

Maps and Figures

xi Utrecht

The Hague

Ryswick HOLLAND Rotterdam

Low Countries War of the Austrian Succession 1740–1748

UNITED

Arnhem

e Rhin

Dutch Barrier Fortresses

Nijmegen

Meuse

Cranenburg Cleve

Grave

Bois-le-Duc

PROVINCES

Breda Bergen-op-Zoom

THE

Flushing

OF

Bruges

AN CE

Lens Arras

Tournai Fontenoy 1745 Leuze

N

Hamont

Roermond Stevensweert

A

O F

Brussels

B

Dyle

Sen ne

Aerschot Lauffeldt ete Louvain Ghe Leau Maastricht Tirlemont Elxiheim Halle Tongres Landen 1746 NETHERLANDS Rocoux Mehai Liege Ath Steenkirk Ramillies

Oudenarde

A

ldt he Sc

SDendermonde

B I S H O P R I C

Lille

Menin

R

gn e

FR

Aire St Venant

A

NCourtrai

E

R

L

F

D

an dr e

Ypres

Ghent

D

Wynendael Dixmude

Ly s

Ys

er

Knocke

T

AU S T R IA N

Eckeren Antwerp

B

Nieuport Dunkirk

t eld Sch

Ostend

L I E G E

LANDS

GENERALITY

Me u se

ZEELAND Walcheren

Fleurus Huy Namur Mons Charleroi Meuse bre Valenciennes Malplaquet m Sa Douai Denain Maubeuge Bouchain Walcourt

Map 2 The Low Countries in the War of the Austrian Succession

1747 Aix-laChapelle Limburg

xii

Maps and Figures

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1743. Hanau Frankfurt

Seligenstadt

Dettingen

Spessart

n ai M . R

Klein Ostheim

Mainz

Aschaffenburg

R. Rhine

T

Darmstadt

Oppenheim

H E

P A

Worms

BAVAR IA

L A Mannheim

T I Ne ck ar

Heidelberg

R.

N

A Spires au and To L

Map 3 The 1743 Campaign

T

E 0

English Miles 5

10

Maps and Figures

xiii

Hudson Bay

St. L awr e

nce

Riv er

Louisbou

N E W F R A N C E

MI’QM Halifax AK

NOVA SCOTIA

Montreal

MASS Boston io IROQUOIS RHODE I tar n e O NEW YORK CONNECTICUT Lak

n ro Hu ke La

DELAWARE

Lake

Michiga n

Lake Superior

Quebec

New York PENNSYLVANIA Philadelphia

River

L

rie eE ak

MARYLAND DELAWARE

Ohi o

VIRGINIA

Williamsburg

ATLANTIC OCEAN

CA TA W

EE ROK

CHE

L O U I S I A N A

BA

NORTH CAROLINA

Mississippi River

SOUTH CAROLINA

Charleston N

GEORGIA

E W

h)

nis

Spa A( ID OR FL

New Orieans

Eastern North America CHEROKEE ...................... Native American nations PENNSYLVANIA ............. British mainland colonies 400 miles 400 km

Map 4 Eastern North America

S

xiv

Maps and Figures

0

Montreal

100 km

0

50 miles

r ve Ri

NEW FRANCE

St.

Montcalm

ce en wr a L

Lake Champlain

Lake

Crown Point Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga)

Ontario

Lake George Fort Oswego Lake Oneida

Fort William Henry Mo ha wk Great Carrying Place Fort Edward River

Fort Herkimer

Half Moon

Schenectady

Albany

River

NEW YORK

MASSACHUSETTS

Boston

Kingston

Hudson

CONNECTICUT

RHODE ISLAND Loudoun New York

(from Halifax) ATLANTIC OCEAN

Map 5 The Hudson and Mohawk Valleys

Maps and Figures

xv

County where major Cherokee-settler clashes occurred: Bedford 0

Miles

100

Shippensburg

h na an eh qu

Philadelphia

r ve Ri

Ohio River

s Su

Fort Duquesne

PENNSYLVANIA Fort Cumborland

Sh en an do ah Riv Mo er un tai ns

Mou ntai ns er Riv kin Yad

Map 6 Pennsylvania and Virginia

Blu e

Rid ge

Alle ghen Gr my een bri er Riv Mo er un tai ns

Ap pa lac hi an

r ive r aR ve Ri wh dy na na Ka tS ea Gr r ive nR lsto o H

AN D

E AR AW

Ohio River

M AR YL

L DE

Winchester

Bedford

VIRGINIA Williamsburg Luneburg

Halifax

NORTH CAROLINA

ATLANTIC OCEAN

xvi

Maps and Figures

Ri ve r

Susqu ehann a

All egh eny

Harris Ferry Carlisie

Fort Lyttleton

ny he

oc k

leg

dd

H ill

M t.

Lovalhannon (Fort Ligonier) ro ad

Al

Monongahela

eny ogh ghi You

Br a

Ju ni at a

For bes

La ur el

Fort Duquesne

Riv er

io Oh

Ri ve r

(Fort Bedford) Fort Loudoun

Shippenspurg

road e Blu

River

Riv er

Fort Cumberland

Rid

100 miles

ge

Winchester

Map 7 Forbes and Braddock Roads

100 km

Maps and Figures

John Forbes 1609–1687

Duncan Forbes 1644–1704

David Forbes Thomas Forbes Alexander Forbes b.1649 b.1652 b.1653 m. Catherine Clerk m. Jean Cuthbert

Anna Forbes Unknown Forbes Duncan Forbes Agnes Forbes b.1695 b.1698 b.1700? b.1701

Anne Dunbar

Jonathan Forbes b.1656

John Forbes of Pittencrieff Jean Forbes Naomi Forbes 1658–1707 b.1659 b.1662 m. Elizabeth Graham m. Robert Munro m. Robert Dunbar

Hugh Forbes Arthur Forbes of Pittencrieff Marion Forbes Arthur Forbes (2) 1704–1760 b.1703 b.1706? m. Ann Gordon m. Margaret Alkman m. Agnes Graham

James Forbes b.1726?

Figure 1 The Forbes Family of Pittencrieff

xvii

BRIGADIER GENERAL JOHN FORBES 1707–1759

John Forbes Marion Forbes Ann Forbes Elizabeth Forbes b.1736? m. David Robertson 1745–1834

Margaret Forbes

xviii

Maps and Figures

John Forbes 1609–1687

Duncan Forbes 1644–1704

Anne Dumbar

David Forbes Thomas Forbes John Forbes of Pittencrieff Alexander Forbes Jonathan Forbes b.1649 b.1652 1658–1707 b.1653 b.1656 m. Catherine Clerk m. Jean Cuthbert m. Elizabeth Graham

Jean Forbes Naomi Forbes b.1659 b.1662 m. Robert Munro m. Robert Dunbar

John Forbes Duncan Forbes 1685–1747 Duncan Forbes (2) Jean Forbes 1672–1734 Lord President of the Council Anna Forbes Mary Forbes Margaret Forbes Isobel Forbes Naomy Forbes Grizelle Forbes m. Mary m. Henry Innes m. Jean Gordon m. Mary Rose

Figure 2 The Culloden–Pittencrieff Forbes Connection

Maps and Figures

xix

James Graham

Elizabeth Graham m. John Forbes of Pittencrieff

James Glen Governor of South Carolina 1701–1777

Andrew Glen b.1702

Thomas Glen

Marion Graham m. Alexander Glen

Alexander Glen b.1705

Marion Glen b.1707

James Graham

Agnes Glen b.1708

John Glen b.1710

Elizabeth Glen b.1712

Margaret Glen m. John Drayton

Agnes Graham m. Arthur Forbes

James Frobes b.1726?

Figure 3 The Forbes–Glen Connection

Introduction: A Death in Philadelphia On Wednesday, 14 March 1759, a long military funeral procession wound its way towards the spire of Christchurch, the most prominent and most modern building in the city of Philadelphia, the most populous and arguably most sophisticated city in all of North America. The church, built of brick between 1727 and 1744 in fashionable neo-classical style, was both modern and prominent; the spire, added in 1754 and over two hundred feet high, made it the tallest building on the continent. It was an imposing destination for a solemnly imposing event. Great silent crowds stood hatless as solemn minute guns thudded out their mournful respects. Military pioneers and detachments of infantry, officers wearing crepe arm bands, drums and colours swathed and draped in black, led engineers, staff officers, a pair of cannon, the deceased’s bareheaded servants, a riderless horse, pairs of medical officers and civilian and military clergy walked before the coffin. The silver-handled coffin itself was borne on the shoulders of six field officers, majors and colonels. Behind came official mourners, Governor Denny and his council, the entire Pennsylvanian representative assembly, ‘the Judges; the Magistrates and Gentlemen of the Province and City, two and two’, and finally pairs of officers representing the garrisons dotting the frontiers of the colony. Brigadier General John Forbes, commander of all His Majesty’s forces in the southern British colonies, Colonel of the 17th Regiment of Foot, was being carried to a hero’s grave.1 The interment too was worthy of an imperial hero. This was no hurried service by an open grave in a cold churchyard but a full Anglican ‘Order for the Burial of the Dead’ within the chancel itself. At the church door the mourners were met and led inside by the Rector as he chanted the words prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer. There followed one of both prescribed psalms, a very long lesson taken from St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians – ‘Behold I shew you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trump (for the trumpet shall sound)’ – and the prayers at the open tomb in the sanctuary, the lowering of the coffin, the blessing and dismissal. All through the rite the minute guns outside could be heard booming with dreadful regularity and as the congregation emerged the troops fired three volleys of musketry into the air.2 It was a fitting tribute. Forbes had marched 140 miles inland from Philadelphia, much of it over steep forest-covered mountain ridges, to expel the French from Fort Duquesne at the Forks where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers met to form the mighty Ohio. Here he had begun the building of a new fortification which he named Pittsburgh, after the British Secretary of State for the Southern Department. In doing so, he had avenged the defeat and death of Major General Edward Braddock in those same woods in 1755; he had secured the frontiers of

2

John Forbes

Pennsylvania and Virginia after three years of devastating French and Indian raids; he had contributed to what promised to be the fall of New France, the French colony on the St. Lawrence River; and had, at least for the time being, secured the goodwill of the Delawares, Shawnees and the other Native American nations of the Ohio region. To do so, he had had to hold together a disparate force of British regulars, provincials from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Delaware; cajole and bully and intrigue with royal governors, Indian Superintendents, awkward colonial legislatures, incomprehensible and astonishingly fickle Native allies, and subordinates ranging from the talented to the inept, from the dedicated to the parochial and self-interested, to the downright undisciplined and incompetent. He had thought through and encouraged the use of Indian-style dress, equipment and tactics, attempting to combine the discipline of European warfare with the demands of wilderness campaigning. Such an achievement would have distinguished even a fit robust man, but Forbes did it while he was dying of a combination of a longterm internal disease, most likely stomach cancer, an unpleasant and debilitating skin infection, and amoebic dysentery contracted during the campaign. For a great part of the journey, he had to be carried in a horse litter, yet remained the force that held the expedition together. This reputation has proved enduring. Over a century and a half later, a memorial stone was set into the north wall of the chancel by the Society of Colonial Wars, composed of citizens of the independent United States, to celebrate Forbes’s loyal services to ‘the interest of his King and Country’. Enthusiasts still work to preserve the roads carved into the wilderness by Braddock and Forbes; the Forbes road has been graced with memorial markers and another marker has been presented to his home town of Dunfermline; admiring scholars have studied, traced, photographed and interpreted almost every mile and minute of the 1758 campaign; Fort Ligonier, the base he constructed for the final push to the Forks, has been lovingly reconstructed and made home to perhaps the finest museum dedicated to the Seven Years’ War anywhere in the world. Across the Atlantic, where he had long had only passing attention from historians, and where he has no monuments outside Dunfermline, a handful of modern scholars have been dissecting and resurrecting his achievement.3 On both sides of the ocean, there is a new interest in his work in drawing Native Americans into partnership with the expanding empire. Thus John Forbes is remembered for his last tragically heroic campaign. Indeed, there is a danger that we may regard him only as hero: the patient logistical genius, the gifted leader and manager of people, the soldier with the mental and physical toughness to direct an extraordinarily difficult expedition while dying of an agonizing disease. He is not a great icon, like Nelson or Wellington or Washington, or even Wolfe; as a general he fought no great actions; he did not die in battle. Yet, he has been placed on a modest pedestal where it is difficult to get at the real man; and that pedestal rests almost wholly upon the last twenty months of his fifty-one years of life. This biography is an attempt to redress that imbalance: character, relationships, identity and professional growth are its major themes. Character might be a good place to begin. John Forbes’s obituary printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette the day after that magnificent funeral has, with some justice, set the prevailing tone.

Introduction: A Death in Philadelphia

3

As a Man, he was just, and without Prejudices; brave, without Ostentation; uncommonly warm in his Friendship, and incapable of Flattery; acquainted with the World and Mankind; he was well bred, but absolutely impatient of Formality and Affectation. Eminently possessed of the sociable Virtues, he indulged a chearful Gratification; but quick in his Sense of Honour and Duty, so mixed the agreeable Gentleman and Man of Business together, as to shine alike (tho’ truly uncommon) in both Characters, without the Giddiness sometimes attendant on the one, or the Sourness of the other.4

There is plenty of evidence that this opinion was shared by people of all kinds, including perhaps Forbes himself. His portrait, of uncertain attribution and now in the possession of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, and which may well show Forbes as he wished to be seen, supports this image of a man who could so easily combine command, informality and affability. The gold epaulettes, laced button holes and high white stock provide the trappings of authority, but the open red coat, partly unbuttoned waistcoat and bare head, apparently lacking a wig and with greying hair, suggest a relaxed, dignified openness. His letters, scattered through archives – public and private, British and American, suggest a fondness for humour and wordplay, a boisterous masculine good humour, a man who would be good company whether in a tavern or at a dinner table. While Forbes wove, as all professionals did, a web of patrons and clients, favour and obligation, upon which advancement depended, for him these relationships were never divorced from affection. His friendships were deep and strong and not easily broken. Though this sometimes led him into misjudgements – indulgent support for his wild young nephew Jock, for example – more often it was a strength. Yet he also, as we shall see, was inclined to overspend and often failed to pay his tradesmen. He was increasingly terrified by huge debts, more and more bitter at what he saw as neglect of his deserts and talents, alarmed and tormented by his ailments, and at times deeply jealous of those projected over his head into high rank and distinction. He enjoyed a boisterous exuberant masculinity and probably shared what Professor Black calls the ‘phallocentric’ attitude to sexual relationships so common amongst men of his social station and profession.5 The wit and wordplay which delighted some contemporaries, and which still enchants historians who read his papers, merely irritated others. The monumental Forbes – the patient, engaging, strong-minded and self-sacrificing hero – is indeed the greater part of the reality, but to fully understand him we must examine the feet of clay on which the monument stood. Since the publication in 1992 of Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, scholars have debated the process and degree to which eighteenthcentury local and national Scots and English identities became subsumed into the ‘British’ one. In the course of that debate, historians have demonstrated that the growth of a sense of Britishness was a slow and uneven process. Moreover, a continuing Scots national identity (and an English one for that matter) was far from incompatible with a British one. The same is arguably true of local sub-national identities, which were probably stronger in Scotland and Ireland than in England

4

John Forbes

(where they were still potent). However, while the most obvious Scottish example of such adaptable regionalism is the resilient Highland clan system, most Scots were not Highlanders, and most of the nation’s wealth and its major centres of political power were located outside the Highlands.6 One must therefore ask whether local attachments were as strong in the Lowlands and to what extent those loyalties were subsumed into allegiance to the British state. In the case of John Forbes, local identity within Scotland seems to have been very largely displaced by wider loyalties. John Forbes was a Lowlander and of a family not identified with the town of Dunfermline until his father bought the Pittencrieff estate there. While his brothers, as we shall see, retained close links with the community, John’s profession and his landlessness made him a wanderer: he never acquired a home that was not military and temporary. He was born in Edinburgh, not Dunfermline, and as a very young man he may have attended medical school there. In 1729 he joined his regiment, the Royal North British Dragoons, which became his home and family for the next twenty-eight years, most of them outside Scotland. However, John was brought up and schooled in Dunfermline, he often returned to Pittencrieff on winter leave and he seems to have had (in theory rather than in fact) the income from a farm on the estate. Moreover, acquaintances made in his early years in Dunfermline had an enduring influence on his later life. A close friendship with Lord Charles Hay, a friendly relationship with Sir Peter Halkett and an avuncular connection with Halkett’s son Francis were all important. When Forbes joined the Greys, his lieutenant colonel was the ageing Sir Robert Hay of Linplum, brother to Lord Tweeddale and Lord Charles’s uncle. John and his eldest brother Arthur were initiated into Freemasonry at the Lodge of Dunfermline, and John was a founder member of the Edinburgh-based Lodge of Dunfermline Kilwinning.7 Nevertheless, it is likely that broader Fife and Scottish networks, particularly Lowland ones, mattered rather more. Masonry may be seen in this light, as may his probable – but not proven – membership of the eccentric Fife-based sex club, The Beggars’ Benison. His maternal aunt Marion Graham married Alexander Glen of Linlithgow, between them providing John with nine cousins, the eldest of whom, James, became governor of South Carolina in 1738. John’s first colonel, patron and surrogate father was Major General James Campbell of Lawers, a Perthshire man; and Campbell’s nephew, John Campbell, from 1731 Earl of Loudoun in Ayrshire in the west of Scotland, was a lifetime friend and comrade in arms. After James Campbell’s death in 1745, John was taken up by the Earl of Stair, a Dalrymple from Galloway. Military service on both sides of the Border between 1729 and 1742 – more often in England than in Scotland – was a key factor in establishing a sense of being British. As we shall see, the North British Dragoons were a Scottish Lowland regiment with an impeccable pro-Revolution, pro-Union and pro-Hanoverian pedigree The Greys, like other regiments were moved around the kingdom and used, when needed, as an armed police force in support of the civil power. Coast duty in pursuit of smugglers in Essex, Kent, Sussex and Dorset was almost routine. The practice of billeting troops in inns instead of in barracks had serious drawbacks for both civilians and soldiery, but it may have helped to ensure identification with the local population, not separation from it.

Introduction: A Death in Philadelphia

5

The War of the Austrian Succession, involving active service alongside regiments from all over the kingdom, reinforced a sense of British solidarity among officers. Certainly, from as early as 1742, Forbes used the term ‘English’ when he probably meant ‘British’. As we shall see, that conflict also brought him to the notice of the Duke of Cumberland (George II’s favourite son); Sir John Ligonier (who liked to entertain his acolytes at Cobham House in Surrey); Lord Albemarle (who disliked Scots in general but enjoyed Forbes’s company); and a large number of lesser ranking English officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Charles Russell of the 2nd Foot Guards, now better known as the Coldstream. It brought rapid promotion from lieutenant in the Greys to lieutenant colonel in the army and deputy quartermaster general in Flanders, a level of responsibility which could not have existed in a tiny Scottish military establishment – around 1,500 men by 1707. Wartime introductions went well beyond the narrowly military. Probably through his friend the diplomat Robert Keith, Forbes entered the circle of the ambitious aristocratic English politician John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, and through him that of Sandwich’s own patron, the Duke of Bedford. Though baptized a Presbyterian, he seems to have moved towards Anglicanism as well as to Anglicization. Though there was plenty of anti-Scots prejudice in English circles, much of it stimulated by the success of Scots in British law, medicine, administration and politics as well as in the armed forces,8 Forbes seems to have been especially gifted in breaking through such barriers. If his career faltered after 1748, it was because peace narrowed opportunity, and a poor Scot from the lesser gentry had fewer claims upon the patronage of the great and good than many another with more money and better connections. The rise of ‘Atlantic’ history has recovered for us contemporaries’ perception that Britain and her trans-Atlantic colonies were parts of the same political, economic and social organism. However, that has sometimes tended to hide the importance of Europe to British perceptions of self. Although American colonists were viewed as fellow ‘Britons’, men like Forbes were mentally and professionally Europeans rather than Anglo-Americans and were certainly not aggressive imperialists.9 Such people spent most of their professional lives in Britain, with occasional forays into Europe, which until 1755 was the main theatre for professional soldiers. Forbes fought in Flanders and (briefly) in Germany from 1742 to 1748; in peacetime he had served in England and Scotland from 1729 to 1742 and from late 1748 to early 1757, a total of about twenty years. Until 1754, Forbes seems to have had little interest in America. He served there only from July 1757 until his death in March 1759, a matter of some twenty months. Like most Britons, when they thought about America at all, he considered Americans to be British as himself, but his mind, emotions and past were all rooted in Europe. To what extent then was the concept of local–central partnership applicable to the Americas, and did Forbes see himself as operating in a system of partnership? It is arguable that the Revolution of 1688 was a victory of localities over the centre, but it is also likely that contemporaries saw the 1707 Union, which extinguished the Scots parliament altogether, as the triumph of parliamentary centralism against sectional Jacobitism. By that reading, anything which challenged the overriding authority of parliament was a threat to the constitution, the liberties supposedly guaranteed in

6

John Forbes

1688–1689, and to Protestantism itself. It followed that men whose commissions emanated from that authority should be able to override the selfish parochial interests of colonial assemblies. It was a view that any Scot committed to the defence of Revolution and Union was bound to defend. Like his friend Loudoun, Forbes took this position very seriously, but he was far more subtle, flexible, devious and clever in his assertion of it. Forbes’s formative military experience was in the environment of disciplined European forms of warfare. However, his experiences in Flanders, most dramatically at the Battle of Fontenoy, brought home to him the value of irregular troops and tactics. Those ideas were probably crystallized when he devoured Turpin de Crissé’s Essai sur L’art De La Guerre,10 a treatise which argued for both a systematically protected advance by regular troops and the vigorous use of irregulars, probably soon after its publication in French in 1754. This intellectual discovery came just as the growing conflict in America began to offer new professional opportunities. His early experience in Nova Scotia and New York certainly concentrated those thoughts. As shall see, he had worked out a doctrine of this kind by the end of 1757, one which he sought to put into very effective practice the following year. One manifestation of this attitude is frequently praised by modern historians: his approach to dealings with Native Americans. To Forbes the Indians were the true partners whom he wanted to draw into the imperial structure, not savages to be dispossessed in the name of British expansion. Only in this way could the frontier be stabilized, and like many in Britain he did not begin from an assumption that the North American conflict of 1754–1763 was an expansive war of conquest. This produced a clash of mentalities between himself and those colonists, George Washington prominent among them, who saw the war against France in terms of land acquisition and commercial profit. While his poor understanding of Cherokee and Catawba mentalities made his management of Native allies chaotic and very nearly disastrous, his role in producing the conciliatory third Treaty of Easton with hitherto hostile Delawares and Shawnees was critical to the campaign’s success. Had he lived, his approach might have become a model for Anglo-Native relations. Forbes’s views were not always shared by his contemporaries; notably not by William Pitt, the minister whose overwhelming aim was victory in the Seven Years’ War, nor afterwards by Major General Jeffrey Amherst whose clumsy insensitivity produced the bloody upheaval known as Pontiac’s War. Yet neither was Forbes entirely alone: as I have argued elsewhere, his friend and subordinates Archibald Montgomery and James Grant pursued a similar agenda to end the Cherokee War in 1760 and 1761, while at home Lord Halifax’s work at the Board of Trade was carried on and elaborated by Pitt’s successor Charles Wyndham, second Earl of Egremont.11 The John Forbes who was committed to the earth at Christchurch was then a man of the new age and of the old. He trod in the new when he espoused a humane and rational approach towards Native Americans; yet they were people he did not understand, eulogize as noble savages or even particularly like. He explored new ideas about warfare and displayed the mental and professional agility needed to adapt to novel American conditions; yet his ideas were firmly rooted in his European

Introduction: A Death in Philadelphia

7

experience and he remained a European in manners, tastes and instincts. He became increasingly British in identity yet remained consciously a Scot. Many Americans found him engaging and he was admired in the end by many more; yet he represented a relatively new centralizing concept of imperial authority that many colonists would come to reject.

1

‘Merry pintle Cout’ The town of Dunfermline had once been a great place, capital of the old Kingdom of Fife, boasting a royal palace and a famous abbey, encircled by high medieval walls and looking regally down upon the Fife plain and distant Forth from its long gently sloping ridge. By 1701 it was a desperately depressed brewing, coal and weaving town, no longer a capital and hard-hit by Scotland’s long-standing exclusion from English markets. The abbey and royal palace were abandoned and crumbling and two of the town gates were in a state of collapse. The great abbey church, now the town kirk, and the stone market cross were both in need of repair. Many of the houses had one or two wooden upper storeys with furze roofs and rough outer stairs with dogs, chickens and pigs housed under them and middens at their feet. The stinking middens and encroaching stairs narrowed the few streets into winding alleys frequented by the plaid-clad, and often barefooted, poor.1 But on the very western edge of the town, part of it yet buffered from it by the gushing Tron Burn and a substantial and attractive park, stood the modest twostoreyed mansion of Pittencrieff. Originally built around 1610 it lacked refined comforts but had substantial potential for improvement in line with the English manners and habits beginning to permeate the Scottish gentry. With it went an estate with significant economic potential in the form of tenanted agricultural land and a coal mine – one of many tapping into the large coalfield along the north shore of the Firth of Forth. The owner Alexander Yeaman was anxious to sell and here came a Colonel John Forbes, looking for a suitable and affordable place to set up as country laird.2 This John Forbes was the seventh son of Duncan Forbes of Culloden near Inverness. A professional soldier in the Scots Army, in 1688–1689 he had supported the accession of William and Mary and fought against the subsequent Jacobite uprising: he was in command of a company at Ruthven Castle when it was forced to surrender to Dundee. By 1690 he was a major and in 1692, travelling north from London, he was the unwitting bearer of the order that triggered the Glencoe massacre. By the late 1690s he was a lieutenant colonel serving in regiments at Fort William and Inverness.3 This was a professional soldier, with immaculately Whig and protestant credentials, exactly the sort of officer who could look to rise under the new regime. No later than 1695 Colonel Forbes had married Elizabeth Graham, daughter of an Edinburgh baillie, who by the time they came to Pittencrieff had already borne him at least two daughters and a son. Anna was born in Edinburgh in December

10

John Forbes

1695 and Margaret some time later, possibly in 1698. Duncan, their first boy, was baptized at Inverness in July 1700, but appears to have died young. Now Colonel Forbes was looking for a family home suitable for a younger son aspiring to set up as a gentleman in his own right. He had considered a number of estates, including Connage which had the merit (or perhaps the drawback) of being only ten miles from Culloden, his childhood home. In 1701, with his wife again heavy with their next child, he found what he was looking for at Pittencrieff. It was convenient to Edinburgh, the capital, where Elizabeth’s father lived, dignified and above all reasonably priced. Yeaman sold house and estate to the colonel for £40,402 Scots, the equivalent of £3,366 17s 8d sterling. The family moved in time for the birth of another daughter, Agnes, on 10 September. A fourth daughter, Marion, was born in Dunfermline in January 1706, although as of Anna and Agnes, we know little about her.4 It was Arthur, the next son (b. January 1703 in Dunfermline), who inherited the estate, which then Elizabeth managed on his behalf, on Colonel Forbes’s death in May 1707. An open-handed, financially feckless eccentric, Arthur seems to have taken over as laird when he reached his majority in 1721. The liberal Presbyterian clergyman Dr Alexander Carlyle, who met him in 1748, saw ‘a man of infinite humor, which consisted much in his instantaneous and lively invention of fictions and tales to illustrate or ridicule the conversation that was going on; and as his tales were inoffensive, though totally void of truth, they afforded great amusement to every company’.5 He seems to have taken service with the Dutch army, served for a time in Flanders in the 1740s and eventually reached the rank of Colonel. It was Arthur who took the first step towards family ruin when he commissioned a substantial extension of Pittencrieff House: work on a third storey was begun in 1731, allegedly using stone from the abbey ruins, and which was not finished until 1740. The result was a 50 per cent increase in living space internally and externally a handsome frontage in rose-tinted plaster. The expense must have been immense – especially as the laird failed to control his spending in other directions – but Arthur’s extravagance was far from unique.6 The first half of the eighteenth century saw a revolution in manners and taste, as the Scots gentry competed with each other to achieve a more English standard of elegance and comfort – and more often than not their extravagance led to crushing debt and the loss of their estates. Shared wooden trenchers gave way to individual porcelain plates, glasses replaced pewter cups, enormous carnivorous meals became smaller and better balanced, sparse rough-hewn furniture and box beds were edged out by the likes of Chippendale, carpets displaced rushes on bare stone floors and wallpapers covered crude plaster. Tea began to replace beer and spirits, even – most shocking to the traditionally minded – in the refreshment offered to morning callers.7 While Arthur’s manner suggests that he retained some characteristics of the rougher-hewn manners of the traditional laird, the building work marks him as a man of the new age. The third-born child and second-surviving son was Hugh (1704–1760), an altogether more serious character who entered the legal profession to become, partly under the patronage of the Marquess of Tweeddale, a prominent Edinburgh advocate

‘Merry pintle Cout’

11

and judge. Being, in his own estimation, more financially responsible than Arthur, he was driven to distraction by his elder brother’s extravagance and (at times) by his younger brother John’s indebted impecunity. However, Hugh too was inclined to overspend: in the early forties he dated his letters from Braid, a mansion and park on the edge of Edinburgh; and about this time he bought Loretto, a grand house he could barely afford, at Musselburgh just east of Edinburgh in the parish of Inveresk, a place close enough to Edinburgh to be a fashionable summer resort (‘as they do from London at Kensington Gravel Pits, or at Hampstead and Highgate’)8 but far enough away to provide something like genteel country life. Like many other advocates of the time who invested in land, he may have seen Loretto as a first step back towards the status of laird.9 The purchase of the house also illustrates the importance of family and patronage networks and obligations in this world of lesser gentry and younger sons. According to Dr Carlyle, who became minister of Inveresk in 1747, Hugh ‘purchased Lorretto from John Steel, a minion of the President’s [Duncan Forbes, Lord President of the Council and Hugh’s cousin], who had been a singer in the concert, but had lost his voice, and was patronized by his lordship, and had for some years kept a celebrated tavern in that house’.10 In other words, largely to oblige his patron, Hugh bought a pub and then tried to turn it into an elegant home. The other side of the coin was that Duncan’s high regard gave Hugh access to Tweeddale’s patronage as well as to the goodwill of the powerful Dukes of Argyll, the London government’s principal manager of Scottish affairs; as they were rarely out of London himself it fell to Duncan Forbes and his associates to deal with matters at home. Our John, the youngest of all the children, entered the world in Edinburgh on 5 September 1707 OS, probably in his grandfather’s house, four months after his father’s death. John’s life, therefore, coincides with the passing of a distinctive Scottish state and the early development of the United Kingdom. In 1701, the year Colonel Forbes appeared at Pittencrieff, and the year after the death of Princess Anne’s last child, the English parliament had tried to secure a safe succession through an Act Settlement. Six years later the Scottish parliament issued its own Act of Security, asserting that whoever might succeed Anne in England the Scots would not be bound by that choice. In other words, Scotland could have a different monarch, even a restored Stuart; and in case there should be a shared sovereign, the Act anent Peace and War gave the Scots parliament the right to make a separate peace if it so chose. Coming during the long Spanish Succession war, from the English perspective and from that of committed Scottish Whigs, this was a security emergency: a state with a land frontier with England and a pool of valuable military manpower might suddenly join the other side. Scots supporters of the Revolution Settlement were equally appalled at this prospect. Union would avert this catastrophe and for its Scots supporters offer other positive advantages into the bargain. This was particularly true of those whose military careers had flourished in Marlborough’s campaigns: the merging of the armed forces would provide Scots officers with hitherto undreamt of avenues for promotion and distinction. It can be no coincidence that most of the MPs in the Scots parliament which voted for the Act of Union also held commissions in the Scottish army. One of those was Sir Peter Halkett, who had promised the citizens

12

John Forbes

of Dunfermline that he would vote against it.11 Moreover, the loss of a Scottish parliament would be balanced by a numerically modest but potentially significant one at Westminster: thirty county MPs, fifteen representing new groups of burghs and sixteen representative peers chosen by the 154-strong Scottish peerage. In addition, though arguably far less significantly, the Scots economy suffered from exclusion from English home and colonial markets and sources of exotic commodities: a situation exacerbated by the collapse of Scotland’s own highly expensive colonial enterprise, the Darien colony in Central America. Though this was probably not a leading motive in the minds of the Scots who supported Union, after the event it became an expectation. The 1707 Union of the two kingdoms into the United Kingdom of Great Britain was therefore a marriage of mutual convenience.12 Unfortunately, in its first years the Union failed to deliver significant economic benefits. That, a yearning for lost independence, nostalgia for the house of Stuart and a very large number of aggrieved Episcopalians, lay behind the biggest Jacobite revolt of them all. The trigger was the accession of the Elector of Hanover as George I in 1714. The following year the Earl of Mar rapidly assembled an army overwhelmingly superior in numbers to the government forces led by Aryll. For a time it looked as if Scotland might be overwhelmed: a Jacobite force briefly occupied Dunfermline, uncomfortably close to Edinburgh, where it was successfully raided by government cavalry.13 Whether seven-year-old John was at Pittencrieff or whether the family had evacuated to Edinburgh is unknown, but it was a dramatic demonstration of the fragility of the regime upon which the Forbes fortunes depended. Indeed, in 1715 the United Kingdom was rescued not by the strength of Hanoverian arms but by Jacobite incompetence and fatalism: by the ineptitude of the Earl of Mar, by the failure of English Jacobites to turn out in significant numbers and by the gloomy inaction of James II’s son – the ‘Pretender’ to Whigs and styled ‘James III’ by Jacobites, who arrived in Scotland late and left it early.14 John Forbes grew up in an environment which stamped him a pro-Hanoverian, as well as a Briton and a Protestant: but in origin he was a man of Fife and of Dunfermline in particular. Around 1724 Daniel Defoe saw Dunfermline as in ‘its full perfection of decay’, a declining town still dominated by the ruined abbey and the even more ruined royal palace. ‘The people hereabout are poor, but would be much poorer, if they had not the manufacture of linnen for their support, which is here, and in most of the towns about, carry’d on with more hands than ordinary, especially for diaper, and the better sort of linen … ’:15 In fact what Defoe witnessed was the beginning of an economic recovery springing from the manufacture of fine table linen and damask introduced around 1715, using techniques allegedly obtained through industrial espionage. Dunfermline’s revival was a symptom of the much wider Scottish economic renaissance brought about through the 1707 Union.16 The coal mining on the Pittencrieff estate and other neighbouring lands was part of a wider phenomenon along the Firth of Forth. Early-seventeenth-century Scottish legislation, not repealed until 1779, had made miners hereditary serfs, so the lairds and nobles who controlled the mines were assured of cheap labour. In 1713, for example, the town council lent the Earl of Rothes two coal miners and reserved one William Watson in case ‘lady Pittencrieff ’ – John’s mother Elizabeth, of

‘Merry pintle Cout’

13

course – should want him.17 The introduction of English capital and English smelting techniques, especially substituting coal for wood, ensured a growing market although mass production did not begin until around 1759. In agriculture the enclosures and other ‘improvements’ noted by Defoe on the Aberdour estates of the Marquess of Tweeddale were only symptomatic of the wide introduction of crop rotations and other refinements pioneered in England.18 John Forbes was growing up in a world bracketed by the old and the new, and some of the old was tough and persistent. What effect had this environment and his fatherless childhood on John’s upbringing and character can only be guessed. However, the widowed Elizabeth must have had to cope with a houseful of lively children, and there is at least one scrap of evidence to suggest that John may have been a robust handful. In a blue window pane in the old Pittencrieff House he engraved, in a shaky but stillrecognizable hand: ‘Jo. Forbes merry Pintle Cout’. ‘Pintle’ was an impolite synonym for ‘penis’, a ‘Cout’ was a colt and Merry Pintle was a famous racehorse. Already he was developing – along with a penchant for horseflesh and a liking for crude sexual humour – a taste for word play, a kind of verbal exhibitionism which in later life entertained many friends and colleagues but utterly failed to impress Dr Carlyle. ‘He was an accomplished, agreeable gentleman,’ opined the clergyman, ‘but there appeared to me to be more effort and less naïveté in his conversation than in that of Hew, whose humor was genuine and natural’.19 In short John became a verbal show-off with a penchant for irony and satire, often earthy, frequently light-footed and witty, but occasionally laboured, a streak that shows up throughout his adult correspondence. For many his conversation and company were engaging but the Presbyterian cleric – who was a sophisticated, well-travelled and cultured young man – clearly found him heavy going. His relations with his mother and sisters are still obscure. There is no surviving correspondence between him and them, and the Dunfermline parish records were so poorly kept before 1745 that there are no surviving records of their marriages or funerals. Though he certainly had women friends as an adult – his sister-inlaw Margaret Aikman who married Hugh, for example, their daughters his nieces, Loudoun’s London mistress Kate and Helen Anderson of the British Coffee House, for example – the women in his immediate family have sunk from the record almost without trace. Yet throughout his life John was closely attached to his brothers, particularly Hugh, whose son John (known as ‘Jock’) became John’s protégé and friend. The open-handed, fiscally reckless and buffooning Arthur and the sober legalistic Hugh sometimes upset each other, and on those occasions John became the bridge-builder. ‘Arthur has been here these three or four days,’ John reported to Hugh from Ghent in 1744, ‘pray write him for he is certainly a kind hearted fellow, and altho’ he has his follys one shou’d endeavour to palliate them’.20 Arthur seems to have been equally fond of John and the affection was lifelong. ‘John’ he wrote in 1757, ‘know that I love your more than any man living’. And there is physical evidence of this tender regard. The little blue window engraved by John as a boy was moved from somewhere else in the building, perhaps from John’s own original bedroom, to the new third floor added by his brother. And there, still in its original frame, it sits to this day.

14

John Forbes

Fife connections outside the family were extremely important. The Forbes boys formed close relationships with the sons of local gentry and nobility, connections that though personal were also very helpful to Hugh’s career and from time to time to John’s as well. Most significant were John Hay, who was to succeed his father as fourth Marquess of Tweeddale in 1722, and his younger brother Lord Charles with whom John later shared a strong but ill-starred adult friendship. Tweeddale, who although his main power base was in the Borders kept a house at nearby Aberdour, was the dominant local magnate and a key figure in Scottish politics. Defoe observed that, ‘The Marquess of Tweeddale has a good estate in these parts, and is hereditary Housekeeper, or Porter of the Royal House, and, in effect, Lord Chamberlain.’ Tweeddale was a leading figure in the political faction of dissident Whigs known as the Squadrone, opponents of the Walpole ministry in the 1720s and 1730s. Following Walpole’s fall in 1742, Tweeddale was given the revived post of Secretary of State for Scotland in the administration led by Lord Carteret. Tweeddale thus came to command considerable royal patronage; and fortunately for the Forbes brothers, he was very well aware of the political significance of their cousin, Duncan.21 His brother and John Forbes’s close friend, Lord Charles Hay, though a younger son himself, followed a professional, political and social trajectory that was well beyond John’s means. Some seven years John’s senior, he began his career at an earlier age as an ensign in the Second Foot Guards (the Coldstream) in 1722. He became captain in the 22 Foot in 1727 and in 1729, the year John entered the army as a mere surgeon, he acquired a troop in the 9th Dragoons. He was for a few years MP for Haddingtonshire after being elected unopposed in 1741. In 1743 after service at Dettingen, he rose to lieutenant colonel in the First Foot Guards. In 1749 he became aide-de-camp to George II and colonel of his regiment and two years later inherited from Sir Robert Hay the baronetcy and estate of Linplum.22 He was promoted major general in 1757. The 1734 James Young case illustrates Forbes brothers’ early dependence upon Tweeddale’s patronage. Young was indicted for manslaughter in the local court of regality, a court of heritable jurisdiction, ‘depute baillies’, magistrates sitting for the proprietor or ‘heritor’, were Arthur and Hugh.23 Moreover, if the Forbes brothers did not consider themselves committed to Tweeddale and the Squadrone before 1742, they certainly did once he had obtained his Secretaryship. Hugh Forbes wrote him an obsequious letter of congratulation, assuring the marquess that ‘Your country has got its wish’ and reporting ‘the exaltation of every honest man’.24 Afterwards, if not before, Hugh seems to have acted as Tweeddale’s political agent in Dunfermline, reporting the tangled commercial and religious disputes there as well as Halkett’s efforts to make offices held by Hay’s clients as uncomfortable as possible. In return favours flowed the other way. Hugh successfully lobbied Tweeddale in favour of his cousin William Forbes and man of business, who wanted to continue with his long-established office of handling monies related to criminal prosecutions. Hugh was very careful to mention that William was a friend of Duncan Forbes. When Sir John Dalrymple, Clerk of the Session, died on 24 May 1743 Hugh instantly asked the marquess to fulfil an earlier promise and obtain the place for him. Although Tweeddale was unable to make appointments unilaterally, he was keenly aware of Hugh’s value as a client with an important connection. He therefore drew up the necessary warrant before approaching

‘Merry pintle Cout’

15

Carteret to point out that Hugh was ‘very agreeable to Duncan Forbes Lord President of the Council’.25 The case was well made: Hugh was appointed. Subsequently he was able to use his connection with Tweeddale to promote his own clients: in 1744 he asked for preferment for his friend James Dundas of Castle-cory. Tweeddale’s tenure did not last – his patron Carteret fell in 1744 and Tweeddale, having grossly underestimated the seriousness of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and facing an effort to prune his limited authority still further, followed him two years later. Nevertheless, he remained a Scottish representative peer and an important London contact for Scots seeking preferment. In November 1751, an indebted John Forbes was to approach him through Lord Charles in an unsuccessful bid to become Deputy Quartermaster General at the Horse Guards. Tweeddale’s main local competitors were the Halketts of Pitfaranne, prominent gentry with deep local attachments. Pitfaranne was only a mile west of Pittencrieff and Sir James Halkett was a baronet, MP for Fife Boroughs and annually elected Provost of Dunfermline until killed by a fall from his horse in 1705.26 His son-in-law, Peter Wedderburn, adopted the Halkett surname and with it the baronety, the office of Provost (until ousted by Tweeddale in 1734) and the seat in Parliament, where, unlike Tweeddale, he supported the Walpole ministry. Sir Peter’s son, also Peter, who succeeded him in 1746, was John Forbes’s contemporary as well as becoming his friend and potential patron. Thus while Hugh appears to have become a Hay partisan, John was no more inclined to alienate the Halketts than to offend Tweeddale. As late as the 1750s he was referring to Sir Peter Halkett as one of his ‘friends’: that is, a friend in the sense of a patron. Sir Peter and his two younger sons, James and Francis, were all soldiers. The third son, also named Peter, inherited the baronetcy when Sir Peter and James died with Braddock at the Monongahela in 1755. Francis continued to serve in North America until 1759, for the last twelve months as John Forbes’s confidant and brigade major. He was elected Provost in absentia in October 1758 and re-elected after his return to Scotland the following year. He then enlisted Pitt’s support for an attempt to recover the parliamentary seat, in the firm conviction that Dunfermline was ‘irrevocably attached to the Interest of my Family’ and that the other burghs could be brought into line.27 Thus for the Halketts, as well as for the Forbes brothers, local attachments were perfectly compatible with identification with the wider British state in terms of both ambition and service. Another Fife connection was John Lindsay (1702–1739), twentieth Earl of Crawford and fourth Earl of Lindsay. At ten Crawford had inherited an estate deeply mired in debt, a burden only partly offset by a government pension, so necessity and family tradition came together to dictate a military career. He obtained his first commission rather late – in 1726 – yet reached the rank of captain in the 3rd Foot guards by 1734, a rapid rise for peacetime. Politics certainly had something to do with it: he was attached to the interest of John Campbell the second Duke of Argyle and his brother Archibald, Earl of Ilay (who succeeded him as Duke). Crawford was elected a Scottish representative peer in 1732 and supported Sir Robert Walpole throughout the excise crisis of 1733 and beyond. Loyalty it seems was his main political asset: Lord Hervey commented acidly on his long boring speeches in ‘broad Scotch’. Militarily, however,

16

John Forbes

Crawford was brave, skilful and enterprising, even heroic. Like Lord Charles Hay, he joined the Austrians and fought with distinction in the War of the Polish Succession. In 1738, he served with the Russians against the Turks and the following year he rejoined the Austrians. At the battle of Krotza on 22 July 1739, he received a severe thigh wound which would never properly heal, plaguing him with pain and repeated re-openings until it finally killed him in 1749. Even that painful disability did not prevent him rising in the British army to become colonel of the Black Watch in 1739 and of the Horse Grenadier Guards in December 1740.28 He and John Forbes were friends: they served together in Flanders during the War of the Austrian Succession and they were, as we shall later see, briefly prisoners together on the night after Fontenoy. Another binding force was Protestantism, a keystone of the Revolution of 1688–1689 and of the 1707 Union. In Scotland that generally meant Presbyterianism; the Episcopalian Church, the equivalent of the Church of England and until 1689 the legally established church, having been thrust aside at the Revolution and therefore increasingly Jacobite. In 1715 the Catholics who turned out for the Pretender were probably outnumbered by their Episcopalian brethren, especially in the northeast. But that division was far from absolute. In many parishes affection for the established incumbent, as well as the difficulty in finding a suitably qualified replacement, meant that Episcopalian clergy survived in their livings well into the new century. There were penalties after the ’15: Episcopalian ‘meeting houses’ where prayers were not offered for King George were closed in 1719; and numbers of Episcopalians thereafter generally declined. Yet in 1720 they reorganized themselves under a bishop for the whole of North Britain and the adherence and protection of many gentry and surprising numbers of clergy ensured survival and influence.29 This national configuration was reflected in Dunfermline. There were thriving Presbyterian and Episcopalian congregations in Dunfermline where Tweeddale – whom no one could have suspected of Jacobite sympathies – seems to have actively patronized the latter. Mr Graham, the last Episcopalian minister, was not deposed by the Kirk until 1696 and continued to officiate until 1701 when a Presbyterian, Mr Kemp, was appointed in his place. He probably would not have been removed even then but for a nation-wide demand for all clergy to subscribe to the Westminster Confession. Graham continued to minister to his breakaway flock and between 1701 and 1705 the denominations co-operated, using the old abbey church at different times of a Sunday. The Presbyterians gathered in the morning while the Episcopalians used their meeting house before taking over the church in the afternoon. Until 1703 the meeting house may have been in a large room in Tweeddale’s Dunfermline house at the foot of the street called Kirkgate, when it was removed to one of the Hay family vaults in the abbey. This, as much as Kirk hostility to lay presentations, may have caused Tweeddale to fall out with the local minister over his right to appoint a reader to the parish. (On this occasion the Tweeddale claim was backed by Sir Peter Halkett.) Graham died only in 1710 and the new Presbyterian regime may have seen Tweeddale’s role as a potential Trojan horse.30 With such blurred confessional lines the Forbes family could have been attached to either congregation or both. All the Forbes children were baptized into the established Presbyterian Church, but may have been less a matter of conviction

‘Merry pintle Cout’

17

than of legal necessity, an entry in a parish register being the only record of a child’s legitimacy. In 1732 Hugh and Arthur were cited in the minutes of the Dunfermline Kirk Session, the local Presbyterian disciplinary body, in disreputable but revealing circumstances. On 16 March a girl named Margaret Donaldson was arraigned in the Sessions for being pregnant out of wedlock and named ‘Hugh fforbes brother to the Laird of Pittencrieff ’ as the father. And on 8 June another girl named Arthur as the man who had impregnated her ‘in the place of Pittencrieff ’ about six months earlier. Neither brother responded in person: Hugh was safely in Edinburgh and merely offered to write to the Session, while Arthur left hurriedly on an openended visit to the Highlands. Such behaviour does not suggest a committed dour Presbyterianism – nor does the frequency of such cases, one or two a month, suggest that those values ran very deep in the local population.31 Perhaps this family of minor gentry, heavily dependent upon the patronage of their powerful neighbour, attached itself to his denomination. They may have been drawn, like the young James Boswell later, to a less severe, more tolerant, more theatrically satisfying form of worship.32 Or perhaps they and other local gentry were Episcopalian anyway. As for John himself, it is likely that service under the Crown, involving long periods spent in England, association with English Anglican fellow officers and the necessity of seeking the patronage of prominent Anglican nobility and upper gentry, tugged him in the direction of the established Church of England. There is no sign of spiritual agonizing in his letters, but in 1758 he apologized to an Anglican chaplain for being unable to attend church services.33 As we have seen, he was buried in Christchurch, the Anglican church in Philadelphia, but even that may have been more to do with the appropriate setting for the tomb of a hero and servant of King George than of any particular confessional attachment. How was young Forbes educated? There is no direct evidence. He may have been sent to school, in Edinburgh perhaps, or taught by private tutors at home like Francis Halkett. The Halketts were, however, more established and prosperous gentry than the Pittencrieff Forbeses and lived at a greater distance from the town. It is far more likely that John attended the grammar school at Dunfermline, established since 1496 in a fine stone building not far from the gates of Pittencrieff Park. Here he would have been taught reading, writing and arithmetic before moving onto Latin as a secondary subject. Dunfermline must have been one of the few grammar schools to offer French as well: his letters often contain French tags as well as Latin ones, and between 1754 and early 1757 he read the whole of Turpin’s Essai some seven years before an English translation was printed. Most sons of the middling and lesser gentry went to these burgh day schools, carrying their own packed lunches and rubbing shoulders with the sons of town artisans their fathers’ rural tenants, to receive the best public education available in North Britain.34 As a younger son John was destined for a profession, but a profession suitable for a gentleman. One obvious route was to follow his father into the army, but, perhaps because the family could not afford a military commission, he seems to have studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. That was an occupation just about suitable for a gentleman and he may have been following the example of James Glen’s younger brother Thomas, about three years John’s senior, who became a physician. Physicians

18

John Forbes

were the elite of the three-tier medical profession – surgeons and apothecaries were definitely, at least in the eyes of physicians, of a lower order. According to John’s Philadelphia obituary, presumably resting on Forbes’s own account of himself, in his younger days he too was ‘bred to the profession of physic’, which would suggest a physician’s background rather than a surgeon’s. There is no documentary evidence of his graduation or of membership of the Scottish Royal College of Physicians, which may or may not mean that he dropped out before completing his studies. However, in 1733, as a witness to his colonel’s will, he was referred to as ‘Doctor’ John Forbes,35 a title technically available only to qualified physicians. Certainly, evidence based on practice a generation later suggests that he was a little older than the average for an unqualified man, though younger than usual for those with a medical degree and some civilian experience: so it may be that he completed his degree and went straight into the army. Army surgeons often had little or no training, so John may have been better qualified than most. The crucial elements were finding the purchase money and a colonel willing to be one’s employer. In John’s case both obstacles were overcome, the first probably through borrowing, the other through Fifeshire connections. Sir Robert Hay, baronet of Linplum and Lord Charles’s cousin by marriage, was lieutenant colonel of the Royal North British (2nd) Dragoons, informally known as the Scots Greys.36 Developments abroad contributed too. In 1727, when war broke out with Spain, the army was expanded in expectation of continental service and of a Bourbon-backed Jacobite descent. The Greys were augmented from 207 officers and men, to a total strength finally fixed in 1729 at 309 officers and men organized into nine troops. On 25 September of that year, aged just twenty-two, John Forbes was commissioned as the regiment’s surgeon.37 The middle-aged colonel, James Campbell of Lawers in neighbouring Perthshire, distinguished veteran of Blenheim and Malplaquet, was John’s patron and friend from the start, and we may surmise that John found in him a substitute for the soldier-father he had never known.

2

Grey Dragoon The Greys were a living symbol of a growing integration with England and sense of Britishness – or rather of a dual identity – evident amongst those Scots who favoured the Revolution settlement, the Union of 1707 and the Hanoverian succession. Significantly it was a Lowland regiment – the tapping of the Highland military potential had hardly begun in 1707 – and it represented the vastly improved avenues of advancement created by the Union and the amalgamation of the Scottish and English armies and was almost the only Scottish regiment to retain both its corporate identity and its Scots character. In addition, the unit provided a public space within which networks of relationship, friendship and patronage operated to engender a strong sense of esprit de corps, networks that could give access to wider Scots and ultimately British webs of influence. It was these networks of relationships that were to determine and define John Forbes’s career. The regiment’s origins lay in the 1678 establishment of three independent troops of dragoons – mounted infantry – to support the restored monarchy. In short, from the start they were associated with the unity of the two Crowns although at this time their wearer was the Stuart Charles II. Their role was to put down not mainstream Presbyterians but extremist radicals who had in mind the exclusion of the openly Catholic James Duke of York from the succession. In 1681, the year of the defeat of the Exclusionists in England, the three original troops were expanded to six and amalgamated to form the Royal Regiment of Dragoons on the Scottish establishment. In their fur hats and grey coats they were part of substantially expanded standing armies on both sides of the border used to reinforce the growing power of the Crown. By the time of Charles II’s death in 1685 that power rested on a public opinion that favoured stability over disturbance and legitimate succession over religious affiliation, a healthy treasury and, in the background, armed force. James II, despite his open Catholicism, inherited all these advantages. Had it not been for the folly of his attempt to provide an irrevocable liberty for his fellow Catholics in his own lifetime, involving him in methods that looked very like an attempt to establish popery and absolute monarchy in both kingdoms, the Greys might have become the instruments of a strong and long-lived Stuart monarchy.1 As it was, when William of Orange arrived in 1688 the Greys, then stationed in London, at once went over to the invader’s side, so becoming permanently associated with the twin causes of constitutional monarchy and Protestant dominance. In England the subsequent constitutional settlement was a compromise between the Church-and-King principles of the Tories – who were prepared to wink at an

20

John Forbes

altered succession if the Church of England’s dominance was preserved – and the Whigs, some of whom were already articulating a contractual theory of monarchy. Consequently, the 1689 Toleration Act, while granting conditional freedom of worship to Presbyterians and other mainstream non-conformists, denied the same to Catholics and Unitarians and upheld Anglicanism as the official faith. NonAnglicans were officially excluded from service under the Crown, from parliament, from borough corporations and from higher education. The Anglican parish register remained the only legal record of births and marriages.2 In Scotland, however, a Tory boycott of the discussions allowed the Whigs to dictate terms. The result was a rebellion by Jacobites – supporters of James – and consequently the Greys served at the disastrous battle in the pass of Killiecrankie in July 1689 where government infantry was swept away by a ‘Highland charge’. However, the Jacobite success was deceptive. They were barely 2,000 strong, the ground had prevented their enemies from making full use of their superior firepower and the regulars’ vulnerability in close combat was soon to be redressed by the adoption of the socket bayonet. Killiecrankie was soon redressed by a government victory at Dunkeld and the rebellion was crushed at Cromdale on 1 May 1790. After the government victory, the joint monarchy of William and Mary was accepted on the basis that the Episcopalian church became disestablished and the Presbyterian confession took its place. In Ireland, the third of James’s multiple kingdoms, the largely Catholicized army remained loyal to the Stuart king, looking to Louis XIV for help and posing a serious threat to both the English and Scottish settlements.3 Thus the great European war that immediately broke out – called sometimes the War of the League of Augsburg, sometimes the Nine Years War (1689–1697) and occasionally the War of the English Succession – might as well be called the War of the British Succession. The Greys, now mounted on grey horses and in red uniforms, fought in the Netherlands against Louis XIV during the last three years of that conflict and in every major action of the subsequent War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713). In the process the royal forces from both sides of the Border were vastly expanded. For sons of the impoverished lesser gentry, less able than their English counterparts to enter a trade, and in any case inclined to see themselves as a warrior caste, war opened up attractive sources of employment, advancement and distinction. This professional and economic drive was combined with a patriotic one. For the English and Scots Whigs, and for most Tories, the over-riding issue was to secure the new regime and prevent a second, French-sponsored, Stuart restoration. That was also the rationale behind the Union of 1707.4 The crucial issue was again the succession. Mary’s sister Anne succeeded William in 1702 but her last surviving child had died in 1700. The English Act of Settlement of 1701 provided for the succession of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, descended from James I’s daughter Elizabeth, and her heirs. But Scotland was not about to let an English parliament foist an alien regime upon its technically separate state. If the English parliament could choose one successor, why should the Scots not choose another? This point was driven home by the Scots’ Act of Security, raising the spectre of a Stuart Scotland, potentially allied to France, on England’s northern border at the height of the war against Louis XIV.

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By the time Anne died in 1714 the Hanoverian claim had passed to Sophia’s son George, over the heads of fifty-eight more legitimate claimants. Nevertheless George, the only plausible alternative to a Catholic Stuart, was enthroned with surprisingly little fuss. On the Jacobite side, on his death in 1701 James II and VI’s claim had passed to his son, whom Louis XIV recognized as ‘James III’ – and whom the Hanoverians stigmatized as ‘the Pretender’. However, French recognition of his claim had been withdrawn under the 1713 Peace of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. Without French bases, money and men a Jacobite restoration was most unlikely to succeed.5 Yet in 1715 the Greys served with Argyll against the most widely supported Jacobite rising of them all. This was the moment when the counter-revolution, now supported by disgruntled Episcopalians as well as Catholics, attracted many Scots disappointed at the results of the Union and dismayed by the end of the Stuart dynasty. Jacobitism was becoming associated with Scottish independence. When the Earl of Mar’s numerically superior Jacobite army of about 10,000 met Argyll’s 4,000-strong government forces at Sheriffmuir in November, it should have swept its opponents from the field. Unfortunately for them Mar was a hesitant general and the gently undulating ground at Sheriffmuir was both unsuited to a Highland charge and very good for cavalry. While Mar overran the Hanoverian right wing, the Greys and other regiments broke Mar’s own right. The Greys then joined one other cavalry regiment and a single battalion of foot to block Mar’s advance, thus helping to hold him to a draw. Mar withdrew leaving Argyll in command of the field and still holding the gate to the Lowlands. It was a result the Pretender’s cause could not afford – especially as the relatively minor English revolt in Lancashire had been crushed at Preston. After Sheriffmuir Jacobite morale plummeted, a state of mind not helped by the Pretender’s late arrival in Scotland (at Peterhead in December), his gloomy unprepossessing manner, illness and early departure (on 5 February 1716).6 The Greys were now also instrumental in the crushing of a much smaller Spanishbacked revolt in 1719: the Jacobite rebels were but a handful and their Bourbon auxiliaries on Scottish soil were pathetically few in number because the Spanish fleet had been defeated and because an invasion flotilla had been scattered by storms. Afterwards they were reduced to 207 sabres but when war broke out with Spain in 1727 they were expanded again, gaining three additional troops, and in 1729, the year in which John Forbes put on his first red coat, their strength was fixed at 309.7 This was but part of the much wider military expansion of the early eighteenth century. Under the regulations issued in October 1729 all dragoons had to have a red sergelined coat, a waistcoat, breeches, regimental cloak, laced hat, large buff-coloured gloves, a shoulder belt with a pouch, a waist belt with a bayonet sheath and a strong horse of 15 hands. Though armed with pistols and a carbine as well as a basket-hilted sword, a dragoon was now essentially a cavalryman.8 John Forbes, like nearly all new officers, must have been familiar with the basics of fencing, horsemanship and use of firearms. What he now had to learn, more or less on the job, was the correct use of the sword on horseback against both horse and infantry, and the various drill-manual evolutions that enabled a troop to manoeuvre together. Indeed he would have been required to learn all the basic duties of a common trooper,

22

John Forbes

from the very important routine of caring for his horse and tack – three hours in the morning and three in the evening every day for the eight months of the year when the horses were not at grass – to practising ‘firings’ with ‘squibs’ (blank) or more rarely with ball. Though he may have had already read one of the many manuals available, he would have needed to refer to it constantly and to ask questions at every turn. Above all he would be kept extremely busy with parades, guards and learning complex internal administration of his regiment. Eighteenth-century army officers may have had to learn on the job, but they were neither amateurs nor amateurish.9 The Greys were, like most regiments in peacetime, widely dispersed, in their case across the southern West Riding of Yorkshire: in 1729 Leeds, Bradford, Doncaster, Pontefract, Wakefield, Rotherham and Wetherby were all garrisoned by whole troops or detachments. By the end of the year the regiment was little more concentrated, with two troops at Leeds, two at Wakefield and one each at Rotherham and Bradford, but the object was the same, to take advantage of the ‘conveniency’ of the ‘Riding house’ (or cavalry school) at Leeds.10 There was more to the location, however, than learning the niceties of dragoon horsemanship. Service in England was one way in which Scots officers acquired a sense of Britishness; and coming to the north of England placed young Forbes in a country that was not so very foreign in speech and culture to his own. The clothing towns he saw may have reminded him, in at least some degree, of Dunfermline. And here, in his new family the regiment, which was not so dispersed as to preclude bonding between officers of different troops, he found friends, built relationships and plugged into networks which were to have a profound effect on his career. Among his fellow officers was Captain Alexander Forbes, a cousin with far more money than John, who was later to assist his promotions financially. Two cornets, James Erskine and George MacDougall, were to become particular friends. Among the captains were two Fife noblemen: Lord Crawford and James Lindsay, fifth Earl of Balcarres, who had been out in the 1715, fought at Sheriffmuir and had afterwards gone into hiding until his mother procured his pardon. He had subsequently recovered enough of his former standing to be trusted with an army commission. His promotion to captain had come only two years earlier, so in 1729 he must have been hoping for further advancement. However, it became clear that George II had no intention of allowing a former Jacobite to rise any higher – and this despite the support of his two uncles, the Earl of Stair and Sir James Campbell.11 Most significant of all was the presence of a cornet of two years standing and another of the colonel’s nephews: John Campbell, son and heir to the third Earl of Loudoun.12 With this young nobleman, who became the fourth Earl in 1731 and a Scottish representative peer in 1734, Forbes formed a personal and professional comradeship that would endure for the rest of his life. The Yorkshire sojourn did not last long. In March 1730 the Greys were ordered to march north by way of Alnwick and Berwick in Northumberland to Kelso in the eastern Border region of Scotland, where on 5 November 1732 the regiment was reviewed by Field Marshal George Wade, the commander of the troops in Scotland, on Musselburgh Links.13 Even at this early stage of his career, John’s developing bond with his colonel was strong and very personal. The following year John, the twenty-

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five-year-old regimental surgeon, possibly the least significant of all the officers, accompanied Major General James Campbell to Edinburgh to be the first of three witnesses to Campbell’s will. Already the relationship was close, probably affectionate and, certainly on Campbell’s side, based on trust.14 The close bonds within the regiment were replicated across the entire British army: in each unit the officers formed a kind of exclusive club governed by an unwritten code of honour and they mattered more to a unit’s cohesion than the formal Articles of War. The code demanded courage, of course, and upheld the status of fellow officers by avoiding forbade intimacy with the rank and file. It also condemned slanderous gossip or accusations against another person of commissioned rank. Exactly what constituted a breach of these rules varied over time, often covered crimes unknown to the Articles of War. They were often enforced by informal means, such as ostracizing the offender, and the regiment’s subalterns would often take the initiative in unofficial tribunals of their own. Even formal courts martial might be used to enforce the honour code by prosecuting condemned and extremely ill-defined category of behaviour, ‘conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman’. ‘Conduct unbecoming’ was often resorted to as an alternative to a duel, and could cover a refusal to respond to an insult, for example, or as an alternative to a more serious charge such as rape. An officer accused of such conduct – or even a more specific offence such as disobeying an order – could demand a trial to clear his name and so dishonour his accuser. It was not always the man accused who was actually on trial.15 Such a system, in which one man’s honour was no less valuable than another’s, bred an endemic insubordination of mind. A senior officer or even a court martial might be challenged in print, in the civil courts, before a Parliamentary committee or by a refusal to serve.16 In such circumstances a commander’s authority depended far less upon the King’s commission than upon the network of relationships he established within the regiment and the personal regard in which he was held by his juniors. Inevitably personal affection played a very important role in such bonding – particularly for a man like Forbes so ‘uncommonly warm in his Friendship’. Very often this system worked well and produced an extremely powerful esprit de corps within and between regiments. But if such relationships broke down – as we shall later see them do – the discipline of a whole army might be in jeopardy. Army surgery was not a road to wealth, distinction or promotion. A regimental surgeon could never have any kind of command and it was very unusual for one to become a combatant officer.17 Having purchased his commission, Forbes was in debt from the beginning and earned very low pay – in 1740 a surgeon in a dragoon regiment received £109 10s a year, little more than two-thirds of the remuneration of a cornet – in addition to an allowance for medical supplies.18 On top of that he was expected to live as a gentleman officer. Thus an army career brought a physician or surgeon far less money than a private practice, lower social status and greater expense; the acquisition of a red coat was a poor bargain and usually a stop-gap before turning – at a fairly early age – to a civilian practice. John Buchanan (1710–1766), who became a regimental surgeon in 1734 and served in Flanders and Germany from 1742 to 1745, retired in the autumn of 1745 to become a prominent Staffordshire

24

John Forbes

physician and author of a now-famous manuscript study of military medicine. In 1746 Dr Alexander Carlyle encountered two old acquaintances, both Scots surgeons in dragoon regiments, Francis Home and Adam Austin, who later went on to become eminent Edinburgh physicians.19 Socio-economic logic proclaimed that John Forbes should do the same. Yet he chose not to return to civilian life; instead, after six years of service Forbes completed the rare transition from healer to warrior. On 5 July 1735, obviously with Campbell’s blessing, and apparently having borrowed the additional purchase money from his cousin Alexander, he obtained a cornet’s commission.20 Why did he burn his professional boats? Once again, direct evidence is wanting, but a number of factors seem likely. There was some immediate financial gain of course: his annual pay rose to about £146, not counting a daily allowance of 1s 6d per man towards the support of two servants.21 Probably, and more importantly perhaps, he had always wanted a dashing military career, and as the penniless third son, a surgeon’s commission had been his only practicable first step towards it. There was his father’s heritage and, after six years in the Greys, the prospects offered by his connection with Campbell, not to mention the powerful pull of his friendships with other fellow officers. And there was the superior social status of a combatant army officer: a lawyer like Hugh had far more prestige than even a physician, let alone a surgeon who got his hands bloody, but in what was still a Scots warrior caste, an army officer could stand above them all. That may have been one reason why Arthur combined his lairdship with the Dutch military service. In essence, Forbes was investing in his future prospects of command. The Forbes family of Pittencrieff was far from unique in this matter. There was a long history of minor gentry and others of the middling sort resorting to the profession of arms, either to boost their declining agricultural incomes (as in Arthur’s case) or to provide a suitable profession for younger sons. John’s own father, as the youngest son, had used the Scottish army to establish his own status as a Lowland laird. Sir James Agnew, third baronet of Galloway, who had begun his own career in the Greys, had all eight of his sons in the service, and Sir Peter Halkett two of his. This was a long-standing habit: Scots had served in many armies in the long European wars of the long seventeenth century, including (like Arthur Forbes later) the Scots Brigade in the Dutch service. In Marlborough’s army Scots had held a disproportionately high number of commissions and commands, and after Utrecht many continued to serve with the Dutch and French armies, as well as to take advantage of the rapid expansion of the forces of the British fiscal-military state. In the early to mid-eighteenth century between 25 and 27.5 per cent of officers on the British establishment were Scots, a proportion well in excess of Scots’ share of the total population. There were usually three or four Scots officers in other regiments and a fifth of the colonels were Scots. Consequently, the Scots elite tended to see itself as a class of warriors, an attitude that could make adaptation to civilian occupations such as trade psychologically problematic. The Church, the law and, at a pinch, medicine were regarded as moderately suitable careers for gentlemen but none really touched the standing of soldiering.22 Then there was the sheer adrenalin rush of prospective adventure and even exotic travel which just possibly, and if so belatedly and erroneously, John hoped to achieve

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through British intervention in the War of the Polish Succession of 1732–1735. His former childhood neighbour, Lord Charles Hay, had served in Gibraltar during the Spanish siege and in 1735 was a volunteer with the Austrian forces while doubling as a the British government observer; while Lord Crawford was winning a reputation for military skill and courage at the expense of his serious wound. At all events Forbes had now abandoned medicine for good and was committed to a career which might bring adventure, glamour and promotion, as well as the comradeship of a tightly knit elite of fellow professionals. County and national associations reinforced, and were reinforced by, regimental and other bonds. Clubs of like-minded men, usually but not always based on taverns and coffee houses, were a common. It was not until the 1740s that officers’ ‘clubs’, the forerunner of the later officers’ messes, appeared – in February 1744 John alluded to ‘our Saturdays’ Club (ye Greys) being met this half hour’23 – but there were other associations. That the Greys, like most other units, had its Masonic Lodge: membership is uncertain, because the lodge’s records were lost in Germany in 1757, but Forbes of course was already a Mason and most of his fellow officers were probably initiates. Less reputable was the Beggar’s Benison, a male masturbation club founded three years earlier in Anstruther in the southeastern corner of Fife. The name, and the society’s slogan, ‘May never purse or prick fail you,’ came from a blessing given to lubricious James IV of Scotland by a beggar woman who, so the story goes, had carried him across a river. As one might expect, very little in the way of member lists survive but it seems that the society’s founders were middle-aged businessmen with ‘free trading’ – smuggling – and vaguely Jacobite sympathies. Within a short time however, membership spread across Scotland and even into England, and an Edinburgh branch was opened to cater for those who found access to the far end of Fife problematic. Another appeared in Glasgow and in due course Scots mercenaries founded a branch in Russia. One scholar has described the Benison as ‘a cross between a Masonic Lodge and a Roman orgy’, and surmised that the image of James V as the ‘Gudeman of Ballangeich’ was a way of looking back nostalgically to a pre-Calvinist era of sexual liberty.24 That certainly makes sense of the participation of soldiers in the Hanoverian service, men who were neither ‘free traders’ nor closet Jacobites nor strict Calvinists. Alexander Monypenny, infantry officer and energetic womanizer, a friend of Forbes and, in America in 1757, Lord Charles Hay’s aide-de-camp, was certainly a member of the Beggars’ Benison. Loudoun had been associating with the Benison from 1739 and was a member in 1747. Some of the society’s more bizarre and disturbing rituals – including communal (and sometimes competitive) masturbation and rubbing penises together on a silver platter, and ceremonies in which naked teenage girls were sometimes present for inspiration rather than participation – had strong homoerotic or at least bisexual overtones. However the club’s founding institutes of 1739 express an apparently sincere dislike of sodomy, which was then a capital crime. More significantly, not all members were privy to such rituals and others, notably Monypenny and Loudoun (who kept at least two mistresses in England and took a third with him to America) were notoriously, vigorously and promiscuously heterosexual.25

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John Forbes

Where did Forbes fit into all this? It is impossible to say for certain. Forbes’s close association with Loudoun and Monypenny, combined with the club’s Fife base, might suggest that John too was a participant. Then again it might mean nothing. The only direct indication is a single concluding line – ‘the Beggar’s Benison to you’ – in a 1757 letter from another fellow officer, Captain James Masterton. But ‘The Beggars Benison’ was a slightly daring toast or salutation common among gentlemen who may have known nothing of the club, let alone its rituals, but who quite enjoyed its motto. (It even crops up as the name of a merchant vessel seized in the West Indies for smuggling.) However it operated, and however nominal much of its membership may or may not have been, the Benison probably acted as a space for the preservation of a nostalgically Scots Lowland identity in an increasingly Anglicized and ‘British world’. John’s own surviving letters are invariably discreet on sexual matters, though he enjoyed the odd earthy jest which may or may not mean anything in itself. Until 1757 he was friendly with Loudoun’s London mistress ‘Kate’, or ‘K. E.’, and frequently referred to her in his own letters. In 1744, apparently when she was pregnant with Loudoun’s child, he offered ‘compliments to Katte who I fancy is very fatt smooth and Sleaked’. In January 1748, referring perhaps to Kate’s reluctance to join Loudoun in Flanders, he wrote, ‘tell her she is a foolish jade, for if she had any remains of taste for pleasure, she wou’d come Breda or Williamstadt, where I am sure she would see what she ne’er saw before’. Then he added, apparently referring to an affair of his own: ‘They tell me Betty Gordon is in town, if so pray see her if she is, I confess I resent being in this damnation bog. Tell her if she will bring her husband this way I will have papers ready for them.’26 One may very cautiously conclude that, like many another unmarried officer – Loudoun and Ligonier for two – he was a part of the prevailing self-consciously masculine, phallocentric, womanizing culture. On the other hand, there is also the curiously gnomic remark he made to Loudoun about his relationship with the latter’s uncle, James Campbell. The Generall (Campbell) I mean is as to eating drinking and Sleeping as you ever saw him, but I vow to God if somebody does not provide him a Limmer, I have my own Apprehensions he wou’d make a prostitute of me, were it not for these Blessed west country principles (yt are my Comfort) when I reflect how religiously he interfer’d 'twixt me and the Carthusian at Tholouse.27

James Campbell was a Perthshire man so the West Country principles may be less an ironic reference to the Campbell country (Loudoun Castle lay in Aryshire) than to the extreme Presbyterian sect the Cameronians whose heartland lay in Scotland’s southwest. A limmer was a prostitute. So perhaps Forbes was simply saying that Campbell was overworking him? Or was he referring to a less than Presbyterian sexual relationship? The latter hardly seems likely given that he was writing to Campbell’s own nephew. The presumably coded reference to the Carthusian remains a mystery: did Campbell interfere in what he saw as an improper relationship for his protégé? Another public space, within the British context but, like the Benison and the regiment, protective of Scots identity, was the British Coffee House in Cockspur

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Street, Charing Cross. London (and indeed provincial) coffee houses were key foci for the educated and professional elite. Subject to a genteel appearance and payment of a modest admission charge, men of all ranks could mingle freely, meet friends, read newspapers and converse in an atmosphere relatively more sober than that of the inns and taverns. Established around 1710, the British quickly became a cultural and social focus for Scots in London, providing a meeting place for military officers, medical men, lawyers and judges such as Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, and even the occasional anglicized Presbyterian clergymen like Alexander Carlyle. It was just a short stroll from Loudoun’s house in Privy Garden off Whitehall – as a representative peer he needed seasonal London residence – and Loudoun was in the habit of meeting his friends there. George Forrest (1729–1734) was the proprietor in the early 1730s, but Forbes probably first knew it under the patronage of Archibald, Isabella and Jane Douglas (1735–1755). By the 1740s he was an established habitué. In 1744, writing from Flanders, he asked Loudoun to ‘tell Mrs Douglass at the Coffee house to send to Younger my shoemaker in Dukes street, for the boots I bespoake, and lett them be well taken care off as well as the rest of my concerns … ’. Robert Anderson was the proprietor from 1756 to 1772 but his wife Helen, daughter of a Fife merchant and sister of John Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, was the real manager until she took over the ownership in 1773. Helen, who acquired a reputation for cultivated lively intelligence, ran the British as a kind of salon for men she respected, and who might have already been an old Fife acquaintance, formed a warm friendship with John Forbes.28 At first his new military life was far from dashing or exotic. The Walpole ministry firmly avoided intervention in the Polish Succession conflict and in peacetime there was little employment outside the United Kingdom, even for infantry. What activity there was came supporting civilian authorities against endemic smuggling and in dealing with occasional popular disturbances. Such work was far from glamorous and sometimes humiliatingly ineffectual. The Greys, for example, were still quartered in and about Edinburgh in 1736 when the Porteous Riots broke out. Porteous was the Captain of the Edinburgh Town Guard sentenced to death for murder after his men had fired on a threatening crowd at the execution of a popular smuggler. When he was reprieved, a well-organized mob broke into the tollbooth prison by night, hauled Porteous out and hanged him in the street. The garrison failed to intervene because the perpetrators avoided the area around the Castle – so preventing early alarm – and troops outside could not get at them because they had nailed up the city gates.29 After that the North British Dragoons were deployed in garrisons and in support of the civil power in the four corners of England. In the spring of 1737 they were ordered to Essex to suppress smuggling and in June sent a detachment to Kent for the same purpose.30 In February 1738 dragoons from that detachment escorted a recaptured smuggler to the fleet Prison in London. In March another party escorted one John Martin from Maidstone gaol to his trial at the Rochester assizes; if acquitted he was to be taken with another smuggler, John Bowra, for a further trial at East Grinstead in Sussex.31 At the end of the month the detachments in Essex and Kent were gathered for a march to Dorset, another smuggling hotspot and therefore a

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John Forbes

place where troops were often deployed on coastal duty, pausing for three days at Barnet to allow James Campbell to review them. By the end of April there were two troops at Dorchester, two at Shaftesbury and one each at Blandford and Sherborne.32 In June the two troops at Shaftesbury moved north to Salisbury in nearby Wiltshire.33 The large and important Wiltshire woollen industry was in decline. Here operated the ‘putting-out’ system under which clothiers provided yarn to weavers who worked in their own homes or, increasingly, in small workshops. As in neighbouring Devon, the woven country cloth coming into the towns by packhorse for finishing was first cleaned, soaked in urine, soaped and sent to the fulling mills, dried, pressed and (if for export) dyed. In this way cottage industry was becoming combined with industrial finishing processes. Technological changes (notably the rise of waterpowered spinning mills around Halifax in distant Yorkshire) and foreign competition were already undermining the domestic spinners and weavers of the West and East Anglia. Falling orders led to declining wages and a shortage of work just as rural textile workers were becoming more dependent upon their piecework wages as opposed to farming. Handloom weavers were being slowly driven into destitution. Attempts at collective wage bargaining failed and at the end of November a clothier in Melksham, a town notorious for low wages, cut his weavers’ pay once too often. They sacked his premises and disabled his looms, thus ensuring that there could be no early return to work and prompting the Chippenham magistrates to send to London for military assistance. Consequently a detachment of Harrison’s 15th Foot was marched from Bristol to Chippenham to be at the disposal of the local justices. But already the violence had triggered similar outbreaks in nearby Chippenham, Bradford and Trowbridge, where men feared the wage cuts would spread, and prompted the magistrates to demand even more troops. At midnight on 1 December the Secretary at War, Sir William Yonge, sent Campbell’s dragoons orders to move the two troops at Salisbury to the aid of the Chippenham magistrates and the 15th. On 9 December the troop at Sherborne was ordered to Westbury and the troop at Blandford to Warminster.34 In the absence of effective local police forces, this calling in of the military by appeal to the Secretary-at-War was far from uncommon. The soldiers could not use force without the specific request of local magistrates, and then only after the Riot Act, requiring a mob to peacefully disperse, had been read; but it could not disguise the fact that ultimately they might have to use their swords against unarmed civilians. To most officers this was a peculiarly detestable species of task, and even when the Riot Act was read officers commonly waited far longer than the statutory time for the crowd to trickle away. Lord Barrington, Secretary-at-War from 1756, was to call it ‘a most Odious Service which nothing but Necessity can justify’.35 Right through to February 1739 the Greys and the infantry performed this unpleasant duty, containing the outbreaks and eventually restoring the peace so successfully that the good folk of Westbury petitioned for the removal of the supposedly licentious dragoons. The final act was the use of two troops to oversee the crowd at the executions of the rioters’ ringleaders at Salisbury in March. It must have been with a palpable sense of relief that they moved back towards London in time to be reviewed by George II on Hounslow Heath in July.36

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This was odious service indeed and not untypical of its kind. Fortunately it accounted for only a tiny proportion of the Greys’ activities between 1737 and 1743, even allowing for war preparations from 1740 and active service abroad from 1742. In this period aid to the civil power accounted for only 2 per cent of their service time as against 13 per cent on coast duty and 56 per cent on routine marches and inland deployments.37 And by the time the King saw them at Hounslow the international situation was beginning to promise greater things.

3

Rumours of Wars In 1733 the two Bourbon powers, France and Spain, had signed a Family Compact, an agreement to act together in defence of each other’s territories and against Britain. That might have come to nothing but for the escalation of a long-lived Anglo-Spanish dispute superficially over trade privileges, partly about Spanish claims to sovereignty in the Americas, but primarily about the balance of power in Europe. The resulting conflict, sometimes labelled the ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear’ after a merchant captain who claimed to have been mutilated by Spanish guarda-costas, would almost certainly have led to French intervention and the nightmare of a naval war against both Bourbon powers without a single European ally to distract their attention. Succour came, in the nick of time, in the unexpected form of Frederick II’s sudden invasion of the Austrian province of Silesia. When France backed Frederick the old Anglo-Austrian alliance of earlier wars was resurrected: the naval war was merged into the European conflict, a conflict almost made to advance the careers of penniless British cavalry subalterns such as John Forbes. The 1713 Peace of Utrecht, a complex of treaties ending the wars between Great Britain and the Bourbon powers of France and Spain, had been overwhelmingly concerned with Europe. Despite a short-lived British scheme to subdue Canada, the transfer of French Acadia to Britain as Nova Scotia, the restoration of a few trading posts along the bleak shores of Hudson’s Bay and minor adjustments in the Caribbean, the settlement was really about the balance of power in Europe. King Philip V, the first Spanish bourbon monarch, had to give up all claim to the throne of France and both he and Louis XIV had to recognize the new British regime established by the Revolution of 1688–1689. Two years later the Second Barrier Treaty allowed the Dutch to garrison a string of fortresses in the Austrian Netherlands as a safeguard against French invasion: the Netherlands, unlike France, possessed harbours capable of sheltering an entire invasion fleet. Therefore, keeping both the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Republic out of French hands was major British strategic aim.1 For Spain, however, the treaties were far from final. The cession of the naval bases of Gibraltar and Minorca ensured a revisionist approach in Madrid, while in America Spanish claims to sovereignty were limited only by Madrid’s 1713 recognition of the British colonies from South Carolina northwards. This meant that British settlements not specifically sanctioned by Spain – notably logwood settlements in Honduras and the new colony of Georgia founded in 1732, the latter uncomfortably close to Spanish Florida – were from the Spanish perspective illegal. As for trade, the treaty arrangements of 1713 permitted the British South Sea Company to import a specified

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number of black slaves and one shipload of general merchandise to the annual fair at Puerto Bello in the Gulf of Mexico. The Company used these privileges to cover largescale smuggling and naturally the Spanish authorities retaliated with ship searches and seizures by guarda-costas. British resistance, on the other hand, took the form of demands for compensation. The dispute rumbled on at a very low level until 1737 when the capture of seven British merchantmen provoked vociferous protests from the ‘Patriot’ opposition in parliament. By the spring of 1738 it was known that a 3,000-man expedition against Georgia was assembling at Havana and a British squadron under Admiral Haddock was sent to the Mediterranean as an implicit threat to force Spain to the conference table. An agreement, the Convention of el Pardo, was reached in January 1739: Spain was to pay £95,000 compensation, searches were to be regulated and there was to be free navigation in American waters: The South Sea Company, on the other hand, would pay compensation to Spain for its smuggling activities. That should have settled the matter, with honour preserved on both sides – but the agreement was never implemented, partly because the South Sea Company refused to pay.2 Moreover, fear of French intervention led the British to step up their naval pressure. Haddock’s squadron was not reduced as planned and by the early summer it was off Cape St Vincent, threatening Spain’s links with America while another fleet under Ogle hovered off Portugal. In response in May Spain suspended the Asiento and refused to pay its £95,000 while Haddock and Ogle remained on their respective stations. As Madrid had hoped, France prepared to intervene – the very development British pressure had been designed to prevent. By the summer of 1739 a French squadron sailed from Brest to attack the British in the West Indies.3 The Duke of Newcastle, who always warned against the danger of a combined Bourbon naval offensive, was particularly alarmed and argued that Britain must have an Austrian alliance to divert Franco-Spanish resources. Otherwise, if war broke out France would inevitably join Spain and invasion would certainly follow. For their part the Austrians were in dispute with Spain over territories in Italy and had reason to fear that France would not respect the Pragmatic Sanction – by 1737 she had pledged support for Bavarian claims to various Habsburg lands – and her proximity to the Austrian Netherlands was a standing threat. The veteran admirals Sir John Norris and Nicholas Haddock agreed that the British navy could not withstand a combined Bourbon onslaught at sea; and only an Austrian alliance would suffice to distract Franco-Spanish resources to the Continent. Norris thought that putting 80,000 men into the Austrian Netherlands by the spring would trigger a joint war against the Bourbons and bring in the Dutch, who not only garrisoned the barrier of fortresses but were obliged by treaty to respond to an invasion. Walpole would do no such thing, but with the ‘Patriots’, supported by Tweeddale and the Squadrone as well as by Argyll’s Scottish Whigs, preparing a devastating attack on the January convention, he was unable to resist demands for war with Spain. The War of Jenkins’ Ear broke out in October 1739 and by the spring of 1740 France was visibly about to intervene. Walpole had to give way to Newcastle’s insistence on preparations to resist invasion, and for possible action on the Continent.4 Consequently in the early spring of 1740 four training camps were established: at Newbury with three regiments of horse, three of dragoons and four of foot under

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Field Marshal Wade; one on Hounslow Heath just east of London; one on the Isle of Wight to cover Portsmouth and another under General Philip Honeywood, with a similar composition to Wade’s, in Windsor Forest whence the Greys were directed. Their underlying purpose was to give the assembled corps the advanced training rendered impossible in normal peacetime conditions by the customary dispersal of detachments. France and Prussia did not neglect their soldiers’ training in this way, and most British military thinkers would have liked to follow suit. But expense, in a state where parliament controlled military expenditure and in which the standing army was still distrusted, combined with the demands of coast duty, prevented such operations until a crisis appeared. However France did not intervene and consequently there was no Austrian alliance and no fighting in Europe. The campaigns were seaborne or colonial, with no use for cavalry units – so for Forbes and the Greys there was still no prospect of active service. Meanwhile, the camps appear to have been a miserable shambles. Very bad weather and rain produced widespread sickness, while at Windsor Forest, ironically, there was a shortage of clean drinking water. The dragoons’ horses went to grass on 26 August making the soldiers’ own presence redundant. When Wade complained that to persist would be merely to fill up the hospitals, the camps were broken up on 30 September.5 That ended any pretence of warlike preparations. In October the Greys were moved north to Yorkshire, only to return south to Berkshire in the following month. Even the growing likelihood of French intervention did not offer the Greys much chance of action. Unless Britain could find a continental ally, or the Bourbons managed to invade, the war would remain on the seas. The weeding out of officers too old or infirm for active service – including the Greys’ lieutenant colonel, Sir Robert Hay, who was almost eighty – did little for promotion and nothing for prospects of action.6 Salvation for Forbes, as for many another destitute young officer, came not from London or the Caribbean, but from the heart of central Europe. The spark was the long-expected death of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, leaving his hereditary Austrian, Hungarian and Netherlands provinces to his daughter, Maria Theresa. Because in many of these possessions a female succession was legally questionable, Charles had spent much diplomatic energy in persuading the other Great Powers, and some minor ones, to sign the Pragmatic Sanction, a pledge not to contest Maria Theresa’s rights. Once Charles was dead, however, the young and ambitious Prussian king, Frederick II, tore up the agreement with an unprovoked attack on Silesia. His own claim was flimsy, his personal experience limited, and a Habsburg counterattack inevitable. When it came in 1741, and the two armies clashed at Mollwitz, the king himself foresaw defeat and fled the field. But even as he galloped to safety his soldiers snatched victory from the jaws of apparent disaster and Silesia was secured. Frederick quickly recovered his confidence and went on to prove an extraordinarily talented military commander as well as a clever and slippery diplomat. France quickly joined in the new war, ostensibly in support of Charles Albert of Bavaria’s claim to the imperial throne, hoping to at last dismember the whole Habsburg Monarchy – and although Frederick turned out to be an unreliable ally, she seemed set to succeed.7 There was now a powerful strategic case for British intervention on the side of Maria Theresa. If the Habsburg Empire were to fall the whole European balance of

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power would be tilted dangerously in favour of France. More specifically, should the French overrun the Austrian Netherlands, modern Belgium, they would possess the means of invading Britain itself. While no French Channel port was sufficiently large to contain a whole invasion fleet and its escorts, the estuary of the Scheldt was ideal for such a purpose. Should a blockading squadron be dispersed by bad weather or driven away by enemy action, even for a few hours, the Fleur-de-Lys would shortly appear in Essex or Kent, bringing in its wake a Catholic Stuart restoration. There was every reason to combine with the Austrians and (if possible) the as-yet reluctant Dutch, technically committed to the defence of the Austrian Netherlands by the 1715 Barrier Treaty, against France.8 Mid-eighteenth-century ministers could not do without a majority in the House of Commons but to achieve and to remain in office they needed the king’s confidence. They would therefore find it hard to resist if George II wished to use British resources to defend his German electorate of Hanover, which occupied a strategically sensitive position. However, there were powerful forces pulling the Walpole ministry in the opposite direction: having been dragged reluctantly into one expensive and inglorious war they were not about to embark upon another. Besides, any action in Germany would inevitably be represented by ‘Patriot’ navalist politicians, the young William Pitt among them – as slavish truckling to Hanover. Caribbean islands were rich prizes in their own right and theoretically the props of naval power; they could be used as bargaining counters in any European settlement, whereas intervention on the European continent was most unlikely to produce anything of the kind. Thus by December, instead of charging French horse, the Greys were fighting vicious little engagements with Sussex smugglers – in one such encounter a party of dragoons seized a quantity of tea from a barn only to be overwhelmed by a pursuing gang.9 In April Lord Balcarres, the former Jacobite, was at long last promoted captain,10 thus opening up a vacant lieutenancy, but on the whole officers’ chances of promotion remained exactly as they had been. Their prospects were gloomier still by September 1741 when George II concluded a convention with France that neutralized his beloved Hanover.11 John had been six years a cornet, the average time for his rank, but he was older than most and could not expect a lieutenancy in less than fourteen.12 His noble friend Loudoun, by contrast, since 1737 a lieutenant colonel in the army as well as captain in the 3rd Foot Guards, now received the governorship of Stirling Castle.13 Such a plum, which for Forbes would have made the difference between shabby gentility and financial security, was far beyond a younger sprig of minor Lowland gentry. Yet if he sold up he would be without a career or income. At thirty-three he was fast becoming an obscure and ageing junior officer in a peacetime regiment. Then Walpole fell. The failures in the seaborne war in the West Indies and the neutrality of Hanover on the continent had damaged his reputation beyond repair. The general election of 1741 reduced his slender majority of forty-two to a mere nineteen, most of the swing occurring in Cornwall and Scotland. In December Walpole lost the chairmanship of the Committee of Privileges and Elections – with Lord Charles Hay voting for the opposition’s candidate – which heard and made decisions upon petitions against election results. This committee’s rulings could change results in thirty or more seats and might thus destroy what was left of the administration’s majority. When

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it upheld a petition from Chippenham, and when his supporters began to refuse to attend the Commons, the game was up for Walpole. He resigned on 2 February 1742.14 The new ministry was headed by Lord Carteret as Secretary of State for the Northern Department, with the Earl of Wilmington at the Treasury and Newcastle remaining in office as the other Secretary of State. John Russell, fourth Duke of Bedford, became First Lord of the Admiralty, while Tweeddale (much, as we have seen to Hugh Forbes’s satisfaction) was projected into the office of Secretary of State for Scotland. This new cabinet had a deeply interventionist agenda. Following Carteret’s advice, George II refused to renew Hanover’s pledge of neutrality and accepted that the Habsburg Monarchy, while it might have to yield or exchange territory, must remain substantially intact. Anything less would make the Bourbons far too powerful and ultimately endanger the United Kingdom; and therefore, Maria Theresa must have British military support. Carteret was not reckless and aimed to postpone open conflict with France for as long as possible. For the time being Britain would act only as the auxiliary of Maria Theresa, not as a principal belligerent, and there was no declaration of war. Nevertheless, the new government proposed to send a British contingent to join Hanoverian, Austrian and Dutch units to defend the Austrian Netherlands and to ensure the neutrality of Hanover. John Dalrymple, Earl of Stair, an ageing but shrewd Scots veteran of Marlborough’s campaigns, was chosen as commander and the Greys were among the regiments earmarked for the expedition.15 At this Lieutenants James Dalrymple and James Wilkinson of the Greys elected to retire. Dalrymple had bought his first commission in 1708 and had been a lieutenant since 1723; and Wilkinson, though younger, had obtained his cornetcy as long ago as 1721 and he had been a lieutenant since 1733. Apparently, and understandably, neither of these ageing subalterns felt inclined to undergo the rigours of active overseas service. Indeed their predicament illustrates well a key fact about peacetime soldiering: for those career officers without adequate reserves of money and family connections, promotion could be painfully slow. Forbes’s position, in other words, was far from unusual. But for young John Forbes and George Preston, the cornets next in the queue for promotion, the lieutenants’ decisions were a godsend. The news must have sent Forbes scrabbling around to find the purchase money for Dalrymple’s place – and find it he did, by borrowing from Alexander Forbes (who was promoted major on 27 May). On 23 April 1742 John was promoted lieutenant, along with his comrade in arms Preston, who replaced Wilkinson.16 Just a day earlier the Greys had been ordered to concentrate three troops at Reading (six days later the Lewes detachment was ordered to join there) and three at Speenhamland and Newbury in Berkshire. In April they moved south to take up quarters in and around Kingston, then a Thames-side village to the west of London, and in June they were reviewed by George II on Kew Green. On 22 June they moved east along the river to Southwark, London’s south bank suburb, where they were duly admired as ‘fine hardy Fellows that want no Seasoning, and made an Appearance agreeable to all but the Inn-keepers’. Two days later their last two troops left southeastward for their embarkation port, which the newspapers wrongly reported to be Dover. In fact they were bound for Gravesend which they reached by mid-July and where the Greys and Hawley’s dragoons took ship for Ostend in the Austrian Netherlands.17

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Moving cavalry across even such a narrow band of water required a major logistical effort, meticulous planning and attention to detail. Officers, men and 896 horses of both regiments were packed tightly into twenty-six transports under the escort of HMS Liverpool. The army officers had successfully objected to the contractor’s planned dimensions for the horse stalls – he had wanted a maximum of 25½ inches – but for a number of units the voyage involved distressing injuries to the animals. Here it probably was that young Forbes learned the importance of nailing up sheepskins behind the horses to prevent damage to their tails. It was with relief that on 24 July they landed at Ostend where the Pragmatic Army of Austrian, Dutch, Hanoverian and British troops was gathering.18 Loudoun was there as was Hay with the 1st Foot Guards. Here too was Stair’s military secretary, Robert Keith, nearer Arthur’s age than John’s, who nevertheless became part of the same circle. Like many laird families, the Forbeses clustered thickly in the British armed forces and campaigning – even in the phoney war of 1742 – meant even tighter familial bonding. Professor Devine cites the example of Sir Andrew Agnew, fourth baronet of Lochnaw in Galloway and lieutenant colonel of the 21st Foot, who had no less than four brothers serving in two different regiments and who counted Stair, a Dalrymple but a kinsman and fellow Galloway man, as family.19 These five and other friends and neighbours met regularly in the evenings. Very distant relations with different surnames and even friends and acquaintances from the same counties might belong to these extended military families. In August a convivial Forbes gathering at Bruges was recorded by a distant connection named Brown, probably a military surgeon, in a letter to Duncan Forbes: I had a night here with Majr Forbes, Capt. Arthur, Hugh Forbes, John of the Grays & a brother of Sir Arthur’s [Sir Arthur Forbes of Craigieuer] who is a Lieut. in Genll Copes Dragoons, the Greys were much admired here, and indeed all the troops that are come.20

New and renewed friendships, family parties and showy reviews were about the most exciting things to happen to the Pragmatic Army in 1742. The main British force took up positions around Ghent, well placed to counter a French thrust along the upper Lys or upper Scheldt, but equally well positioned for an invasion of France itself. The Greys were garrisoned at Oudenarde, further up the Scheldt Valley, where they could both screen Ghent and, if needed, move to support the Dutch garrison of Tournai. D’Aremburg, the Austrian commander in the Netherlands, and the two British generals – Stair, and the French Huguenot émigré Jean-Louis Ligonier – wanted to attack France. However, Stair urged the ministry to first detach Frederick of Prussia from his French allies: in effect, to persuade the Austrians to reach an accommodation with their Prussian assailant and then to concentrate against France. Carteret was enthusiastic but Maria Theresa, when the Prussian king would not make suitable concessions, was determined to have another try at expelling Frederick from Silesia. Only when this campaign met with ruin at the Battle of Chotusitz on 17 May

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was she prepared to negotiate, but by then Frederick had no incentive to make the concessions she demanded. Stair’s precondition had been frustrated and Pragmatic Army pragmatically stayed where it was.21 In Bohemia, however, a rapid Austrian concentration had tipped the balance sharply against France. The hopelessly outnumbered French under Broglie and BelleIsle began a disintegrating retreat. On 17 June their shattered fragments stumbled into Prague where they were besieged. The disaster persuaded Frederick that he must negotiate before the whole weight of Austria’s might was turned against him – even before Prague was invested his representatives began peace talks at Breslau and in Berlin on 27 July the treaty was signed. Frederick kept Silesia in return for withdrawing his forces from Austrian lands within sixteen days, leaving Maria Theresa without her most valuable province but also freeing her armies for a major offensive against France.22 As Stair had foreseen, the French force in Westphalia, astride the communications between Hanover and Flanders, was sent to save Broglie in Bohemia, thus enabling the Hanoverians and Hessians to join the Pragmatic Army and leaving France wide open to invasion. The junction of forces took place that autumn and in October, John – apparently already acting as Campbell’s aide-de-camp – rode over to Ghent to see a review of the newly arrived Hessian and Hanoverian horse. Here the Scottish outsider combined admiration for the Germans with wry amusement at English officers’ – already he was using ‘English’ when he meant ‘British’ – preconceptions about Hanoverians. The English, he remarked, had expected ‘the oddest ill dress’d dirty rascals they [could] fancy’, only to discover that, though British horses were better, the Germans’ ‘Cloaths, dress, uniformity, regularity … Horse Accoutrements and Appointments out of sight of what any mortall here imagined … ’. As for their artillery, he ‘saw them fire their cannon sixteen shot in a minute by one of our minute watches’.23 Within a year this impression was to be confirmed by the first sight of Hanoverian gunners in battle. Still there was no decision as to what the army should actually do. The only casualties came from accidents, though such injuries were frequent, sometimes grotesque and occasionally bizarre. On a Brussels street, for example, a Dutch soldier shot a British private in the genitals, the ball carrying away the lower half of his penis and one of his testicles, damaging the second one beyond repair and exiting through his thigh. Dr Buchanan recorded the treatment with professional enthusiasm: ‘the testicles were taken out as in Castration; the penis cut off about an inch from its root, stitching a small artery … ’. The man recovered, though his beard never grew as formerly and he became so peevish and fussy that he was discharged from three regiments in succession.24 Stair wanted a rapid concentration followed by a fast march on good roads towards the Oise, thus securing water transport for his supplies. From there he could quickly reach Paris or Rouen and move on to attack Le Havre. However, the Dutch government, wedded to its theoretical neutrality, was firmly opposed to any kind of offensive. The Austrians, who wanted to intimidate or encourage the smaller German states to join them, wanted an invasion of Germany, as did George II who wanted to

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protect Hanover. The King’s demands were final: in a political system where retention of office depended upon the king’s approval as much as upon a parliamentary majority, Carteret was bound to support his master. But by the time he and the King had won the argument the campaigning season was over.25 The army went into winter quarters and action was deferred until the spring of 1743.

4

Dettingen In February 1743 the British contingent left its winter quarters, joined with D’Aremburg’s Austrians and marched to Aix-La-Chapelle. After three weeks’ dawdling at Aix, they marched on towards the Rhine. The weather was good at first and progress was steady, if dusty and exhausting with the rank and file on bread and water rations. Reaching the Rhine they crossed by a bridge of boats and turned upstream along the right bank until, opposite Coblenz, they were halted by snow. Not until the end of April did they turn across country to reach Frankfort-on-Main. Stair had not given up pressing for a bolder policy, suggesting a rapid advance to the Danube in imitation of Marlborough, to catch the French army then retreating from Bavaria before Prince Charles of Lorraine’s Austrians. That was too bold for the King who, directing the campaign by letter from Hanover, wanted to avoid open direct war with France – in theory Britain was merely an auxiliary of Maria Theresa and France an auxiliary of Prussia – and more immediately to secure the installation of his own candidate as Elector of Mainz.1 For three weeks, the army lingered near Frankfort while Stair used the time to build a bridge of boats. He hoped to push south, catching Marshal Noallies as he assembled a French army on upper-Rhine and cutting him off from Bavaria; but to do so he had to suppress George II’s direct written order forbidding him to cross the Main. On 3 June (25 May OS) the allies began to tramp across the bridge of boats and two days later Stair heard that Noallies was obligingly coming north to attack him. Stair promptly blocked French advance where the high road emerged from a narrow forest defile to the south, although the cautious D’Aremburg disapproved and Austrian units were slow to follow the British and Hanoverians. Noallies turned aside rather than accept battle on unfavourable ground, so Stair’s manoeuvre protected the Main, the allies’ principal line of supply and communication. However, in Hanover George II took alarm, ordering Stair to return to the apparent security of the right, or north, bank. As the British and Hanoverians retired across the Main, Noallies reacted by marching north-east on Aschaffenburg, where by occupying the town and securing the bridge he could threaten the allies’ communications with Hanover. Stair had to respond: on 15 June the army began two days of forced marches upstream but they were too late. Noallies blocked the bridge at Aschaffenburg and cut off the allies’ waterborne supplies from upstream; and once Stair had appeared opposite he planted heavy batteries at and above Seligenstadt, severing the Pragmatic Army from its magazines and Hessian reinforcements at Hanau.2

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When George II and Carteret arrived at last on 19 June the army was already hungry. Bands of enemy hussars forded the Main to surprise overland food convoys, and the allies lacked the light cavalry needed to counter them. Discipline and morale eroded fast as bands of soldiers spread out to loot the countryside. This had its own knock on effect as the peasants in turn stopped bringing food in for sale. ‘Gin’ observed, Dr Buchanan ‘became a greater favourite than ever, was mixed with poorsower Rhenish wine plundered from the neighbouring villages’. Though Stair was seen every day riding round the camp and encouraging the men, the position was not sustainable. Very reluctantly – he took a week to make up his mind – George was forced to recognize reality. In the dark small hours of 26 June the army began to withdraw on Hanau.3 Its way was funnelled through a narrow road between the river and the heavily wooded ever-closer Spessart Hills and on through the little town of Dettingen. Noallies, seizing his chance, thrust a powerful blocking force over the river at Seligenstadt and stationed it behind two converging marshy streams and a deep ravine just east of the town of Dettingen. The only bridge, just below the confluence of the two steams, could be easily blocked and covered by troops in the buildings behind. Noallies gave the commander of this detachment, his nephew the Duc de Grammont, strict orders to remain on the defensive while another strong force crossed at Aschaffenburg and closed in on the allies’ rear. The Pragmatic Army, believing the road to Hanau to be open, was to be caught between Dettingen, the Aschaffenburg force, the flanking batteries on the south bank and the dense woods to the north. As day broke on 27 June George and Stair saw dense French columns pressing upstream towards Aschaffenburg, confirming George’s appreciation that the danger would come from the rear, and prompting him to ride off to join the powerful rearguard of British and Hanoverian guards’ regiments. But the real danger lay just ahead.4

Aschaffenburg

R. Main

Spessart Hills

To Han au

Dettingen

Baggage baggage KleinOstheim

AMP CH C N E FR

DETTINGEN, th

Seligenstadt

Battle plan 1 Dettingen

British Allies French

June 16th 1743. 27

0

Scale of Miles. 1

2

Dettingen

41

At first light the French gunners opened fire. Smoke billowed across the water as eighteen-pound shot howled over the heads of the marching troops or ploughed through their dense columns, shattering bodies, removing heads and limbs. Around 8.00 am some units – or perhaps just some field batteries hoping to make a reply – halted with their fronts to the river. At that moment the allied cavalry, still moving ahead, saw Grammont’s men pouring out of Dettingen and taking up positions behind the marshy streams. Immediately George ordered his troops to form a line of battle facing Grammont: their only hope – a desperate one – was to dislodge him and break through on the Hanau road. The king, Stair and, no doubt, Lieutenant Forbes were confronted with the awful prospect of encirclement, defeat, George II taken prisoner and a lost war.5 Only faulty coordination of the French forces allowed the Allied army to fight its way out. Instead of standing firm, Grammont launched a piecemeal attack before the Aschaffenburg detachment could descend on the allies’ rear. He may have been moved by vainglory or, as he claimed later, a fear that the main allied force had already slipped past him. More likely he saw the Pragmatic army in the slow cumbersome process of changing its front and letting the infantry pass forward through the cavalry ahead – it took four hours to complete – and decided to catch them in midmanoeuvre. Or it may simply be that his half-disciplined infantry pressing through Dettingen, pushed the units in front forward beyond the stream and in the confusion they escaped from their commander’s control. Whatever its causes his mistake was decisive. Suddenly the numerical odds were tipped in favour of the Allies and there was a chance – just a chance – that they could battle their way through.6 The British regiments met the initial onslaught of the French Guards by rolling volleys, causing them to recoil and take shelter behind their own advancing cavalry. Nine squadrons of French horse now closed on the allied left where the French cannonade had seriously weakened the 3rd Dragoons and the 33rd Foot. Brushing aside desperate counter charges, the élite Maison du Roi and Carabiniers twice attacked the left of the allied infantry with pistol-fire and swords, on the second attempt breaking clean through the first line. The infantry rallied and the quality of its peacetime fire drill showed as its volleys brought down the isolated French horsemen and then shattered two successive assaults of the French foot. They did not fire at command but mechanically, as their drill taught them, as fast as they could load and prime. Great clouds of smoke rolled across the lines, obscuring the target; but still the soldiers fired into the gloom, their faces blackened, closing up when men fell and slowly moving forward. On the right a Hanoverian battery, brought forward by George himself, repeated on the field the performance Forbes had seen at Ghent, firing case shot into the fugitives with astonishing rapidity.7 The whole of Grammont’s force was now in retreat. As the remains of the Maison du Roi re-advanced to protect the shattered infantry, the bulk of the British cavalry, held back for most of the battle, charged. Campbell, Forbes and the Greys hit the French horsemen in flank, breaking their formation and driving them from the field. Grammont might still have retired behind his streams and tried to hold Dettingen until the Aschaffenburg force closed in. But now his battered foot soldiers were out of control, fleeing pell-mell through the village and cramming onto the hopelessly narrow

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pontoon bridges at Seligenstadt, many tumbling into the water or trying desperately to swim the river. Hundreds drowned as Noallies’s fine plan disintegrated into defeat. At about 4.00 pm with ample daylight left for a vigorous advance Stair was desperate to turn his cavalry loose on the retreating foe, and one may imagine Campbell, with Forbes at his elbow, urging him to do what cavalry did best. Noallies’ army might then have been utterly ruined and a fortuitous success might have become a resounding victory.8 But there was no hot pursuit. D’Aremburg was against it and it appears that George II, relieved and shocked by his narrow escape, concurred. Grammont’s surviving men were allowed to retire unmolested as Noallies, who seems to have forgotten all about the troops still under his hand, directed them to the south bank. As if to confirm that decision the heavens opened, the rain filling soldiers’ hats with drinking water before soaking them all to the skin. The downpour continued unbroken for sixteen hours. That evening the hungry soldiers camped on the edge of the field of battle, in the pouring rain, with very few tents pitched (many had lost poles and pegs) and within sound of the dying and wounded. Next day the army marched on to Hanau, leaving behind about 600 wounded for whom there were no wagons. ‘[We] were’, commented Buchanan, ‘like the Roman army commanded by Fabius in Campania, when defeated by the Samnites, viz: in the most unhappy & deplorable condition imaginable, without provisions for the troops, remedies for the sick & wounded, or any means of Reposing themselves, of which they were in so much want … ’. The army’s whole administrative support system had collapsed.9 At Hanau they found plentiful food, if little straw for bedding and horses, and 12,000 fresh Hessians and Hanoverians. The reinforcement encouraged Stair to urge another cross-Main offensive, this time to cut Noallies off from the Rhine. But his colleagues were doubtful, and George II would have none of it. The most the king would do, a few days later the battle, was to knight four of his generals – Campbell, Ligonier, John Cope and Honeywood – for their services on the field. It was late July before he consented to an advance in conjunction with the newly arrived and very able Austrian general Prince Charles of Lorraine. Even then it took a month to move the thirty miles southward to Worms, where again caution – caution possibly deepened by a huge sick list – got the better of him and he gave up. Exasperated beyond bearing, Stair resigned his command on 4 September, his place going to Sir Philip Honeywood, an intellectually challenged nonentity whom Ligonier and many other officers held in disdain. Barely a fortnight later the arrival of a belated Dutch contingent tempted George to march on to Speyer; but there, with the French strongly posted across the Rhine, and Prince Charles sending word that he thought it too late in the year for offensive operations, the king gave up altogether.10 Dettingen had a brief psychological impact out of all proportion to the allies’ actual achievement. At home it produced far-fetched comparisons with Marlborough and Blenheim and prompted Handel to write a celebratory Te Deum. In Vienna Maria Theresa, who had been in Linz, made a triumphant return to her capital. In France there was gloom, only deepened by Noallies’s assessment of the superiority of enemy infantry. Strategically, however, the campaign had far less impact than the triumphant Hapsburg re-conquest of Bavaria. Diplomatically its significance was minimal: Cateret’s negotiations at Hanau with the agents of the French-sponsored

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Bavarian, the Emperor Charles VII, were a dead end because Maria Theresa wanted to keep Bavaria and he wished to return it.11 As for Lieutenant Forbes, he had experienced his first major action, taken part in a triumphant charge and – unlike his friend Preston, the only Greys’ officer wounded – escaped unscathed. He now knew he could perform coolly under fire and in the thick of a cavalry melee, which for a hitherto un-blooded subaltern was satisfying enough. However, the campaign had taught grimmer lessons too. He had seen at first hand that the provision of adequate wagons and supplies was crucial to any military expedition, and that allowing an enemy to threaten communications could easily become fatal. Moreover a commander’s outstanding courage could not outweigh failure to control the battle, not to mention neglecting to exploit success. All these experiences began to form the Forbes who, fifteen years later, would conduct that meticulously systematic advance on Fort Duquesne. In October and November the Pragmatic Army returned to winter quarters near Brussels by way of the Rhine valley. For the able-bodied the march was less fatiguing than the outward journey. The weather was fine but cool; the shortening days meant shorter marches; and longer halts allowed men more time to pull off their boots and rest their limbs. Swollen legs were rare even amongst the cavalry. For the wounded carried downriver in barges it was a different story: they ‘suffered much from cold & wet & bad provisions, were Sick, faint & weake, pains in all their bones, Limbs numb & threatning a mortification’. Somewhere along the way Lord Crawford’s old wound reopened yet again and he was forced to convalesce for some time at Aix-La-Chapelle, a noted spa town to which Dr Buchanan sent at least one other patient. For those men the return was a miserable one.12 In the New Year a French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands was expected. Command of the 38,000 strong British and Hanoverian contingents now passed to the cautious 71-year-old George Wade, with Ligonier and Campbell as generals of the foot and horse, respectively. In practice Wade, having the largest number of troops, generally got his timid way when it came to strategic decisions. In theory, however, Wade was no more than the equal of the Austrian D’Aremburg who led 7,000 men, and of Maurice of Nassau who commanded the 20,000 Dutch troops. D’Aremburg tended to be oversensitive to threats to Hainault where he had estates, while Maurice of Nassau was only there because the Dutch were treaty-bound to contribute to a field force when the Austrian provinces were threatened. In London the ministry provided no clear strategic direction. Consequently, though the Pragmatic Army gathered around Ghent to meet the expected French thrust against the Barrier Fortresses, it was paralysed by a bickering and excessive caution that disgusted Prince Charles.13 It was as well for the allies that Marshal Maurice de Saxe’s huge French army assembling near Lille had other purposes. To all appearances it was intended to parry any allied thrust towards Dunkirk and, ultimately, to invade the Low Countries. However, that obvious threat concealed a plan to invade England from Dunkirk. The Rochefort and Brest naval squadrons were to combine, engage the British Channel fleet and so enable Saxe’s transports to slip across the Straits of Dover; 10,000 troops were to be landed at Maldon in Essex on the Blackwater River estuary, within easy

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striking distance of London itself. The invaders would then link up with a planned Jacobite rebellion with the aim of overthrowing the Hanoverian dynasty and putting James Edward on the throne.14 The danger, however, did not go unnoticed in London – or indeed in the country, which saw a sustained panic. The government sent orders to Flanders for ten battalions to concentrate at Ostend where they could defend the port or be embarked for England under the escort of the Channel fleet commanded by Sir John Norris. In the Pragmatic Army, there was a welcome flurry of activity as the troops moved coastward, but very little alarm. As Forbes chirpily put it to Loudoun, The Devill confoun’d Brest Sqadrn say I, who not contented to unhale the heal hearts of England, comes now to set our beards alow. Know that from the aforesaid preamble that Last night at 8 wee received an Estaffette [a military courier] from Co: Patison of the train at Ostend. it is needless to tell you what he said least this fall in wt the Brest Squadron, (Dont you admire my wisdom?) however the Effects were wonderful on your humble Servt. for from a spectacle in a chimney nick, dying of the Cold, we dispatch’d to Ostend such detachments, that if they but come, Sr John may go back to Spithead. In short in this part of the world wee treat you, as we do our selves, by turns to laugh at you, pity you, despise you, think you mad… all in a breath. So much for the present posture of affairs in Flanders which for the curious may go into the Journall. I mean yr Gazette.

For Forbes, who was more immediately concerned with Crawford’s reappearance at Brussels, ‘full of Spirits, but a Good deal shaken yt is thin and low from his long suffrance at Aix la Chapelle’, the scare was no more than that.15 This was unsurprising – the common reaction of soldiers committed to a local theatre of war upon hearing of alarms elsewhere – but utterly wrong. Had France concentrated her naval resources in the Channel and succeeded in covering the crossing of Saxe’s army, there would have been little to stop them reaching London. Young Forbes, still a mere subaltern, had yet to develop a wide and coherent strategic vision – or if he had one he was too busy showing off his wit and wordplay to display it. Fortunately French strategy had overreached French resources. With only thirtyeight ships of the line divided between its three bases at Brest, Rochefort and Toulon, Louis XV and his council should have attempted to concentrate their strength for a single operation. Instead they chose to launch the invasion of England at the same time as trying to seize control of the Mediterranean in concert with Spain. That allowed only nineteen of the line to cover the invasion and they were ordered to sail in the middle of February. It took the admiral until March to reach the Straits of Dover, and then he reduced his strength further by detaching five ships to Dunkirk to give Saxe a close escort. As the remaining thirteen French ships came within sight of the English shore Sir John Norris appeared with nineteen of the line, and crowds of spectators began to gather on the white Kentish cliffs. The French – whose ships were generally bigger and more heavily gunned than British ones – now faced a battle on roughly equal terms, rather than with the overwhelming superiority the operation demanded. Only a dramatic victory – the destruction of Norris’s fleet – could have saved the invasion,

Dettingen

45

whereas the practice of fighting in line ahead tended to favour a draw. However, the issue was not put to the test of battle. A dramatic storm blew up, inflicting heavy damage upon both fleets and overwhelming one British ship of the line. The French fleet was crippled by dismastings, and in Dunkirk the invasion flotilla was swept ashore and pounded to matchwood.16 The immediate threat had gone but no one in England could be certain it would not return. The failed invasion attempt was quickly followed on 15 March by France’s declaration of war against George II.17 The continued presence of Saxe’s army presented a very credible threat and perfectly plausible rumours of new invasion plans continued to circulate. The panic was renewed. In Flanders, however, reports of such stories were again met with amused incredulity. ‘Wee look upon you as madd in England’, Forbes told Loudoun, ‘for dreaming of ane Invasion from France, to be sure if they find you so easily Allarmed they’ll create invasions apurpose’.18 Soldiers with their boots on the Flanders soil saw little in the tales but the denial of troops to what they saw as the crucial theatre. There was, however, some hope of substantial Austrian reinforcements. Early in the spring Maria Theresa appointed Charles of Lorraine and his new bride, her own sister Maria Anna, to be joint governors of the Netherlands. Though the real work would be carried on by her energetic Minister Kaunitz, this was a symbolic underlining of the importance of these isolated and vulnerable provinces.19 To drive home the point, Charles was to be ceremonially installed in his new office at Ghent and by April there was a fever of competitive preparation to welcome the Queen of Hungary’s representative. John’s friend Lord Crawford gave Charles two horses hurriedly bought from fellow officers, affording Forbes some amusement and an irresistible opportunity for a ribald pun. ‘Crawfurd, who is as you wish him’, observed Forbes to Loudoun, ‘has made P: Charles a present of Homes Batchelor & Geo. Stanhopes mare for the Queen of Hungary so her Majesty will be tollerably mounted, if others answer in proportion’.20 His amusement must have been sustained by the spectacle of the Prince’s official entry into Ghent on Saturday 16 April 1744. It was according to Lieutenant Colonel Russell of the 2nd Foot Guards (Edward Braddock’s regiment) a dismal affair: with rain pouring down ‘few attendants, bad equipage, and post-horses to his coach’. However, the ceremony on the Monday was much more impressive. At one o’clock, after Charles had twice heard Mass, a glittering procession entered the city square where all the balconies and windows of the tall surrounding buildings were crammed with officers’ uniforms and citizens in their finest clothes. Emblems of all the provinces of the Netherlands were accompanied by officials and bishops in elegant carriages; after them, in a rather more modest coach, came the Prince himself, escorted by the Scots Greys ‘whose fine appearance was no small addition to the Cavalcade’. At the far end of the city square stood an open pavilion composed of decorated arches representing the different provinces covered a red-carpeted dais, and on the dais stood a red- and gold-canopied throne and very large portrait of Maria Theresa receiving the homage of Flanders. Charles dismounted from his coach and, flanked by bishops, abbots and priors, slowly ascended to the throne. There the laws and constitutions of each state were read to him as he solemnly ratified and swore to support them in the Queen’s name, and the representatives of the provinces in turn swore allegiance to him.21

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Meanwhile the thwarting of the plan to invade Britain left the French free to take the offensive in the Low Countries – and as spring turned to summer Louis XV personally led his 87,000-strong Army of Flanders into the Austrian Netherlands. The neglected and feebly defended Dutch Barrier Fortresses fell one after the other, with practically no interference from the Pragmatic Army. Courtrai was quickly abandoned, quickly followed by the surrender of Menin on 5 June after only six days of siege. When the allies prepared to defend Ghent against an anticipated thrust down the Lys, the French wrong-footed their opponents by moving east against Ypres on the River Yser.22 Forbes was with Campbell at Ghent, where there were twelve squadrons of dragoons and some foot, and with no indication of how long the defence of Ypres could last or what the Pragmatic Army might do to drive the French away. There were rumours, ill-founded as it turned out, that the Dutch were sending 20,000 men, that the Pragmatic army would march to meet them and that Prince Charles – now commanding a powerful Austrian army on the Rhine – was about to lead 25,000 foot into the Netherlands from Germany. Such stories kept morale surprisingly high. John thought that for numbers ‘wee have the compleatest army every yet known in great health and Spirits’. Yet nothing was done. In fact Saxe had an overall numerical advantage of four to three and the bickering of the allied commanders paralysed all action. Knocke fell as soon as the French arrived on 29 June, Ypres surrendered four days later and Furnes fell in mid-July. Saxe and Louis had demolished a line of defence considered impassable by Vauban and now threatened to overrun the crucial ports east of Dunkirk.23 At this point Prince Charles of Lorraine arrived, providing a momentary diversion by leading, not the promised 25,000, but 70,000 men over the Rhine into Alsace. Louis took 32,000 soldiers from the Army of Flanders to the aid of the French defenders, leaving Saxe at Courtrai with only 55,000 and orders to remain on the defensive. Wade, now numerically the stronger, advanced towards Tournai and then on to Lille, hoping to draw Saxe out of works into open battle. But Saxe did not stir and Wade’s siege of Lille was nullified by quarrels with the Austrians over the cost of moving his siege train from Antwerp. On 14 August Frederick of Prussia, scenting fresh conquests from an overstretched Austria, returned to the fray by invading Bohemia. Charles was obliged to withdraw across the Rhine and the French troops sent to oppose him were freed to return to Flanders.24 Once again, the Pragmatic Army’s opportunity had passed.

5

‘In which We Fail’d …’ In the midst of all this frustration Forbes, now ‘eldest’ (or senior by length of service) lieutenant in the Greys, was thinking of retirement and marriage. In May, writing to propose to visit Hugh in Scotland in the winter, he added ‘I propose so much pleasure to my self after a hurry of three years, that If Sir John Cope has nor carry’d of[f] the whole Beautys, I shall certainly settle.’1 This was toying: John knew perfectly well that selling up was even less affordable than remaining in the service. As for marriage, the ironic reference to Cope, who was in his mid-fifties, marked an awareness of his own ageing. He could hardly support a wife (or mistresses as Ligonier and Loudoun did) so he needed to marry money; and a quick winter’s visit was hardly likely to find a well-off woman who would even look at him. The dream, if dream it was, was to elude him for the rest of his life. More immediately he was seriously worried about promotion – which was the only conceivable way out of his financial problems, yet which must immediately involve him in greater debt. A careful and conscientious dragoon captain, who knew and managed all his men and horse with care, could make a modest profit of £60–70 from the labyrinthine complexities of the mid-eighteenth century pay system; and that over and above a personal salary of £282 17s 6d, an increase over a lieutenant’s of almost £119 per annum.2 Thus if John could but raise the purchase money, he could more than double his income. That would not make him rich, and initially it would leave him in deeper debt, but it might be a first step towards financial security. At Ghent in June it seemed that such a captaincy would become available. Balcarres, a captain since 1727 and who had distinguished himself at Dettingen, had been refused further promotion because of his now distant Jacobite rebel past. Now fifty-seven, still on active service and without a hope of advancement, he had obtained royal permission to sell his commission and retire. The regiment’s captain-lieutenant James Erskine had ruled himself out and therefore John, as ‘eldest’ lieutenant, had the first right to purchase. However there were two problems: Balcarres dithered, reluctant to finally burn his bridges, and Forbes had no money. As John put it to Hugh, ‘my Lord being fickle is afraid to sell out, and I being poor am afraid to push for the purchase, however something will cast up’.3 He was right: he did not buy Balcarres’s commission but three months later another vacancy did ‘cast up’, through the departure of Captain George Mure. This time Forbes was able to pay for the commission. Perhaps Hugh had taken John’s earlier hint and raised the purchase money for him – it was certainly borrowed. At all events Wade signed the commission and John became Captain in the

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Greys on 25 September 1744.4 When Balcarres finally did sell the following year, his troop went to John’s friend George Preston. Forbes was still aide-de-camp to James Campbell, now Commander of the British cavalry as well as colonel of the North British Dragoons. In October Wade and Campbell were recalled to Britain, Wade because he was about to be relieved of his command and Campbell partly for recruiting but mainly because he had leave to settle some private business at Lawers, his Perthshire family home.5 With him went John Forbes, on a journey which demonstrates the closeness of the circle to which they belonged. After a Christmas sojourn at Lawers, bad roads and heavy snow delayed their departure for the south. It was February when they reached Beltonford near Dunbar, east of Edinburgh, a pause which may have enabled John to keep his promise to visit Hugh and probably to visit Arthur at Pittencrieff. From Beltonford Campbell penned a letter to his nephew Loudoun, who was managing the recruiting and embarkation of horses and men in Scotland: ‘both Scott and Forbes salute you and all our Compliments to Hoome’.6 ‘Hoome’ was William, eighth earl of Home, a Midlothian man, captain in the 3rd Dragoon Guards and yet another Dettingen veteran, who crops up repeatedly at this time in John’s letters to Loudoun.7 After Edinburgh they travelled south to London, allowing Forbes to find old friends at the British Coffee House and to commission new clothing, boots and harness, items which he later coolly charged Loudoun with collecting for him. ‘Pray take my horse and Corporall under your protection, send 2 parties one to Grant the Saddler and t’other to Ayton the taylor to send the things ordered from to your house, and tell Mrs Douglass at the Coffee house to send to Younger my shoemaker in Dukes street, for the boots I bespoake, and lett them be well taken care off as well as the rest of my concerns, as you regard the Good Grace of yrslave and humble Servt JoForbes’.8 Not until 7.00 pm on 16 April did they embark at Harwich, landing at Sluys the following morning and travelling via Moordyke and Antwerp to arrive at Ghent on the evening of the 19th. Campbell was always in charge on this long companionable journey, but the harmony of his military family – like Forbes’s own later on – depended on informal, affectionate relationships like these. At Ghent they found a flurry of urgent activity: Saxe was advancing and it soon appeared that he was about to attack Tournai. The army was ordered to concentrate at an encampment at Anderlecht near Brussels,9 even though the Greys were scarcely ready and the recruits and remounts had not yet come. As Forbes put it to Loudoun: How wee are to march or take the field so soon I as yet dont comprehend, the Scots transports are not yet arrived, severall horses are to come by next Embarkation, the Cloathing is but just given out, The Camp necessarys [latrines] are I believe scarcely finish’d, however positive orders are given, that camp wee must, and so say I wee will. If you have therefore any Inclination to see, the first sallys of our vigour come soon, or you may lose your share of the Laurells’.10

His anxiety, plain enough beneath this jaunty tone, was to be more than vindicated. Forbes was at Campbell’s side when the Pragmatic Army, led by George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, engaged Marshal Saxe at Fontenoy near Tournai on 11 May 1745.

‘In which We Fail’d …’

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The French target was indeed Tournai. Saxe first feinted towards Mons, successfully deceiving Cumberland, who did not discover his true objective until 28 April and began his march forty-eight hours later, on the very day that the French opened their first parallel before Tournai. At Soignes the allies were briefly halted by bad weather, but from 4 May they pressed on at a punishing pace: John Forbes was not to see a bed for another eight days. Late in the afternoon of 9 May they found Saxe busily fortifying the village of Fontenoy, covered by piquets in the villages of Vezon and Bourgeon. Both places lay in a tangle of woods facing the open plain and slope before Saxe’s main position, Vezon in particular commanding a narrow defile through which attacking troops would have to pass. Campbell’s cavalry and the Guards cleared Vezon the next day while on the left the Dutch took Bourgeon. In the last hours before dusk the Allies’ infantry battalions wheeled into their assigned positions behind the woods.11 Saxe’s line pivoted on Fontenoy, where – as Forbes understood it – his men cut through the rafters of the houses so that the roofs fell in, and then planted artillery on the compacted wreckage. In that way the French gun-crews had a firm platform which could not be battered either from under them or about their heads. The outskirts of the village were protected by a complex of earthworks and the whole place was so heavily garrisoned that it became the strongest single point in the French line. Between Fontenoy and the town of Antoing on the River Scheldt he posted infantry in depth, behind a front reinforced with three redoubts. From Fontenoy, at right angles to this line, Saxe deployed his left – field guns and infantry backed by cavalry – along the crest of a long gentle slope above the village of Vezon and anchored on a redoubt, the Redoubt D’Eu, at the tip of the Wood du Barri. Behind the tip of the wood was a second redoubt and a line of regular infantry. The wood itself, too large to hold with regulars, he was about to fill with light troops – Grissons – behind a substantial abatis of felled trees, their sharpened branches facing outwards. His cavalry Saxe held back as his only substantial reserve.12

FONTENOY, April 30th 1745 May 11th

Forest Bois du of Barry Barri

To Tou rnay

Scale of 1/2 Mile

CUMBERLAND

British Allies French

From Louse

Redoubt d’Eu

waldeck

Vezon

Fontenoy

R. t eld Sch

Bourgeon CASpo

g seg Antoin nig ö K ê nd Cao To

Battle plan 2 Fontenoy

To B r

issoe l

Maubray

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On the evening of 10 May Cumberland, the Königsegg the Austrian, the Dutch commander Waldeck, Ligonier and Sir James Campbell – who was apparently accompanied by Forbes – carried out a brief reconnaissance. The long gentle unfortified slope between Fontenoy and the wood looked the most promising avenue of attack; but, although they did not see the Redoubt D’Eu, it was apparent that both Fontenoy and wood would have to be cleared first. The alternative proposal – and Forbes and Campbell must have pricked their ears at this – was a flanking manoeuvre: while a powerful force of infantry scoured the Bois du Barri, the massed Anglo-Hanoverian cavalry should sweep around it, through much more open country, and strike Saxe’s left in flank and rear. That would have stretched Saxe’s reserves to the limit, leaving his infantry unsupported against the allies’ frontal assault. Some Dutch hussars were sent forward to reconnoitre this route: but as they skirted the wood they came under heavy fire. At once the outflanking move was abandoned.13 A more imaginative, cautious or experienced commander might have tried a wider sweep; and so made optimum use of his cavalry instead of confining it to the villages, woods, enclosures, ditches and narrow defiles around Vezon. Not for the last time in his career, Cumberland had been too easily deflected from a promising line of action – and on this occasion he had made the first of a series of critical mistakes. Cumberland, though not quite incompetent, was a very young man with far too much authority and responsibility, and far too little military experience; and he was worried about time. He consistently overruled older and more experienced colleagues. He ignored Campbell when he advised clearing the Grassins out of the Bois du Barri on the 10th, and Crawford’s proposal to make the major infantry effort at daybreak and against the Bois du Barri. Instead, this action was relegated to a secondary role and was not even to begin until 6.00 am. At the same time, Campbell’s fifteen squadrons were to deploy in the plain before Vezon – well within French artillery range – to act as a static screen for the main body of infantry as it emerged from the woods and deployed. The first steps towards defeat had been taken.14 The army was roused in dark at 2.00 am on the 11th, and at about 4 o’clock Forbes accompanied Campbell and Cumberland to the position occupied by Hay’s regiment, the First Foot Guards in the front line. There they learned that scouts – or perhaps interrogations of French deserters – had detected a redoubt with guns behind the point of the wood, almost directly opposite the orchard where the Black Watch and Free Companies formed the right tip of the Allied line. According to the diary of George Townshend, who was then a captain in the 7th Dragoons, Forbes, ‘an active and very intelligent officer’, had observed the French ‘posted with a preparation of flanking artillery to gall the right of our line, and he solicited a force to dislodge them on its approach’.15 Whether Forbes should really have the credit is doubtful – Townshend’s account, which gives Forbes his later rank of colonel and later office of deputy quartermaster general, was clearly written or rewritten some time later. Tellingly, Forbes made no such claim himself. More weight should perhaps be given to Lord Crawford’s recollection that the night was so quiet that the patrols sent out by the Highlanders and Free Companies had heard, if they had not actually seen, the French working on their defences.16 But Forbes was almost certainly present when the generals learned of the battery’s existence and, as we shall shortly see, he knew exactly where it was sited.

‘In which We Fail’d …’

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Returning to Vezon, Cumberland assembled a predawn council of war which decided a revised plan of attack. The Dutch were to capture Fontenoy itself while British infantry overran the Redoubt D’Eu and Wood du Barri on the right, thus taking out the only batteries capable of enfilading an attacking force. The main body of British infantry, having formed under the cover of their cavalry, would then launch a smashing attack through the French left-centre. It might have worked too, despite the astonishingly inappropriate use of the cavalry. Saxe had almost no infantry reserves and had not fortified the open stretch between Fontenoy and the wood. Unfortunately, things started to go wrong from the beginning. Cumberland sent for Brigadier Richard Ingoldsby and gave him command of the force earmarked for the seizure of the battery of six guns and the wood. Forbes, who ‘that as he stood by, & knew the way that led by the Right of that Village, up to where the Highlanders were posted, he was order’d by His Royal Highness to shew it to Brigadier Ingoldsby’. Forbes and Ingoldsby rode together to the orchard where Forbes indicated the point of wood – about five hundred yards off – behind which the reported battery was thought to lie. Some of the Highland officers also asserted that there were guns in that spot, again suggesting that their own patrols had been probing it. Ingoldsby and Forbes then rode back to Cumberland’s headquarters, where the brigadier confirmed that he had been shown the place he was to attack. At this point Ingoldsby seems to have been satisfied with what he had been shown and to have understood his role in the assault.17 Cumberland gave him three British battalions, including the Highlanders, a Hanoverian unit and a strong detachment of gunners who should try to turn the French pieces upon their former owners, or failing that spike them. Ingoldsby marched off with two battalions at about 5.30, picking up the third on his way to join the Highlanders. Forbes and Sir James Campbell rejoined the cavalry which as day broke began to move forward into Vezon. Here the gap between the woods on either side narrowed until no more than twenty men could ride abreast, so that the cavalry would emerge into the plain in a tightly bunched column, a perfect target for the French gunners above.18 Everything now depended upon Ingoldsby and the Dutch. Everyone was listening anxiously for the noise of their assaults. At about 6.30 gunfire and smoke to the north-west announced the beginning of the unenthusiastic Dutch attack on Fontenoy. But to the east there was a frightening silence: and there was still no news of Ingoldsby’s progress. Campbell, anxious not to expose his men until the redoubt was silenced, halted the column. When there was still no word and no sound of the attack, Campbell moved forward very slowly, sending Forbes back across the field to find out what Ingoldsby was doing.19 What Forbes found was terrifying. Ingoldsby had got under way at 6.00 am in the shelter of a sunken road but soon halted to wait for the Hanoverians to join him. Once they had come he pushed on a little, only to stop, still in the sunken road, about a hundred yards short of the wood. Peering over the lip of the road, he saw the Grassins already in the trees behind the abatis. Other irregular detachments were marching to support them, one of which lay down in the corn some forty yards to the right of the wood to enfilade his advance. And there was the abattis. Other, regular, units were joining those already on the hill behind

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the wood. Deciding he needed artillery, he sent a Major Bernard back to Cumberland to ask for field pieces, and in the meantime Ingoldsby held a council of war with his battalion commanders.20 While the defences must have looked formidable it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ingoldsby made: not grasped the importance of speed and had sadly lost his nerve. Cumberland at once sent the guns – three six-pounders – and rode over after them to find Ingoldsby stuck in the hollow lane. While the gunners began to blast the woods with grapeshot, Cumberland made Ingoldsby deploy the bulk of his brigade beyond the lane and to begin a slow advance. But no sooner had Cumberland turned his back than Ingoldsby panicked, stopped again and sent Captain Craufurd of Pulteney’s regiment for further orders. Craufurd crossed the field, found Cumberland and having received some vague and contradictory verbal instructions, turned his horse to ride back to the sunken road. On his way he met Forbes also on his way to Ingoldsby. Asked what was holding up the attack, Craufurd replied that the brigade was all ready, whereupon Forbes ‘begged’ him to hurry, as Campbell’s cavalry was at that moment debouching onto the open plain. Apparently riding on together they found Ingoldsby’s brigade crammed back into the hollow lane while the six-pounder guns still raked the wood with grapeshot.21 It was now almost too late for the infantry to attack. Forbes carried the bad news to Campbell, who in turn sent word to Cumberland. The Duke, who had already sent his own aide to enquire after the delay, then rode over to see for himself. He found the situation just as Forbes had reported it: the assault was stalled. Campbell’s horsemen would now be exposed to the full fury of the French artillery and Ligonier’s infantry would have to advance with at least one flank wholly exposed. And afterwards Ingoldsby could claim, with some plausibility, that he had been confused by contradictory orders.22 The fifteen squadrons were even then deploying in the bare plain before the glacis-like slope to cover the infantry forming behind them. At once the dragoons and horse came under heavy French artillery fire. Grey-white smoke lit by orange flashes billowed from the corner of the wood and from Fontenoy; the booming of the guns and the terrifying howl of passing roundshot filled the air. Forbes was by Sir James when a ball ‘enter’d his horse left Counter went through his body and broke the Generalls right leg into a thousand pieces…’ Instantly Forbes was on the ground with him, just as Dr Buchanan, came from nowhere to feel for the ends of the arteries amongst the torn flesh and spurting blood. Normally Buchanan would have secured the arteries before evacuating the casualty to a field hospital for the amputation. But on this occasion, unable to reach them amongst the rags of flesh and bone that were once Campbell’s leg, he severed the shattered limb on the spot. Even while the surgeon was sawing at his leg Campbell found the strength to order Forbes to bring him a full report of the battle. Buchanan tied off the arteries and dressed the stump, after which the shocked Forbes had his dying mentor loaded into a cart and carried off to Bourgeon in the rear.23 So Forbes remained on the battlefield, probably with his now stationary regiment, but close enough to witness the heroic debacle that followed. Between his own observations and those he gleaned from his friend Crawford, he was to form a damning picture of Cumberland’s and Ingoldsby’s subsequent actions.

‘In which We Fail’d …’

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Some accounts have suggested that the loss of Campbell was enough – because he had not passed on his orders – to disrupt the cavalry deployment still further.24 But the old veteran had not made such an elementary error: his orders were in the hands of Lord Crawford, who immediately took over the command and, as he put it later, accordingly completed the general’s instructions in forming them in the rear of the second line [of infantry], taking up as much ground as I could until the other cavalry came in, which happened between eight and nine, when the command of our whole cavalry of the right wing devolved upon lieutenant general Hawley …25

In other words, as soon as possible and just as had been intended, Crawford moved the cavalry line behind the formed infantry, placing his own men in relative safety and clearing the way for the main attack. Meanwhile a battery of the guns in the enclosed ground to the right and a number of others placed along the infantry front were returning the French fire.26 Meanwhile the Dutch had failed to carry Fontenoy and Ingoldsby had still done nothing. Galloping over once again on his grey horse, the angry Cumberland again failed to enforce his authority. Instead he decided it was now too late to clear the wood in advance of the main attack. Here was the second critical error of the day. He abandoned the preliminary attack on the redoubt and wood, ordering Ingoldsby to deploy on the left of the road – the side away from the redoubt – and to keep his front in line with the front rank of the main advance. When Captain Jeffery Amherst, Ligonier’s own aide, appeared with a positive order to attack the wood, Ingoldsby was able to justify his refusal by citing Cumberland’s new order. Ligonier, who knew nothing of Cumberland’s change of plan, received Amherst’s report with horror.27 For a moment Cumberland thought of renewing the assault on the Redoubt D’Eu with the Hanoverian regiment under his direct orders. Then, after a hurried consultation with Marshal Königsegg, he decided to send Ligonier forward regardless, while the Dutch, stiffened with the Black Watch and Duroure’s regiment – that is, by two of Ingoldsby’s four battalions – tried once again to storm Fontenoy. Just as the two units were being detached Ingoldsby was wounded and his successor, the Hanoverian Zastrow, sent the remaining two battalions to join Ligonier’s attack. All attempts to clear the wood had been abandoned and with it the best chance of victory. Instead of pressing on with his original plan – which was still practicable – Cumberland had pinned his hopes on the Dutch storming of Fontenoy.28 Had Fontenoy at last been carried all might yet have been well. But once again the assault collapsed, largely because the Black Watch were not closely supported by the Dutch foot. Later John Forbes was to lament that almost all its officers had been killed or wounded. This meant that the main attack, led by Cumberland in person, went in unsupported and with both flanks hideously exposed. Worse, by isolating himself in the midst of his advancing infantry, the Duke had lost overall control of the battle. There was no simultaneous attack upon Fontenoy and Cumberland seems to have forgotten all about his unused cavalry. Yet the dense line topped the ridge and came face to face with the French infantry hidden behind a sunken road. This was the moment when Forbes’s friend Lord Charles Hay stepped forward to drink the health

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of the French soldiers and invited them to stand and not swim the Scheldt as they had swum the main at Dettingen, in effect offering them the courtesy of the first volley.29 Unfortunately for the French they accepted the invitation and fired prematurely. The allied line replied with a tremendous volley rolling from centre to flanks that brought down 700 men and broke the French line. Still firing by divisions the British forced their way through a second line of foot onto the plateau at the centre of the enemy position. But to the horror of the men on the spot, Hay included, the Redoubt D’Eu was still unreduced and able to fire into their right flank and rear with devastating effect. The British foot held on for another two hours, shattering counter-attacks on both flanks, before the crossfire forced them to retire to the crest. Here Cumberland and Königsegg stopped the retreat, formed their men into a great square and took them forward once again. Having no infantry reserves left, Saxe launched massive but bloodily futile cavalry charges against the phalanx as it inexorably advanced onto the high ground. The leading edge of the British infantry was amongst the tents and detritus of the French camp and the guns in Fontenoy were out of shot and firing blanks. Saxe urged Louis XV to escape across the Schledt before his army could be pinned against it and destroyed. Against all the odds, the French Marshal was on the brink of defeat.30 All that was needed was for the Dutch to advance, edging rightwards to link up with the British: similarly, a renewed and determined drive to clear the wood might have silenced the Redoubt D’Eu and clinched the victory. But Cumberland, whose task it should have been to coordinate both wings of his army, was still isolated in the massive but shrinking infantry square on the plateau and the Dutch failed to take the initiative by themselves. Cumberland did at last think of his cavalry, however, and rode back himself to organize a charge. The fifteen Anglo-Hanoverian squadrons moved forward and a few Austrian and Dutch units formed on their left.31 Had they broken through and cleared the flanks of the embattled square – or even forced the French there to change front – the day might yet have been won. For some reason still obscure the Dutch and Austrians horse charged first – and broke. Their flight swept away the British and German squadrons and the advance disintegrated into chaos. Cumberland now decided that the day was lost and ordered the infantry to retreat, thereby, as Ligonier saw it at the time, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.32 John Forbes later took the same view, though he was careful not to mention Cumberland by name: [W]ee endeavoured to rally but from an order given (by whom God knows) The Drums begun to beat a retreat, upon which indeed the whole line went to the right about, and retired with too much precipitation, till the village of Vezon.33

Cumberland organized an effective rearguard of infantry and cavalry under Lord Crawford and the army withdrew slowly and in good order to the neighbourhood of Ath. The weather was warm and the night fine so that the exhausted unwounded men lay all night in the open without succumbing to sickness.34 Forbes went off looking for Campbell and found him in a house at Bourgeon, fevered and just alive, but more or less stable. Towards evening, however, ‘his fever begun to turn violent’ and outside

‘In which We Fail’d …’

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French light troops were harassing the defeated army. At about midnight a party of Grassins arrived, broke down the doors and took Forbes away as a prisoner, leaving Campbell for dead.35 In the French camp Forbes found himself a prisoner with Lord Crawford, who was probably taken when, after fighting his magnificent rearguard action, he approached a French outpost thinking it was a friendly one. His contemporary biographer makes no mention of Crawford’s capture, preferring to play up his heroism in covering the retreat; but he does record an incident like it, supposed to have happened later in the war.36 Next morning, anxious to get back to his Colonel, Forbes gave his parole not to serve until exchanged and was freed with Crawford who did the same. This was part of a convention of eighteenth-century warfare: regular exchanges of officers and men of equivalent rank, parole given for release in advance and even a scale of ransom payments (£4 seems to have been the going rate for a cavalry captain) – an international code of honour which ameliorated the brutalities of conflict a little. Crawford and Forbes were freed with their servants, whose ransoms they had presumably promised or paid, but to their chagrin with neither their own swords nor their servants’ watches.37 Forbes hurried back, perhaps to Bourgeon or more probably on to the hospital just opened at Ath, to find his mentor and friend conscious but unable to speak. Campbell hung between life and death all through that day and into the following night. Forbes was with him constantly, sleeping, if at all, in short snatches in a chair or on the floor. The end, however, was inevitable: in the small hours of 14 May Sir James Campbell died. Forbes found a wagon and took the body to Brussels where he arranged the funeral. Campbell was laid to rest that night, with only his son James Mure, his servants and the faithful John Forbes at the graveside.38 After the interment Forbes was too shocked and exhausted to sleep. It was beyond midnight when he sat down to write that long letter to his brother, his anger towards Cumberland and Ingoldsby discreetly unspecified but very near the surface. Dear Hugh, Don’t be surprised I have not wrote you of Late, my hurry has been beyond what almost my body cou’d bear, and I am now the Eight night without seeing a bed, I suppose you’ll have heard of our Endeavour to raise the Siege of Tournay in which we fail’d, I won’t ascribe the cause, although I know itt … . 39

He then wrote his long account of the battle before prefacing his description of Campbell’s death with a heartfelt lamentation. This my Dear Hugh is a rough Sketch not to be understood [without a map?], but what I am now going to tell you must affect you as I have lost the best friend, bravest Soldier, and honestest man yt ever breathed. By which I am most extremely miserable, and as I have these 16 years intirely attached my self to him, I now find myself not only out of my friend, but without any patron to take me by the hand.40

Forbes had already set about ordering the dead man’s affairs, paying servants, selling horses and a coach and opening a letter concerning a patronage matter to which he was

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John Forbes

privy. In short he eased his own pain by carrying on with his duties just as if Campbell were still alive. Loudoun, the bereaved nephew and as battle-shocked as Forbes, took umbrage at what he saw as unwarranted interference, and the following evening there was a painful confrontation. The explanatory letter John wrote afterwards is steeped in the double misery of loss and bruised friendship. The more I reflect upon your Lordships discourses last night, the more I am surprized how my Actions shou’d come to give umbrage, or how could ever appear in so assuming a light, as you represented me last night, I must own I may have given Directions to Servants or particular orders about particular things, which I have been in constant use of doing in the Generalls time. without troubling him for his assent, but how any of my actions cou’d carry with them ane air of presumption, or of Despotically ordering [without] Mr. Mure’s & your Approbation, is ane Impertinence I should never pardon in my self, cou’d I upon examination, find the smallest tendency that way in me. What your lordship seem’d to think last night presuming, the opening [of] Jamie Trenchard’s letter was in itself extremely innocent and of no Consequence. I was present in London when the boy Trencharde took the Liberty to beg the Generall, wou’d gett this young man recommended to be a [surgeon’s] Mate, The Generall told him he would do him any Service in his power, and that he might write to him or me [about?] the young man, so I really thought medling in this afair that no mortall knew any thing of but my self, was only doing what I should have done.41

Then there was the question of responsibility for defeat. Cumberland, unaware of or trying to compensate for his own failings, was furious with Ingoldsby and insisted on a court martial. Ingoldsby, who inevitably saw the trial as a chance to save his name and honour, used it to shift the blame to Cumberland and, in passing, to Forbes himself. Forbes had to give evidence of his part in the affair and was cross-examined by Ingoldsby, who asked him where he had been when he pointed out the objective, ‘How far had they been from the point of the wood and had he shown him any cannon?’ Forbes answered truthfully that he had not shown Ingoldsby any cannon – which had, of course, been concealed behind the trees – but the unspoken suggestion was that Forbes has misdirected him. Later Ingoldsby put his insinuations into public print, claiming that he had reported to Cumberland that he had been shown the objective, ‘not thinking it was possible for the Person, that was sent on that Purpose, to mistake his Royal Highnesses Intentions’. In plain English, he suggested that Forbes had misdirected him. The calumny appeared both in the London newspapers and in a pamphlet released simultaneously and advertised in the press.42 The mud, however, did not stick. One line in a polemical publication could not outweigh the fact that Forbes had appeared for the prosecution – that is, in Cumberland’s support – nor the fact that he had come personally to Cumberland’s attention. Nor did the loss of Campbell or Loudoun’s temporary loss of perspective do Forbes any lasting harm. His relationship with Loudoun recovered quickly, continued and was to become crucial to Forbes’s career in 1757. Neither was he long without a patron. He was not named in Cumberland’s list of recommended promotions immediately after

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the battle, but Stair, who succeeded Campbell as colonel of the Greys, sent for Forbes and confirmed him as his own aide-de-camp. When, following the outbreak of the Jacobite rebellion Stair became commander of troops in ‘South Britain’, he may have taken John with him. Legend has it that he went on to serve at Culloden where a coin in his pocket stopped a Jacobite bullet and saved his life. Unfortunately for legend, John did not serve against the Jacobites in the field and was certainly never at Culloden. For on 24 December 1745, months before that climactic encounter, he was promoted deputy quartermaster general in Flanders, and lieutenant colonel in the army, under Lord Ligonier – the latter just one day ahead of another Flanders staff officer and Ligonier client, Jeffrey Amherst. In February 1746, when George MacDougall rose to lieutenant colonel, Forbes made yet another investment in command by purchasing the vacant majority in the Greys.43 At Fontenoy Forbes had seen the necessity of careful preparation, the awesome offensive power of disciplined regular infantry and the potential of irregular troops; to say nothing of the folly of a commander losing control over the battle by leading too much from the front. Moreover, the battle demonstrated the importance of ensuring that every subordinate commander understood and carried out his place in the overall plan. All these experiences he would take with him across the Atlantic in 1757. But now and for years to come, Flanders would remain his military world. Events far away – the fall of Louisbourg in New France to an army of amateur New England soldiers and a few British warships, for example – can have made hardly a ripple on his professional consciousness. North America was not yet on his horizon.

6

The Dancers of Breda Fontenoy was that rare thing, a decisive defensive victory. Combined with Saxe’s formidable martial talents, the need to garrison numerous towns and continued dissention amongst the allied leaders, it threw the Pragmatic Army into a precarious defensive. After five days of licking its wounds at Ath it withdrew to Lessines to escape the harrowing attentions of the French Grassins. Tournai fell to Lowenthal, Saxe’s subordinate, on 20 June and Saxe himself besieged Ath. On 11 July 1745 Lowenthal invested Ghent, hitherto the Allies’ main base and still their chief supply depot and seized it four days later in a surprise attack, taking over 1,000 prisoners. Bruges, Termonde and Nieuport yielded soon after; and on 24 August, after a brief resistance, Ostend surrendered. By October the Pragmatic Army had been seriously weakened by the withdrawal of almost all its British regiments (the Greys being an exception) to deal with the Jacobite uprising in Britain. Albemarle, Ligonier and finally Cumberland himself were ordered home to lead them. The result was the final collapse of the Austrian Netherlands: Ath gave up in October. Brussels fell in February 1746, Antwerp was threatened and the allies were forced to make their main centre of operations at Breda inside the United Provinces. The Dutch Republican government – still not officially at war with France – was terrified of invasion and eager to withdraw from the conflict.1 From this debacle the allied war effort was never fully to recover. John Forbes, now a senior staff officer, was to end his war stuck in what he called ‘this damnation bog’ at Breda,2 networking with those in a position to secure his future, attending balls and dinners and living in fear of the looming peace, which would strip him of his wartime appointment. In London the battle divided the Cabinet. Some ministers, notably the Duke of Newcastle (Secretary of State for the Southern Department) and the Duke of Bedford (at the Admiralty), believed that the fall of Louisbourg had opened the way for a successful maritime campaign, starting with a major assault of Quebec. Therefore they wished to push on with the war regardless of military reverses in Europe and the peril of Dutch defection. Their opponents, including Newcastle’s brother Henry Pelham, followed the Earl of Chesterfield (from February Secretary of State for the Northern Department), who wanted an immediate peace. The result was a compromise: an ambassador would be sent to begin peace talks at Breda, but the Newcastle–Bedford faction would see to it that he was instructed to spin out the negotiations for as long as possible.3 Thus ensued, alongside the slow intricate Low Countries war of marches and counter-marches, skirmishers and sieges, an equally complex and drawn-out diplomatic dance. Each placed a premium upon careful planning, avoidance of unnecessary head-on collisions, assured supplies, protected advances and secured

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lines of retreat. Each provided an excellent advanced education for an observant and meticulous British staff officer. By the end of May 1746 Antwerp had fallen and the government was preparing to send a significant force back to Flanders, while at the same time appointing General James St Clair to command the Quebec expedition, an enterprise later diverted to L’Orient, the Atlantic base of the French East India company. Cumberland, who had finally crushed the Jacobite army at Culloden in April, was still engaged in the pacification of the Highlands, and the choice of British commander in the Low Countries fell upon Sir John Ligonier. Ligonier was commissioned on 22 June with instructions to go to Breda, talk the Dutch out of defection and work with the Austrian commander Prince Charles and the Dutch Prince of Waldeck through councils of war. Nothing, then, was done to do away with the divided command that had so hobbled the Pragmatic Army since 1742. However, he was to take with him four British battalions and to take command of about 24,000 hired Hanoverians and Hessians which, if the Austrians produced their promised 50,000 under a subsidy agreement, and if the Dutch honoured their pledges, should have produced a substantial field army.4 John Forbes was by then back in London, presumably to help Ligonier with the administrative arrangements, but only vaguely aware of what the ministry intended, and quite unaware of what the rumoured peace talks portended. ‘It is said’, he told Loudoun, ‘still yt some troops go abroad [directly]. It is said Mr. Sinclairs expedition don’t take place altho actually embarked but go straight for Flanders, It is said a peace is certainly agreed on, and if so it is certain Ld Chesterfield rules our Roast’. He was at least as much preoccupied with social rounds. He called on Loudoun’s London mistress, who gave him a letter for her protector who was in Scotland: the ever-frugal Kate must have hoped Forbes would use his official frank and so save her the postage. Unfortunately Forbes subsequently ‘got with some honest fellows’, consumed a great deal of ‘the Creature’ and got stupendously drunk. In the course of evening Kate’s letter was (apparently) so defaced with phallic scribbling that it had to be posted under a fresh cover: ‘as you will see by its outside that I am obliged to give you a Condum for decency’.5 Ligonier left with his battalions, and no doubt John Forbes, towards the end of June and crossed to Wilhelmstadt in a violent storm. At Breda he found that the additional Austrians under Prince Charles had yet to enter the Low Countries, there were only 12,000 Dutch and his own mixed force fell 5,000 short of the expected 30,000. The entire field army mustered only 65,000, well short of target and frighteningly feeble compared with the 130,000 deployed by Saxe. Ligonier, though commander-in-chief of the British contingent, was only a lieutenant-general and therefore outranked by a number of less competent and experienced Austrian and Dutch officers, who thus took precedence in the councils of war. The King resisted giving him extraordinary promotion ahead of his seniority and refused to sanction a temporary local rank, so it was November before he was made General of Horse with Forbes continuing as one of his two deputy quartermasters general.6 July opened with Saxe threatening Namur, forcing the allies to make a long perilous southeasterly march across his front to reach the fortress first. The manoeuvre also allowed them to link up with Prince Charles’s tardy Austrian troops: no less than

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twelve battalions of infantry and twenty-eight squadrons of horse. Together they saved Namur and for weeks stood toe to toe with Saxe, generally getting the better of outpost engagements but constantly on the brink of collapse for want of supplies. Forbes, whose professional business was supplies, quarters and transport, must have concurred with Ligonier’s appreciation: that Saxe, with far better and more secure lines of supply, was simply starving the allies out of their position. It was late August before the French commander turned their flank, reaching Huy in their rear and driving the hungry Pragmatic Army back across the Meuse to cover Liège and Maastricht.7 The allies were simply too weak to keep him away from Namur for long, let alone challenge him in battle. In September 1746 Namur surrendered at last and Saxe advanced along the valley of the Meuse towards Liège and, ultimately, Maastricht. Ligonier was strategically hamstrung by the demands and squabbles of his allies and by the perpetual supply problem. There were insufficient bakers in Maastricht so Forbes and his fellow quartermasters had to bring bread from as far away as Cologne, and their reserves were never more than four days ahead of consumption. What was worse, the Austrians insisted on fighting for Liège, so that on 11 October Ligonier found himself in a position he heartily disliked: penned into the angle between the rivers Meuse and Jaar, with little room for manoeuvre and in ground too broken to allow for mutual support. His left – manned by Waldeck’s Dutch troops – rested on Liège itself. The British and Hanoverian battalions in the centre were protected in part by a line of outworks linking the village of Rocoux with a chain of adjoining hamlets; and on the far right were the Austrians. Forbes was almost certainly riding at Ligonier’s side – he later claimed to have been at every major Flanders action – when a precarious situation became a nearcatastrophe.8

R

E

H

C

Shendirmal

Hognou

VE SER

M

To Tangre s

and t. Tr To S

F

N

Houthey A C

P

RR. .JJaa aar r

Paire

E SR

XE

SA

Slins Lonti Alleur Roucoux

Enick Varoux Liers

Fexhe

ROUCOUX,

Ance

Sept. 30th 1746 Oct. 11th

Liége

0

1 ENGLISH ENGLISH MILES. MILES

To Huy &Namur

euse R. M

Battle plan 3 Rocoux

To Maast richt

R. Meuse

British Allies French

2

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Even before the battle began Liège opened its gates to the enemy, disrupting the whole allied left. Saxe followed this with his main assault against the Dutch, dislodging them by force of numbers at the third attempt. The retreating defenders wheeled back behind the Anglo-Hanoverian foot, which was now attacked in front and flank. Ligonier skilfully covered the infantry’s retreat with short sharp cavalry charges, breaking up every French attempt to emerge from the trees and hedges to form in the open. Forbes, as a senior staff officer, was almost certainly with Ligonier – and perhaps even rode with the Greys when they charged.9 Thanks to Ligonier the stubborn infantry got away across the Meuse and both sides went into winter quarters. Forbes and his comrades had to billet most of their men in poor people’s houses without adequate heating, or else three or four to a bed in the dwellings of the better off. The Dutch government insisted on charging the troops for their firewood and Cumberland induced his father to impose a stoppage on their pay to cover it. That winter Ligonier and his staff were at their wits end to look after their men.10 Into this fevered atmosphere – and into the life of the deputy quartermaster general – shambled a tall, clumsy young man said to look as if he was walking down both sides of the street at once, an aristocrat with a penchant for breaking crockery and passions for cricket, sailing, archaeology and women. Possessing a formidable and wide-ranging intellect, high political ambitions and an engaging manner that easily crossed class lines, he was inclined to put merit ahead of family connections and exaggerated concepts of honour. John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich and hitherto a hard-working member of Bedford’s reforming Board of Admiralty, was Britain’s plenipotentiary at the peace congress about to open at Breda.11 Breda was such a small town that on his arrival in August Sandwich had been unable to find a suitable dwelling until William Prince of Orange offered him a pavilion in the grounds of the castle. Forbes was already friendly with Sandwich’s Scots secretary, Robert Keith, who had served Stair until he joined Sandwich around August 1746, and whose name appears in John’s letters from 1744. Keith was as diligent and talented as his master – one of a significant number of able Scots diplomats in the British service, he was later to become a distinguished ambassador in his own right. Sandwich trusted him as he could never trust his two amiable but feckless official secretaries, Edward Wortley Montagu and the Duchess of Bedford’s brother, Richard Leveson-Gower.12 Keith thus became Forbes’s doorway to Sandwich’s favour and therefore to the Bedford circle. Coming so soon after his elevation to field rank and to a senior role, this meeting promised to deliver to Forbes the brilliant career he so needed and desired. Defeat had its compensations. Cumberland returned to resume the command in Flanders while Ligonier kept the cavalry with John Forbes still acting as his quartermaster general. Troops began to filter back from Britain – Loudoun and his regiment returned from Leith in June 1747 – but still the Pragmatic Army could not match French numbers. Although 112,000 men assembled at Breda in February, and though the allies had parity in cavalry, Saxe’s infantry outnumbered theirs by about seventy battalions. Nor had the command problem been solved: Cumberland was, like Ligonier before him, commander-in-chief but he still had to negotiate with his timid colleagues, Batthyani

The Dancers of Breda

LAUFFELD, LAUFFELDT, 0

June 21st 1747. 1747 July 2nd

ENGLISH MILES

Maastricht Maestricht

2

Wyk

Kesselt A

U

ST

DU

TCH

AND CUMBERL

R I KleinSpaeven A Vlytingen N S The Commanderie Gross Spaeven

Wilre

Lauffeld Montenaken R. Jaar

R. Demer

British Allies French

To Heer

R. Meuse

Bilsen

63

res ang To T

Battle plan 4 Lauffeldt

for Austria and Welbeck for the Dutch, in councils of war. While they consulted, and eventually made a half-hearted attempt to recover Antwerp, Lowenthal swept up the remaining west Flanders ports, leaving Cumberland with no communication at all with Britain except through the Dutch Republic.13 On the evening of 1 July Forbes was with Ligonier when Cumberland’s outnumbered army challenged Saxe’s advance on Maastricht at Lauffeldt. Unlike the ground at Rocoux, this was open rolling country, less difficult for the attacker but wide open for massed cavalry action. The allies’ four-mile long front was protected in part by the villages of Lauffeldt and Vlytingen, held by an Anglo-Hessian detachment and by British Guards, respectively. But as darkness drew in, Cumberland and Ligonier fell out over the garrisoning of the villages. Cumberland wanted to form all his infantry into a conventional unbroken line of battle, while Ligonier understood that fortified villages could resist cavalry forever and also break up massed infantry attacks on the main line. Cumberland initially had his way and at dawn the villages were ablaze. Ligonier protested and the order was reversed: the withdrawing infantry turned about and returned – but too late to properly fortify and garrison Lauffeldt.14 Ligonier moved forward to watch the French and immediately spotted French infantry massing in front of the village for an attack on the allies’ left-centre. Forbes found himself galloping across the Allied position to disrupt Cumberland’s breakfast with his warning. At the same time a powerful force of French cavalry was wheeling around the allies’ right to get between them and Maastricht. Had Saxe succeeded at both points he might have destroyed their army in detail in the open. Thanks to Ligonier he achieved neither. Instead of bursting unopposed into what he thought was now an empty village, the heads of Saxe’s infantry columns were mown down by

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heavy defensive fire. When the French closed with the defenders there was murderous hand-to-hand fighting, bayonet against bayonet, musket and pistol firing point-blank. Over four hours the village was taken and retaken four times. At last a Dutch cavalry regiment to the rear was broken by a French charge: panicking horses burst back through the allied infantry line, creating a large gap and, cutting the hamlet off from succour. The French took the village for the fifth and final time and Cumberland’s centre was pierced.15 Meanwhile the French had taken the hamlet of Wilre, clearing the way for their massive cavalry assault on Cumberland’s far left. Ligonier, facing them and unaware that Lauffeldt was lost, saw a golden opportunity to use his own cavalry. Sixty allied squadrons charged, Forbes riding knee to knee with Ligonier to break the vastly superior mass of French horse. Wilre was retaken and Ligonier was about to move on when he received a message from Cumberland: the battle was lost and Ligonier was to retire to cover the escape of the battered infantry. Ligonier, seeing victory snatched away, was furious but obeyed.16 The retreating foot thus had to march towards Maastricht across the front of returning French horse backed by massing French infantry. Ligonier sent Forbes galloping after Cumberland, who was now almost at the walls of the city, with a challenging and vital task: to persuade the Duke that his order to halt the initial attack had been mistaken, and then to extract from him permission to charge again. He succeeded on both counts and galloped back with Cumberland’s order. Ligonier had no time for finesse. He led his three British regiments – the Greys, Cumberland’s and the Inniskillings – pell-mell straight at the massed French horse. By sheer impetus they broke clean through only to run full tilt into the fire of the infantry behind. When the French cavalry reserve closed on their flanks the attackers were overwhelmed: the Greys alone lost a third of their men and Ligonier was taken.17 John Forbes survived – why and how is unknown – apparently free and unscathed. Yet the British horsemen had scored a strategic success: The infantry did indeed retreat safely and Saxe had won a Pyrrhic victory. He probably lost twice as many men as the Allies – 10,000 to about 5,000 – and he was subsequently unable to take Maastricht, his original objective. Though Lowenthal went on to storm Bergen-opZoom in November – a triumph at least partly attributable to the half-heartedness of the Dutch defence – the place proved very difficult to supply: small allied vessels could easily blockade the water routes from Antwerp and the landward ones were vulnerable to interdiction by cavalry.18 Forbes may have thought that Ligonier’s brilliant and heroic conduct would be feted and rewarded, with appropriate appreciation for himself, the key messenger. In fact Cumberland, perhaps aware of his own failings and of the criticism that ran through the army, played down Ligonier’s role. The best he could do for the man who had saved his army was to report that ‘Sir John Ligonier charged at the head of the British dragoons with that skill and spirit he has shown on so many occasions’.19 Forbes’ close association with the hero of Lauffeldt may not, therefore, have helped his standing with Cumberland, and even hampered his career until Ligonier became head of the British army in 1757. At the time, however, he wished to celebrate his deliverance and dress up to his new heroic status. Less than a fortnight after Lauffeldt

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John Forbes found time to enjoy a shopping spree at The Hague, running up a tailor’s bill for £206 10s with the tailor Isaac Barriel.20 He had even more reason to celebrate in November when Ligonier, having been exchanged, returned as General of Horse. Now everyone anticipated an invasion of the Dutch Republic. In The Hague the Prince of Orange’s party, trading on that family’s reputation as defenders of the United Provinces, seized power from the Republicans. William Anne Keppel, Lord Albemarle, who had led the British infantry at Lauffeldt, replaced Cumberland as commander-in-chief and the battered Pragmatic Army again made its headquarters at Breda, well placed to meet a northward thrust. When Bergen fell the wealthier citizens of Breda, expecting to be besieged themselves, sent their best furniture and plate to The Hague for safety (Russell complained that it gave them an excuse for not properly entertaining their British allies) and the new Orangist government ordered its citizens to keep Wednesday as a holy day of prayer for national salvation, if possible holier than Sunday. The Dutch cut the dykes and in early December it rained heavily, swelling the inundations around the city and making the streets so muddy that everyone went around in boots: it even became the fashion to dance in them at assemblies.21 The only comfort was that the waters might hold up the French: but if they did not, and the Pragmatic Army was pushed out of Breda, they would hamper the defenders’ escape. Forbes, sent by Albemarle to reconnoitre possible lines of retreat, found two of the four possible roads made impassable by floods.22 Manning the nearby dyke became a disagreeably damp and unhealthy duty. John joked that he had saved Loudoun’s regiment that discomfort – still in England though expected in the Netherlands – charging His Lordship to ‘take care of me as I have of your bare arses, having at last got a Dutch Battn at Tinaert to take the post’s [sic.] upon Dyke, that would have ruin’d your people’.23 Privately he saw little prospect of action and thought a French advance would very quickly become literally bogged down: I don’t know what you are; but wee are here in the greatest tranquillity, and dream no more of being attacked [than] the French do, of attacking us, which I must own I wish they would try, for I really think by the Blessedness of the country at present, nothing but a Snipe or a Wild duck wou’d either live with us or get to us. And as to our Approaching campaign, I confess I can think nothing about it, only unless wee can [march?] upon the Spot, or give wings, I see no Army but upon paper.24

Time passed slowly: for the officers, apprehension and enforced idleness were relieved by an endless round of socializing. Nervous Dutch citizens entertained them at convivial suppers, two of which Russell found particularly enjoyable. ‘We were elegantly entertained at each, sitting at table till past one o’clock, drinking and singing, then getting up and dancing three or four country dances, and concluding by drinking coffee till three in the morning. Monsieur a Longius sent for his fiddle and played for us.’ Officers got up a subscription to start a Tuesday-night ball that, Russell carefully assured his wife, would be conducted with the greatest decorum. Sexual hospitality was however freely available. Russell had to deflect one young lady over-anxious to have

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him for a dancing partner and perhaps for more.25 As for more convivially masculine company, there were frequent dinners hosted by regiments or by newly formed very like those to be found based on inns in contemporary London. One evening John Forbes, Albemarle and three of Albemarle’s aides were dinner guests of Russell’s regiment; and on 14 December the same dozen or so cronies founded a club to meet on Mondays, ‘play whist, sup, and call for a bill at eleven’.26 This was remarkable: Albemarle was one of those English officers who respected Scots as colleagues but had no time for them as friends,27 and none of his other senior staff officers were there. Forbes was an intelligent and convivial companion in any case, but this intimacy with the great was also essential to a man whose career might be abruptly halted in its tracks if the oft-rumoured peace were to become reality. That would explain why John, whose head told him that peace was all but certain, still clung to straws that suggested further action. By early February he and his comrades at Breda still felt that peculiar combination of anxiety and tranquillity. ‘[Y]ou Cannot’, he told Loudoun, ‘conceive the uneasiness that the frost and easterly winds have given us, as it has prevented us hearing from your side this fortnight and of Consequence can make no guess what you woud [sic] be at’. Yet at Breda they were still ‘in the profoundest peace’, seeing ‘but small marks of one Approaching campaign which some people who love their ease flatter themselves will be prevented by the Congress That (by a letter just now before me from Robie Keith) is to take place, as Lord Sandwich is to set out for Aix this Monday sennight’.28 Meanwhile John was engaged in penning up the French garrison of Bergen-op-Zoom, who were ‘in the greatest distress and next to starving’. Lowenthal had tried ‘the other day’ to throw in supplies from Antwerp by water, only to be frustrated by the small allied vessels blockading the mouth of the Scheldt. ‘[N]ow as it must be supply’d by land’, he observed, adding with a revealing touch of ambition, ‘I think I cou’d make it that difficult as they wou[l]d soon tyre of that.’29 Meanwhile he was looking forward to Loudoun arriving with his regiment at Wilhelmstadt, which he supposed, using his quartermaster’s knowledge, was the only port capable of billeting two battalions.30 A fortnight later he was writing again to Loudoun, once again loading his friend with errands and commissions: thanking him for buying two horses for him, giving instructions about how they were to be sent over to Flanders and in whose care, and asking for a small saddle with holsters and saddle furniture, in imitation of a style formerly used by Home, to accompany them.31 True, the grey was an investment intended for resale, but it seems that Forbes was keen to sustain the image expected of a senior field and staff officer. He was wrong about Bergen-op-Zoom. In March Lowenthal succeeded in getting a convoy into that place under the protection of a force 25,000 strong. By then both Breda and Maastricht were threatened by Saxe whose numbers probably doubled those of the Pragmatic Army. The following month Saxe struck towards Maastricht, forcing Cumberland and Ligonier to concentrate at Roermund on the Meuse. This was the last manoeuvre of the war, for on 4 May the peace preliminaries were concluded at Aix-la-Chapelle.32 France agreed to evacuate the Austrian Netherlands and to return the captured British East India Company factory at Madras in exchange for Louisbourg. Much to Maria Theresa’s chagrin, Frederick was able to keep his ill-gotten gain of Silesia. The final treaty was signed in October, troop withdrawals

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began in November and ratifications were complete by mid-December. The long and indecisive War of the Austrian Succession was over.33 Over too were prospects of rapid professional advancement for talented, energetic but penniless officers. Peace meant austerity. Newcastle’s brother Henry Pelham, now First Lord of the Treasury, was aghast at the way the late war had expanded the National Debt from £46 million to £77 million. All too well aware that his government would now be expected to sustain peace and slash taxation, he began to cut government costs. Within four years he brought the administration’s spending down from £12 million per annum to £7 million, cutting the land tax from four shillings in the pound to three and the interest paid on government borrowings by a third. The consequence was a rapid demobilization and reduction of the armed forces: the navy’s personnel fell from 50,000 to 11,000 and the army from 50,000 to 19,000.34 ‘New’ regiments, formed for the war, rapidly vanished and avenues of promotion contracted. The Greys, a long established unit, survived but prospects for its officers were, at least in the short-term, bleak. John Forbes the former regimental surgeon was now a senior, experienced and battle-hardened veteran, an able and experienced staff officer. But his appointment as deputy quartermaster in Flanders – and the salary that might have given him financial security – ended with the war that had made him. When he embarked with his regiment at Ostend, though still a lieutenant colonel in the army he had no new appointment to go with it. The voyage home did nothing to raise spirits. A violent storm scattered the convoy, killing many of the Grey’s horses below decks and forcing the soldiers to drop the bodies overboard to lighten the ships. Regiments were scattered along the east coast of Britain. Most of the Greys reached Great Yarmouth roads off the Norfolk coast, but at least one transport ran into Hull and others were driven north towards Scotland. It was as the weather-beaten debt-ridden major of the Grey dragoons that John Forbes set foot ashore at just before Christmas 1748.35

7

‘I know the other a mad sort of Fool’

Friends and preferment alike faded away into the winter fogs. Lord Crawford was at home in Upper Brook Street, London, suffering from his old wound, which had opened for the seventeenth time. As ever, the only effective palliative was laudanum: on Christmas Eve the pain was so insufferable that he took much more than usual and died that same evening. In January 1749 his body was carried back to Scotland and interred in the family vault at Ceres. Loudoun went off to Ireland to be colonel of the 30th Foot. For the Greys the dreary round of peacetime postings recommenced: Lancaster, Leicester, Coventry and Warwick were followed by Kent, Sussex and Devon.1 In the autumn of 1750 a rare avenue of advancement turned up when George MacDougall, by now lieutenant colonel of the Greys, departed. Once again Forbes had to choose between even greater debt and professional stagnation. He chose debt. On 29 November 1750 he became lieutenant colonel of the Greys and its effective commander; but what he really needed was a full colonelcy with its valuable perquisites or at least a well-remunerated staff post. And of such a plum there was no sign and very little hope. A rumour that Loudoun had died in Ireland – false as it turned out but enough to send Forbes to Privy Garden to enquire after the funeral – only added to the gloom.2 After the review the regiment was marched to Dorset, where pairs of troops were in each of Dorchester, Sherborne and Blandford. Forbes’s headquarters was at Dorchester,3 where the financial failure of a Captain Wilson involved him in the delicate but unexciting business of getting the bills he had endorsed for the Greys paid without raising a scandal in London. Though he promised himself a renovating visit to the capital (and Loudoun’s company) he finally felt it more discreet to ‘send the paymaster, by which means I am free of all intermeddlings’.4 In the spring of 1752 the regiment, after having been dispersed in detachments for two years, and so unable to exercise as a whole unit, was about to undergo an unexpected review. On top of that they were obliged to march out of Dorchester for the assizes and then again for a by-election, the law assuming that troops might be used by the state to distort justice or to fix elections.5 Even his attempts to furnish seeds for Home’s and Loudoun’s gardening and forestry projects came to nothing. Loudoun wanted to plant a pear orchard and produce perry – pear wine – and asked Forbes to supply him with seed from Dorset, Somerset or Devon. But when Forbes dutifully interviewed ‘some very

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great Nurserymen’ he was told that perry was not made in the southwest, and that when they wanted seed of appropriate varieties it had to come from Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. A conversation with ‘Lady Orford who has a great estate in Devonshire’ produced a promise but apparently nothing more. A local auction of exotic plants was a temptation, but for want of a means of getting bulky purchases to Loudoun’s Ayrshire estate, and for want of money or a garden of his own, he had to forgo bidding. Through a friend he did succeed in obtaining a quantity of New England fir seed for Home; but Lord Home, not unusually, was out of touch and Forbes had no idea what to do with it. At last he sent it up to his agent George Ross and invited Loudoun to help himself to a share.6 He did get to London in the spring of 1752, where he was dismayed to hear of ‘the Grays going to market a second time’. With Lord Rothes’s departure to take over the 3rd Foot, the colonelcy was about to go to John Campbell, the very handsome and reputedly very stupid cousin and heir to the Duke of Argyll. On behalf of his officers, and especially himself, he asked Loudoun to ‘at least bid’ for the vacancy.7 But it was too late: Jack Campbell got the Greys. Pressing on to Edinburgh and his family only brought more exhausting administrative burdens – ‘I have been almost killed with Business since I came down’ – though he was able to travel west to see his friend at Loudoun Castle.8 In the event Forbes found he could work with his new commander tolerably well. Although Campbell was not always helpful when it came to getting the Greys new clothing or equipment, he liked Forbes, could be indulgent when he had a mind to be and was quite prepared to work for John’s advancement. But not even Argyll, let alone his cousin, had sufficient influence to secure places for every needy connection, and Forbes’s other connections were of little use. Early in 1748 Bedford had become Secretary of State for the Southern Department, allowing Sandwich to succeed him as first Lord of the Admiralty. Unluckily Sandwich was removed in 1751 and Bedford resigned his secretaryship in protest: driven out, like Harrington and Lord Chesterfield before him, by Newcastle’s jealousy. After that, not really caring whether he was in office or out, Bedford did not hurry to make compromises with those in power; while Sandwich, albeit on a different plane, was as needful of office and income as Forbes. Forbes had only his pay to live on and had by his own account already borrowed as much as £5,000. His existing creditors were growing restless. It looked as if Lieutenant-Colonel Forbes was doomed to obscurity and genteel poverty.9 Occasional opportunities – or rather professional mirages – did appear. In November 1751 the Deputy Quartermaster General at the Horse Guards died: so here was a vacant position for which Forbes was eminently qualified and one to which he felt, in the light of his Flanders experience, entitled. But whom to approach? Cumberland was ill, while Sandwich and his patron Bedford were out of office and, like the Duke of Argyle, too distant to approach directly. That left Tweeddale and Loudoun, both representative peers, with at least some access to patronage. Forbes picked up his quill and wrote at once to Lord Charles Hay:

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My Lord I shall neither make apology, or ask pardon for the trouble I give you by this, flattering myself that if in your power you will serve ane old acquaintance, without much Sollicitation. The Case is old Colonel Lascelles who was Deputy Qr Mr Genl on the Establishment is dead. And I think I have the best right to succeed him, being the only person who has served all the war under his R:Highness in that post who is unprovided for. The Duke, being now unwell, there is no application to be made there, as therefore the Ministry or Secretary at Warr may slip in a friend, pray My Dr Lord Charles, could not your Bror the Marquiss mention my name, as the person who has the best pretensions to succeed. You know Ten Shillings pr Day and a post for life is in my circumstances a great consideration, so if you will mention it to the Marquiss and if he will countenance me it will be a lasting obligation. Geo: Ross writes me you are to have a Regt and wants much to Send you money as your Agent. So verbum Sapi intice sat est? If you think I trouble you, or that your Brother can not serve me in this Affair, Burn my Letter and forgett I have wrote you, but if you can do me a piece of Service, I dare say without further appreciation you will, I am My Dr Lord ChasYr Most Obt & Humble Servt Jo Forbes10

Whether or not Tweeddale spoke up for him, the project came to nothing, and John went on looking. His intimates were well aware of his frustration. In 1753, his close friend and second-in-command, Major George Preston, was in Bristol, supporting the civil magistrates during the coal heavers’ riots. Thankfully the magistrates did not ask him to act, but while he was there Preston heard that Governor Hopson of Nova Scotia had resigned for the sake of his health (his eyesight was failing), and urged John to try his luck. As he put it, ‘there’s nothing to be got without asking … ’.11 Once again the opportunity proved illusory. Hopson did indeed return in November but he did not resign until 1755, the government being carried on in the meantime Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lawrence, on-the-spot commander of the 40th regiment. When Hopson did go the governorship went to Lawrence, a successful administrator already deeply versed in the intricacies of Mi’kmaw Indian affairs, settler management and boundary disputes with the French: about all of which Forbes knew next to nothing. Moreover Lawrence enjoyed the formidable patronage of the President of the Board of Trade, George Montagu Dunk, Earl of Halifax, another Bedford client who had been at school with Sandwich, and for whom the town of Halifax was named.12 There is no indication that Forbes was really interested in this or – despite the example of his cousin James Glen – any other colonial governorship. Until 1754 he was barely aware of living in a British Atlantic professional world because such a world hardly existed. But as the smouldering North American frictions spread, another possibility caught his attention. Nova Scotia was but one flashpoint. Further south New York and New France were rubbing up against each other in the Hudson–Lake Champlain corridor. Further south again, Pennsylvania and Maryland competed with the French and each

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other for the Indian trade of the Ohio Valley, while Virginian land speculators claimed vast tracts in the region. By 1749 a band of Virginian investors had formed themselves into the Ohio Company and begun to push settlements into the Ohio region. Stockholders in this company included Robert Dinwiddie, the lieutenant governor of Virginia and a very young planter from the lesser Virginian gentry called George Washington. Such aggressive expansionism provoked the French to active response. A sizeable military expedition under Captain Pierre Joseph de Céleron de Blainville toured the region to overawe the Indians, assert the French claim to sovereignty and – bizarrely – to bury small lead marker plates as a sign of possession. The Pennsylvanian traders and Ohio Company agents were not impressed. For two years company’s agent Christopher Gist surveyed the Ohio Valley and in 1752, at Logstown settlement, he and George Croghan met Tanaghrisson, the leading Ohio representative of the Iroquois, who claimed both the valley and the right to speak for its inhabitants. Under the Logstown treaty the company was allowed to build a fortified trading post at the Forks of the Ohio, the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers.13 French retaliation was swift but initially was aimed not at the company but at the Pennsylvanian traders centred on the village of Pickawillany. A force of French soldiers and northern Indians sacked the town, and boiled and ate the pro-British headman Memeskia, known to the British as Old Briton. Later in the year Duquesne, the new French governor of Quebec, ordered the construction of a defensive line of forts from Lake Erie to the Forks. By the autumn of 1753 three forts – Presque Isle on the lake, Le Boeuf a short portage away on French Creek and Venango where the creek entered the Alleghany – had been built and garrisoned. The fourth and last fort was to be built at the Forks in 1754, on the very site of the Ohio Company’s planned trading post.14 In 1754 a Virginian military expedition led by George Washington was forced to surrender at Fort Necessity. The ministry in London then ordered an intercolonial conference at Albany in New York colony to co-ordinate frontier defence. The conference was sparsely attended, was remarkable only for shady land deals negotiated on its fringes and failed to bring about the desired co-operation. Clearly the colonies were unwilling to protect themselves and therefore needed to be protected. By the end of the year a British military expedition was being prepared under Major General Edward Braddock, the very first imperial commander-in-chief in North America. And Braddock, Forbes realized, would need good staff officers.15 America may not have been on his mental horizon at all until this point but here was a clear professional opportunity well within his experience, talents and, in his own mind, deserts. He at once applied to be Braddock’s Deputy Quartermaster General. Though in Scotland at the time, uncomfortably far from London where the decisions would be made, his background gave him every reason to be optimistic. But after returning to his regiment near Manchester in a bitterly cold Lancashire autumn, he read in the newspapers that Sir John St Clair – ‘a mad sort of Fool’ in Forbes’s own estimation – had won it.16 At this point he seems to have thought his friendship with Hay would be of more use to his nephew than to himself. Jock had spent a year learning draughtsmanship at the Royal Artillery College at Woolwich after which John had made him buy a quartermaster’s warrant in the

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Scots Greys in order to learn the dragoon service from the bottom up. After a year of that he was now, in John’s view, ready for a commission. In November 1754, less than six weeks after the bitter news about St Clair, Forbes wrote to Hay asking him, rather stiffly and formally, to consider Jock for a vacant ensigncy in the 33rd. However, the letter on a very different note: So much for business. And now inquire how your old honour does in this cold weather, if you still continue your water course, I am afraid I shall hear of you, as I found my bottle this morning: Froze to the Centre. So you may guess that in this most miserable cold place I scarce have more spirits than enough – however, warm punch & a warm Lass helps out the long nights, That you were able to enjoy both or either shall be always the sincere wish of My Dr Lord Charles …17

The idea of his friend showering himself with cold water, a common treatment for insanity, was depressing enough. But Forbes’s low spirits were, of course, due to more than the cold or to other people’s heath fads; and the warm lass may have been no more than a whistle in the dark. Braddock sailed with two Irish regiments, including Sir Peter Halkett’s 44th, with Francis Halkett as one of its captains and James as a lieutenant. Others it seemed were getting the chances of distinction that Forbes needed and craved. By 1755 he was spending long periods away from his regiment in London, receiving his letters at the British Coffee House while he lobbied for employment and for the proper maintenance of the Greys.18 Yet his failure to secure employment under Braddock was providential. Towards the end of 1755 news came of disaster in the American woods. Braddock was by no means an incompetent general – he had thought long and hard about the problems of moving an army huge distances over high mountains, across formidable rivers and through dense woods inhabited by Indians allied to the French. His advance was carefully conducted and well protected by flanking and screening parties, so that the Indians were unable to do him harm until he was within a few miles of Fort Duquesne. However, his failure to understand the importance of having Indian allies of his own, and his refusal to guarantee the Delawares’ and Shawnees’ lands, deprived him of one of the keys to victory. Eight miles from his objective his advanced column was suddenly attacked on a narrow forest path and shot to pieces by inferior numbers of Indians and French. The redcoats stood for three hours under the fire of enemies they could hardly see, but the final defeat was complete. Among the dead were Braddock and Sir Peter and James Halkett.19 Some pale light appeared on the horizon. Jock got his cornetcy in the Greys and in 1755 became the regiment’s adjutant, John’s patronage apparently being enough to overcome the ambitions of young Lieutenant James Dalrymple, who had asked to his brother to approach the Earl of Argyle.20 In the same year his friend Loudoun was made a major-general and in January 1756 – through the patronage of Cumberland, warmly supported by Fox and Halifax – he was made lieutenant-general and commanderin-chief in North America, successor to the unfortunate Edward Braddock and the stop-gap William Shirley.21 For a moment Loudoun’s appointment and the expansion of the American war appeared to open a way forward for John.

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On 20 January the Cabinet decided to form a regiment of four battalions, at first numbered the 62nd but later as the 60th Foot, and named the Royal American Regiment. The brainchild of the Swiss adventurer James Prevost, it was to be partly officered and recruited from Germany and completed in America. Loudoun himself was to be colonel in chief. Each battalion was to have a colonel commandant and one such post – probably through the good offices of Loudoun and Bedford – Cumberland offered to John. John at once wrote to his creditors, pointing out that the additional pay would enable him to settle his debts sooner than otherwise, so that service in America did not represent an escape from his commitments.22 However, it emerged that a colonel commandant’s pay was to be brought up to only £300, and then only by Loudoun’s generosity in signing over to them one of his chief perquisites as colonel – the off-reckonings of the regimental clothing. ‘Off-reckonings’ were the 2d deducted from each man’s pay towards his uniform: whatever was left over after purchase of the necessary items was the colonel’s profit. The catch was that fourteen months of off-reckonings had to be spent on clothes in the first year and ten months’ worth thereafter. It followed that the colonel would be out of pocket in the first year, might break even in the second and could only make a profit at the end of the third. In short Forbes, who needed a further £1,000 to equip himself for America, would have to borrow even more money in the first year to be able to pay back anything of his existing debts three years hence. This was an exorbitantly expensive promotion, considering that as the most senior of all the lieutenant colonels, and with a record of distinguished service, he had some claim to a full colonelcy at the head of an established regiment. His creditors were not amused, perhaps threatening to have him arrested if he tried to leave England; while others, including Arthur, pressed him to sell up his existing lieutenant-colonelcy.23 Not wishing to alienate Cumberland with an outright refusal, he wrote an account of his circumstances and left the issue to be decided by the Captain General. Forbes persuaded Bedford to convey this letter and waited three weeks for an answer, every day asking Loudoun to find out what he could. At last, having heard that another officer had been appointed, he went to Cumberland to express his gratitude and had Bedford carry a second epistle asking Cumberland not to abandon him. Cumberland, Bedford later assured Forbes, promised to look after him, but John was not convinced. He had lost an opportunity for active service, distinction and perhaps further promotion: and feared he had been put into the same category as some officers who had resigned full colonelcies rather than go to North America. In the process he might have offended the only patron who mattered, and to whom he wrote a gloomy and, it must be said, somewhat self-pitying memorial: Cumberland himself.24 Meanwhile war with France was openly declared, fear of invasion mounted, the wartime camps began to fill with soldiers, and the most likely place for a landing was urgently discussed in London. In the spring of 1756 the Greys were ordered to Blandford camp in Dorset by an inland route. Forbes himself, however, was given a separate task that reflected the confidence of Cumberland and others in his administrative abilities. He was to make a long detour: an inspection of the coasts of Kent and Sussex, from Dover to Selsey Bill near Portsmouth. Taking his own mount, probably a servant or

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two, and a horse obtained on approval from a dealer called Harris to carry his valise, he set out to follow the sea westward while the Greys, under Preston’s command, marched by an inland route. His survey was meticulous and his conclusions sound. The cliffs between Dover and Sandgate Castle were clearly impossible for an invader, but the low-lying land between there and Dungeness offered a few opportunities. He talked to seamen and fishermen, who told him that landings were possible when a south to southwesterly wind made the seas calm. Then, where the beaches were very steep with little sand showing at low water, ships drawing up to seven feet might safely touch at half-tide, land their men and get off safely at the flood. But where the beaches were less steep such vessels could get in only at high tide and would not be able to land their troops in time to get off again before the ebb without ‘beating out their bottoms on the strand’. Even should a landing be made, the land behind the beaches – Romney Marsh – was sticky clay intersected with deep drains and by roads so few and narrow that a hundred men could hold them. Beyond that lay the clayey Weald broken up by woods and hedges and crossed by road that were wet even in the summer. Further west, between Dungeness and Hastings and on towards Eastbourne the prospects for an invader were equally thin. At Eastbourne the shingle beach was too steep for an easy landing and the country behind too swampy; the white chalk cliffs from Beachy Head to Seaford were ‘impossible’; and beyond that the beaches were only accessible to small boats. But down near Chichester and beyond the opportunities were greater and it was here that Forbes recommended that the bulk of the British defences should be concentrated.25 There was more than invasion to be concerned about. Minorca, the key British base in the western Mediterranean, of far greater value than Gibraltar, had been assailed by a French invasion force. Admiral John Byng was sent with an inadequate and tardily prepared squadron to see off a threat which at first Anson and the Admiralty thought miniscule or even non-existent. At Gibraltar Byng had then failed to take on board 700 troops intended to reinforce St Philip’s Castle, the key to Port Mahon. Arriving off the island after the French army had landed and opened the siege, he fought a fumbling and inconclusive battle with the French covering squadron. When the French broke off the action he did not pursue but convened a council of war to decide future options. The council then dutifully endorsed Byng’s view that it would be pointless either to seek a second engagement with the French squadron or to open communication with St Philip’s. He then retired to Gibraltar where he found a reinforcement of five ships and planned to return to Minorca; but before he could do so he was superseded by Admiral Hawke and summoned home in disgrace. There he was charged with failure to carry out his orders to the best of his ability – an offence carrying a mandatory death sentence. Byng had his faults and he had certainly made serious mistakes, but the trial was really a contrivance to exculpate a government that had misread an important strategic situation at long range, and had given its admiral inadequate means to deal with it.26 The trial and subsequent conviction had an electrifying effect upon anyone connected with armed service. Any commander who, confronted with a difficult situation, summoned a council of war and then chose prudence over rashness might

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easily go the way of Byng. Loudoun, whose command had so far witnessed the fall of Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario and devastating Indian raids along the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania, was a prime suspect. Fox, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, could not raise the alarm officially but he made sure that Loudoun received an indirect warning through his agent John Calcraft, a warning that Calcraft strongly seconded: Whenever I think of that Council of War I recollect with great Pleasure, a speech of your Lordship’s, which was that no Man ever call’d one, but when he meant to do nothing, this makes me sure that you are to trouble them very seldom, Yett Mr. Fox will have me, tell my freind [sic] Lord Loudoun He hopes for his Sake, whom he most Sincerely wishes well, to see no Council of War from America.27

In December the cumulative disasters of the year, but not least the Minorca fiasco and the Byng trial, brought William Pitt into office as the Secretary of State for the Southern Department. The Blandford camp was formed partly in readiness for the expected invasion, partly to prepare for descents upon the French coast. The Greys were to create and train a light troop which, combined with similar troops from eight other regiments, was to form part of an elite raiding force.28 The new dragoons, mounted on horses fifteen hands high, were to be armed with carbine, bayonet, pistols and straight sword. By 23 March 1757 the men had been raised but the troop was still thirty-nine horses short of completion.29 The training was the severe ‘Prussian exercise’, which involved jumping wide specially dug ditches, clearing hedges with broad ditches on either side and swimming the horses through inundations. Forbes and Preston seem to have been responsible for directing the regime, which took a heavy toll on men, horses and equipment.30 Nevertheless, the camp offered Forbes a chance to share a convivial bottle of claret or three with Bedford, who as colonel in chief of a regiment originally raised to suppress the Jacobite rebellion, was there until October.31 Here was an opportunity to cultivate a powerful patron whom he may already have known through Sandwich. But Bedford was still not in office and so there was still no opening on the horizon. There was trouble in the family too. Hugh was ill and worried about money and mortality. Loretto was proving beyond his means to maintain. Worse, while he himself had had ‘not received a shilling from Pittencrieff these sixteen years’, he was legally bound to pay interest on huge debts incurred by Arthur, ‘who it seems most miserably Spends the Income of the whole Estate’. Moreover Hugh had guaranteed some of John’s own debts. Thus when John failed to pay £30 interest on a loan his brother had guaranteed for him, Hugh was unamused. The creditor was one Oliver Couts whose representative was William Forbes, an Edinburgh attorney and the very cousin whose advancement Hugh had supported and who seems to have been Arthur’s main creditor too. Hugh, a married man with at least five children, accepted that John was in want of patronage but thought his responsibilities less and his income greater than his own. He wrote repeatedly and petulantly to demand reimbursement of the £30 and John’s acknowledgement that the debt was his. John wrote to thank him,

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promising to send the money, but appears not to have followed his words with action. Hugh was afraid that should he be ‘distressed’ for the whole debt all his creditors would be upon him at once – in short he would be ruined. Adding a little more emotional blackmail he suggested that John’s career alone could save the whole family’s finances.32 Hugh and Arthur may also have been urging John, in the absence of preferment, to sell his lieutenant colonelcy, clear his debts and retire. If so, he refused to accept such an ignominious end to his professional career, an end that would have rendered him penniless for life. As in 1744 he hung on in the hope of something turning up. In October, and dragging miserably on into December, came the breach with George Preston. On the surface it was a dispute over the use of a horse, which Preston claimed he had offered to buy and which John had commandeered to carry his portmanteau on the first part of his ride from Dover. However there were other issues. Preston was irritated by John’s frequent absences – although his own were quite extensive and apparently cheerfully granted – and in particular an incident where he thought that his Christmas leave to be with his family had been subverted by his lieutenant colonel.33 It seems likely too that Preston, having worked to get Jock his adjutancy, now found the boisterous, ill-disciplined, hard-living younger Forbes an impossible colleague. Insubordination of this kind was not uncommon among subalterns and Jock seems to have been a bad case: Hugh was pleased to hear that he had his hands full at Blandford and that there had been no ‘Jollity’; Arthur noted a certain ‘giddiness’ and even John had to caution Jock before he left for America in 1757.34 On 15 December Home wrote to report two related news items and make a suggestion. Bedford had become Lord Lieutenant in Ireland and Lord Forbes, the Irish army’s Quartermaster and Barrackmaster General, had resigned to take up a regimental colonelcy. John stood well with Bedford and the Irish vacancy was now within his gift. Why should John not succeed him namesake?35 Forbes was enthusiastic and immediately jotted down the names of four men whose aid he would need to enlist: Home, Sir John Ligonier, his army friend Sir Richard Lyttelton and, of course, Bedford. Ireland would certainly be close enough to satisfy his creditors and the annual income should be enough to progressively meet their demands. Moreover, the two linked posts usually carried with them the rank of colonel. Forbes at once applied to Bedford, at the same time recruiting Home to press his suit in London, and beginning a clandestine correspondence with Bedford’s ally, Sandwich. Sandwich told Forbes (and Home) that he was in good odour at Woburn but ought to make a direct approach himself, hinting that Bedford was far more likely to respond to that than to approaches through third parties such as himself. He also thought that Forbes ought to appear in London as soon as possible – easy to say but harder to achieve for a lieutenant colonel with only one other field officer at his command and he ill-disposed. Home confirmed Lord Sandwich’s advice, and also obtained the good offices of Colonel John Waldegrave, who was married to Bedford’s wife’s sister. There was yet another avenue of approach. Richard Lyttelton, eleven years younger than Forbes, brother of an English hereditary peer, MP for Brackley in Northamptonshire and himself about to be promoted major general, was sympathetic

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and helpful. At John’s request Lyttelton went to Ligonier to try to get him to speak for the King, although he and Ligonier were on ‘very indifferent’ terms and despite Ligonier having a cold, which prevented him from doing anything immediately. He also tried to see Bedford but he of course was at Woburn. Lyttelton agreed that he had Bedford’s favour but an appearance in London was absolutely crucial. Yet another recruit was the gambling-addicted MP Richard Rigby. Rigby shared the fourth Duke’s love of country sports and had once saved him from a racecourse mob at Lichfield; he owed his present parliamentary seat to Bedford, not to mention a loan to settle his considerable debts and the prospect of becoming the Lord Lieutenant’s secretary in Ireland. Rigby, who knew Forbes and who a year later was referred to by George Ross as his ‘friend’, wrote an encouraging letter. Jack Campbell also sounded out Rigby, though without securing any commitments, and at the cost of annoying Home when Campbell mentioned it to him. Lord Charles Hay tried to approach Bedford and Rigby on Forbes’s behalf but on 1 February Rigby had left town and Bedford, of course, was still at Woburn. Through another Bedford protégé, the clownish MP Bubb Dodington, Home learned – or thought he had learned – that Bedford himself favoured Forbes over all other candidates and that nothing but Cumberland’s veto could stop his appointment.36 It looked as if Forbes, through this motley network of colourful contacts, was about to land a prestigious post worth at least £700 over and above his ordinary pay and a colonelcy to boot. Financial security and a dignified future – both far away from American conflicts – were at last in sight. Cumberland’s veto, however, was a potentially fatal and – in the minds of Forbes and Home, though not of Sandwich – all too likely obstacle. As January dragged on towards its end it looked as if once again Forbes had been pushed aside. At that point he injured his leg – perhaps in a riding accident – so badly that it was still hampering him in April. The winter was harsh and the roads icy so getting up to London to wait on Bedford was an uninviting prospect. The regiment had to be looked after and Preston as far as possible appeased, so John’s window of opportunity would be small. And although his correspondents repeatedly urged the importance of being in London when Bedford arrived, they consistently reported the Duke laid up with gout at Woburn. It would be better to wait at Blandford until Bedford was reported on the move. Then, at the beginning of February he opened a short note, dated the third of the month, from his colonel-in-chief: Dear Col, I have a Notion that your being here upon the spot this time may possbily be of service to you, so that if your tolerably well pray come to Town I have no time to explain my Self, Adieu yours John Campbell It is hop’d that the Duke of Bedford may be able to Come to Town Monday or Tuesday next.37

There was nothing for it: Forbes set out at once. But it was too late: Bedford’s gout had perhaps been a tactical illness, or least it had allowed him to make his decision at Woburn, far away from the importuning of an impoverished Scot and his friends. For Bedford had to balance Forbes’s

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undoubted merits against other obligations: an older and closer friend of his was a Kentish gentleman called Edward Wolfe, himself a soldier and father to one James Wolfe, only thirty years old and already a lieutenant colonel. On 5 February – but probably too late to stop Forbes leaving Blandford – Rigby told Campbell that Bedford had decided in favour of Wolfe, who it seems had already been sounded out and had accepted. Campbell was as unimpressed as he was inarticulate – ‘Woolf, young and inexperienced, Indeed’. He might have added that Wolfe was not an experienced administrator and only wanted the post to leapfrog over older, better qualified and more experienced men into the rank of colonel. Thus Forbes found that he had come hurrying up from Dorset through a terrible winter – lame and in pain – on a wildgoose chase. Once again he had been passed over in favour of someone less deserving. It was mortifying – and, while Rigby confirmed that Bedford was still determined to do Forbes ‘justice’, he would not say how.38 He lingered on, however, nursing his leg, reluctant to travel, possibly expecting something else to turn up; and almost certainly enjoying Wolfe’s discomfort when he found he was not to be Barrack Master and – better still – that the King would not allow him to be a colonel.39 Forbes was about to be rescued by the determination of William Pitt, who in December had risen to Secretary of State on the back of the year’s disasters, to direct the American war from London. Loudoun had proposed a summer assault on Quebec – daring in that he planned to bypass Louisbourg, strategically clever in that it would pin Montcalm’s forces down, preventing him from attacking the New York frontier. Overruling Loudoun’s plan, the Secretary of State insisted upon a preliminary assault on Louisbourg, the fortress on Cape Breton Island commanding approaches to the St Lawrence, followed by an upriver assault on Quebec later in the summer. That would remove Louisbourg as a threat to the communications of the expedition; but by delaying the attack on Quebec it left Montcalm free to launch an offensive in the Lake Champlain–Hudson River corridor. Loudoun was annoyed – just how annoyed would emerge later – but there was a massive sugaring of the pill in the form of a large reinforcement. No less than 5,200 men drawn from seven regiments were to be escorted to Halifax by fourteen ships of the line, a frigate, two sloops, a bomb-ketch and a fire ship. In addition two new Highland regiments already being raised were expected to join the expedition. Loudoun was a good and disciplined soldier and may have calculated that with these extra forces, and the provincials he was gradually extracting from the colonial assemblies, he could afford to leave a sufficient guard on the frontier to see off any threat. Had he known that he was also to have two additional major generals, Hopson and Lord Charles Hay, he would have felt even more reassured. 40 On 1 February Bedford had ordered all officers belonging to the seven designated units on the Irish establishment – the 2nd battalion of 1st Foot Guards, and the 17th, 27th, 28th, 43rd, 46th and 57th regiments – to return to the regiments within two weeks.41 But by then Pitt was temporarily out of office and unable to influence any resulting appointments, which gave the Bedford group an opening to secure plums for their own men. ‘He [Pitt] will find tomorrow a real grievance to complain of ’, gloated Rigby on 3 February – the very day upon which Campbell wrote to Forbes – ‘for … the eight senior colonels upon the list [of regiments being sent to America], are

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absolutely appointed without him’.42 Forbes, of course, was not one of those colonels, but a vacancy was about to arise. Major General Edward Richbill, colonel of the 700-strong 17th regiment of foot, was elderly and close to death. Since the 17th was an Irish regiment the colonelcy – should it become vacant – was technically within Bedford’s gift; or at least he had the right to recommend a successor to George II who, as always, would make the final decision. Richbill died at last in Dublin on 14 February. Whether the event was anticipated when Campbell summoned Forbes from Dorset is unknown – but when the news reached London Forbes was on the spot. Jack Campbell, in his inarticulate, unpunctuated way, was exultant: ‘Richbill is dead you may depend upon that I say no more.’43 In the circumstances Bedford was obliged to do something for Forbes. Forbes was almost certainly supported by Ligonier, who would later congratulate Loudoun in a manner implying that Forbes and George Augustus, Viscount Howe – the newly appointed colonel commandant of the 3rd battalion of the Royal Americans44 – were his own protégés. ‘I wish you joy of John Forbes and of Lord How,’ he wrote, ‘and beg to name one of my aide-de-camps Captain George West as a young fellow worth your notice’.45 In an army where personal relationships mattered intensely Forbes’s connection with Loudoun must have been an additional recommendation – and perhaps his relationship with Hay, who was appointed major general and assigned to the American expedition on 21 February, was helpful. The three long-associated Scots could reasonably be relied upon to work well together. It is also possible that Loudoun himself had asked for his old friend. Whatever the precise reasons, on 24 February 1757 Bedford signed the commission making John Forbes colonel of the 17th regiment of foot. Forbes could now look forward to serving under his two old comrades. On the face of it he could also anticipate the pay and perquisites of a full colonel, promising an income that might stave off his creditors and eventually pay his debts. In the meantime his brothers came to the rescue, generously, one may say recklessly, binding themselves as guarantors for £4,000. Against that had to be set the need to fit himself out for America. In London he had almost nothing: he even had to buy a pair of presentable pistols from a Fife friend, Captain James Masterson of the Royal, exchanging them by way of a written note for a pair of silver-mounted barkers kept at Pittencrieff. He reached Portsmouth about the beginning of March with no money, no aide and not even a servant. As he put it to Loudoun ‘here I am wt out almost any thing in order to join the Regt at Cork when wee proceed with the six others to join you’. He was obliged to ask for ‘a place to putt my head in upon my arrival, as also perhaps a horse or two, or perhaps a cart or wagon, If Your Lordship therefore would compassionate ane old friend, and allow any of your aide de Camps or men employed about you to take some care of me, I shall be most thankfull at meeting’.46 Ironically, opportunity had knocked at the very moment that John began to feel too old, poor and ill to enjoy it. Then there were personal and family troubles. For some reason he had been avoiding Kate, Loudoun’s mistress of some twenty-one years’ standing, and she was not amused. ‘[M]ost of your Friends’, she wrote irritably to Loudoun, ‘have been so kind as

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to visit me except Jock Forbes who has walk’d by my Door sevral times and tho’ he Saw my Servants at the Door never thought it worth his while to ask how I did’. But once Forbes had his regiment and knew he was going to join Loudoun it was a different and, to Kate, impossibly transparent story. ‘[H]e has got a regiment and is coming to you so he sent to me yesterday that he would come and see me, but I sent him word back again that I was engaged, and if he should Call I should not see him if I can help it.’47 What lay behind this? Did Loudoun have some reason, real or imagined, for jealousy? Was it Kate’s guilty conscience? Or Forbes’s knowledge, and Kate’s suspicion, that Loudoun had taken another woman to America? In any case, Jock’s behaviour was more a more pressing matter than Kate’s petulance. After his temporary falling out with George Preston over the disputed horse and Jock’s advancement, John had himself been obliged to warn his nephew about his youthful wildness. Hugh came up with a plan to pay Arthur’s creditors by selling Loretto and merging the two households at Pittencrieff. But Arthur, though about to be ‘beaten to pieces by Law’, angrily rejected the scheme. Hugh took the deepest umbrage and the brothers broke off all contact, each waiting for the other to give in, until a bemused Jock went to Pittencrieff to play peacemaker. In 1758 Jock reported the whole affair to John who, heavily in debt himself, felt obliged to arrange with Ross to let Arthur borrow £4,000 of General Hawley’s money to stave off his most pressing creditors.48 The expedition was exciting but obviously perilous. The year 1756 had been a year of misfortunes and already the prospects for 1757 were gloomy. Pitt had fallen, not all the troops were ready and the ministry was divided, the French were known to be about to send naval forces to Louisbourg. He confided his fears to Loudoun: ‘Wee have had bad luck last year God send us better this, but the Difference and dispositions of our ministry, are terrible things for any Expedition. I am afraid the two new raised Regts of highlanders will not be ready to go wt us. Wee sail for Cork Sunday morning and hope for a speedy and prosperous voyage.’ 49 But the fleet did not sail. For two weeks it was confined by howling winds to St Helen’s Road off the Isle of Wight. On 14 March there came the depressing spectacle of Byng’s execution. He was led onto the quarter deck of his own flagship, HMS Monarch where he knelt on a cushion before three files of marines. He dropped the handkerchief he was holding and the two front ranks fired into his body, the sight that could not have failed to impress upon Forbes the perils awaiting all who went on uncertain expeditions, and particularly his friend Loudoun. As we shall see, it certainly made a deep impression upon Hay. Next day, Forbes bade farewell to Jock after lecturing him on his wild behaviour and urging him to avoid ‘Company’ for a year; at the same time, ever the indulgent uncle and patron, he urged his nephew to sell his adjutancy as there might be an opening for him in the 17th. John then retired on board his own ship in St Helen’s Road, ostensibly to get away from the distracting bustle of Portsmouth but most likely to get away from the scene of execution. When he wrote to Hugh that day he did not mention Byng – but he did report being too ill and lame and buffeted about by the gales to do more.50

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Hay and Forbes reached Cork, with Hopson, Lord Howe and Colonel Perry of the 57th, only on 26 April.51 It appeared that Loudoun would now have at least two effective general officers, and a colonel known to be a very competent chief staff officer; and Forbes could enjoy working with intimate friends. What actually happened could hardly have been more painful. And over the whole expedition hung the dark shadow of Admiral Byng.

8

The Madness of Lord Charles Hay Though Hay was a man of winning personal charm, boundless egotism and undisputed bravery in the stress of action, or impending action, a streak of insanity, never very far below the surface, assumed control of his mind, and lent a tragic sombreness to the qualities that won him high rank in the army.1 Stanley Pargellis’s acute analysis of Lord Charles Hay’s character is beyond improvement. Without much doubt Hay suffered from a ‘mood disorder’, a bipolar condition in which bouts of depression alternate with manic episodes characterized by exaggerated self-confidence, overestimation of one’s abilities, excessive sociability and loss of normal social inhibitions. But to fully understand it we must go back into Hay’s military past. His vanity was clearly visible in his tales of his service with the Austrians in the War of the Polish Succession, with which he thereafter never ceased to bore his friends. He was in his mid-thirties at the time, on the upper edge of the common time frame for the onset of a mood disorder and it may have been a kind of over-compensation for remembered stress and fear.2 The trait became obvious at the battle of Fontenoy in the incident which was to become his one claim to lasting fame – and to a place in endless dictionaries of quotations. He was in the front rank of his 1st Foot Guards as the British square marched stolidly through the murderous crossfire of the Fontenoy and Redoubt D’Eu batteries and breasted the rise. There, perhaps thirty yards away, were the French Guards, sent forward to check them. According to Voltaire, Hay courteously invited the enemy to deliver the first volley: ‘Gentlemen of the guard, fire first’. Hay’s own version, far wordier but no less melodramatic, may be considerably nearer the truth: [I]tt was our Regiment that first attacked the french guards and when we Came within 25 or 30 paces of them I advanced before our Regiment drank to them and told them that we were the English guards and hoped that they wold stand till we Came quite upe to them and not swimming the scheld as they Did the main at ditingen upon which I Immediately turned about to our own Regiment Speechd them and made them Huzza an officer of the french Guards came out of the Ranks and tried to make his men Huzza However there were not above 3 or 4 in there Brigade that did …3

That piece of almost unbelievable bravado might be explained as evidence of the excessively ceremonial nature of eighteenth-century warfare, and as a survival

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mechanism, intended to tempt the enemy into firing prematurely. More likely it was neither of those things – or at least not the first and not predominantly the second – but Hay’s own response to the stress of a terrifying situation. The French fired and Hay was wounded in the arm. The British replied with a rolling volley that demolished their opponents and the line pressed forward over the crest. Bleeding profusely Hay led his men into the French camp where they withstood a charge by French cavalry. But the horror was far from over as the unreduced Redoubt D’Eu fired into their flank and rear. ‘[A]t the same time’, he told his brother later, ‘the Enemy had a fort which fired grap[e]-shot in our rear which I imagined we had been in possession of many hours before and by what fatality it was not taken I cannot tell[.] [N]ot withstanding the Disadvantage we reather[sic] gaind Ground than Lost and so Remained till past two a Clock till we had orders to retire’. It was only now, as he became weak and faint from loss of blood that the seriousness of Hay’s wounds became apparent to those around him. Though he was slowed by his injuries, some of his men stayed with him as they fell back, so enabling him to reach safety at the foot of the hill. There he encountered Marshal Königsegg who at once ordered him to the hospital already being set up in a barracks at Ath. By the time he got there Hay was alternately fainting and vomiting and probably delirious. He was unconscious all the next day and half of the next: for a week he hung between life and death. Fortunately for him the hospital at Ath was a model of its kind: Buchanan called it ‘the most commodious we have had’ where even the rank and file patients had small clean six-bedded rooms, each properly walled off and with a fireplace. Of the 991 patients, including 600 wounded treated there by 25 August, only fifty-nine were to die.4 Hay, of course, had even better attention. By 17 May, the day after the army withdrew to Lessines, his fever had abated and he was able to sit up in a chair, consume a little chicken, walk around his room with the aid of a manservant, talk to his secretary and dictate a short letter to his brother. But the letter itself was incoherent, veering alternately between boasting a strong recovery and moaning at the scale of the damage: at one moment marvelling that he had escaped so lightly and at the next complaining that ‘my wounds is very Large making a great Discharge which makes me Consequently very Low’. Though a week later he claimed his wounds were of ‘little consequence’, he was soon invalided home and did not serve in Flanders again.5 The episode certainly speaks of impressive courage, in the proper sense of a man overcoming terrible fear in the face of imminent violent death; and the loyalty of his men says much for their courage and for his leadership. But it is equally clear that Hay was suffering from severe combat stress and coped with it through theatrical posturing. There is some evidence that the combination of a fragile psychology and the post-traumatic effects of the battle were long lasting. When news of the Jacobite rebellion reached London, Hay – once again implying want of energy and courage on the part of others – suggested that reading a proclamation was all that was necessary to disperse the rebels. This too was heroic posturing in the face of crisis, combined perhaps with loyalty to his brother’s inclination to dismiss the rebels as a minor nuisance. After the rebels took Edinburgh by surprise and Sir John Cope’s little army

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was routed at Prestonpans, George II with appropriate irony remarked: ‘Well, lord Hays, I think you had best go down and read the proclamation to the rebels.’6 On 19 October Cumberland was sent his orders to return to Britain with a substantial proportion of his Flanders force, Tweeddale and Lord Charles were humiliated and England lay open to invasion. It is hardly surprising that on the night of Thursday 24 October he was suddenly taken ill at his house in Grosvenor Square, an attack that might have been a physical disorder but which could well have been a mental breakdown. He did go north however, apparently intending to raise a regiment among the loyal Highland clans. On 30 December he was reportedly on the church tower at Dunfermline, watching the withdrawal of a Jacobite detachment, when a concealed Highland straggler tried to pistol him. Death – if the story be true – passed an inch from his ear, taking away a curl of his peruke. In April 1646 Cumberland disposed of the reduced and hungry Jacobite army at Culloden but Lord Charles’s mental health continued to deteriorate. In November one acquaintance reported that ‘poor Lord Charles Hay, I am told, is confined raving mad. I hope he will not continue so, but as I hear he has been confined to his bed for some time’. Because of this disorder he did not seek re-election for Haddingtonshire in 1747. Yet he was permitted to resume his military career and in 1749 to become aidede-camp to George II.7 This was the man who – having outwardly recovered – was now to become one of the key commanders in whom, if the war in America was to be successful, Loudoun would have to repose absolute trust. The impact of the Byng affair upon this charming, nervy, unstable, histrionic personality cannot be overestimated. No one watching the gales at Portsmouth could have failed to feel opportunity seeping away, the possibility of failure or disaster ever present and – through Byng’s fate – the possible consequence of failure. Byng had been driven by distance and local circumstances to take a strategic decision that killed him. If that could happen in the Mediterranean, a familiar theatre relatively close to home, how much more likely was it to happen in the new war in distant North America? As we have seen, the eighteenth-century army depended upon patronage and personal associations, rather than the formal regulations imposed by the Crown, for its discipline and coherence. In particular, an officer’s loyalty to his commander was very personal. On that reasoning appointing Hay to support Loudoun in North America made perfect sense, just as it was sensible to send John Forbes as a friend of both. All were Scots and all had close personal connections and loyalties. But what if a tension developed between those personal bonds and Hay’s inner need to deal with anxiety by appearing braver than anyone else? What if Hay became so erratic and unreliable he could not be trusted with any kind of independent command? And what if his behaviour threatened to undermine the discipline of Loudoun’s whole army and confidence in the commander-in-chief himself? The voyage itself – a trans-Atlantic journey in the face of powerful French naval forces and with a major battle waiting at the end of it – was a key source of stress. Hay, like Forbes and every other officer who had served in Europe, had crossed the Channel often enough but an oceanic expedition of three thousand miles was another prospect entirely. The storm-tossed delays off Portsmouth had been bad

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enough and before they sailed it was known that the Toulon and Brest squadrons were at sea and probably headed for Louisbourg – even though, as John Forbes solemnly informed Hugh, the objective of the expedition was still officially secret. In fact it was well known to be bound for America – John felt free to tell Hugh as much – and the French planners would have been sadly lacking had they not guessed that the target was Cape Breton.8 The strategic implications were obvious: if such a powerful force should arrive at Louisbourg before them the whole expedition would be in peril. That, combined with the dismal events of 1756 – Byng’s failure, the fall of Minorca, failure in North America – must have had a generally depressing effect. Forbes was probably expressing a widely felt pessimism when he wrote to Loudoun on 10 March: Wee have had bad luck last year God send us better this, but the Difference and dispositions of our ministry, are terrible things for any Expedition. I am afraid the two new raised Regts of highlanders will not be ready to go wt us. Wee sail for Cork Sunday morning and hope for a speedy and prosperous voyage. Admiral Holburn Commands, wt 12 Line of battle Ships and some Fregates, I wish to God wee gett to your seas before the French.9

He was right about the Highlanders, who were not dispatched until June,10 but dismally wrong about ‘Sunday’: the up-channel winds persisted and the expedition did not sail for until 17 March. And every day of delay, as every officer aboard must have divined, rendered the expedition more and more vulnerable. At Cork the assembling and embarkation of the Irish regiments were straightforward enough. Forbes’s 17th, 700-odd men in all, were embarked on five vessels: Constant Jane (469 tons), Elizabeth (231), Two Brothers (283), Blakeney (197), Wallington (279) and Fishburne (242). Forbes was still pessimistic and ill: ‘Lame & sick neither able to eat, drink write or think.’ But by that time a third French squadron had sailed for America, from Rochefort on 3 May, making seventeen of the line in all bound for Louisbourg. The British government’s reaction – dispatching three of the line and a frigate to join the escort at Cork – appeared disturbingly feeble; the arrival on 7 May of this clearly inadequate reinforcement, when the transports were on the point of sailing, provoked as much anxiety as reassurance. Two days later, when the convoy attempted to sail a series of collisions damaged one or two transports and several of the warships, and the Centurion, 54, ran smoothly aground. By morning the ships were dispersed off Kinsale, waiting while Centurion was refloated on the new tide.11 It was an inauspicious beginning. At New York, Loudoun was assembling some thirty transports and adequate provisions for the six regular regiments and 500 New York Rangers led by Major Robert Rogers. On 21 May the troops embarked for Halifax and two days later the whole fleet dropped down to the outer anchorage of Sandy Hook. The station commander, Rear Admiral Sir Charles Hardy, had only one fifty-gun ship of the line and four smaller vessels at his disposal: far too weak a squadron to escort the whole available force in North America across a sea in which a superior enemy fleet might at any moment appear. Loudoun and Hardy at first waited for Holburne, but at the

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end of May, with the campaign season dribbling away, they had to choose between abandoning the expedition and risking the loss of the whole North American army at sea. With great daring they decided to take the risk and go without him. Just as they were about to sail came news of the probable arrival of de Bauffremont with his five of the line. Again they hesitated, but after two of Hardy’s frigates reported no activity at Louisbourg and encountered no fleet at sea, they sailed on 20 June. By then all three French squadrons had arrived in Louisbourg and had they been at sea the whole expedition might have been lost. At Halifax he found a couple of ships of the line and soon after the first vessels of Holburne’s convoy, dangerously dispersed in thick fogs, began to straggle in. Holburne, with the main body, did not appear until 9 July, by which time it was too late to contemplate taking Louisbourg and Quebec in one campaign. The question was now whether to attack Louisbourg or, bypassing it, go straight for Quebec? To answer that question frigates were sent to look into Louisbourg to see what naval strength the French had there, a reconnaissance which took three weeks. Meanwhile Loudoun exercised his troops in siege warfare and planted vegetable gardens to protect their health.12 The Halifax Forbes and Lord Charles saw that day was a square palisaded settlement, laid out in a grid pattern and built entirely of wood. Most of the buildings, according to Lieutenant Knox of the 43rd regiment, were ‘mean, and do not display any great knowledge of architecture, much less of taste, in those who erected them’. The one prominent structure, also wooden, was the Anglican Church. By the waterfront were a number of forts of double palisades filled with earth, and on a hill overlooking the town was an inner citadel. Beyond town and citadel, in what Captain Christopher French of the 22nd Regiment described as ‘the worst Ground my Eyes ever beheld, being full of Stumps of Trees, rocks, & in many places morasses’, the troops from New York were encamped. The seven Irish regiments were soon to join them there, crowding the steep barren ground still further, until ‘with great Labour’ and in torrential rain more space was cleared. Woods were thick on the landward side and the fogs were ‘almost perpetual’.13 The whole place had a bleak, beleaguered, frontier air – an atmosphere unlikely to steady already shaky nerves. The senior officers took up separate quarters in the town – Forbes sharing a house with Major Alexander Murray of the 45th regiment, Murray’s wife and two small children. He settled down to the business of looking after his regiment, asking Hopson to ensure that it was placed on the same fiscal basis as other units.14 He kept a table for fellow officers at a local inn and established – or renewed – a particular friendship with Dr Richard Huck, a distinguished London and Aberdeen-trained practitioner, who had worked in Edinburgh in 1753 and 1755, and whom Loudoun had made physician to the army. Other members of his circle were Hay’s aide-de-camp, the observant, capable and womanizing Captain Alexander Monypenny of the 55th Foot, William Byrd of Virginia and another Ligonier protégé, young George West of the 45th.15 Soon Loudoun made Forbes his adjutant general making him a man of even greater consequence, particularly as his friendship with the commander-in-chief was well known. That may have been the occasion of an ‘Entertainment’ he provided for fellow officers at the Globe tavern. But routine, administrative procedure and in-service socializing could not dispel the prevailing atmosphere of anticipation and trepidation. Gloomy thoughts were

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compounded by reports of the French concentration at Louisbourg, the perils of the coming voyage to Cape Breton, and by the lurking presence of hostile Indians. Daily parties of Rangers scoured the neighbouring forest but disturbing incidents were not uncommon. In July four sailors who had wandered inland were attacked and two killed and scalped. Three Rangers vanished, taken, it was supposed, by the Indians for intelligence purposes. In August Christopher French and some companions, who had gone fishing along the shore in a small boat, were shot at by unseen assailants16 Moreover, everyone was now aware of Byng’s fate: Loudoun and his senior officers were caught between what might be a reckless gamble and the deadly perils of disobedience. In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that within a fortnight Hay’s old instability resurfaced. To some, like Major Craven of Pepperell’s regiment, he was his old charming self, as convivial as ever at Loudoun’s table in the evening, chatting to passing fellow officers at his window by day. But when Craven heard it said that Hay was insane he asked Monypenny if anything was amiss. After much hesitation, the embarrassed Monypenny admitted that there had been a great change in Hay of late. When Craven pressed further Monypenny admitted that he thought Hay had gone mad. Rumours continued to fly around Halifax and were only strengthened when he began openly to accuse Loudoun of dithering and (by implication) of cowardice. On 26 July, Loudoun called a council of war to debate the likelihood of being able to take Louisbourg. It was a very solemn business: everyone was thinking of what had happened to Byng. Hay, however, refused to treat it seriously and made very clear that he thought anything less than an immediate attack a dereliction of duty. He would sit for hours in the window instead of in his chair at the table, sometimes dozing off, as if to show his contempt for the proceedings. He perked up only when junior officers were admitted as witnesses, putting to each the same loaded question: was there any chance of an assault succeeding at this time of the year? By stressing the season, Hay was attempting to make out that every other obstacle was chimerical. Most witnesses argued that Louisbourg harbour could not now be forced and it was now too late in the year for a formal siege; others refused to answer and only one was surprised into emphatic agreement.17 And Hay did not confine his attitudes to the Council. One day on the parade ground Hay accosted Forbes’s friend Murray of the 45th, in the hearing of the troops and of Christopher French. ‘Murray’, cried Hay, ‘ … I thought wee should Embark before this, By God we might have Landed in five hours last Night without the loss of a man, pray what number of Ball Cartridges have you[?]’ Murray replied: ‘Thirty-six per man, Your Lordship.’ ‘By God’, responded Hay, ‘you have a Damn’d despicable opinion of your Enemy to take so few, this [is proof] enough what are they doing with it, Murray take my advice and make of [up] Some Hogsheads of Cartridges’. Next day French heard Hay holding forth again. ‘I suppose the Troops will soon embark and then we shall have Embarking and Disembarking, Ships covering the Landing, and at last all End in Smoak.’ On 30 July, when he was major general of the day, Hay’s seditious utterances became public in a characteristically dramatic and self-advertising way. He rode up to

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the works where soldiers were practising digging approach trenches towards a dummy fort and began to harangue the workmen. A crowd of all ranks of soldiers, sailors and civilians gathered around him, including French, Captain Robert Ross of the 48th, James Abercromby of the 42nd, the purser and a lieutenant from HMS Oford and a lieutenant from another man o’war: By God, … Charles Hays name will cut a great figure in history for his Exploits in America, however I’m not in their Secrets, but by God Difficult as it may be, I shall find a method of letting the Mother Country know what is doing here that we were taken up in building show forts and making Approaches to them, when we should be Employ’d in Real attacks.18

‘This affair was what happened in the Mediterranean, that Byng has suffered, and that he hoped to God some people would suffer for six months were at an end.’ His behaviour was nothing less than a threat to Loudoun himself, and perhaps against his fellow major generals too. It was quite enough to justify his arrest and confinement. Loudoun could not brook this challenge to his authority forever. The Articles of War aside, he could himself be charged with ‘conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman’ for failing to respond to a challenge to his honour. Yet he was reluctant to act against a newly arrived major general with influential connections; so instead he and the rest of the council met in secret without Hay. To allow him to witness more of their hesitations and uncertainties would only give him potentially lethal ammunition to use against them at home. Hopson, having re-read Pitt’s orders, had reached the uncomfortable conclusion that they left no room for a debate upon whether an attack should take place. To hold such a debate, and then to decide not to proceed, would open them to a charge worse than that brought against Byng: that of direct disobedience. Loudoun now agreed that he had been putting the wrong question. Therefore, on 31 July, the day after Hay’s Mediterranean outburst, he asked the council which of the two specified objectives, Louisbourg or Quebec, should be attacked? The board unanimously advised Louisbourg.19 In effect Hay’s misbehaviour had forced his colleagues into a decision that they all knew was folly. By 3 August the troops for Louisbourg were embarked and waiting for a wind, Forbes himself being quartered in the Constant Jane. Loudoun may have hoped that the continuing foul winds or further intelligence or both would come to his rescue. Next day the wind failed him and turned fair; but he was blessed with information, taken from a captured French schooner and brought ashore that day by Holburne, of the overwhelming strength of the French naval concentration at Louisbourg. Loudoun seized his chance and abandoned the expedition. The regiments already on shipboard were ordered to disembark and preparations began for an immediate return to New York. At once ‘some malevolent spirits’ as Knox called them, began to whisper that Loudoun had been misled by a French deception: a planted dispatch and a schooner never meant to reach her destination. Most of the officers and men, in Knox’s opinion, had too strong a faith in Loudoun and in the common sense of the decision to be swayed by such stuff; but the very fact of the rumours was troubling.20 The following day, very well aware of what Lord Charles was already making of his decision, yet still

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willing to tread lightly, Loudoun took the precaution of reporting his reasons for not arresting Hay to Lord Holdernesse, the Secretary of State. Hay, he argued was so clearly deranged, probably by the strain of the long ocean voyage and the climate, that there could be little threat to discipline. Moreover, it would be ‘very Disagreeable’ to take drastic steps against a man of Hay’s ‘Family, Rank and Connections’. He therefore proposed to order Lord Charles to remain at New York once the army had withdrawn there, pending his recall by the King. Moreover, rather than commit Hay’s misdeeds to paper, he sent a verbal message with the officer carrying his letter.21 Hay’s next action, however, was to shatter that plan beyond redemption. At about 11.00 am on 6 August, Hay learned that the campaign was to be abandoned and went straight to Loudoun to have it confirmed. Loudoun told him that it was and Hay at once demanded to be allowed to go home on leave. What happened next became a matter of dispute but it seems that Loudoun gave his verbal consent. At that moment, as he told Cumberland, ‘I dreaded the Consequences of his being trusted on any Command’ and was only too glad to be rid of such an awkward colleague so cheaply. Moreover, though Loudoun did not say so to Cumberland, preventing Hay from going might in the long run make it appear that there was some truth in his accusations. Soon after Hay left his room, however, Loudoun had second thoughts. One consideration was that he might not have the authority to permit the return of a major general so recently sent out with the King’s commission. The other was a perfectly justifiable fear that Hay’s rantings in London might bring down upon his own head a court martial for disobedience in not attacking Louisbourg: in other words, exactly what had happened to Byng with every possibility of an identical result. Loudoun then sent a message round by an aide-de-camp: Hay was to remain until further notice. Hay refused to accept the counter-order and announced that he was going home anyway.22 The direct collision, which Loudoun had worked so hard to avoid, was now a reality. This was only a matter of days after Loudoun had appointed John Forbes to the post of Adjutant General, pending Cumberland’s approval. Loudoun decided to send him, in both his official capacity and as Hay’s friend, to warn Lord Charles not to leave without consent. ‘I chose to send him’, as he told Cumberland, ‘both from the Office he was in. and the connection there is between them, by that means to make things go gently … ’ To sweeten the pill a little more, Forbes was to tell Hay that he could choose between the Hawke and Jamaica sloops of war for his passage with the army to New York. Not finding Hay, Forbes left a short note, in which he stated Loudoun’s orders in formal but unmistakeable language, which his closing ‘with the Greatest regards & Esteem’ could do little to soften. While Forbes was searching, Hay was making arrangements for his departure. He had himself rowed out to the flagship where he was received by the Admiral and his secretary in the great cabin. Hay asked for a vessel to take him home, upon which Holburne – who had not heard of Loudoun’s countermand – offered him a passage in the packet, which was about to leave. Hay scornfully refused, demanding at the very least a sloop of war as more fitting to the dignity of a major general – and, of course, to his own safety: ‘I did not think it decent … for in case she should be taken the World must think Me Mad not to come to the Admiral to apply for some armed Vessell.’ Not

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content with making this extraordinary request, Hay could not refrain from sarcasm, adding that as the squadron was about to sail for Louisburg he would not wish ‘to endanger the Fleet from any Arm’d Force he might send with Me’. Keeping his temper, Holburne told Hay he might expect an answer that afternoon. Hay then turned to the secretary and ordered him – in the Admiral’s presence – to let him know when the decision was made and to send him ‘the List of the French Fleet suppos’d to be at Louisburg’. The suggestion could hardly have been clearer or more offensive: in Hay’s view the French force at Louisbourg was overestimated – possibly non-existent – and its supposed presence was simply an excuse for inaction.23 Hay spent the rest of the day touring the fleet to say his goodbyes, ashore packing some of his things and arranging to sell others and visiting army officers to take his farewell. It was nine that evening when Forbes at last found Hay at home with Monypenny and Captain Ourrie of the Success. Anxious to protect his old friend, Forbes whispered that he must talk to him in private, bundled Hay into his bedroom and closed the door. Quietly he began to urge discretion, ‘notwithstanding’ the leave Hay believed he had been granted. Hay, however, was beyond reason, affection or caution. He cut Forbes off, demanding that any messages from Loudoun should be put in writing as verbal messages might easily be misunderstood. Shouting, and insisting he would ‘have no Secrets’ he flung the door open and burst back into the outer room. Forced to follow, Forbes apologized and tried to express his concern at the clamour that would ensue – but again Hay cut him short: John, I will hear no Message, My Lord has given me Leave, I have taken Leave, & in case of any more Orders or Messages relative to My Going, I desire they may be deliver’d to Me in Writing.24

This was Hay’s later version. But the words Forbes wrote down on the spot, watched by Monypenny and Ourrie, were a little different. ‘Lord Loudoun has given me Leave, and I have taken his Leave, and I am going, what His Lordship has more to say he must send in Writing.’ Hay later accused Forbes of ‘putting in some [words] that I did not say’, the crucial phrase being ‘I am going.’ Later, at Hay’s court martial, Monypenny said he could not remember those words which, if uttered, would have constituted a clear intention to disobey an order – which would explain why Hay was so keen to deny them.25 Certainly Loudoun took them in that way, for when Forbes reported them he was immediately ordered, in writing, to return and place Hay ‘in arrest’. Forbes returned dutifully but certainly unhappily, to place his old friend in confinement.26 Again he began an apology, which was cut short by Hay’s demand for all communication to be in writing. Forbes replied that he was very sorry but had orders to arrest him. ‘Sir, You surprize Me, Have you that Order in Writing?’ asked Hay. According to Hay, Forbes replied that he had not, but would write it down if Hay would give him paper and ink. Hay’s response – again, the words are according to his own account – was hysterical and aggressive. ‘Sir, You seem to treat me like a Child, do You imagine that I will lend You a Razor in my own House for You to cut my Throat?: No: Go either to Lord Loudoun’s or your own House, Write Your Orders, & deliver

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them as an Officer shou’d do.’ He even suggested that the command might be given out in public orders instead of being delivered to him in person. Forbes then produced Loudoun’s written order to himself, as adjutant general, but for Hay this would not do. Forbes bowed and began to go, followed by a parting shot: ‘I beg that You wou’d send me the Order soon (as I generally ride out at Six in the Morning) that I may know whether I am in Arrest or not.’27 That, at least was Hay’s version: as Forbes reported the conversation to Loudoun, Hay undertook to remain at his quarters until nine – but the detail hardly mattered. Hay rose early next morning, and when no order had come by six, he began to fret. He asked Monypenny whether he should consider himself in arrest or not. To be on the safe side he sent Monypenny round to Forbes’s lodging with a written enquiry: Sir, I desire to know if I am to look upon what passd last night as a Private Conversation only, or if I am a real Prisoner, in wch Case I demand a Copy of the Order in Writing for my Confinement. C: Hay Maj: General Sunday 6 in the Morning Augt 7: 175728

Monypenny found Forbes in his quarters in Murray’s house, just getting up. He opened the note, read it and told Monypenny that Hay must certainly consider himself arrested. At about 11, Hay received a copy of Loudoun’s written order of the previous evening and a sentry was posted outside his door. Hay responded by returning his letter of service, declaring himself no longer part of the army in America and demanding that the sentry be removed. When Loudoun insisted that Hay was still under his orders, and that the guard was provided only out of ‘respect’, Hay announced he was being detained illegally, ‘by Force and Violence’. Discontent was now spreading further amongst civilians. That morning the Anglican parson pointedly chose to sing verses from the forty-fourth psalm – ‘Thou makest us to turn our backs upon our enemies’ – and two citizens were briefly arrested for claiming that there were only five ships of the line at Louisbourg.29 Loudoun had to act, but act with circumspection. Forbes was spared the comedy which followed, perhaps because Loudoun, foreseeing the indignities that might ensue, preferred to expose junior officers to that discomfort rather than distress his adjutant general any further. Hay refused to embark for New York and Loudoun declined to force him. Having sent Hay a direct order to join Jamaica, on 10 August he embarked with Forbes in HMS Winchelsea, and, the ships being wind-bound, waited. Two days later, with Hay still on shore, Loudoun sent Hopson an instruction to allow Hay such exercise as was consistent with his state of arrest. On Tuesday 16 August, the wind having at last turned fair Loudoun and Forbes sailed with the fleet, gratefully leaving Lord Charles behind.30 Once they were gone Hay set to work to substantiate his charges. In September he fired off letters to his brother Tweeddale, Cumberland, Lord Granville and Pitt.31 He

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stayed in Halifax until February, officially under guard but fascinating the tiny town and its much-reduced garrison with his charm, manic-depressive mood swings and lavish entertaining. ‘I frequently visit Lord Charles Hay,’ reported Alexander Murray to his friend Forbes, ‘he is now much as you left him, he was for some time rather low spirited, but at present he has a constant round of People to dine with him and the Mercury very high’. Nevertheless, warned Murray, the old paranoia was still strong. ‘I am very glad you do not write to him as things are; he is suspicious of every body & every thing.’32 There was sexual magnetism in the mix as well. In February Murray reported that ‘Lord Charles continues to entertain & shew away, and has a most brilliant Assembly every Thursday evening where he has all the women in town a playing at Cards.’33 This combination of provincial boredom and Hay’s popularity alarmed Hopson prodigiously – as no doubt it was designed to do. When a crowd of officers descended upon Hay’s house to discover if he had news or letters from a visiting man of war, Murray and two lieutenant colonels were carpeted and told that Loudoun would be informed. Hay’s behaviour towards Hopson was so insolent that Hopson refused to risk insult by having any contact with him whatsoever. For that reason, when Forbes wrote asking him to deliver a message to Hay – no doubt an attempt to rebuild bridges with his old comrade – Hopson emphatically declined.34 Barrington sent orders recalling Hay on 5 September35 but already a popular storm was brewing in London. Five of Pitt’s fellow ministers approved of Loudoun’s decision to abort the expedition. Fox (who had a year earlier warned Loudoun of the perils of councils of war) and Halifax (already a respected authority on American conditions) supported him without reservation. Lord George Sackville (yet to be disgraced by Minden) disliked the tone of Loudoun’s letter but warmly supported his decision, as did the Duke of Devonshire, despite reservations about the council of war. Mansfield, confirmed in his opinion by the letter from Forbes, argued that Loudoun had acted correctly and could not be bound by an over-literal interpretation of the King’s orders.36 Pitt, however, thought that Cumberland had conspired with Loudoun to wreck his strategy. Others, while failing to share Pitt’s lonely paranoia, condemned Loudoun on military and moral grounds. Newcastle (whose views inevitably carried considerable political weight) and the highly respected First Lord of the Admiralty, George Anson, thought Loudoun should have attempted Louisbourg whatever the risks. Hardwicke considered Loudoun’s letter an ex post facto self-justification by a second-rate general who had ignored his principal naval officers and the decision of the Council of War. Moreover, and a little inconsistently, Hardwicke argued that Holburne himself was to blame for failing to forestall the French – ‘I presume the same wind would serve both squadrons the greatest part of the way’ – and for lingering a month in Halifax tinkering with minor repairs. His conclusion, though based upon ignorance, was chilling: ‘it seems to me that they all proceed upon the Byng-Principle, – that Nothing is to be undertaken where there is Risque and Danger’.37 That sentiment was certainly abroad among the public. In September the London Chronicle hinted as much in an extract from a letter dated from New York on 26 July:

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‘It seems very odd to us, that a French Squadron should arrive on the Coast of Nova Scotia near 2 Months before ours from Ireland.’ In estimating the balance of forces in America, and at Louisbourg in particular, to be overwhelmingly in Britain’s favour it asked ‘whether our Generals and Admirals are not asleep?’ Lloyd’s Evening Post also drew parallels between Byng’s and Loudoun’s councils of war, leaving the reader in no doubt as to the conclusion he should draw. Though both journals subsequently published a letter, allegedly from a New Englander recently arrived at Bristol, praising Loudoun and Holburne and urging that they be kept on to make a second attempt in the spring, the damage was done.38 The furore certainly alarmed George Ross, whose frequent, newsy and often anxious letters kept Forbes abreast of developments at home. For Ross and his circle – after the retreat of Frederick II to Saxony and Cumberland’s defeat near Hamelin – the prospect of taking Louisbourg had seemed the only hope of success that year.39 In September a raid on Rochefort miscarried when its military commander, Sir John Mordaunt, dithered in the face of contradictory intelligence and largely imaginary obstacles and summoned two councils of war to provide justification for a premature withdrawal. That is, he did exactly as Loudoun was accused of doing and a court of enquiry found no evidence that the defences were anywhere near as strong as Mordaunt claimed them to be. To the horror of George II, a court martial acquitted him of disobedience – his orders had indeed given him considerable discretion – but he had come very close to sharing Byng’s fate.40 Failure was everywhere and the mood was to let heads roll. There was a real danger for Loudoun and Forbes; and that notwithstanding that every cool-headed person Ross spoke to praised Loudoun for declining to throw away his army, and that ‘Ld Chas Hays behaviour towards Lord Loudoun is condemned’. Forbes’ epistolary silence had irritated his patron Bedford to the point where Ross asked one Captain Hale to reassure His Grace that Forbes had written to no one else. While Ross appreciated that discretion was essential, he saw the urgency of countering reports of Loudoun’s alleged dithering and lack of courage. He wrote to Forbes, suggesting that it would be well for both Loudoun and for himself were he to send his own version of events to Bedford. In November Ross reported a sudden revival of the controversy following the arrival of Hay’s September letters.41 The whole correspondence was to keep Forbes in a continual state of anxiety for himself and, more urgently, for his old friend and commander, well into the New Year. However, Loudoun’s fate was already sealed, not in America or in London, but by events in Germany. The Duke of Cumberland, sent to protect Hanover with a woefully inadequate allied ‘Army of Observation’, had been defeated at Hastenbeck and on 8 September forced to conclude a humiliating capitulation at Kloster-Zeven. This news ruined the Duke’s military reputation and strengthened Pitt’s hand with Cabinet and King. The Capitulation was repudiated and Cumberland was replaced by Ferdinand of Brunswick in Germany and at the head of the British army by the aged but still very able Ligonier. Further strengthened by the Hay affair, and perhaps anxious to cover his own responsibility for the year’s North American mishaps, Pitt could now get rid of Loudoun. On 15 December, Pitt persuaded the Cabinet to

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dismiss the commander-in-chief in America and to replace him with Major-General Abercromby. Execution of the sentence was delayed by distance and weather until February, but there could be no amnesty, pardon or appeal. That Forbes, Loudoun’s intimate associate, not only survived but briefly prospered was due partly to his administrative efficiency, partly to his relative obscurity and unimportance, but very largely to his connections in London.

9

‘Am now a downright Leopard’: 1757–1758 Forbes was an educated and thoughtful officer. As we have seen, before leaving England, and some seven years before an English translation was available, he had read Turpin’s Essai sur l’art de la guerre. Books four and five, expounding the principles, respectively, of a systematically protected advance and ‘la petite guerre’, seemed to be particularly applicable to American conditions – and as the 1757 New York campaign developed he began to apply them. At the same time he impressed upon Loudoun the primacy of firepower rather than shock tactics and stressed the importance of woodcraft and the Indian style of fighting. He came to value the vain, uneducated but effective Robert Rogers whose Rangers he had seen in action in Nova Scotia and who now harassed the French on the New York frontier. Hearing belatedly that Rogers had been beaten and (falsely) reported killed at the ‘Second Battle of the Snowshoes’ in March 1758, he remarked ‘I shall be very sorry if it proves true, as I take him to be too good a man in his way, to be easily spared at present.’1 Thus Forbes saw from the outset that while American conditions demanded a particular mode of warfare, the principles and disciplines of the European experience could be brought fruitfully to bear in frontier fighting. Moreover, the social and political conditions of individual colonies had to be considered; and in this respect, as winter set in and 1757 morphed into 1758, he began to develop ideas that even his friend Loudoun thought subversive and dangerous. The voyage from Halifax to New York was slow: the ships suffered fickle winds and occasional fog and did not arrive until late on the last day of the month.2 Forbes and Loudoun used the voyage south to assemble the evidence against Hay and in composing an account to counter the version, which they knew would soon be winging its way from Halifax. Forbes planned the structure and content of the proposed letter, so the first task on the day after landing was writing up the final version and getting the whole packet of papers, complete with a narrative of events and depositions from Halkett, Ross and James Abercromby, sent off to Holdernesse. Ten days later he followed it with a dangerously frank letter to Pitt about the way orders from 2,000 miles away had hamstrung his on-the-spot strategic decisions.3 Forbes, aware of the risks his commander was taking, took the precaution of writing to his patron Sir John Ligonier and also, it seems, to Lord Chief Justice Mansfield.4 But all this was justification after the event: what Forbes and Loudoun really needed was a resounding North American success. A great deal would now depend on how he and Loudoun responded to an alarming threat to New York.

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A Boston schooner brought the bad news. An early spring raid on Fort William Henry on Lake George had destroyed its sloop, the only vessel capable of preventing the carriage of French siege artillery across the lake, thus rendering the place highly vulnerable. Montcalm’s expedition landed on 3 August and by 7 August it was clear that Major General Daniel Webb, Loudoun’s third in command, was not about to send the relief force at his disposal. A short battering by French guns made the fort untenable and on 9 August – just as Loudoun’s army embarked at Halifax – Fort William Henry surrendered on terms. Montcalm’s Indians, however, insisted upon the plunder and scalps they had been promised and a massacre ensued. On the face of it Montcalm now controlled the northern end of the ‘Great Carrying Place’, the portage overland from Lake George and around the Hudson falls. It was all too likely that he would go on to attack Fort Edward on the upper Hudson, at the southern end of the portage, and so open up the whole of upper New York colony to attack. Forbes personally saw no reason why Albany should not have fallen as well.5 Once in New York Loudoun responded energetically to the emergency on his doorstep. Within two days he had four regular regiments disembarked from the ships, re-embarked in impressed sloops and pushing up the Hudson towards Albany. The going was hard. There were not enough sloops and they in turn depended upon favourable winds matched, in the lower reaches, by favourable tides; higher up the wind struggled against the current. On top of that navigation of the winding channels and lurking banks was fraught with peril: in one place Christopher French saw three sloops aground. When wind or daylight failed vessels had to anchor and wait. Progress was variable: by 11 September most of Forbes’s own 17th under Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Morris was at Albany, but one company was still unaccounted for. On the 15th French’s sloop was stopped within five miles of the place by shallow water and shoals, whereupon he loaded his men and baggage into canoes, paddled ashore and marched his company into town overland.6 From there, as summer turned to fall and the forests turned to red and gold, some units worked their way along the Mohawk River to Schenectady while others pushed on up the Hudson to man the lines at Fort Edward. The problem here was that the Hudson above Albany was barely navigable in places – Forbes was later to recommend cutting a new channel through the ‘riffs’ which, he had been told, would make river transport more efficient and be relatively inexpensive. The alternative was to force-march overland, a four-day expedition endured by, amongst others, the 17th. Mid-September was very hot, so waist and shoulder belts and some other items of equipment were left behind to ease the men’s burdens. Once in the lines outside Fort Edward the soldiers had to sleep on the bare ground until they could cut brush for bedding, an activity that, because of lurking bands of Indians, was reported by Morris, ‘not to be done, without a Covering Party this close to the Fort’.7 When the snows came in November, such marches could only be attempted by improvising skis and snowshoes. Loudoun and Forbes were not far behind the troops. It was probably at Albany that Forbes met, and formed a dislike to, Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department. And it must have been here that he began fully to appreciate the importance of Indians as both allies and foes. Sir William was

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one of the two Superintendents of Indian Affairs appointed by the home government in 1755–1756 to co-ordinate Indian policy in the northern and southern colonies, respectively. Johnson, the Irish nephew of Admiral Sir Peter Warren, had lived among the Mohawks, the easternmost of the six federated Iroquois nations – Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora – since the 1730s. He was therefore a natural advocate of the long-established Covenant Chain policy, whereby British negotiations with Native peoples were channelled via New York through Mohawks and thence through the Iroquois council at Onondaga. The Chain had long been under strain, notably after a fraudulent New York acquisition of Mohawk land in 1751, and acutely so following the debacle at Fort William Henry. However Johnson was first a colonial landholder, manager and Indian trader, and an imperial official second; consequently, he tended to conflate imperial interests with his own status in the Mohawk Valley. His value lay in his intimate knowledge of Indian culture and diplomatic forms and in his role, as the Mohawks saw it, as their voice in British councils. Forbes saw how useful he was, recognizing the man’s deep knowledge of Indian affairs and his own ignorance; but that, as we shall see, did not mean unswerving deference to Johnson’s views and priorities.8 From the first Forbes was of the view that the Mohawk Valley was of critical importance, partly because it lay on the flank of the communications with Fort Edward, partly because there were settlements to protect, but mainly because it was highly vulnerable to attack from the Lake Ontario region. He was sure that its best defence lay in building a strong fort to command the Oneida Carrying Place, the portage between the headwaters of the Mohawk River and Wood Creek. This was the main route by which raiding parties came: up the Oswego River and its tributary the Oneida to Oneida Lake and thence along Wood Creek to the portage. As early as March 1756, a French and Indian party had surprised and stormed the inadequate and weakly held Fort Bull at the Wood Creek end of the portage, and ambushed the subsequent relief column from Fort Williams lower down. The Carry was refortified and strengthened to protect the vital artery to Lake Ontario and Fort Oswego, but that did not prevent Montcalm from taking Oswego in August. Webb had panicked, burned the newly built forts, blocked Wood Creek with trees and retired to Schenectady far down the Mohawk, thus handing to Montcalm a standing strategic advantage.9 However, a new, large and strongly held fortification at the Carrying Place would check French incursions and provide a base for a counter-offensive down the creek and across the lake. This, Forbes insisted, should be Loudoun’s first priority. Loudoun listened to the scheme but did not then carry it out because, according to Forbes later on, of ‘a tenderness for General Webb’. That was not of course the whole story: the season was very late, resources were limited and there appeared to be an emergency at Fort Edward. Nevertheless, events proved Forbes’s point. Fort Edward was not attacked, partly because Montcalm was short of supplies, but very largely because after the Fort William Henry massacre Montcalm’s disgruntled Indians deserted him. The French commander, who disliked them thoroughly, had tried to deny them the plunder, prisoner and scalps they had earned by their services; contact with French regulars had spread smallpox among them and they were annoyed by the French tendency to treat them as soldiers under formal military discipline.10 Thus

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by October the crisis was past. But raids into the Mohawk Valley continued and the British units deployed to stop them were often helpless to intervene. In November the garrison at Fort Herkimer on the Mohawk River failed to prevent the burning of a settlement at German Flats on the opposite bank by 300 French and Indians. Fifty settlers died and 150 others were herded into captivity. The sheer surprise and audacity of this stroke was enormous and its psychological impact immense. The Mohawks were shaken and gave credence to stories that the French were about to destroy every settlement upon the river. Worse, though ministers could not be expected to grasp all the local implications, the reverberations in London of yet another reverse could only do Loudoun harm: Forbes had to caution him against making too much of it in his dispatches lest it should be held against him.11 Personal problems loomed large in Forbes’s mind, one of which was – as ever – money. Arthur’s financial affairs were in chaos, Hugh’s perhaps not much better and the brothers were at odds over how to manage them. John himself was pursued by unpaid bills, including that for the clothing he had ordered in The Hague a decade earlier and a more recent account for £14 2s from his London jeweller John Dingwall. ‘I presume you forgot to order me payment of the bill due me when you left London,’ began Dingwall politely, but ended firmly, ‘your complyance will greatly oblige’. Forbes also owed money to his London tailor, James Ayton, a debt still unpaid when he died.12 All this of course was on top of the fundamental problem, his huge debts from his purchased promotions. His colonelcy of his single-battalion regiment, without (as yet) benefits from the off-reckonings, was very far from providing a solution and without adequate compensation from his post of adjutant general. He was still anxious about his lost seniority and particularly the effect of having refused to serve under Prevost ‘who never yet saw a gun fired in the face of an Enemy’. Moreover George Ross’s letters from London and Murray’s from Halifax reminded him of how vulnerable he and Loudoun had become in the wake of the Hay business. In the winter of 1757–1758 he wrote privately to Ligonier, pleading for a two-battalion command at home and enclosing (without Loudoun’s consent) a copy of their strategic plan for 1758 with a plea for discretion where Cumberland and Pitt were concerned. There was still a fine balance to be struck between circumspection and need: he had not taken up Pitt’s invitation to correspond because ‘it’s dangerous meddling with Edged tools’.13 Then there was the affair of Daniel Forbes. First Hugh and then Arthur had taken in this poor relative, and obtained for him a commission and adjutancy in the Royal Americans. According to Arthur he had earlier taken the young man into his own regiment in the Dutch service, but when Daniel left the regiment he took with him some 300 Dutch guilders, the whole of Arthur’s company’s funds. Arthur also maintained that Hugh, who had earlier had Daniel in his own household, ‘was obliged to turn him out of Doors for practising with his daughter’. It was all very vague – the daughter was not named and the circumstances were not explained – so, while John could hardly ignore such a serious charge, it was hard to know what to do. Taking the path of least resistance, John put off acting upon it, burying himself in work until the autumn crisis was past. Although Loudoun himself returned to New

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York in October, Forbes was kept busy at Albany well into November, worrying about roads, river navigation, winter quarters for his own regiment and sending other units back down the Hudson. By the end of the month he was at New York dealing with headquarters business, while Daniel was at the Royal Americans’ winter quarters at Kingston, up-river mid-way to Albany. Only at the beginning of December did he at last summon Daniel into his presence. Even then he was careful: he would, he said, give him ‘no countenance’ until his name was cleared – but sensibly said nothing in his letters to Hugh. It was a distressing task, particularly coming on top of the Charles Hay affair, but Forbes must have hoped that his tact and Daniel’s common sense had put the matter to sleep.14 That, unfortunately, was not the end of the matter. Daniel at once wrote to Hugh and Arthur protesting his innocence.15 One can imagine the consternation at the unsuspecting Hugh’s family breakfast table when he opened that letter. Hugh was furious with Arthur for making the accusation and with John for appearing to believe it. He sent Arthur a demand for explanation, which was practically a challenge to a duel. John was to be hit with all this correspondence – Hugh in particular sent transcript after transcript – in October 1758, at the worst possible time for his health and peace of mind. Meanwhile Loudoun was contemplating a counter-stroke against Montcalm. Reconnaissance from Fort Edward and subsequent questioning of prisoners established that Carillon had barely 350 regulars in garrison and Crown Point only 150. Loudoun and Forbes, who advised his friend and drafted the orders, at once prepared a winter attack on Carillon itself with Crown Point as a secondary objective. This daring enterprise by 2,400 redcoats and 600 rangers, and led by the talented and energetic Lord Howe, would involve an approach across the ice on Lake George, shelling Ticonderoga with high-angle artillery, and a sudden escalade. The performance might then, circumstances permitting, be duplicated at Crown Point, which would then be burned and blown up. Ticonderoga, if in Howe’s opinion it could not be garrisoned and held, should receive the same treatment after the removal of as much as possible of its artillery, stores and munitions. Daring was matched with common sense and caution: because circumstances might change in a matter of days, and ‘as it often happens that wise retreat is preferable to a rash and precipitate attempt for Success’, Howe was given complete operational discretion.16 At this point Forbes tried to revive his plan for the Oneida Carrying Place, by encouraging a plan being put forward by Lieutenant Colonel Bradstreet, a deputy quartermaster general and late commander of the bateaux service on the Mohawk. Bradstreet was an ambitious maverick thrown up by the swirling currents at the edge of empire: son of a French Acadian woman and a British officer; a gifted strategist who had spent his entire life in America and a career regular who understood how to manage irregular troops and irregular operations. Bradstreet had long wanted to attack Fort Frontenac, which he saw as the key to severing New France from her western trade, and which he had now heard was ill garrisoned and poorly supplied. Beyond that he had even grander ideas, envisaging the recovery of the guns and vessels lost at Oswego, control of Lake Ontario and even, in the long run, an assault on Fort Niagara. For the time being this was going too far – Forbes thought the

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scheme ‘in itself Chimerical’ – but he could see considerable advantages in its more modest objectives. The building at Schenectady of the large number of flat-bottomed bateaux that would be needed – 100 by Forbes’s calculation – would lead the French to expect Loudoun’s main thrust to be against Frontenac and so prevent them reinforcing Ticonderoga and Crown Point. As for the actual attempt on Frontenac, even should Bradstreet be unable to seize the fort he could hardly fail to capture or burn the considerable French flotilla sheltering nearby.17 But Loudoun was hard to convince: he concentrated on the Ticonderoga expedition. Over 200 sleighs together with heavy mortars, howitzers, cohorns (light mortars portable by four men) and scaling ladders were assembled at Fort Edward. Such a raid – which stood a good chance of success – would have restored morale, rescued Loudoun’s reputation and opened the way for an advance on Montreal in the spring. It certainly lifted spirits amongst the regiments earmarked to go. Forbes found his own lieutenant colonel, who had just applied to sell out on grounds of health, begging to be allowed to take part. George West, whom Loudoun (at Forbes’s prompting) had summoned to choose between the posts of aide-de-camp and brigade major, stayed with Howe rather than keep his appointment in New York. Other officers included in Howe’s force complained about slights to the seniority of their regiments in the proposed order of march.18 Loudoun, with Forbes at his elbow, was demonstrating a commendable willingness to learn from his enemy, adapt to American conditions and to act imaginatively and aggressively – not at all the image his critics were propagating in London. Once again, however, he was frustrated by elements beyond his control. The lakes froze very late (in February), the snow that accompanied the freeze was four-feet deep and there was a shortage of snowshoes. Moreover the surprising of a 100-strong French party near Fort Edward, it was feared, might have alerted the French to the concentration there. Forbes thought the physical problems overrated: ‘In Switzerland and the Alps’, he argued, ‘when the snow is from ten to 16 feet Deep two or 3 flat bottom’d sleighs push’d forward by some men at the [back], makes the best roads in the world, and this is the method through muscovy’.19 Moreover, ‘if 100 French can march to Fort Edward and back again, th[a]t some 200, or 2000 British, might execute it likewise’. If, because of the snow, the British force could no longer haul its heavy equipment northwards, then the French would be unable to reinforce and resupply the forts. Thus a small lightly equipped opportunistic raid would risk little and might meet with dramatic success: ‘3000 men going upon a Scout is nothing, if they find no probability of success they return, and if they see ane opening they may try’.20 But in the end it came to nothing. In mid-February Loudoun went north to Hartford and Boston to meet the New England governors led by Thomas Pownall of Massachusetts. The governors and their assemblies had been resisting the commanderin-chief ’s demands for specific troop quotas for 1758 – and even contemplating their own intercolonial military organization.21 While he could keep in touch by letter, his busy on-the-spot energy was gone from New York colony. At Albany, therefore, the fate of Howe’s force was in the hands of the less-than-daring Abercromby. Forbes, lacking a major general’s authority, weighed down with all the New York headquarters

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correspondence as adjutant general, and hobbled by ill health, was unable to take unilateral action. The shortages and the snow were allowed to become overwhelming obstacles. By the end of the month, as Forbes complained to Loudoun, he had despaired of anything happening: ‘I shall say nothing of our Tuneroga Expedition nor off the snow shoes nor Scaling Ladders, nor of all the field officers that go; nor off their stay, nor of any Coup d’Essai that wants every one thing to putt them in motion’.22 The raid was cancelled: and so, defeated by the vagaries of climate and by Abercromby’s failure of will, the British were unable to offset the year’s disasters with even a modest triumph.23 At Albany and later at New York – where, through his local agent Hugh Wallace he rented a house from Horatio Gates and his wife24 – Forbes was unwell and overworked. The lame foot he had been trailing round for months turned out to be fractured,25 he was tormented by boils on his legs and soreness in his hands – suggesting a nasty skin infection – and he was probably already suffering from the debilitating internal disease that was to plague him in 1758. However, he tried to maintain an optimistic exterior – though he confided to Ligonier that he was now perhaps entering on the close of life, he said nothing else of it in his few letters home and managed to persuade at least some of his colleagues that he was on the mend. In January James Abercromby wrote that ‘Nothing could give me greater Pleasure, than to learn that you had, once more, got something the better of your Indisposition … ’; and Richard Huck, who was with Loudoun in New England, was ‘Overjoy’d’ at news of Forbes’s improved state of health.26 But on 3 February Forbes wrote more frankly to Loudoun: ‘my infirmity’s are really no joke, nor are they to be played the fool with, Both legs and thighs being one absolute sight, and the soals of my feet so Blistered, so it was impossible for me to gett abroad’. Two days later he added, ‘my dan’d legs have fallen down to my toes and soles of my feet, so hope by tomorrow it will fly off – but at present can not walk’. Another ten days on he was ‘now lame of both Legs and Hands, which makes me employ another Pen’. By the end of the month he observed that ‘by following Huck’s advice as to dressings ‘[I] am now a downright Leopard … ’ and added ‘I wish to God Huck was back again for out of joke to earnest I am farr, nay very farr from being as I should be altho I have tried his damned exercise, which has quite thrown me back again’. There was also a very painful internal complaint for which he was already being dosed twice daily with opiates: once probably by anal injection, the other in the form of a ‘Glyster’ or enema. It would be going too far to see in this a man frequently confined to his bed, but it is clear that throughout the winter of 1757–1758 John Forbes was seriously disabled and often house-bound. Two-and-a-half centuries later it is not possible to positively identify his disorder but it is clear that something periodically debilitating, with periods of remission, afflicted him throughout the winter.27 As if work and debilitation were not burdens enough, demands for patronage took up a significant portion of his time. Forbes was now a considerable man, with privileged access to the commander-in-chief whose favour every officer in America needed and desired. Requests varied from applications for commissions to pleas for retirement or for leave to return to Britain on private business. Robert Mowbray, a naval officer Forbes had met on board the Winchelsea during the voyage to New

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York, wrote an introductory letter asking for a hospital appointment for the bearer: ‘Dr. McLean is a sensible genteel man & you’ll find him worthy of yr Patronage’. His own lieutenant colonel Arthur Morris still wanted to sell up on grounds of ill health and Major John Darby wanted to succeed him; and Frank Halkett, now Forbes’ own secretary and client, aspired to Darby’s majority. The uncle of Edward Burton, a young gentleman who had enlisted as a common soldier, desired a commission for the young man; he enclosed a letter from Ligonier to Loudoun and asked Forbes to ‘remind’ his commander of it. Major Murray wrote from Halifax asking for the next vacancy as lieutenant colonel, being ‘heartily tired of this Province, and the sooner I can get out of it the better’. Forbes’ cousin, Thomas Glen, a medical man and brother to James the ex-governor, wanted a military hospital appointment.28 And on it went. None of this could be ignored, although Forbes was sometimes slow to reply. The request from his own patron Ligonier could hardly be put aside, while those from friends and comrades – purely personal feelings, family obligations and good manners apart – were the stuff from which his own network of clients and right to future favours must be made. Yet throughout all this Forbes was working out a military doctrine for North American conditions. First in importance was the adoption of Indian and Canadian wood-fighting tactics: a large body of men ‘taught and bred to marching in the Woods, securing themselves behind trees, and good marksmen’ would be an indispensable counter to the Canadians and hostile Indians. An additional benefit would be stronger discipline than could be observed amongst the Rangers. He disapproved of Gage’s proposal to create a special corps trained in this way, foreseeing recruiting problems if those volunteering were not better paid than line infantry and seeing in it ‘a most flagrant jobb’ for enriching Gage himself. His own far more ambitious solution was to train all regulars in North America in forest warfare. When he advised Loudoun not to make too much of a fuss about undersized recruits or soldiers drafted from Britain he had political consequences in mind; but he added that firepower, especially in America, should be reckoned superior to physique. ‘For surely the middle of a Warr is not the time to beautify Regts and if any size is taken in England that can carry a musket, there can be no reason for refusing them here, where from behind a tree may kill a Polyphemus … ’. Of cardinal importance was the use of small parties rather than big bodies, and within that setting to teach every junior officer and soldier to act promptly and independently when necessary. An ‘Experienced officer or soldier secure’s [sic] himself directly behind some tree Stumpp or Stone, where he becomes his own Commanding Officer, Acting to the best of his judgement for his own defence and General Good of the whole.’ By contrast an inexperienced soldier would ‘not knowing where his Safety lyes, either falls a Sacrifice to a merciless Enemy or betakes to Shameful flight, to starve in the woods’. He did not succeed in scuppering Gage’s unit, which became the 80th Light Foot, but he was certainly in the forefront of attempts to adapt the regulars to wilderness operations.29 Through the winter, Loudoun and Forbes worked on a new strategic plan for the spring of 1758. A renewed attempt on Louisbourg – or failing that on the St John’s River forts to close Canada’s only winter outlet to the sea and France – would be made with Hopson’s four regular battalions and at least 3,000 New England troops. Loudoun’s

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mission to Hartford was to secure from the northern colonies the manpower that he believed the project demanded. Meanwhile through Alexander Murray in Halifax, Forbes garnered informed opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of the place. Murray suggested that a spring offensive would catch the garrison of Louisbourg with their hillside batteries flooded from the melting snow. It should be attempted, he thought, even at some risk. But Murray was a relatively junior officer with little to lose. Commodore Lord Colville, on the other hand, held the temporary rank of Commodore which might end either with his promotion to Rear Admiral or with his reversion to Captain. He was therefore politically and professionally vulnerable, and determined not to yield hostages to fortune. Declining to give a view, he argued that the case had been debated thoroughly in the 1757 Council of War, to the deliberations of which he was ‘entirely a stranger’; and, perhaps more significantly, he would not ‘chuse to run the hazard of differing in opinion with those who are much better judges than myself ’.30 The shade of Byng – and the shadow of Hay – still hovered over Halifax but the expedition would nevertheless go ahead. This time, however, it would be accompanied by a thrust against Forts Carillon and Crown Point – the main effort – thus neutralizing any French attempt to repeat the counter-offensive of 1757. On the contrary, as Forbes observed, it would force them to concentrate around Quebec and Montreal, thus leaving their outer defences weak and vulnerable. And at last Bradstreet’s scheme was to be built into the wider strategic plan. He was to assemble a force for a sudden descent upon Fort Frontenac, with the aim of cutting off Niagara and the western posts from New France and ultimately of threatening Montreal from the west.31 Further south Colonel John Stanwix was to lead two regular battalions and colonial troops overland against Fort Duquesne – not from Virginia but from Pennsylvania, a far better base in terms of port facilities, food production and wagons. Forbes recommended that Stanwix should approach Fort Duquesne in the fall, when the bare trees would afford the enemy less cover and so reduce the risk of surprise and another Monongahela. Success here would sever Canada from Louisiana and bring several Indian nations over onto the British side. The Senecas would change allegiance while the Miamis and Twightwees, no longer ‘overawed by the French present superiority in those parts’ would come out openly for the British. Further south still the Cherokees and Chickasaws must be conciliated, both for the security of Charleston and so that their raids on the lower Mississippi could support a seaborne attack on New Orleans. Thus, although the New Orleans enterprise was never attempted, securing Indian allies was already a key part of Forbes’ thinking.32 The news of Loudoun’s recall arrived in New York with the sloop of war Squirrel at about noon on 4 March 1758. Loudoun was still in New England and it was Forbes’ melancholy duty to inform his friend that not only was he dismissed but that his successor was the portly, slow-thinking and lethargic Abercromby. He played down his own elevation to Brigadier General to a single line in a terse postscript list of colonels elevated to that rank – Stanwix, Howe, Whitmore, Lawrence and himself. Forbes knew already from George Ross that Pitt had been helped by a renewed and even more heated outcry against Loudoun engendered by Hay’s September letters from Halifax – the second wave of the affair. Otherwise, thought Ross, both the recall and

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the appointment of Abercromby in Loudoun’s place were inexplicable.33 Forbes felt the injustice to his old friend even more keenly than his own vulnerability. With a curious blend of political caution and unrestrained affection, he poured out his own feelings: I assure you my Dr Lord I wish the government well, and that all their Servants with the same zeal and assidity be their humble servants is my real wish. But I can say nothing upon a Subject that if you believe there is faith in Mankind, you must know is distressing to me to the utmost, but God be thanked I hope to laugh and eat collops with you at Loudoun – Spite all this treatment.34

The reputation heaped upon Loudoun by Hay, by London’s interference in his strategic decisions and by the vagaries of trans-Atlantic logistics was to stick. Until quite recently it was still possible for a reputable scholar to assert that Loudoun was a man of ‘mediocre ability’ who had risen ‘incompetently but inexorably’ to the North American command because of ‘his title, his territorial power in Ayrshire and his unflinching Whiggism’. From that perspective his recall was a very fortunate indeed.35 The work of Dr Brumwell has since demolished that notion: while, through no personal fault, he did not win victories, he carefully prepared the ‘American’ army for the successes of 1758–1760.36 There is little reason to believe that a Loudoun– Forbes team would have made worse decisions than that committed by Abercromby at Ticonderoga in 1758, or failed subsequently to seize Quebec and Montreal. Less than three months before Forbes had credited Pitt with being Loudoun’s supporter: that is, supplying the reinforcements Loudoun had needed and which he believed Cumberland had diverted in 1756. Now that the Hay affair and Cumberland’s capitulation at Kloster-Zeven had strengthened his hand with Cabinet and King, the Secretary of State was free to pursue the strategy he had been mulling over for at least a year – substantially identical to Forbes’ and Loudoun’s conception of a three-pronged attack on New France – and to replace Cumberland’s clients with his own. However, these new appointees, though lacking in seniority, would be men of administrative and military ability. On Pitt’s behalf Ligonier had picked out four candidates. Ligonier’s own protégé Jeffery Amherst, fresh from a staff post in Germany, and five years Forbes’ junior as a colonel, was promoted right over his and many other heads to major general and given the plum job, the Louisbourg expedition. Forbes’ old rival for the Irish posts, young James Wolfe, became a brigadier general and Amherst’s second-in-command. Abercromby was not removed, indeed he was made commander-in-chief in Loudoun’s place, but Howe was appointed to stiffen his enterprise and resolve.37 Forbes, however, was to have the Cinderella command, the renewed attempt on Fort Duquesne. Whereas Amherst and Abercromby would be allocated almost all the regular regiments already in America as well as substantial reinforcements from Britain, Forbes was to have barely two: the five companies of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Bouquet’s 1st battalion of Royal Americans and Archibald Montgomery’s new Highland regiment, both already in America but inexperienced and untried in action. Artillery and stores to be sent from Britain might take months to arrive. As for staff Francis Halkett, loyal but plodding, would go with him as brigade major and Sir John

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St Clair, the ‘mad sort of Fool’ of 1754, would be his deputy quartermaster general. For the rest he would be reliant upon Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina for the thousands of men, hundreds of wagons and enormous quantities of additional supplies required. It would be a mammoth and possibly thankless undertaking. He was not yet out of danger – his association with Loudoun was still a liability, the verdict of the court martial of Sir John Mordaunt was still unknown and the very status of an independent commander would lay him open to future personal criticism. Ross repeatedly warned John to make his own decisions rather than appealing for instructions from home; to be meticulous in his planning; ‘And for God’s sake be on your guard in what you Say or write with respect to the late measure of recalling your friend Ld Loudoun.’38 No doubt Forbes paid due attention to his friend and agent’s advice – but perhaps the advice was unnecessary. Forbes understood discretion and knew how to survive. Thus it was that this complex man was given the most difficult and least glamorous task of 1758: the capture of Fort Duquesne, the expulsion of France from the upper Ohio, vengeance for Braddock. In many ways he was the ideal commander: an intelligent, thoughtful soldier, with a gift for managing his people with tact, warmth, firmness where appropriate and deviousness where necessary. He recognized the need for imaginative and sympathetic Indian diplomacy, saw the need to adapt tactically to woodland conditions and he was willing to work with whatever tools were to hand, whatever the niceties of official instructions might say. Yet in many other ways he was excessively burdened: seriously ill, plagued with a family feud; well aware that this was his last chance of distinction; disappointed, not to say bitter, at yet more promotions made over his head; jealous of those allowed the comparatively conventional and potentially glorious tasks of assailing Louisbourg and opening the way to Quebec. On top of all that he had to co-ordinate the eff orts (and therefore the politics) of three more or less unwilling colonies; assemble and command regulars and provincials and rangers; keep his Cherokee and Catawba scouts happy and active and, finally, to push a disparate force with all its supply systems along a road hacked for 150 miles through dense forest and over endless ridges and rivers. It would have made a formidable undertaking for a fit man, let alone a desperately ailing one. (Huck sent him two sheets of medical directions.) In that context, perhaps his £355 purchase of Loudoun’s four-wheeled chariot – together with six bay geldings, items of harness, two brace of pistols, sheets, tableware, storage canisters and a barrel of port, all of which had to be shipped to Philadelphia by sea – was less an extravagance to support the dignity of a new general than an insurance against a fresh failure of his legs.39

10

‘Necessity will turn me a Cherokee’ The Philadelphia Forbes and Halkett saw from the Delaware River on Tuesday 18 April 17581 was the largest, busiest and most sophisticated city in all the British Americas. Tall church spires, the tallest being that of Christchurch, the Anglican place of worship finished only four years earlier to a Wren-inspired neo-classical design, soared above the solid brick houses. Built on a grid pattern fronted by its extensive wharves and shipyards, the adopted home of Benjamin Franklin, oozed modernity and businesslike efficiency. But once ashore they found almost nothing ready: Brigadier General Forbes was a captain without a command. There were of no regulars. The five companies of Royal Americans had been summoned by Loudoun from South Carolina to New York, where he had intended them for the Ticonderoga campaign; in effect they and Forbes had passed like ships in the night; six days later, he heard they were still at Sandy Hook waiting for a wind. Ten companies of the 77th were, as far as anyone knew, still in Charleston, while the three new ones coming from Britain were, like the ship carrying all the expeditions’ artillery, tents and additional arms, yet to be seen. There were neither any provincial troops apart from those already committed to frontier defence, nor wagons, supplies, arms, Indian presents or money. All this was despite William Pitt’s offer to pay virtually all the costs of provincial forces from the British Treasury. Yet, at Winchester, there were already about 600 temperamental Cherokees, impatient to see the British army assembled, and who at all costs must be soothed, cajoled and retained until the expedition could be assembled. Forbes shared the irony of the situation in a wry and private letter to Loudoun: ‘Think a little my Dr. Lord how I am to proceed or succeed, I have been here these six days by my self alone, having no mortall but Halkett. In short necessity will turn me a Cherokee, and dont be surprised if I take Ft du Quesne at the head of them, and them only, For to this day I have no orders to command any troops nor has any troops orders to receive my Commands that I know off.’2 Forbes went immediately to call on Denny, whom he found very willing to help, but – as Forbes read it – the bickering in the assembly between the Quakers and the supporters of the proprietors prevented the voting of money and troops. Not even William Pitt’s offer to repay virtually all the costs of provincial forces from the British Treasury, which had reached America in March, had broken the impasse. Forbes responded with persuasion and intrigue. He rented a house for a home and headquarters and kept open table there, entertaining both factions and starting a particular acquaintance with the very able Quaker Israel Pemberton. Most of what

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happened around that table, and in discreet meetings in that and other houses, will forever remain in the shadows but within days the assembly was contemplating action. On 20 April, Forbes noted with some grim satisfaction, the assembly were now admirably frightened by raids creeping ever-closer to Philadelphia – ‘the Indians having now come down to marsh Creek which lyes upon the road between Lancaster and Conegcheeque, by which our Communication is intirely Cutt off un till we can send some troops that way’ – that they seemed much more inclined to vote the necessary funds.3 The fruit of this fright was an expanded Pennsylvania Regiment of 2,700 men organized as three separate battalions. Meanwhile, Virginia was raising a second regiment of its own, but recruitment and training took time. There was no word at all of the hoped for contingent from North Carolina, while the Maryland assembly repeatedly refused to sustain the 300 men the colony had provided to garrison Fort Cumberland. Loudoun had been forced to take these Marylanders into Crown pay, and when the assembly broke up without voting any funds, Forbes, unwilling to lose a band of seasoned woodsmen, was obliged to continue the arrangement. The episode provoked from him uncharacteristic but revealing outbursts on the subject of those provinces which selfishly presumed ‘to obstruct the King’s measures’ to defend the whole empire at the height of an exhausting war. ‘I must Confess’, he wrote to Governor Sharpe, ‘that your Assemblys braking up without concurring in any way with His Majesty’s Demands, is such a Piece of Presumption that Deserves a much Severer Chastisement, than I shall pretend to think of ’. Of the contingent hoped for from North Carolina, there was no word at all. A Scot committed to the maintenance of the 1707 Union, and whose own authority derived from the Crown, could have little patience with provincial politicians who put their parochial concerns above the King in Parliament.4 The regulars dribbled in as slowly as the provincials assembled. On 20 April, Forbes heard that Lieutenant Colonel Henry Bouquet’s 1st battalion of the Royal Americans was still at Sandy Hook. The three additional companies of the 77th arrived soon after, but they had at least fifty men sick and the rest were too debilitated by their long voyages to be any use without a period of rest and recuperation. The Royal Americans turned up at the beginning of May, four companies rather than five and those still sickly from their long residence in South Carolina; yet there was still no news of the Highlanders from South Carolina.5 Even Forbes’s staff was less than skeletal. Apart from Halkett, Forbes had only one staff officer, Sir John St Clair, the deputy quartermaster general and the very ‘Mad … Fool’, whose appointment had caused him such bitterness in 1754; and even St Clair had to be sent up-country. Forbes was thus left without anyone but Halkeet ‘capable of writing three words of military business – which makes me write in place of thinking’ and was immediately inundated with clerical work which distracted him from ‘the business of a Soldier’. ‘I wish you could send me either a Secretary or a Clerk or anything’, he begged Abercromby, ‘for I have not time to dine or Supp for this terrible writing … for you well know that Major Halkett although honest & willing is rather slow’.6 With such thin resources, the problem of managing the Cherokees assumed terrifying proportions – and their assistance was absolutely essential. Pennsylvania

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and Virginia had been employing Cherokee and Catawba auxiliaries on their western frontiers ever since Braddock’s disaster. In that time the frontier had been swept back over a hundred miles and enemy raiders had penetrated much further than that. Had it not been for these southern Indians coming north in their hundreds, the palls of smoke rising over sacked farmsteads, the scalpings and the abductions would have been even more extensive. Even now enemy raiders were breaking up settlements around Lancaster and Carlisle, and in the absence of troops the Cherokees alone could check them. Moreover, they would be invaluable in scouting towards and around Fort Duquesne, taking scalps and prisoners and gathering intelligence, before screening the advance of the army once it could be assembled.7 But their allegiance was brittle. Even the Catawbas, whose dependence upon North Carolina was almost absolute, could bargain hard, but the mountain-dwelling Cherokees were concerned to preserve their independence and their hunting grounds from the inexorable tide of white settlement pushing the South Carolina frontier ever westwards. Sovereignty might be saved by playing British off against the French, and some Cherokees favoured this approach. But the reality was that New France and Louisiana were too distant to provide real military support, presents, arms or trade; and the prevailing view held that, although business must be done with neighbouring South Carolina, Virginia must be brought in as a counterweight. Unfortunately, beginning with the 1756 Treaty of Broad River, Virginia had proved a slippery partner. A fort promised to protect the homes of the Overhill Cherokees – those dwelling on the Mississippi side of the Appalachian mountain chain and with easiest access to the Ohio region – had been built but was never manned. Virginian traders could not provide sufficient trade goods; and Cherokee warriors going north found their promised arms and presents either missing or inadequate. In 1757, disgruntled returning warriors had clashed with back-settlers who claimed that the Indians had stolen horses.8 Managing these touchy people would thus require skill, experience and patience. Who could deliver such qualities? Officially, the southern Indians fell within the jurisdiction of Edmond Atkin, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern Department; so in theory he should have been the chief coordinator of recruiting and conducting the Cherokees northwards. Unfortunately, Atkin had a huge district to cover with little in the way of long distance communications or a dominant nation through whom to channel negotiations. He was far more systematic in his planning than Johnson, which was one reason why he often appeared slow, and he was hampered by lack of funds, a shortage of assistant staff and the obstructions of wary local colonial administrations. Moreover, Atkin had every right to expect that the commanderin-chief and his local subordinate would conduct their Indian affairs – including recruiting – through him. The suspicion that he was indolent and self-indulgent was nevertheless enough to move Loudoun and Forbes to circumvent him by engaging William Byrd, the young, energetic, gambling-addicted and debt-ridden Virginian planter Forbes had first met in Halifax in 1757.9 Byrd was a member of the Virginia Council, a keen servant of the Crown, a principal negotiator of the Broad River Treaty in 1756 – and a personal friend. His prosperous Westover plantation made him a gentleman of the first rank, perhaps more socially acceptable even than

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Washington, and his love of good living made him agreeable company. Forbes and Loudoun each wrote separately to William Henry Lyttelton, the governor of South Carolina, warning him to expect Byrd and asking for his co-operation.10 In this way, Forbes, if not Loudoun, was beginning to build a colonial network of friendship and obligation, patron and client, of the kind he was used to in Britain. What he did not appreciate was that even agreeable and capable Americans such as Byrd did not necessarily share all his assumptions about the aims of the war and therefore about the best means of prosecuting it. Once the southern Indians entered Pennsylvania, they came under the authority of Sir William Johnson, the New York-based northern superintendent whom Forbes had met in 1757 and learned to dislike. More pertinently, Johnson, while eager to claim sole authority in his district, seemed less than keen to take vigorous measures in Pennsylvania. Indeed, it would soon become clear that Johnson, focussed upon recruiting Indians for Abercromby’s expedition in New York, would treat Forbes’s mission as a sideshow. Abercromby refused to take any action himself without Johnson’s approval, while Johnson’s lack of interest inspired Forbes to point out that the Superintendents were under the commanderin-chief ’s control, not the reverse.11 While Forbes could not at once show the Cherokees an army, at least he might be able to keep them with arms and presents. Already St Clair had privately bought up and dispatched whatever light firearms he could lay hands on in Philadelphia, and he had sent Gist £300 Virginian to purchase whatever he could find locally. The arms were, however, so few and defective that St Clair looked round for a pair of armourers to go Winchester to repair them; and the money, Forbes feared, might stick to Gist’s fingers. ‘I shall not say but some of this money may remain with Gist but in the Employment he is, there is no avoiding trusting him.’ He therefore asked Denny for 218 ‘fuzees’, light firelocks, held in the Pennsylvania provincial arsenal, pointing out that this would leave the province with more than adequate weapons to arm all its own forces.12 Denny promptly gave him an order for the fuzees which, within days of his arrival, Forbes had begun to send up the country to Winchester. However, on the evening of 21 April, two commissioners appointed by the provincial assembly stopped the shipment on the grounds that the arms did not belong to the Crown. Behind this constitutional quibble lay a complex of provincial fears. The inconclusive 1757 Treaty of Easton had achieved a shaky peace with the Susquehanna Delawares led by Teedyuscung, though not with the Ohio nations, while deferring investigation of the fraudulent land deals. The presence of armed Cherokees might well reignite those hostilities and perhaps force a real scrutiny of the land issues. Moreover, in the light of some Cherokees’ behaviour in 1757, they might prove as much a threat to the back settlements as to the enemy. Therefore, it might be better to bribe the Susquehanna Delawares to patrol the frontier with guns rather than equip the unreliable Cherokees. Forbes was contemptuous of such timidity: the Susquehanna warriors, who – even if they appeared – might not number more than fifteen or twenty; and even if they came in full strength ‘would not make a breakfast for the Cherokees’. Thus, if it came to a choice, he would give the latter ‘preference in everything’.13 Moreover, like

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Loudoun and Braddock before him, he insisted that the King’s authority, invested in himself, overrode any objections that might arise from governor or assembly. He wrote in peremptory terms to Denny, insisting on ‘the Undoubted Right of the King to demand’ the weapons for the defence of the colony and demanding ‘an answer, in writing, as soon as possible, whether you are to deliver to my orders the Fuzees demanded or not’.14 Denny at once called his council to decide whether the Crown could requisition Pennsylvania’s weapons for its own defence, starting another round of ‘fresh altercations’. Now Forbes demonstrated his political skill, flexibility and penchant for conciliation over confrontation. Seeing that insistence upon the Crown’s rights would get nowhere by itself, he resorted to ‘reasoning coolly with some of the Commissioners’, whereupon their objections were dropped. Denny took possession of the keys to the magazines and had the fuzees delivered to Forbes, who promptly sent them up the country.15 The episode demonstrated that while Forbes, like Loudoun, had no doubt of his right to demand provincial resources, he was prepared to be supple, diplomatic, conciliatory and even devious in his means of getting them. In other cases of obstruction, he was capable of far more robust action. For presents, Forbes ordered St Clair to buy up quantities of blankets, matchcoats, vermillion and deerskins, and within five days of landing he was able to send up enough to keep the Cherokees happy for a short time.16 He went on to acquire still more, only to find that almost all the remaining supplies – including those already ‘bespoke’ by St Clair, had been bought up by Ferrell Wade, one of Johnson’s agents, for distribution to Indians in the Hudson–Lake Champlain corridor. Forbes countered with an embargo on all such goods leaving Philadelphia and sent another consignment towards Winchester, ‘the whole being but scarcely sufficient to keep these people together and Prevent them returning home’. Indeed, by 1 May he had managed to equip only 400 of the 652 Cherokees; more were expected, and arms and presents remained in short supply. He pointed out to Abercromby that the Cherokees were outside Johnson’s jurisdiction and argued that since there was no sign of Atkin, he should be allowed to conduct their management himself.17 Cherokees and Catawbas alike were irritated by the delays. The Cherokees were in any case already highly ambivalent, indeed deeply divided, about the merits of the alliance with the British. On the one hand, attempts to open an alternative source of trade goods from the French had failed: France could not supply the quantity and quality required and could not come anywhere near British prices. New France and Louisiana were simply too far away. On the other hand, the constant encroachment of white settlers onto the lands of the Lower Cherokees, the dishonesty of some of the South Carolina traders and the willingness of South Carolina to use trade as a diplomatic weapon, had brought some Cherokees to the brink of war. Relations had been further exacerbated in 1757 by clashes between Virginian back-settlers and parties of Cherokees going north to defend the Virginian and Pennsylvanian frontiers and by the failure of both colonies to produce adequate presents. Now the pattern was repeating itself, so that the Cherokees at Winchester were all the more sensitive about the dearth of presents, which they regarded not only as pay for their services, but also as pledges of good faith.

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The French did their best to crank the tensions up still further by encouraging other Indians to launch cleverly targeted raids. Chickasaws were persuaded to attack Cherokee towns to prevent the warriors from leaving home. In April, marauders descended upon the Virginian frontier in a campaign designed to disrupt the flow of recruiters southwards and the stream of warriors heading north. Some of these raiders were mistaken for Cherokees, which made meetings between Cherokees and backsettlers all the more likely to end in violence. From the Cherokee perspective, every death on the trail required blood vengeance, so every clash threatened to escalate into a spiral of bloodshed.18 Forbes did not understand all these complexities and was conscious of his own ignorance. But he did know that the Cherokees were vital to his expedition, that they were unhappy and that therefore he had to try to please and keep them. If the Indian superintendents were reluctant to get involved, he must find his own man: a reliable and honest individual with the relevant knowledge and diplomatic skills. But while there were ambitious men all too ready to fill the breach, some were more or less untrustworthy, others of probably limited experience and effectualness. Abraham Bosomworth of South Carolina, captain in the 2nd battalion of the Royal Americans since 1756, and brother-in-law of the formidable Creek woman Mary Musgrove,19 was not short of ideas. On the basis of his self-proclaimed expertise in Cherokee affairs, Bosomworth had been commissioned by Loudoun and by Virginia to be a ‘conductor’ for warriors recruited by Byrd.20 But he could not get guides to take him overland and when he asked John Blair – president of the Virginia council and acting lieutenant governor following Dinwiddie’s departure – for further instructions, he was sent to manage the Cherokees at Winchester. Bosomworth wrote at once to Abercromby demanding full authority over Atkin’s department, including the superintendent’s stores of trade goods, and over all local interpreters and ‘Conductors’ of the southern Indians. He also wanted the services of Quentin Kennedy of Gage’s Light Infantry as a negotiator and scoutmaster. Even before Forbes landed in Philadelphia, he wrote a letter – a letter that Blair saw and approved – to offer his services as Indian coordinator for the entire expedition. By May he was in Philadelphia, pressing his claims upon Forbes and penning a memorandum arguing the case for a single Indian manager, and thereby – while modestly suggesting Atkin’s deputy Christopher Gist for the post – angling to be chosen himself.21 The cumulative effect would have been to displace Atkin, quite possibly to forward Virginian interests, and to sideline Byrd into the bargain. Captain Bosomworth was nothing if not ambitious. Forbes never quite trusted Bosomworth, who probably exaggerated his expertise and who was certainly corrupt. However, at the time there seemed little option but to employ this importunate American, if only as a stopgap until someone better could be found. Bosomworth was sent to Winchester to escort the Cherokees there to Bouquet at Fort Loudoun, where he actually did some good. Bouquet reported on 3 June that twenty-nine warriors he brought from Winchester to Fort Loudoun had calmed the Cherokees there, demonstrating that Bosomworth was too useful to sack. When in mid-June Forbes had discovered that Bosomworth was inflating his claims for purchases of Indian goods and dividing the illicit profits with their supplier, the

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Philadelphian merchant William West, he warned Bouquet about the profiteering but ordered him to keep the information confidential.22 Bouquet had similar feelings: ‘J’entends rien à la maniere de diriger les Indians’, he wrote from Carlisle on 3 June, adding that the present confusion of efforts and policies had already seriously damaged relations with the Cherokees. He suggested that Forbes himself should take direct responsibility and appoint his own chief agent: Bosomworth, he thought, would be more suitable than Gist. Forbes agreed with the principle, but he was less certain about Bosomworth: to him Byrd seemed a much safer prospect. ‘I agree that the Indians ought to be under the direction and management of one person’, he wrote, ‘and for that purpose think Colo Bird of Virginia would be the properest with Mr Bosomworth’s Assistance, as I do not yet know how farr we can trust to Mr Bosomworth or how farr Sir William Johnston [sic] will intermeddle but keep this to yourself and make the best of it in the meantime. And tell Bosomworth that I will settle some thing for him when I come up’. ‘Bosomworth’, he told Bouquet, ‘I am sensible has been of service but you must not believe everything he says, however he must be encouraged.’23 Another contender early into the field was Forbes’s own cousin James Glen, who wrote from South Carolina in March to offer his expertise as a Cherokee expert.24 Glen certainly had plenty of experience at formal negotiations with Indians – more of dealing with the Cherokees, thought Forbes, ‘than any man alive’. He had frequently entertained with embassies of headmen to Charleston and in 1755 he had negotiated the Treaty of Saluda which attempted to fix the frontier of white settlement. However, he had no other diplomatic success to his name and, being a committed expansionist, probably never intended to enforce the Saluda boundary, even if it had been in his power to do so. Moreover, he had never negotiated with gangs of irritable young warriors far from the restraints of their headmen at home. Glen’s credibility among the Cherokees was likely to be very limited indeed – and unlike Bosomworth he was not even on the spot. He did not appear in Philadelphia until June, when he landed with Montgomery’s regiment. But, as Forbes was later to observe, his offer was made ‘de bon ceur et avec le meilleure grace de monde’ and could not well be declined. When he did arrive, Forbes got him to write a talk, a diplomatic message, to the Cherokees and to go up to Winchester to persuade them to stay. Thus, there were three competing Cherokee managers – Gist, Bosomworth and Glen, none of them with overall authority or with Forbes’s full confidence.25 Clearly, Forbes would have preferred his friend William Byrd. The trouble was that until May Byrd was stuck in the Cherokee country, where he was becoming thoroughly fed up with Cherokees. Even their generous sexual hospitality – which Byrd, whose marriage was in a state of collapse, might have found very welcoming – had its negative side. ‘[T]he Squaws are the only good things here’, he wrote from the Cherokee town of Keowee, ‘& I cannot break them of anointing themselves with Bear’s Grease, & depriving themselves of the greatest ornament of Nature’. The Cherokee leaders he dealt with, principally Ostenca and Attakullakulla, were nervous, suspicious, evasive, inconsistent, obstructive and sometimes drunk. Attakullakulla, anxious to please the British and preserve their alliance, but seriously worried about clashes with Virginian settlers, and not totally convinced of British sincerity, was particularly mercurial. ‘That

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little savage was very insolent this morning’, Byrd reported, ‘said we all told him lys and that neither he [n]or his men would go to Virginia’. Yet that same afternoon he was ‘well pleased again & has promised to go as soon as his wagon [load of presents] comes up’. Consequently, Byrd was unable to leave Keowee until 1 May – the date on which he was due at Winchester – by which time many parties of warriors had set out without him, almost guaranteeing further clashes with back-settlers; and even then others, the Carpenter included, declined to go with him. Byrd returned to Virginia with less than sixty Cherokee warriors, whereupon Forbes hoped rather desperately that Byrd and Glen would somehow manage to co-operate, but that hope collapsed when Byrd refused to accept Glen’s suggestions.26 By then, Pitt had overcome most American objections to wartime expenditure by promising to reimburse the colonies, and Virginia was raising a second provincial regiment. Byrd then accepted gratefully the command of the new unit. He had had quite enough of Indians. That left Forbes undecided about whom to put in charge. While he did not quite trust Bosomworth, he was not entirely sure that Glen, whenever he could reach Pennsylvania, could do any better. And while he certainly wanted to keep the Indian superintendents at bay, he was nervous of offending them. He was also unwell and besieged by a host of other problems concerning the co-operation and coordination of three disparate and disputatious colonies. Consequently, he let the question of Cherokee management drift. The other pressing Indian problem concerned the Shawnees and Delawares, whom Forbes was determined to detach from their French allies. By June he was sure that not only that this was possible but that with better management and generously supplied with ample cheap and cheaper British goods, they would never have been alienated at all. But by allowing them to be most grossly cheated and abused by the sadest of mortals called Indian traders (In place of giving a fair open market under the Eye and direction of Government, and by allowing a rage and madness in stretching out our settlements into their hunting Countries, the only resource they had for sustenance) and that without any previous Contract, or agreement with them, they have thereby been drove into the arms of the French.27

A complicating factor was the Pennsylvanian Quaker community’s offer to play honest broker in negotiations between the colony and the hostile Ohio Indians. For a long time, these Quakers, who dominated the Pennsylvanian Assembly, had expressed disapproval of what they saw as the colony’s predatory past and future intentions. In 1751, the assembly had blocked a proposal, falsely represented as coming from the Indians, for a Pennsylvanian fort on the Ohio. The Quaker view was that peace could never be established without addressing Indian claims that some land cessions, particularly the Walking Purchase and an agreement made at Albany in 1754, were fraudulent. In 1756, with noble intentions and a notable lack of verbal economy, they formed the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures to act as honest broker between the hostile Indians and

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the colony.28 Forbes was no Quaker and no pacifist, but once again he could see the usefulness of enlisting people so unlike himself. Loudoun had been opposed to the whole idea. Such a course, he thought, would be fraught with ‘Fatal Consequences’ for the whole British ‘interest’ in every nation on the continent. There was some solid reasoning behind this. The Friends, though genuinely concerned with the plight of displaced Delawares, were often deeply involved in the Indian fur trade and political enemies of the Penn family proprietors. Moreover, in earlier negotiations, they had felt free to denounce both proprietary and Crown officials in public. On top of that – and given Loudoun’s Halifax experience, this may have weighed heavily – such a course would be contrary to the King’s instructions to work through the superintendents and colonial governors. While Loudoun forbade such a negotiation, he would do all he could to stop it; and now Abercromby turned out to be no more flexible.29 Forbes, with his usual discretion, seems to have said nothing to his friend, but his mind was moving in quite another direction. Once in Philadelphia, Forbes quietly encouraged the Quakers to continue their negotiations. To ensure that they went forward smoothly, he had to see that Johnson was excluded from them, and to do that he had to have Abercromby’s permission to take local Indian affairs under his own wing. He wrote to New York accordingly but worded his letter so as to give the impression that he was only concerned about managing the Cherokees. Abercromby gave his consent in terms so generally that Forbes was able to use it to pursue two separate but connected initiatives. While encouraging Pennsylvania to continue its own negotiations, he used the friendly association as a channel for his own diplomatic effort.30 In the long term, the negotiations might induce the Ohio Indians to desert the French, thus leaving the Fort Duquesne garrison hopelessly exposed. But in the short term, there was a pressing need for intelligence. Forbes still wanted to know the garrison strengths of the French Ohio forts; their supply and ammunition situations; how recently they had been relieved or might expect relief; the numbers of hostile Indians at and around Fort Duquesne; whether they and the French planned any further raids and if so in what numbers; and whether an attack by the British was expected. Six weeks later, he was no further forward, and so turned to Israel Pemberton, a prominent member of the friendly association. As the association was already negotiating with the Susquehanna Delawares, could not Pemberton recruit a few friendly Shawnees and Delawares – ‘unknown one to the other’ – to go to the Ohio as spies? In return for prompt intelligence, he would provide them with a safe passage back through the British posts and would reward them ‘largely and with pleasure’.31 The Association’s response to Forbes’s dual proposals was to send the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post with a Quaker interpreter named Charles Thomson to Wyoming, home of those Delawares who had not decamped westward to Ohio. Here they found a number of Ohio Delawares, including Pisquetomen, brother of the hostile headmen Tamanqua and Shingas, who had come to see if rumours about peace negotiations were true. Thomson and Post brought Pisquetomen and Teedyuscung, leader of the Wyoming Delawares, back to Philadelphia. Denny and his council hesitated, using Sir William Johnson’s self-proclaimed monopoly of Indian

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diplomacy as an excuse. At this point Forbes weighed in, armed with the powers conceded by Abercromby, to point out that Johnson’s claims bore little relation to his actions and therefore the colony should carry on alone. Conscious that Forbes, the Quaker-dominated assembly, and even the proprietary party wanted peace, Denny gave way. He and the council instructed Post to take Pisquetomen back to the Ohio on an exploratory mission. The general had bounced the civilians into a real diplomatic effort.32 At the Delaware town of Kuskuski, Post met with a mixed reception. Ohio Delawares and especially the Shawnees were deeply suspicious of British motives and quickly declared themselves free of any obligations undertaken by Teedyuscung. On the other hand, the French had proved unable to supply them with adequate trade goods and they were nearing the end of their resources. By then, the Ohio Indians were uncomfortably aware of Forbes’s slowly advancing army: already there were advance guards at Fort Cumberland and at Carlisle and Raestown. Some Delawares, though they declined to give Forbes active assistance, suspended hostilities. Most importantly, they agreed to send Pisquetomen with Post to a new peace conference due to open at Easton in the fall. To the Ohio nations peace was undesirable but appeared to be increasingly necessary.33 Whatever the long-term prospects, Forbes still had only the makings of an army. It was almost June before the Royal Americans were fit for service, the provincial regiments were still recruiting, and the stores and artillery had not yet arrived, the Cherokees were troublesome. As logistical and political difficulties kept him tied to Philadelphia, Forbes became increasingly disenchanted with his long-wished-for independent command. He believed – and with reason – that he had been given the least glamorous and most difficult of all the campaigns and would have to watch others winning promotion and glory. Even Abercromby’s expedition against Ticonderoga, Crown Point and ultimately Montreal would be almost entirely by water. Not for him the slow painful business of assembling wagons from reluctant and grasping settlers, the cutting of a long road through a mountainous wilderness; not for him, with so many regular units committed to that campaign, the slow creation of an army out of almost nothing. The feeling became intense when he heard that Jeffrey Amherst, once Forbes’s junior on the lieutenant colonels’ list, fresh from Germany and without any experience of high command, had arrived with the rank of major general to take over the Louisbourg expedition. That venture was on the face of it, far less difficult even than Abercromby’s, for the army would be escorted to the doorstep of its objective by sea. It was, perhaps, made even worse than news that James Wolfe, his old rival for the Irish posting and a mere thirty-two, had been raised to brigadier general, Forbes’s own rank, and made Amherst’s second in command. But, while Wolfe had at least a track record as a tactician, Amherst, the unqualified newcomer, was to be given the potentially most glamorous and, in Forbes’s view, easiest of the three expeditions, one likely to win him glory and promotion over the heads of his more experienced colleagues. As Forbes caustically put it to Abercromby: I am sorry to hear you have your own share of your own difficultys and cant help thinking that Mr’ Amherst has come to lick the butter off both our breads. No

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manner of trouble; everything ready to his hand, a weak Garrison to oppose him, and a great name to be acquired by the surrender of the place, and I suppose a speedy passage home. This you will allow is very good luck.34

It was 7 June before Montgomery’s ships anchored in the Delaware, and even then his men were too sick to be put immediately in motion. However, the long-awaited store ship from New York appeared a few days after and there were now enough provincials assembled to push them, the three additional Highland companies, the Royal Americans (and some ship artillery borrowed to impress the Cherokees) from Carlisle to Raestown. News arrived that Governor Arthur Dobbs of North Carolina had of his own volition sent 300 men to Virginia. The rest of the Highlanders, once recovered, marched after them and at the very end of the month the last of the real artillery, followed closely by Forbes, left Philadelphia for Carlisle.35 The expedition was at last off to a shambling, drawn-out start, but it was at least a start.

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Crossing Laurel Hill Henry Bouquet had served in the Sardinian army which made extensive use of irregular troops and methods to neutralize the superior numbers of their French foes. Given Forbes’s study of Turpin, and in the light of the ideas about American warfare he had formed in 1757, their first encounter, in Philadelphia in May 1758, must have been an encounter of like minds. ‘I have long been of your Opinion’, Forbes wrote towards the end of June, ‘of equipping Numbers of our men like the Savages, and I fancy that Col, Byrd of Virginia has most of his best people equipt in that manner. I could not so well send orders to others to do the same as they had got Provincial Cloathing, but I was resolved upon getting some of the best people in every Corps to go out a Scouting in that stile, for as you justly observe, the Shadow may often be taken for the reality, And I must confess in this country, wee must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from enemy Indians or any thing else who have seen the Country and Warr carried on in it’. Irregular methods and Indian tactics were not to be the province of a special unit but, as far as practicable, of the whole army.1 Their empathy went further, however, than a shared tactical doctrine: Forbes came to trust and rely upon Bouquet more than any other officer under his command. With Forbes managing the headquarters business from the rear and the Swiss soldier commanding the advanced troops, they made a formidable combination. Forbes’s dealings with the Virginians, Pennsylvanians and Marylanders were more difficult, fraught with tensions arising out of clashes of interests and mentalities. His senior Virginian officers saw the war against France and the expansion of their province into the Ohio basin as inseparable: the conquest of the region was for them the principle purpose of the war. After all, that was how the war had begun in 1754. Pennsylvanians and Marylanders, though generally less committed to land speculation and settlement, wanted to recover the Indian trade lost at that time. And all three were resistant to the idea that the colonial assemblies were bound to obey orders issued by the King through his London ministers and transmitted by his generals in America. Forbes, however, put the King’s orders and military efficiency first, an attitude which occasioned a sharp dispute with Washington and Byrd over the best route for the army to take. In the same way, he saw Pennsylvania’s failure to provide adequate supplies and wagons as unwarranted interference with the King’s service. As we have seen, he was already moving to the view that a stable post-war frontier meant a negotiated settlement with the Ohio nations and a guarantee of their rights of occupation: a position which ruled out the substantial territorial acquisition the Virginians were fighting for and which implied that Pennsylvania must give up

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some of what it had already acquired. Yet, while capable of standing his ground – sometimes, as his health deteriorated, to the point of irascibility – he had to cajole, flatter and wheedle to retain the co-operation of assembles and loosen their fingers on their purse strings; not to mention winning the goodwill and the obedience of those few key officers – regular and provincial – without whom his campaign must fail. For a sick man used to operating through an established network of friendship, obligation and common purpose, this was exhausting work. Though his health was agonisingly bad, and there were moments when he thought he must resign, there were periods of remission which, combined with an iron determination and a keen awareness that this was his last chance of distinction, kept him going. At the end of May, he had had to delay his departure from Philadelphia, writing to Stanwix of being ‘at deaths door with a severe Cholick’; nine days later he complained of having been ‘much out of order with a kind of Cholera Morbus’, which held up his reports to Abercromby.2 He consistently maintained, and doubtlessly convinced himself, that his illness did not once retard his advance, but it was clearly a factor. Privately he was frightened: he asked Loudoun to speak to Ligonier about his request for the command of a regiment in Britain, adding that ‘I ought to have leave to come home to save my life after the campaign.’3 When he set out from Philadelphia at the end of June he rode where he could, but with him, in case of need, went his newly purchased chariot. On 5 July he reached Carlisle where he found the provincial troops in great disorder, brigades having merged into each other and their accompanying wagons having fallen into ‘the greatest Confusion’. He spent the next 5 days riding and walking around the camp, sorting out the mess and impressing at least one provincial officer with the contrast between his physical weakness and his keenness of mind. He thrived on the work which, thought Frank Halkett, ‘recovered him greatly, and reistablished his health more than I have seen him since his coming to the Continent’. Yet, within a fortnight, Halkett had to tell Bouquet that ‘General Forbes is so extreamley Reduc’d & low in spirits with the Flux, and other afflictions, that he is not able to write to you’; and eight days later, ‘the General is so much indispos’d this day by taking Physick, that he is not able to acknowledge the Receipt of your letter himself … .’4 By this time he was eating little or nothing and rapidly losing weight. August was particularly trying. He recovered slowly in the first week, driving out every evening in the chariot, an exercise which made him feel much better and which Halkett thought was the start of a full recovery.5 Forbes wrote to tell Glen of his improvement – the first that his cousin had heard that he was ill – and to Bouquet he remarked that ‘I am now able to write, after 3 weeks of a most violent and tormenting Distemper, which now thank God seems much abated as to pain, but has left me as weak as a new born Infant.’6 Unfortunately, it heralded nothing of the kind. Thereafter he suffered recurrent and painful relapses. Dysentery, which swept through his little army, bizarrely combined with constipation: ‘I have been very much out of order by what Dr. Basset will call the flux, which is a most violent constipation attended with Inflammation of the Rectum, violent pain & total suppression of the Urine.’7 He confided to Richard Peters, Anglican priest and Secretary to the province of Pennsylvania, ‘I stand greatly in need of a few prunes by way of Laxative, if any fresh are lately arrived

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a few pounds will be a great blessing, or a pound 2 or 3 of such fine raisins as Mr. Allen’s were, as I eat nothing.’8 As he wrote to Abercromby on 4 September, he had ‘been in such a condition this month past from a most violent flux with excruciating pains in my bowells and I rendered so low and weak that I had oftener than once or twice firmly resolved to have wrote you to appoint some other person to take this Command as I absolutely found myself incapable to proceed. – But now thank God I am a great deal better and that my sickness has never retarded my operations one single moment’.9 He was not being quite candid: 5 days later he told Pemberton ‘I have been extreamly bad, and worse two days ago than ever’.10 The symptoms suggest amoebic dysentery, which combines the discharge of a bloody mucus, constipation and violent pain, but his longterm disorder may perhaps have been bowel cancer. Whatever its exact nature, the illness made the crucial business of choosing a road a painful affair in more ways than one. From Carlisle he might march to Fort Cumberland via Fort Frederick and take Braddock’s road, a long but arguably readymade route; or go directly over the mountains, laboriously widening existing Indian and trading paths crossing the formidable Allegheny Ridge and the reputedly even rougher Laurel Hill, to make a new but far shorter way. Part of the latter, following an old Indian and trading path, had been cleared in 1755 but abandoned following Braddock’s defeat. The choice was complicated by colonial rivalries and lobbying. Washington and the Virginians wanted him to use Braddock’s road, for that – once the French had been expelled – would ensure their dominance of the only made road to the Forks. But if he were to choose the Laurel Hill route the Pennsylvanians would reap the greater advantage; and they too had their eyes on the commercial potential of the Ohio. Somehow he must chose the most efficient route for his army, putting the King’s service ahead of all parochial ambitions, while at the same time avoiding the alienation of any one province. That dilemma, far more than his illness, and at least as a much as the supply and organizational problems, kept him at Carlisle until early August. Forbes weighed the options carefully and professionally, but from a very early stage he disliked the longer route. He knew that in the three years since Braddock’s expedition shoots had grown from the stumps of the trees and the way was now blocked by brushwood, so with the extra distance taken into consideration – which at this stage he estimated at only forty miles – the old road would take hardly less work to prepare than the new.11 At first he followed the advice of Sir John St Clair, part of whose brief was to examine and report on the roads and paths, to push the head of his army from Carlisle to Raestown; from there, St Clair argued, Forbes could decide whether to go on directly across the Alleghenies or south to Fort Cumberland and into Braddock’s old road. But by the time the column was committed to Raestown St Clair had changed his mind: he said that to go to Fort Cumberland that way was too roundabout and that the mountains barring the second route were impassable: Braddock’s road was the only viable way and therefore the army should march via Fort Frederick after all. Forbes was not impressed by the quartermaster general’s lack of foresight, but he was obliged to order the finishing of the Raestown-Fort Cumberland road in case he turned out to be right about the mountains.12 The general was keeping his options open.

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As July drew on, the shorter route looked more and more promising. A conversation with James Dunning, an old Indian trader who had frequently used a path over Laurel Hill, suggested that there was a practical way to get wagons across; and Forbes at once sent him up to Raestown to help Bouquet with the reconnaissance. Captain Edward Ward, Captain Clayton and Lieutenant James Baker, with three other officers and 100 men spent most of July exploring ways over the Allegheny Ridge and Laurel Hill and found, contrary to expectation, that while the former would be extremely steep for loaded wagons, the Hill was perfectly practicable. Ward’s original journal of the distances was very detailed and confusing, but the digest sent down by Bouquet painted a more promising picture. It showed that, on paper at least, the road from Raestown to the Forks was little more than half the length of that via Fort Cumberland and Braddock’s route, 160 as against ninety; while a report submitted by Dunning through Bouquet made the distance only eighty. To Forbes it was now pretty clear that the shorter route was overwhelmingly the better, provided ‘that Bugbear, or tremendous pass of the Laurel Hill’, should really prove practicable. With that in mind, Forbes ordered the detachment cutting the Fort Frederick–Fort Cumberland road to abandon its task and march to join Bouquet at Raestown. Nine days later, he instructed Bouquet to send 500 men ahead to the base of Laurel Hill there to build a stockaded supply base. But he was still very cautious – ‘to Judge at such a distance, and of a country I never saw, nor heard spoke off but in Capt Ward’s account, I can therefore say nothing decisive’ – and while urging Bouquet to begin making the new road as soon as possible he directed St Clair to go up and find its ‘most Ellegible’ route. At the very end of the month he had the view of a capable young military engineer, Ensign Charles Rhor, who found that, while the trading path over the Allegheny Ridge was impossible for wagons, a road might be cut up to and through a gap a few miles to the east. All this made nonsense of St Clair’s earlier claim that the route was impossible.13 By 14 July, while still at Carlisle, he began to see what lay behind St Clair’s apparent confusion. Sir John had been at Winchester talking to Washington and Byrd, both Virginians with extensive business interests and good private reasons for wanting the Braddock road. As to them the whole purpose of the war was to secure Virginian dominance in the Ohio basin, or at the very least to prevent their rivals, the Pennsylvanians from doing so, Washington could argue, possibly in all good faith, that the road which served Virginian interests was the better option in terms of time, labour, expenses and likely levels of resistance. Forbes, on the other hand, saw the war as an imperial effort which should be beyond and above parochial concerns. Therefore, plans which put local interests first were both wrong-headed but pernicious. ‘I am sensible’, Forbes informed Bouquet, ‘that some foolish people have made partys to drive us into that road, as well as into the road by Fort Frederick, but as I utterly detest all partys and views in military operations, so you may well guess, how and with what arguments I have had with Sir John St Clair upon that Subject’.14 On 22 July he confronted St Clair with Ward’s journal and charged him with plotting to make him change his mind. The next day he observed that ‘as I disclaim all parties myself, should be sorry that they were to Creep in amongst us. I therefore cannot Conceive what the Virginia folks would be att, for to me it seems to be them, and them

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only, that want to drive us into the road by Fort Cumberland, no doubt in opposition to the Pennsylvanians who by Raestown would have a nigher Communication [than them] to the Ohio’.15 He saw straight through a claim by Byrd that he had sixty Indians at Winchester who would join the army only if Forbes marched that way. ‘This’ the general snorted, ‘is a new system of military Discipline truly; and shows that my Good friend Byrd is either made the Cats Foot off himself, or he little knows me, if he imagines that Sixty Scoundrels are to direct me in my measures’. Washington visited Bouquet only to find him ‘fix’d’ upon the Laurel Hill route. He then tried to subvert Halkett – whom he knew well from the days of the Braddock campaign and whose acquaintance he had already taken pains to renew – with a cozening letter (‘My Dear Halkett’) claiming that the Braddock Road was ‘universally confessd to be the Best Passage through the Mountains’.16 Halkett was not subverted and showed that ‘very unguarded’ letter to Forbes, confirming the general’s opinion that the Virginians had indulged in ‘a Scheme that I think it was a shame for any officer to be concerned in … ’. 17 Exasperated by this latest manoeuvre in a campaign of ‘Singularly Impertinent’ lobbying, he let Washington and the others know what he thought of them. ‘I believe’, he afterwards told Abercromby, ‘I have now got the better of the whole by letting them Very roundly know, that their Judging and determining of my actions and intentions before I had communicated my opinion to them, was so premature, and was taking the lead in so ridiculous a way that I could by no means suffer it.’18 He was being over-sanguine. Washington was still trying to persuade Henry Bouquet to his view, clearly in the hope that Bouquet would in turn influence Forbes. On 27 July Bouquet agreed to meet Washington half-way between Winchester and Raestown where, ‘weighing impartially the advantages and disadvantages’ of both routes, ‘We shall I hope be able between you and I, to determine what is most eligible: and Save to the General [the] trouble and loss of time in inquiring upon the same subject.’ Bouquet added significantly, ‘he can not well be here before Sunday next: Therefore if we meet Saturday 29th Inst we have time enough’. To Washington it must have seemed that Bouquet was quite prepared to conspire to impose an answer upon Forbes. At the conference, however, Bouquet was appalled at the Virginian’s partisan lack of objectivity. Two days later, Bouquet informed Forbes that ‘I learned nothing satisfactory. Most of these gentlemen do not know the difference between a party and an army, and find every thing easy which agrees with their ideas, jumping over all the difficulties’.19 Washington, who could not understand the prosecution of the war separately from the advantage of one colony over another, was nonplussed. He was able only to suppose that the ‘Pennsylvanians, whose present as well as future interest it was to conduct the Expedition thro’ their Government, and along that way, because it secures at present their frontiers and the trade hereafter – a chain of Forts being erected – had prejudiced the General absolutely against this road; made him believe we were the partial people; and determined him at all events to pursue that rout’. This was true only insofar as the harder they tried so obviously to manipulate their general, the more inclined the ailing and increasingly irritable Forbes was to lean the other way. But he had little time for

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grasping Pennsylvanians either. When he learned that the Virginians also suspected him of being hand in glove with Philadelphian merchants in the matters of supplies he was appalled. It was, he told Bouquet, ‘a Jealousy and suspicion… which they can have no reason for, as I believe neither you nor I values one farthing where we get provisions from, provided we are supplied or Interest ourselves either with Virginia or Pennsylvania, which last I hope will be damn’d for their treatment of us with the Waggons, and every other thing where they could profit from us by their impositions, Altho’ at the risque of our perdition’.20 Forbes had tried to build up the kind of personal support network he had been used to within the British army and in Europe. Now men, upon whose professionalism and loyalty, and even friendship in Byrd’s case, he should have been able to rely, were failing him through partiality and personal interest. The only man he believed he could trust at distance was Bouquet; and around his person he had only, besides the faithful but plodding Frank Halkett, the indifferent Archie Montgomery, and the able but ambitious Major James Grant of the Highlanders. Pursuit of provincial interests was not the only way in which the provincial forces, of which Forbes had had high hopes, proved unsatisfactory. Whatever their faults of outlook, Washington, Byrd and Stephen were competent commanders, had some understanding of frontier warfare and were unquestionably gentlemen; and the three Pennsylvanian colonels were able enough. The first battalion’s John Armstrong, an Irish settler who had made his home in Carlisle, had led a successful raid if costly on the Delaware village of Kitanning in 1756. James Burd of the second battalion was an Edinburgh-born Scot turned colonial merchant who had served as one of Braddock’s local road engineers. The third colonel, Hugh Mercer, a physician from Aberdeenshire had been out as a Jacobite surgeon in the ’45 – a miscalculation which explained his presence in America – and had served under Armstrong on the Kitanning raid. Though not professionals they were able, conscientious and moderately experienced men.21 Unfortunately, as much could not be said of the majority of their juniors. ‘I vainly flattered my self ’ Forbes reported to Pitt, ‘that some very good service might be drawn from the Virginia, & Pennsylvania Forces, but am sorry to find that a few of their principle Officers excepted, all the rest are an extream bad Collection of broken Innkeepers, Horse Jockeys, & Indian Traders, and that the men under them, are a direct copy of their Officers, nor can it be otherwise, as they are a gathering from the scum of the worst of people, in every Country, who have wrought themselves up, into a panick at the very name of Indians … ’22 Just as in the matter of the roads Forbes did not judge by prejudice but by evidence and performance. Even his regulars could be problematic. St Clair in particular was a wild eccentric whose conspiracy with Washington and Byrd was far from his only attempt to go his own way and justify it later. At Carlisle, Forbes found that his quartermaster general had done nothing to correct the confusion and had made no provision for feeding the horses, so he had to make arrangements for feed made from rye. A little later, St Clair admitted he had only arranged forage for Fort Cumberland, which Forbes supposed he had done ‘on purpose to drive me into that road’. The result was to delay the march from Carlisle in order to prevent Bouquet’s resources at Raestown from

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being overwhelmed. From Raestown came the unwelcome news that 100 packhorses and 700 pack saddles sent up to from Carlisle, all previously reviewed and approved by St Clair, had arrived unfit for purpose. The saddles turned out to be so inadequately filled by the colonial contractor that on the first day they ‘gauled all the Horses into the bone, so they must everyone be refitted & new stuffed’. The quartermaster general had, Forbes concluded, ‘served me as he did General Braddock promising every thing and doing no one Individual thing in the world, except confusing what he undertakes’.23 The shortage of forage led in turn to a critical shortage of supplies, overturning Forbes’s original careful calculations. By this time, the road over Laurel Hill, from Raestown on the east side to Loyalhannon on the west, had been ‘thoroughly reconnoitred’ and, though it had ‘many bad steps, with very steep Ascents and descents at times’, it was clearly practicable. In any case, he was now fully committed, with about 1,200 men working on it and a new base being prepared at Loyalhannon. Moreover, none of this activity had been disturbed by the French and Indians. Forbes, through Bouquet, had ordered Washington to parade parties of his regiment up and down the near end of the Braddock road, and the enemy, misled by this feint, had taken it for the principal line of thrust: ‘from the Great meadows to the Great Crossing of the Yohegenny, they have reconnoitred every pass and Defile, and have proceeded so far as to have a Battis de bois where of necessity we must have passed had we been Confined to that road entirely’.24 Forbes worked to maintain the deception, even though keeping troops at Fort Cumberland and moving them on Braddock’s road, combined with the need to guard his main line of communications, reduced his numbers alarmingly. To ameliorate this problem, he asked Sharpe to provide Maryland militia to relieve Washington, so that the Virginians could march forward by Braddock’s road and, if a suitable track appeared, to move across to join the main army near Shippensburg. Sharpe, who was far more enthusiastic for the expedition than his assembly, complied and the Virginians were able to advance.25 Forbes was not content with having a road suitable for laden wagons: he also wanted one which would facilitate protection of the column’s flanks and rapid deployment in case of an encounter action. To this end, he suggested that ‘a small road might be carried on at the same time, at about a hundred yards to the right and left of it, and parallell with it, by which our flanking partys might advance easier along with the line, I don’t mean here to cut down any large trees, only to clear away the Brushwood and Saplins, so as the men either on foot or on horseback may pass easier along’. Moreover, by allowing parallel columns of infantry to advance together, it would also ensure that ‘your line can always be formed much quicker and easier’.26 A month later he reiterated the point.27 As August slipped into September, as the army edged to within striking range of Fort Duquesne and as his long-projected scheme for an Indian peace conference was about to mature, Forbes allowed himself some cautious optimism. Although his chariot could not go beyond Shippensburg, and as he was too weak to ride or bear the jolting of a wagon, from thence he was able to ‘sally forth in a kind of horse litter actually made by Doctor Russell and my Servts’. He had assembled some 1,500 men at Loyalhannon on the far side of Laurel Hill and within forty miles of Fort Duquesne

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without interference. The first of his artillery had likewise passed the Hill and the rest was not far behind. The retention of the Marylanders at Fort Cumberland and the appearance of fifty woodsmen volunteers from that province had given him, he thought, enough troops to take Fort Duquesne, though perhaps not to garrison it for the winter. His one major anxiety was a shortage of provisions which followed directly from St Clair’s mismanagement and the failure of Pennsylvania to provide sufficient replacements for the wagons which had been worn out or wrecked. If that obstacle could be overcome, if a humiliating withdrawal could be by that means avoided, if counter-action by the enemy could be prevented by care and caution, Fort Duquesne must be his.28 Then came the news of a stunning defeat.

12

The Fall of Fort Duquesne Major James Grant was an unusually competent soldier. Forbes recognized his abilities and trusted him, both as a man who could turn the raw Highlanders into a first-class battalion and as an adviser, secretary and part-time staff officer. ‘Pardon a hurry of business at the same time finding every thing here in confusion and disorder’, he wrote to Bouquet on 9 July from the chaos at Carlisle, ‘so have employed Grant and Halkett to write to you’. Like Forbes, he was the penniless younger son who had forsaken a civilian profession, in Grant’s case law, for a military career. Commissioned into the Royal Scots regiment of foot, he had been taken up by his colonel, General James St Clair, who had employed him as aide, diplomatic assistant and tutor to his great-nephew. It is probable that Forbes had run across Grant before, if not in Scotland then perhaps in Flanders (Grant was at Fontenoy) in 1744–1745 or 1747, or in London in the spring of 1746.1 Grant was that rare gem on the expedition of 1758: an intelligent, able, agreeable, empathetic and reliable fellow-professional. Moreover, he had recently revealed an unexpected feel for Indian negotiations. On 10 August, Forbes had ordered Grant to force-march two Highland companies to Fort Loudoun where a band of fifty disgruntled Cherokees were threatening the garrison and demanding their presents, which had been kept in the fort as a guarantee of their continued service. ‘As’, wrote Forbes, ‘I have no mortall about me that understands Indian affairs or their Genius’, and anxious not to provoke an ‘outrage’ by refusal, he instructed Grant to rebuke the Cherokees ‘in moderate terms’ while releasing the presents as a gesture of goodwill. He was to ‘beg’ them to stay with the army but if they would not he was to warn them against clashing with back-settlers on their way home.2 It was a mission that Grant executed with zeal. Arriving with his exhausted men at nightfall on 15 August, Grant was surprised to find the Cherokees quiet and orderly and asking only for their legitimately earned presents. They did not even demand the rum he had brought with him. Knowing he must play for time until Forbes himself could arrive, Grant pretended to be too tired to see them until the following day. The Cherokees were not to be deflected, however, and in the end, and to their unfeigned pleasure, he had to hand over the presents. Grant once more tried delaying tactics, inviting their leaders to a conference and dinner for the following day. Again he failed. The Cherokees simply took their presents and left, but Grant, probably to his own surprise, had played what cards he had with relish and skill. He found the Cherokees to be engaging rogues, who only wanted what was rightfully theirs and whose worst crime had been the theft of a few horses. Like Forbes – perhaps even because of his association with Forbes – he believed that

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Indian hostilities arose from the machinations of unscrupulous traders and from the unrestrained expansion of white settlements. He was to carry these views with him on the Cherokee War campaigns of 1761 and 1762, even earning the enmity of many South Carolinians for the very restrained peace terms he obtained.3 From Fort Loudoun, Forbes sent Grant up to the head of the army to support Bouquet, because of his military abilities, for his man-management qualities and because his appearance would not upset the sensibilities of the provincials. ‘Your proposal of going forward yourself ’, he told Bouquet, ‘is what would be very satisfactory but at as present we are circumstanced I am afraid you must desist from it and turn the Burden of the whole upon Major Grant whose parts as a Military man are inferior to few and he has the advantage that I expect he can manadge Sir John and remember that one must save appearances with Colo Byrd who Commands Grant from his Provinciall Rank’.4 Grant and Bouquet were already close from their time together in Charleston, and it was Bouquet who recommended Grant to Forbes.5 Now that Byrd could no longer be absolutely trusted, the Scots major was becoming indispensable. Grant, however, was ambitious, at times almost comically so. From the start he meant his military career was meant to produce not only promotion, distinction and financial security, but fame and opulence as well. A London house with a good cook, ample wines and convivial friends was a long-standing ambition, and he was quite open about his intention to ‘have an Estate before I die’.6 He needed to make a name in order to prosper and his impatience had become as obvious as his charm. At Carlisle he had asked repeatedly for permission to lead ‘a party’ against Fort Duquesne, promising to take every precaution against surprise and to refrain from launching a premature attack. Forbes had then firmly refused but Grant now espied, in this decision to push him forward, a chance to achieve glory, promotion and possibly even that elusive estate. The lateness of the season gave the whole expedition a very narrow window for success, which, combined with reports of the garrison’s weakness and dire shortage of supplies, made the idea of a sudden descent almost irresistible.7 Perhaps with Byng in mind, Grant had absorbed the idea that in terms of one’s career boldness was far preferable to caution. And just as Forbes, because of sheer distance from his chief, could negotiate with Indians and pursue forbidden intrigues with Quakers, so Grant and Bouquet, at the sharp end of the enterprise, were tempted to launch a coup which Forbes would never have sanctioned. The upshot was a reconnaissance in force which turned into a disastrous attempt to lure the garrison out into the open. With a picked force of Highlanders and some Virginian and Pennsylvanian provincials led by Major Andrew Lewis, Grant approached silently and by night, taking the garrison unawares. A party sent forward to attack Indians camped to the east of the fort achieved nothing because there were no Indians there. The Virginians set fire to an outbuilding, but the garrison were used to accidents and took no notice. At dawn, having posted Lewis’s Virginians in ambush to his rear, Grant resorted to parading his Highlanders, drums rolling loudly, on a hill within sight of the fort. As he advanced a torrent of French and Indians, far more than Grant had believed could possibly be there, poured out of the gates and enveloped the smaller British force. If Grant is to be believed, the hundred or

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so Pennsylvanians guarding his right fled in a sauve qui peut, while his Highlanders stood their ground and were decimated by fire from all sides. Grant tried to fall back on Lewis’s position but Lewis, moving forward to support Grant, missed him altogether. Over a third of the 850-strong detachment fell or surrendered, Grant himself being taken and sent to Montreal.8 Forbes was appalled at both Grant’s behaviour and Bouquet’s complicity, observing that ‘the rashness and ambition of some people brings great mischief and distress upon their friends … ’. Bouquet had been repeatedly told, and had repeatedly promised, to give no provocation and enter into no risks. As for the major himself, he had ‘by his thirst of fame, brought on his own perdition, and run a great risque of ours’; and had, through ‘his inconsiderate and rash proceeding’ acted in exactly the manner he had criticized in Abercromby. As for the provincials’ alleged misbehaviour, Forbes blamed not them but Grant’s error in dividing his force before provoking a battle. But perhaps the most telling phrase was a reference to ‘my friend Grant’. This was a personal as well as a professional betrayal.9 Suddenly, Forbes’s strength had been perilously reduced, in both numbers and in quality; ‘for the Detail of my Army, Guards, Garrisons, Escorts &c is immense in proportion to my numbers, and will leave me with almost as few to act with as Major Grant had under his Command, who upon his Detachment had not made choice of the worst of Montgomery’s regimt’. Worse still, the imminent negotiations with the Delaware and Shawnees at Easton, which promised to offset Forbes’s numerical weakness by removal of the Indian threat, were now in danger.10 Among the dead was Rhor, the only engineer attached to the expedition whom Forbes trusted and respected – ‘of more service in his way that all the rest of that class put together’ – leaving him with the barely reliable Captain Harry Gordon. Gordon had left Raestown without providing any plans for the protective post to be built there, later to be named Fort Bedford. In Forbes’s view, he ‘has either gone off at the nail, or is turned so dilatory in every measure under his charge that it is almost impossible to get any one thing done to the purpose where he is concerned. If a triffle is to be done he makes it a labour to man and horse, and if a work of consequence makes slight of it.’ On 10 October, Forbes was startled to learn that at Loyalhannon Gordon was building a fort (later to be named Fort Ligonier) ‘fitt to stand a siege’, a dangerous waste of precious time, and immediately ordered Bouquet to put a stop to all such ‘superfluitys’. St Clair, of course, was still ‘beyond the power of man either to change or amend … the immense confusion of Waggons and roads are intirely of Sir John’s creating, who by a certain dexterity has put you in fresh Dilemma’s every day, and with his solemn face will tell you when he has done the worst, that he really acted for the best and can justify it’. 11 In the circumstances, he might have thought himself well rid of Grant and could have reasonably withdrawn his confidence in Bouquet. Yet, he repeatedly asked Abercromby to hurry to arrange Grant’s exchange because he was, after all, a valuable officer. So, he wrote, ‘you may very well imagine how I am circumstanced and what a loss I sustain in Major Grant’s person’, adding ‘Colo. Bouquet excepted I am solus in every thing even down to the trifling detail of camp duty’. In October he remarked, ‘now that major Grant is gone I have no mortal belonging to my Command that I can

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either trust with a letter, or argue seriously about Army proceedings, Frank Halkett alone excepted, who is most diligent’. Eight days later he added, ‘I hope to God you will lose no time in endeavouring to get back Majr Grant from Montreal, …[a]s he was my only plight anchor and support[.] I can expect no assistance this Campaign but without him the Regt is undone as they can do nothing Officer or Soldier, being equally ignorant of almost every part of military duty, nor can it be expected otherwise, as they are quite young and unacquainted. Another year with Grant would make them a fine Battalion.’12 The omission of Archie Montgomery’s name was significant: Grant had been the key officer in this unit, and Grant, not Montgomery, had been a key staff officer. In the same way, he treated Bouquet as a loyal and talented officer who had made a single mistake. As for the choice of road, even now the Virginians had not given up. In midSeptember, when the Laurel Hill had been passed, Bouquet was preparing for the last push towards Fort Duquesne. The road over Laurel Hill was much worse than had been anticipated, and for a short time Forbes was worried that he might have made the wrong choice of route.13 This gave the advocates of the Braddock road their chance. Adam Stephen, then Washington’s lieutenant colonel, remarked to his commander that, ‘you have no reason to Alter your Opinion of the Rout of the Army’, and he could ‘make it Appear’ that the Virginians had done their utmost for the service. About the same time he wrote representing the road from Loyalhannon as impracticable, thus giving Washington and Byrd eleventh-hour ammunition in favour of the old route.14 Forbes was not amused and face-to-face he told them so: I told them plainly that, whatever they thought, yet I did aver that, in our prosecuting the present road, we had proceeded from the best intelligence that could be got for the good and convenience of the army, without any views to oblige one province or another; and added that those two gentlemen were the only people that I had met with who had showed their weakness in their attachment to the province they belong to, by declaring so publickly in favour of one road without their knowing anything of the other, having never heard from any Pennsylvania person one word about the road; and that, as for myself, I could safely say – and believed I might answer for you – that the good of the service was the only view we had at heart, not valuing provincial interest, jeaousys, or suspicions, one single twopence, and that, therefore, I could not believe Col. Stephen’s descriptions until I has heard from you, which I hope you will very soon be able to disprove. I fancy what I said more on this subject will cure them from coming upon this topic again.15

In such circumstances, his resentment, one may even say jealousy, of Amherst was sharpened by the news that Louisbourg had fallen. ‘Pray’, he asked Abercromby, ‘my compliments to Genll Amherst if with you, I should be obliged to him for if he will send me a small sprig of his Laurells for my cursed wilderness produces nothing but briars and thorns, nor is there great hopes of vast improvement considering the labourers I must work with, who are beyond all description’.16

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Yet, Grant’s fiasco did not put an end to Forbes’s hopes of an autumn offensive. Indeed, in some ways it made early action all the more urgent. Thus, with the season so advanced, and with his numbers so reduced and most of his key subordinates either incompetent or unreliable, his whole self-esteem, his reputation and career required an early assault on Fort Duquesne. And there seemed to be positive reasons for hope. Having despaired of his hundred remaining Cherokees and all associated with them – ‘the most imposing Rogues that I have ever had to deal with’ – he was cheered by news from Winchester. Attakullakulla of the Cherokees and the Catawba leader King Hagler had left that place on 8 October with sixty-three warriors; ‘so if those will join as heartily and persuade the others to return’, he should have enough Indian scouts to allow a rapid advance.17 Even a sudden French counter-stroke, a determined assault on Loyalhannon, did not change his intention. A force of 800–900 French and Canadians with perhaps 100 Indians made a stealthy approach through the woods, intending to drive in the outposts and to follow so closely that the defenders would be overwhelmed before they could form. At the very least, the raiders would be able to destroy or drive off the cattle, horses and wagons, so paralysing Forbes’s advance for the foreseeable future. But, on the morning of 12 October, they were detected by a British patrol. A party of Marylanders, subsequently reinforced by two successive waves of Pennsylvanians were sent out but were driven in by force of numbers. The firing had given the defenders, about 1,500 in number, time to man their breastworks and hold the advancing enemy with musketry and artillery fire. After an hour, the attackers withdrew, taking with them nearly all their dead and wounded as well as the post’s horses. To Forbes’s subsequent chagrin, the garrison ‘neither made one Sortie nor followed them half a yard … ’: what might have been a victory could now look very much like a French success. Therefore, ‘I puffed up everything and ordered a general Feu de Joy’, much to the astonishment of the few Indians remaining at Raestown.18 With such unenterprising material, and considering the sharp reduction in numbers and the lateness of the season, the whole campaign was now in doubt. Much, if not everything, now hung upon success at Easton. The October negotiations at Easton were at some levels less than decorous. One scholar has gone so far as to contend that none of the negotiators ‘were more ignorant or arrogant than William Denny’, whom he goes on to describe as a ‘peevish and impatient military man’. At Easton, so the argument goes, he was at his worst, issuing threats at his first encounter with the Indians, losing his temper and swearing when they were slow to gather, and then storming out of Easton altogether. According to this view, the Iroquois found him ridiculous and mocked him in front of Conrad Weiser. The same historian has barely more regard for Teedyuscung, who was drunk and insulted both colonial representatives and Iroquois. ‘Teedyuscung, like Denny, could wreak havoc with efforts to sustain an atmosphere of decorum and consensus.’19 At a deeper level, however, Denny’s rages were in part tactical, designed to isolate Teedyuscung and prevent any discussion of land fraud. In this context, Teedyuscungs’s behaviour, as he felt his diplomatic position dissolving under his feet, can be seen as the panic-driven actions of a desperate man.

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On the Indian side, there were at least three contradictory aims: the Iroquois wanted to reassert their authority over the Ohio Valley; the Susquehanna Delawares wanted their territory guaranteed against anyone, Indian or white; and the Ohio nations wanted a guarantee that there would be no settlement in the Valley. On the Pennsylvanian side, the Quakers and their distant mentor Forbes were opposed by the proprietors and Denny. The latter were anxious to isolate the Susquehanna Delawares and deflect their demands for the restitution of lands fraudulently obtained, and to a significant degree they succeeded. Opposed by both the Ohio Indians and the Iroquois, his ability to wage war undermined by Forbes’s advance and the inability of the French to supply his warriors, Teedyuscung’s influence was in terminal decline.20 Nevertheless, there was significant progress. Aiming to drive a wedge between Teedyuscung and the other Indians, Denny agreed to return to the Iroquois, not to the Delawares, all lands obtained by Pennsylvania in 1754 west of the Allegheny Mountains. This included neither the Walking Purchase lands nor those purchased to the east of the watershed in 1754, and Teedyuscung was forced to negotiate directly with the Iroquois to retain the territory around Wyoming. On the other hand, the colony had made substantial land cessions and agreed a formal boundary with the Iroquois – a boundary which promised to secure the Ohio nations from future British encroachment west of the Allegheny watershed. This gain was reinforced by a British promise that the provinces would not make permanent settlements in the Valley.21 Pisquetomen and Post returned to the Ohio with the news by way of Loyalhannon, which Forbes himself reached early in November. He entertained them as royally as he could and sent them on their way with two messages endorsing the Treaty of Easton. The first was addressed to the Ohio Shawnees and Delawares in general, advising them to return to their towns and stay away from Fort Duquesne as his army advanced. The other, accompanied by a belt of wampum, was directed to the two principal Delaware leaders, urging them to desert the French. All now turned upon the Ohio peoples’ reaction.22 Attakullakulla, together with about forty Cherokees and perhaps as many Catawbas, joined Forbes at Raestown in mid-October just as the camp was celebrating the repulse of the French attack at Loyalhannon with the feu de joie. The Carpenter had come not on a military mission but a diplomatic one, the prevention of a war between the Cherokees and Virginia over the blood shed in the clashes with backcountry settlers. Forbes, on the other hand, thought he had miraculously been given a new band of Cherokee scouts. Ill and in pain and directing operations from his litter, Forbes had already lost all patience with Indians, the fourteen or so Catawbas who had gone with Grant excepted; he was anxious and upset by the loss of James Grant, and in no mood to tolerate the usual pattern of demands for huge quantities of presents followed by lack of performance. In the back of his mind, as ever, was fear for his reputation, that ‘the vulgar Clamour that must destroy more power, Capacity and Intergrity, than perhaps I can boast off … ’.23 Moreover, his illness was more painful and debilitating than ever. On 21 September, in the wake of Grant’s defeat, he had informed Abercromby that, ‘I am fitter for a Bed and women’s milk, than for the active scene that I am like to pass for this month to come … .’ By November, he was

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receiving an anal injection of opium twice a day and a ‘glyster’, an enema, at night: a treatment that was to continue into January.24 A man in such a condition could not be expected long to keep his temper with Indians he neither liked nor fully understood. But while Forbes failed to understand Indians, the Carpenter did not make the true purpose of his mission sufficiently clear. He made four or five speeches warning Forbes of the storm that was brewing in the Cherokee country but at the same time demanded a high price for his staying with the army. Forbes, who naturally assumed that he was being blackmailed, was bitterly angry; he thought the speeches as ‘stupid’ and the demands ‘extravagant’, but he gave in, partly because he had few other scouts and partly to have hostages against further Cherokee misbehaviour. By 24 October, imagining he had got the upper hand by ‘treating them as they always ought to be, with the greatest signs of scorning indifference and disdain that I could decently employ’, he sent the Cherokees and Catawbas, about a hundred all told, up to Loyalhannon. Attakullkulla, however, went to oblige Forbes, despite the general’s unwelcoming manner, and certainly not because he had abandoned his original mission.25 Even when the Carpenter’s scouting bore fruit, misunderstanding and mistrust prevented its efficient exploitation. Around 18 November, the Carpenter met some local Indians in the woods and learned from them that they had deserted the French, who were preparing to blow up Fort Duquesne and abandon the Forks. He reported the news to Forbes and immediately – on the assumption that his services were no longer needed – took his forty warriors off towards his original objective, Williamsburg. From his own perspective, he was doing no more than exercising any warrior’s right to leave a war party once his presence had become redundant. To Forbes, it was the latest in a long line of Indian betrayals and, in the military terms he understood, outright desertion. Worse, he believed that it was a declaration of the war of which the Carpenter had so often warned.26 Even then he saw the need for restraint. In ‘prudence and self-preservation’, they should be relieved of their arms and horses, but not their ‘Blankets, shirts, silver truck &c’. They were then to be escorted on their way with ‘a sufficiency of provisions and no more, so that the Cherokee nation may see plainly they will have nothing to complain off but the baseness and perfidy of those, whom they sent among us as friends for these seven months past’. In fact, his order was exceeded: the Cherokees were stopped and relieved of everything they carried, even the beads the Carpenter was taking as diplomatic tokens to Virginia.27 There followed belated attempts to minimize the damage. At Winchester, Attakullakulla appealed successfully to a sympathetic Christopher Gist; and Bosomworth, who personally released four Indians, later observed that some Cherokees from Keowee had their liberty and presents restored by Forbes’s own order. Yet, Forbes was very lucky that the upshot was not an immediate Cherokee war; and the credit for preventing one may go to the Carpenter, who was far more adroit at cross-cultural conversation. Afterwards, he was careful to blame Glen, not Forbes, for his humiliating treatment; and when he met Francis Fauquier, the new lieutenant governor of Virginia, at Williamsburg, he took care to be suitably repentant for his own behaviour. Moreover, when the Carpenter returned to the Cherokee country in the spring of 1759, he was able to restrain the young men and then to keep the peace for

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another six months.28 Perhaps Forbes’s anger was really a reaction to his own isolation and to being continually let down by everyone he thought he had a right to trust: Byrd, Grant and Bouquet were as culpable in that context as the Carpenter. Attakullakulla’s intelligence was in fact perfectly correct. The French commandant had for some time been worried by a lack of supplies, a shortage of manpower and trade goods and, above all, the increasingly recalcitrant state of his Indian allies. Had Forbes acted immediately, he might have secured the fort and its garrison intact. It was four days before three prisoners taken near Loyalhannon revealed the true situation. At once, Forbes pushed his advanced troops forward without tents or baggage – just too late. On 24 November, the destruction of the fort was heralded by an enormous explosion and a towering column of smoke. That evening the Catawbas led the British light forces into the smoking remnants of Fort Duquesne. Forbes and the remainder of his army arrived next day.29 The soldiers’ first business was to secure their precarious possession of the Forks: and to do that both a new fort and decent relations with the Ohio nations were necessary. Every action taken by Forbes and Bouquet at this juncture demonstrates their determination to secure the loyalty of the Indians above all else. ‘Pittsburgh’, as it is named in the correspondence, bore little relation to the later massive fortification known as ‘Fort Pitt’. A plain 175-foot square frontier stockade with a plain bastion at each corner, with a dry ditch and glacis armed only with a few cohorns and meant to be garrisoned by no more than 221 officers and men from the Virginian and Pennsylvanian regiments under Mercer’s command, it was not designed to do more than repel a sudden raid. It certainly would have stood no chance against an artillery-supported French counter-attack in force – and could not possibly have overawed the Ohio warriors so lately enemies of the British. Douglas Cubbison has pointed out that there is no sign that Amherst or the home government had anything more substantial planned at this stage, and particularly that Forbes had long tried in vain to get precise instructions out of his commanderin-chief. Its entire security must rest with the friendship of the Delawares, Shawnees and Mingos – and to secure that the British must show that they meant to honour the Treaty of Easton.30 Thus, Forbes was not merely building a new fortification but constructing an entire Indian-centred frontier policy upon the boundary agreement reached at Easton. Even before the physical works began, he invited the headmen of all the Ohio nations to a conference to settle relations between themselves and the British. To Amherst, now Abercromby’s successor as commander-in-chief, he stressed the importance of ‘having in a Manner reconciled the various tribes, and Nations of Indians inhabiting it, to His Majesties Government’. To Denny he reported that he had summoned the headmen ‘as the Conquest of this Country is of the greatest Consequence to the adjacent Provinces, by securing the Indians, our real Friends, for their own Advantages … ’. All other matters dealt with in these reports – asking Amherst yet again for clear orders, the very important business of securing barracks, winter quarters and food for his troops, and sending Halkett to England to secure his own reputation – were subordinated to the emphasis upon Indian affairs. Even his report to Pitt began with crediting the expulsion of the French to their ‘being

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abandoned by their Indians, who I had previously engaged to leave them, and who now seem all willing and ready to implore His Majesty’s most Gracious Protection’.31 These first two reports begun on 26 November were interrupted by another onset of agonizing disorder: ‘being seized with an inflammation of my stomach, Midriff and Liver, the sharpest and most severe of all distempers’. And that brought him to another concern almost as painful as the disease itself: the fear that he would die before vindicating himself and recovering his seniority in the army. ‘I shall leave this’, he wrote from Pittsburgh, ‘as soon as I am able to stand, but God knows when, or if I ever reach Philadelphia’. Accordingly, as he told Amherst when he resumed his letter two days later, he ordered Halkett to go down to Philadelphia and take ship immediately for Britain, there ‘to explain the motives upon which I proceeded, and the various, and almost insurmountable difficulties I had to grapple with. He asked Amherst to prepare explanatory despatches for him, ‘as I cannot put pen to paper myself, and as he is the only person with me, in whom I could place the smallest confidence, or from whom I have met with the smallest assistance, Colo. Bouquet alone excepted’.32 The memories of Byng, Hay and Loudoun, perhaps stretching back even to Ingoldsby’s fate – made him fear even the appearance of sloth or reluctance or timidity; and now the only guarantee against such an outcome was his old connection with the Halketts. Indeed, in this remote and still-threatening place, the forms and attachments of long-ago far away Fife seemed more important than ever. On 27 November, Forbes celebrated his success with a feu de joie and the next day funeral parties were told off for the interment of the human remains still lying on Braddock’s field and on Grant’s Hill. A local warrior, anxious to demonstrate his new allegiance, led Halkett to the base of a large tree where he remembered the bodies of two British officers had been left. There they found two skulls, one of which had distinctive dental work proving that it had belonged to Sir Peter Halkett. The other belonged to James. Father and son were solemnly buried in a traditional Scottish ceremony featuring a piper and drummer provided by Forbes’s own order.33 But Halkett’s departure had to wait. Forbes was too ill to write letters for him in his own hand, so he kept Frank with him until he should recover sufficiently to hold a quill. Nor was he well enough to stay for the expected Indian conference, which he left to Bouquet. On 4 December, after barely ten days at the Forks, John Forbes set out for Philadelphia.34

13

‘Brave without Ostentation’ John Forbes was carried, slowly, painfully, back over the mountains to die. Still anxious to do his duty, he worried continually about Indians, supplies, dispositions, horses. His dislike of Indians in general had deepened rather than abated, but he was even now able to separate the issues of justice and diplomatic necessity from personal feelings. ‘I hope’, he wrote to Bouquet, ‘with your address, you will soon get quit of the Indians as I really pity you as much as I detest them. However hope you will be able to make them easy, with regard to our just and Honle Intentions towards them’.1 In his last days he would strain to ensure that justice was done to the Ohio nations, even as he tried to see to the comfort and safety of his men and horses, to the garrisoning of the frontier and – all the more powerfully as he felt life slipping away – his reputation and rank. He feared the impact of his connection with Loudoun and of the Hay affair, not to mention what Sir John St Clair might make of his own part in the campaign. But the nagging worry, in his mind the most important issue, was to get the Indian problem settled quickly and on terms which both sides could respect. They took more than three weeks to cross Laurel Hill. Forbes was feeble and in pain, the road had been ploughed by hooves and boots and rutted by wheels, and the weather was turning nasty. Not until after dark on the night of 27 December, in a snowstorm, did the party reach what they all expected to be the relatively warm shelter of Tomhach camp and its hut. The hut was indeed there, but its chimney was unclayed and therefore unfit for use, and there was no burnable wood ready to make a fire outside. Forbes had to sit in the cold and swirling snow for over two hours, and it very nearly killed him. Yet even in this utmost distress, he was annoyed that there was no grain to feed the exhausted wagon horses, and immediately sent an express messenger to Stony Creek to see if any could be got there. He even kept in mind his promises to a Captain Provost who had been pressing Bouquet for an adequate reward for his services.2 Next day they crossed the Allegheny ridge, an effort which, coming after the first ordeal, should have prostrated him but instead put him into ‘tollerable spirits’. Yet, that evening, he had the energy to open an official letter being sent west by Armstrong to Bouquet and immediately countermanded some troop movements ordered by Armstrong – Highlanders who had been sent down the country had to be called back to Fort Bedford at Raestown.3 His condition and the weather improved a little as they descended to Fort Bedford, Fort Loudoun and Lancaster and thence by 18 January to Philadelphia, and in the absence of clear instructions from Amherst, he directed the Highlanders and Royal

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Americans into winter quarters. He took care of his regiment, writing to Amherst about Morris who was still trying to sell out and finding a purchaser for the commission of an ageing and worn-out captain.4 He communicated repeatedly with Bouquet over supplies of flour and hogs, hay and oats, the soldiers ‘clothing and winter shelter, the hiring of packhorses’. He did all this while drugged heavily against the pain. The man’s sense of duty was indefatigable, one might almost say obsessive.5 Most importantly, he was always conscious of the need for good, firm and sympathetic frontier management. As Forbes had hoped, Bouquet had satisfied the suspicious Ohio leaders for the time being, but only Amherst had the authority to permanently adjust relations with the Ohio Indians and to adjudicate between the competing claims of the three colonies. As he moved slowly and painfully downcountry to Philadelphia, which he reached by 14 January, he dictated letter after insistent and artful letter to Amherst, an old colleague but never a close friend, to press the need for the commander-in-chief ’s personal presence in Pennsylvania. His sense of urgency, honed by his personal resentment at being passed over, gave a sharp edge to some of his remarks. When Amherst pleaded complex business at New York, Forbes retorted, ‘If I don’t misjudge greatly, you have business here of fully as great consequence to look into, and give your orders about as any in North America.’ At the head of his list was ‘the Jealousy subsisting between the Virginians & Pennsylvanians’: as both were aiming to monopolize the Indian trade and the settlement of the Ohio country, a solid settlement of their disputes was necessary ‘as the preservation of the Indians, and that of the Country, Depends upon it’. Any delay would lose the fragile influence over ‘a Capricious avaritious barbarous priest rid people’, – he clearly thought French Catholic influence to be as widespread in the Ohio as it was around the St Lawrence and lower Great Lakes – especially as the French were still among them and as the force withdrawn from Fort Duquesne was at Venango and Presqu’Ile awaiting reinforcements. The French, he added, were prepared to give the Indians ‘tinsel Raiments’ and other frivolous but desirable presents, ‘none of which we have ever found openness of heart to give away’. In short, should Amherst delay, or fail in generosity, the enemy might win back their allies and recover their lost ground. When near the end of the month Amherst had still not committed himself, Forbes reprimanded him again: ‘perhaps I Did not explain fully the evident necessity of your presence on the Southern Colnys … ’.6 Frontier management apart, his deepest worry was over his reputation and his standing in the army. Until he reached Lancaster he was not well enough to release Frank Halkett to report to Amherst, a delay that brought an aggrieved protest from New York. Forbes finally dispatched him on 13 January, not merely as his messenger to the commander-in-chief but more importantly as his emissary to Pitt in London. Halkett carried with him a letter of introduction and recommendation to Bedford, containing a plea that His Grace intercede with Pitt. Forbes needed someone trustworthy with first-hand knowledge to explain direct to government what he had done and why he had done it. Amherst did not like that idea at all and thought the journey unnecessary but Forbes was persistent. While apologizing for the long delay, he let Amherst know that his opposition had ‘hurt me not a little’ and pleaded that there was no one ‘that could be employed upon this message proper to acquaint the ministry with matters of fact but Major Halkett

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who alone was the only person I had to trust But who Im afraid will make but a bad puff of an Ambassador at home’. At the end of the month Forbes, hearing from Halkett that he had missed a warship sailing to Britain, begged Amherst to use ‘all the assistance in your power in getting Major Halkett Dispatched for England instantly without one moments loss of time’. By February, Forbes knew from Halkett that St Clair, who had taken himself off to New York, was freely criticizing the conduct of the expedition, and was – ludicrously but threateningly – insisting that the quartermaster general had a right to succeed Forbes in command of the army. Halkett reported that Amherst was unimpressed, but Forbes nevertheless thought it best to set out his concerns in writing. On 7 February, he wrote what he called ‘a letter of sincerity’ to assure ‘My dear Jeffrey’ of his sincere attachment and to point out to ‘Dear Jeff ’ that his deeds could not be allowed to speak for themselves – ‘I was put upon my guard to call to mind The rock Loudoun hurt himself upon … ’ – and had therefore sent Halkett to London. When at last he heard that Amherst had sent Halkett to Britain ‘without any stop and the procuring of him a Ship’, his relief and gratitude were manifest.7 The old demands for money had not gone away and new ones were still coming in. Just staying in Philadelphia meant outgoings for rent, foods, fuel and servants. He was confronted with a bill for £31 13s from Samuel Smith of Compton Street, Soho, dating back to January 1756, for a tent and marquee.8 More significantly, he had had to pay out over £2,000 of public money to cover extraordinary expenses, including the entertaining and reconciliation of colonial politicians and the costs of the Indian negotiations; these payments, being unauthorized, he was now expected to meet personally. The moment he reached Philadelphia on the night of 17 January, he composed a memorial petitioning against the charge.9 In Philadelphia he continued to entreat Amherst to come to Pennsylvania, even putting aside his resentment over promotions sufficiently to play on their old acquaintance and to point out his fears for his own reputation. ‘You see My Dear Sir’, he wrote on 26 January, ‘that I wrote you without either Ceremony or Disguise as we have known one another a long time and were pretty much bred under the same masters’. These matters had risen higher in his thoughts as his own mortality loomed larger, but his mind kept returning to the nagging, insistent, crucial problem of the Indians: one which he was certain was ‘not generally understood, or if understood, perverted to purposes serving particular ends’ – not least Johnson’s ‘private interested views’. This issue – made all the more urgent by the appearance of a Native delegation at Philadelphia – was the real main subject of the letter to Amherst. ‘I Delayed hearing what those Indians had to say who came lately down’ he began, ‘still flattering myself that I might have the pleasure’ of the commanderin-chief ’s company. He dictated no less than five letters in less than three weeks, but to no avail.10 The family upsets that had distressed him hitherto faded into the back of his mind. A letter from Hugh brought the news that he had sold Loretto at a considerable loss in order to live with Arthur at Pittencrieff (allegedly to give Arthur ‘some degree of Credite & esteem’), but Arthur ‘wanted no such guests’.11 John was too ill to deal with matters so distant and so beyond his control and too preoccupied with worries much bigger and more urgent.

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By this time he was well aware that he was defending his posthumous reputation. He was so weak that he was unable to see the Indian delegation he had put off receiving against Amherst’s appearance: he had to be represented by James Grant the surgeon. On 13 February, he made his will, sadly brief, dividing all his worldly goods equally between Arthur and Hugh.12 There were of course few worldly goods to divide – a wagon and a cart, a couple of portmanteaus and a writing desk, a commode and a bedpan, bits of furniture and bedding, a couple of mosquito nets, seals, a gold watch chain and assorted trinkets, amounting to £43 10s in value – and little else in the way of assets apart from some back-pay. But there was much more in the way of unpaid debts – a confusion which would take the courts and Glen, his unfortunate executor, years of toil to untangle.13 Perhaps his last act as commander in the south was to order the striking of a campaign medal to be worn by all officers who had taken part. The Medal has on one side the representation of a Road cut thro an immense Forrest. Over Rocks, and mountains. The motto per tot Discrimina – on the other side are represented the confluences of the Ohio and Monongahela rivers, a fort in Flames in the forks of the rivers at the approach of General Forbes carried in a Litter, followed with the Army marching in Columns with Cannon. The motto Ohio Britannica Consilio manuque. This is to be worn round the neck with a dark blew ribbon – by the Genls command.14

The John Forbes who died on 11 March 1759, still worrying about his duty to the King and to the Indians, was released from overwhelming pain, physical weakness, family quarrels and distress and overwhelming personal debt. He did not have to be called a witness in the court martial which Lord Charles Hay demanded and got just before his own timely death in 1760. His public reputation, albeit a modest one, was secure – even Washington’s carping had turned to expressions of admiration – and just for a moment the Philadelphians made him into a hero.

Notes Introduction 1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

10

11

Pennsylvania Gazette, 15 March 1759. Ibid; ‘The Order for the Burial of the Dead’. The Book of Common Prayer. Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002); Matthew Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2003), esp. Chapter 6, 157–185. Pennsylvania Gazette, 15 March 1759. Jeremy Black, An Illustrated History of Eighteenth Century Britain, 1688–1793 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996), 61–72. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1070–1837 (Vintage, London, 1996); Stephen Conway, ‘War and National Identity in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Isles’, English Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 468 (September, 2001), 863–893; Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1750 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007). I am indebted to Robert L. D. Cooper, Curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, for this information. See, for example, Jerry White, London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing (The Bodley Head, London, 2012), 94–99. Stephen Conway, War, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century Great Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, New York, 2006); Matthew C. Ward, ‘Reluctant Imperialists? William Pitt, Pennsylvania and the First Global War’, Pennsylvania Legacies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (May 2005), 6–9. Lancelot Turpin de Crissé, Essai sur l’art de la guerre (Paris, 1754). The first English translation was Joseph Otway’s, An Essay on the Art of War, Translated from the French of Count Turpin de Crissé (London, 1761). John Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo Cherokee Frontier, 1756–1763 (Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001); John Oliphant, ‘The Cherokee Embassy to London, 1762’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 27, No. 1 (January 1999), 1–26; John Oliphant, ‘The Anglo-Cherokee War, 1759–1761’, in Mark H. Danley and Patrick J. Speelman (eds), The Seven Years’ War: Global Views (Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2012), 325–358.

Chapter 1 1

Ebenezer Henderson, The Annals of Dunfermline and Vicinity, from the Earliest Authentic Period to the Present Time, AD 1069–1878, Interspersed with Explanatory Notes, Memorabilia, and Numerous Illustrative Engravings (John Tweed, Glasgow, 1879), 369–371, 373.

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

26 27

28

Notes Ibid., 270. Duncan Warrand (ed.), More Culloden Papers, Vol. I: 162–1704 (Roger Curruthers and Sons, Inverness, 1923), 210–223. Ibid.; Old Parish Register Births, 098/0020 0360, 0373. Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk: Containing Memorials of the Men and Events of His Time (Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1861), 179. Henderson, Annals, 436. T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People (Fontana, London, 1985), 265–271. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London 1724–1726, Penguin edition, London, 1971), 574. Smout, Scottish People, 264. Carlyle, Autobiography, 179. Carlyle wrongly identifies Duncan as Hugh’s uncle. Henderson, Annals, 378–380. T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 (Allen Lane, London, 2003), Ch. 3 passim. Frank O’Gorman, Long Eighteenth Century (Hodder Arnold, London, 1997), 66–67; Henderson, Annals, 395–396. O’Gorman, Long Eighteenth Century, 67. Defoe, Tour, 627–628. Smout, Scottish People, 227–228. Henderson, Annals, 392. J. D. Mackie, A History of Scotland (Penguin, London, 1964, revised 1969), 288–292; Henderson, Annals, 392. Carlyle, Autobiography, 179. John Forbes to Hugh Forbes, Ghent, 13 June 1744, NLS Culloden, MS 2968, f. 357. Defoe, Tour, 628–629; John Stuart Shaw, The Political History of Eighteenth Century Scotland (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1999), 40. Jonathan Spain, ‘Hay, Lord Charles, of Linplum (1700?–1760)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb .com/view/article/12711, accessed 16 Aug 2013; R. S. Lea, ‘Hay, Lord Charles (c. 1700–60), of Linplum, East Lothian’. The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–1754, ed. R. Sedgwick, 1970, http://www.historyofparliamentonline .org/volume/1715-1754/member/hay-lord-charles-1700-60. Henderson, Annals, 429. Hugh Forbes to [Tweeddale], Edinburgh 3 July 1742, Yester Papers, National Library of Scotland, MS14421, f. 198. Hugh Forbes to [Tweeddale], Edinburgh, 3 July 1742, Ibid.; Braid, 24 August 1742, 24 May 1743, Ibid.; Edinburgh, 5, 9 July 1743, 24 MS Ibid., ff. 199, 205–206, 215, 224–225, 226; 25 January 1744; Ibid., MS 7060, f. 10; Tweeddale to Carteret, Whitehall, 31 May 1743, SP 54/23/53. Henderson, Annals, 372–376. George Edward Cockayne, Complete Baronetage Vol. IV (Exeter, 1904) 374. Available at http://archive.org/stream/cu31924092524408#page/n393/mode/2up; Francis Halkett to Pitt, Pitfaranne, 7 May 1759, Chatham Papers, PRO 30/8/39, ff. 39–40. William C. Lowe, ‘Lindsay, John, twentieth earl of Crawford and fourth earl of Lindsay (1702–1749)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16707 (accessed 15 September 2014); Richard Rolt, Memoirs of the Life of John Lindsay, Earl of Craufurd (London, 1753, JSGtesting, [USA] reprint edition, c. 2012).

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31 32

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34 35 36 37

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Mackie, Scotland, 294–295. Alasdair Raffe, ‘Presbyterians and Episcopalians: the Formation of Confessional Cultures in Scotland, 1660–1715’, English Historical Review, Vol. 125, No. 514 (June 2010), 570–598; Henderson, Annals, 371, 373. Dunfermline Kirk Session Minutes National Archives of Scotland, Digital Volumes, CH2/529/5. James J. Caudle, ‘James Boswell (H. Scoticus Londoniensis)’ in Stana Nenadic (ed.), Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century (Bucknel University Press, Lewisberg, 2010), 120–121. Douglas R. Cubbison, The British Defeat of the French in Pennsylvania: A Military History of the Forbes Campaign against Fort Duquesne (McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina and London, Kindle edition, 2010), location 3205. T. M. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 (Fontana, London, 1965), 270. Will of James Campbell, Prob 11/742. List of Officers in the Royal North British Dragoons, according to their Troops, 1727 n. d., SP 41/6. J. B. Paul, The Lowland Scots Regiments: Their Origin, Character and Services Previous to the Great War of 1914 (1918), 45–46; Original commission, RH4/86/1.

Chapter 2 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14

Charles Grant and Michael Youens, Royal Scots Greys (Osprey, Oxford, 1972), 1–9; Edward Almack, The History of the Second Dragoons: Royal Scots Greys (De La Mare Press, London, 1908), 2–4; Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603–1714 (Longman, London, 1980), Ch. 11, passim. Coward, The Stuart Age, Ch. 11, passim; Grant and Youens, Royal Scots Greys, 5. Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685–1720 (Kindle edition, Penguin, London, 2007), chs. 10 and 11, passim. Paul, Lowland Regiments, 44–45. O’Gorman, Long Eighteenth Century, 65–66; Coward, The Stuart Age, 438–439. O’Gorman, Long Eighteenth Century, 66–67. Paul, Lowland Regiments, 45–46. Ibid.; Percy Sumner, ‘Uniforms and Equipment of the Royal Scots Greys, Part 1-1678–1751’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, Vol. XV, No. 59 (Autumn 1936), 15–170. J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army 1715–1795 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981), 271–273. Marching orders, WO 5/28, 198, 247; WO 5/29, 53, 63, 86, 95, 112–114. Alan J. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army 1714–63 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1985), 20; http://www .thepeerage.com/p2046.htm#i20457; List of Officers in the Royal North British Dragoons, according to their Troops, 1727 n.d., SP 41/6. Stephen Brumwell, ‘Campbell, John, Fourth Earl of Loudoun (1705–1782)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004); online edn, Jan 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4516 (accessed 22 Dec 2010). Daily Journal (London), Thursday, 11 November 1731. Will of James Campbell, Prob 11/742.

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21 22

23 24

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26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Notes Arthur N. Gilbert, ‘Law and Honour among Eighteenth-Century British Army Officers’, Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No. I (March 1976) 75–87. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline, 37–38. Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (Harper Perennial, London, 2001), 95–97. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline, 92. Paul E. Kopperman, ‘The British Army in North America and the West Indies: A Medical Perspective’, in George. L. Hudson (ed.), British Naval and Military Medicine, 1600–1830 (Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2007), 55; Paul E. Kopperman, ‘Regimental Practice’ by John Buchanan, M.D.: An Eighteenth Century Medical Diary and Journal (Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, 2012), passim; Carlyle, Autobiography, 198. Original commission, John Forbes, North American Papers, RH4/86/1; Testament Dative and Inventory, CC8/8/119 Edinburgh Commissary Court, 9 August 1762, www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline, 57, 92 James Hayes, ‘Scottish Officers in the British Army 1714–63’, The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 37, No. 123, Part 1 (April 1958), 23–33; Brumwell, Redcoats, 87; Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815, 295. Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent, Saturday 29 February 1744, NLS LO MS 2520. David Stevenson, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals (Tuckwell Press, Berlin, Edinburgh, 2001) esp. Ch 1 passim; David Hopkin, ‘Folklore and the Historian’, Folklore, Vol. 112, No. 2 (October 2001), 221. Stevenson, Beggar’s Benison, Ch. 7, passim. For Monypenny’s reputation during the Seven Years’ War see William Amherst (Jeffrey’s brother) to James Grant, New York, 13 May 1761, Ballindalloch Muniments, Bundle 378. For Loudoun’s association with the Benison see Bute LO 2/25, 77, 93. Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent, Saturday 29 February 1744 OS, 23 January 1748, NLS LO MS 2520. Ibid. ‘Site of Nos. 25–34, Cockspur Street’, Survey of London: volume 16: St Martinin-the-Fields I: Charing Cross (1935), 146–149, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ report.aspx?compid=68126 (accessed 21 Apr 2014); John, Earl of Loudoun. A message and a small yard adjoining in the Privy Garden within Whitehall Palace, Exchequer: Pipe Office: Particulars, Warrants and Transcripts for Crown Leases. London and Middlesex 1734/ 1735, 1758.E 367/4386, E 367/6955, E 367/7199; Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and America (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006), 189 and n. 82; White, Eighteenth-Century London, 119–120. T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (Penguin, London, 1999), 23. Marching orders, 8 April, 5, 9, 11, 26 May (no day given), June 1737, WO 5/32, 392–3, WO 5/32, 426, 428, 439, 440, 452. Daily Post, Thursday 16 February 1738; Marching orders, 3 March 1738, WO 5/33, 31. Marching orders, 30 March, 25 April, 11 May 1738, WO 5/33, 82–85, 100. Marching orders, WO 5/33, 11 May 1738, 100. Houlding, Fit for Service, 65–66. Quoted in Houlding, Fit for Service, 65.

Notes 36

37

147

Houlding, Fit for Service, 66; Marching orders, WO 5/33, 7 December 1738, WO 5/34, 187–188; London Evening Post, 29–31 March 1739; London Daily Post and General Advertiser, Saturday, 21 July 1739. Houlding, Fit for Service, 399.

Chapter 3 1

2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20

21 22

23

Bernard Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire (Allen Lane, London, 2007), 68–70, 105–106; Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (Penguin, London, 2007), 554–556. M. S. Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession 1740–1748 (Longman, London, 1995), 11–16. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid.; Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat, 258–273. A. C. Atkinson, ‘Jenkins’ Ear, the Austrian Succession War and the ‘Forty-Five’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, Vol. XXII, No. 3 (Autumn 1944), 290–298. Return of officers incapable of service, 23 July 1741, SP 41/13/82. Anderson, Austrian Succession, 59–80. Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat, 289–294. Houlding, Fit for Service, 81–82. SP 41/13/48. Anderson, Austrian Succession, 86–87. Houlding, Fit for Service, tables 1–3, 109–110. Brumwell, ‘Loudoun’. O’Gorman, Long Eighteenth Century, 84. Anderson, Austrian Succession, 108–110; Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 1995), 101–102. Army List 1740; William Yonge, Secretary at War, to Secretary to the Rt. Hon. Lord Carteret, Secretary of State, Royal consent for commissions as lieuts to be issued to Forbes (vide Lt Dalrymple who retires) and Preston (Lt Wilkinson, retires War Office, 23 April 1742, SP 41/13/138); Forbes’s original commission, 23 April 1742, RH4/86/1. Marching orders, 9, 15, 18, 21 June, 2, 12, 14, 16 July 1742, WO 5/35, 257, 275, 281, 384, 390, 395, 397, 398, 403; London Evening Post, 19–24 June 1742; Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, Saturday, 26 June 1742. David Syrett, ‘Towards Dettingen: The Conveyancing of the British Army to Flanders in 1742’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, Vol. 84, No. 34 (Winter 2006), 316–326. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 295–296. R. Brown to Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Bruges, 26 August: OS 1742 OS, in Duncan Warrand (ed.) More Culloden Papers, Vol. III, 1725–1745 (Roger Curruthers and Sons, Inverness, 1927), 203–204. Browning, Austrian Succession, 101–105. Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army 1702–1770 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958), 63–66; Anderson, Austrian Succession, 101–105, 112–113; Browning, Austrian Succession, 102–110. John Forbes to Major Alexander Forbes, ‘Royal Scots Gray Dragons in Garrison at Oudenarde’, Ghent, 20 October 1742, NLS Culloden MS 2968, ff. 193–194.

148 24 25

Notes Kopperman, Regimental Practice’, 154–155 (275, 277, 278). Anderson, Austrian Succession, 110; J. Fortescue, History of the British Army, Vol. 2 (Macmillan, London, 1899), 86–87.

Chapter 4 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Whitworth, Ligonier, 68–69. Fortescue, British Army, 89–92; Whitworth, Ligonier, 69–71. Fortescue, British Army, 89–92; Whitworth, Ligonier, 71–73; Kopperman, Regimental Practice, 146 (265); Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Russell to his wife, Aschaffenburg, 15 June 1743 OS; HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley (HMSO, London, 1900), 248–249. Whitworth, Ligonier, 75. Fortescue, British Army, 92–93; Whitworth, Ligonier, 75. Stephen Brumwell, Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe (Hambelton Continuum, London, 2006), 27–28; Whitworth, Ligonier, 75. Fortescue, British Army, 97–99; Brumwell, Paths of Glory, 29–30. Brumwell, Paths of Glory, 31; Fortescue, British Army, 93. Whitworth, Ligonier, 77; Kopperman, Regimental Practice, 151 (271); Brumwell, Paths of Glory, 31–32. Brumwell, Paths of Glory, 32; Whitworth, Ligonier, 77–79. For the sick see the petition of John Ranby, Worms, September 20 NS 1743, SP 41/15, 256. Anderson, Austrian Succession, 117–122. Kopperman (ed.), Regimental Practice, 140 (252); Rolt, Craufurd, 89. Whitworth, Ligonier, 84–85; Browning, Austrian Succession, 172–173; Francis Henry Skrine, Fontenoy and Great Britain’s Share in the War of the Austrian Succession, 1741–1748 (Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1906), 95–96. Browning, Austrian Succession, 156–157. Forbes to Loudoun ‘Ghent’ Saturday 29 February 1744 OS, NLS Culloden MS 2520, ff. 65–66. Browning, Austrian Succession, 157–158. Skrine, Fontenoy, 94. Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent, 11 April 1744, NLS Culloden MS 2520. Browning, Austrian Succession, 158. Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent, 11 April 1744. Lieutenant Colonel Russell to his wife, Ghent, Wednesday 20 April 1744, Report on the Manuscripts of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley (HMSO, 1900), 306. Browning, Austrian Succession, 173. Ibid.; Skrine, Fontenoy, 97; Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent, 20 April NS, 1745 NLS Loudoun MS 2520. Browning, Austrian Succession, 174–178; Whitworth, Ligonier, 86–88.

Chapter 5 1 2

John Forbes to Hugh Forbes, Ghent, 13 May 1744, NLS Culloden, MS 2968, f. 257. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline, 13, 90–105.

Notes 3 4 5

6 7

8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

149

Ibid. Original commission, Captain in the North British Dragoons, Headquarters, Peteghem, 24 September 1744 OS; Vide George Mure RH4/86/1. Whitworth, Ligonier, 88; Sir James Campbell to Carteret, camp at Anstein, 22 September 1744, SP 87/15/66, f. 127; Carteret to Sir James Campbell, Whitehall, 15 September 1744, SP 87/15/67, f 128. Lt. Gen James Campbell to Loudoun, Beltonford, 12 February 1744/5 (1745) Huntington Loudoun Collection, Scottish Papers LO 11153. T. F. Henderson, ‘Home, William, Eighth Earl of Home (d. 1761)’, rev. Stuart Handley, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford), 2004. [http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13649, accessed 19 Sept 2014]; Forbes to Loudoun, ‘Ghent’ 29 February 1744 OS, Ghent, 20 April 1745, NLS Loudoun MS 2520. Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent, 20 April NS, 1745 NLS Loudoun MS 2520. Written response of the British and Hanoverian generals to the second council of war, recommending that the armies assemble in the environs of Brussels. Signed by Wade, Honeywood, Wendt, Sommerfeldt, Sir James Campbell, Ilten, Pauli, Albemarle and Rothes, SP 87/14/50, ff. 79, 80; J. Pringle, Observations on the Diseases of the Army (London, 1754), repr. Philadelphia 1812, 32. Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent, 20 April 1744 NS, NLS Loudoun MS 2520. Sir Everard Fawkener, ‘A Relation of the Action between the Allied Army and That of France Near Tournay the 11th of May 1745’, 15–17 May, 1745, SP 87/17/21; Skrine, Fontenoy, 141–157; [John Forbes] to Hugh [Forbes], Brussels, 16 May [1745], NLS Culloden MS 2969, f.1. [John Forbes] to Hugh [Forbes], Brussels, 16 May [1745], NLS Culloden MS 2969, f.1v. Skrine, Fontenoy, 50. Whitworth, Ligonier, 98; Skrine, Fontenoy, 149–150. Quoted in Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, The Military Life of Field Marshal George First Marquess Townshend, 1724-1807: Who Took Part in the Battles of Dettingen 1743, Fontenoy 1745, Culloden 1746, Laffeldt 1747, & in the Capture of Quebec 1759; from Gamily Documents not Hitherto Published (John Murray, London, 1901, reprinted 2010), 65. Rolt, Craufurd, 97. Evidence of Captain John Forbes to the court martial of Brigadier Ingoldsby, WO 87/17, ff. 289–290. [John Forbes] to Hugh [Forbes], Brussels, 16 May [1745], NLS Culloden MS 2969, f.1v. Evidence of Captain John Forbes to the court martial of Brigadier Ingoldsby, WO 87/17, ff. 289–290. Skrine, Fontenoy, 159–161. Evidence of Captain John Forbes to the court martial of Brigadier Ingoldsby, WO 87/17, ff. 289–290. Skrine, Fontenoy, 162–163. [John Forbes] to Hugh [Forbes], Brussels, 16 May [1745], NLS Culloden MS 2969, f.1v; Kopperman, Regimental Practice, 149–151 (269, 270, 271). Skrine, Fontenoy, 163; Townshend, Military Life, 60; Whitworth, Ligonier, 100. Quoted in Rolt, Craufurd, 97. Ibid. Whitworth, Ligonier, 100–101.

150 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

Notes Skrine, Fontenoy, 167. Whitworth, Ligonier, 101; Skrine, Fontenoy, 169–171. Skrine, Fontenoy, 171–178. Skrine, Fontenoy, 178–180. Whitworth, Ligonier, 103. [John Forbes] to Hugh [Forbes], Brussels, 16 May [1745], NLS Culloden MS 2969, f. 2. Pringle, Observations, 32–33. [John Forbes] to Hugh [Forbes], Brussels, 16 May [1745], Forbes of Culloden Papers MS 2969. Rolt, Craufurd, 102. Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent, 16 May 1745, NLS LO MS 11518. [John Forbes] to Hugh [Forbes], Brussels, 16 May [1745], NLS Culloden MS 2969. Ibid. Ibid. Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent 16 May 1745, LO 11518. [Richard Ingoldsby], Remarks on the Case of the Hon. Brigadier General Ingoldsby, in Relation to the Battle of Fontenoy, in a Letter by a Gentleman to His Friend in the Country (London, 1745); General Evening Post, 4–6 June 1745; London Evening Post, 4–6 June 1745; Daily Gazetteer, 5, 6, 18 June 1745; General Advertiser, 18 June 1745; St. James’s Evening Post, 2–4 July 1745. Original commission, Deputy Quarter Master General under Stair and Lieutenant Colonel of Foot in the Army, 24 December 1745 John Forbes, North American Papers, RH4/86/1; Original commission, Major and troop captain in the North British Dragoons, 3 February 1746, Ibid.

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Browning, Austrian Succession, 219–221; Christopher Duffy, The ’45 (Cassell, London, 2003), 213–217, Whitworth, Ligonier, 107–111; Skrine, Fontenoy, 209–287. Forbes to Loudoun. Breda, 23 January 1748, NLS LO MS 2520, ff. 112–113. N.A.M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, 1718–1792 (HarperCollins, London, 1993), 40–41. Whitworth, Ligonier, 120–121; Jonathan Spain, ‘Sinclair, James (1687/8–1762)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004); online edn, Oct 2007, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25622 (accessed 20 Oct 2014). Forbes to Loudoun, London 3 June 1746, Huntington LO 11520. Whitworth, Ligonier, 120–126. Ibid., 127–131. Ibid., 132–137. Skrine, Fontenoy, 210–213; Whitworth, Ligonier, 137–142. Whitworth, Ligonier, 142–143. Rodger, Insatiable Earl, 85. W.A.J. Archbold, ‘Keith, Robert (c.1697–1774),’ rev. R. D. E. Eagles, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.) (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15271 (accessed 22 Dec 2010); Rodger, Insatiable Earl, 85.

Notes 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Walter Scott to Admiralty, Leith, 20 June 1747, ADM 106/1050/153. Whitworth, Ligonier, 150. Ibid., 150–153. Ibid., 153–154. Ibid., 154–155. Skrine, Fontenoy, 331–332, 335–366; Browning, Austrian Succession, 316–321; Forbes to Loudoun, Breda, 9 February 1748 NLS MS 2520, ff. 114–115. Quoted in Whitworth, Ligonier, 155–156. Whitworth, Ligonier, 155–156; Account dated 20 July 1747, Broun-Lindsay Papers NRAS 2383/3 Bundle 210. Russell to his wife, Breda, 2 December 1748, HMC Report, 406–407. Albemarle to Cumberland, Breda, 4 January 1748, enclosing Forbes to Albemarle, Breda 4 January 1748 (docketed Dec. 1747), Cumberland Papers, Box 30/312, 313. Forbes to Loudoun, Breda, 23 January 1748, NLS LO MS 2520. Ibid. Russell to his wife, Breda, 2, 8 December 1747, HMC Report, 406–408. Russell to his wife, Breda, Sunday 6, Sunday 13 December 1747; Ibid., 406–407, 408. Hays, ‘Scottish Officers’, 29–30. Forbes to Loudoun, Breda, 9 February 1747, NLS LO 2520. Ibid. Ibid. Forbes to Loudoun, Breda, 16 February 1748, NLS LO MS 2520. Whitworth, Ligonier, 165. Browning, Austrian Succession, 358–363. O’Gorman, Long Eighteenth Century, 90–101. Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 24–27 December 1748; General Advertiser, Tuesday 27 December 1748; Penny London Post or the Morning Advertiser (London, England), 13–15 January 1749.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

151

Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 24 December–27 December 1748; General Advertiser, Monday 27 November 1749. Forbes to Loudoun, Chichester, 24 February [1752], Bute LO 2/61/45, 46. Marching Orders, 18 September 1751, WO 5/42, 65 Forbes to Loudoun, Chichester, 24 February [1752], Bute LO 2/61/45, 46. Marching Orders, 20 March 1752, WO 5/42, 16. Forbes to Loudoun, Chichester, 5 March 1751, Bute LO 2/61/46. Forbes to Loudoun, London, 20 April 1752, Bute LO 2/71/50; Shaw, The Political History, 64; Read’s Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, Saturday 16 May 1752. Forbes to Loudoun, Edinburgh, 24 June 1752, Bute LO 2/71/51. Rodger, Insatiable Earl, Ch. IV, passim. John Forbes to Lord Charles Hay, Dorchester, 25 November 1751, NLS Yester MS 7052, f. 27. Preston to John Forbes, Bristol, 11 June 1753, GD 45/2/3/17. A. J. B. Johnston, Endgame 1758: The Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of Louisbourg’s Last Decade (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2007), 66.

152 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36

Notes Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 24–29; Michael N. McConnell A Country between: the Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples 1724–1774 (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1997), 89–95. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 29–35. Ibid., 36–38. John Forbes to Hugh Forbes, Manchester, 17 October 1754; Alfred P. James, The Writings of General John Forbes Relating to His Service in America (Collegiate Press, Menasha, 1938), 1–2. John Forbes to Lord Charles Hay, Manchester, 25 November 1754, NLS Yester MS 7062, f. 35. Letters from George Preston, GD 45/2/3. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (Faber, London, 2000), Ch. 9, passim. Stana Nenadic, ‘Military Men, Businessmen, and the “Business” of Patronage in Eighteenth century London’, in Stana Nenadic (ed.), Scots in London, 236. Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1933), 40–42. Ibid., 61–67; Alexander V. Campbell, The Royal American Regiment: An Atlantic Microcosm (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2010), 15–29. John Forbes, unsigned memorandum [to Cumberland], n.d., RH4/8; Forbes to Cumberland, no place, n.d., John Forbes North American Papers RH 4/86/2; Forbes to Bedford, Forbes to [Bedford], (draft), no place, n.d., RH 4/86/2. John Forbes, Memorandum [to Cumberland], n.d., Ibid; Forbes to [Bedford], (draft), no place, n.d., Ibid; Forbes [to Cumberland], no place, n.d., Ibid. Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat, 417. Colonel Forbes’s Report of the Coasts &c of Kent, Sussex &c 1756, Cumberland Papers, Box 46/121–122, MFR 678, Reel 71. Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Byng, John (bap. 1704, d. 1757)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, Jan 2008, http://www .oxforddnb.com/view/article/4263 (accessed 15 Feb 2014). Brian Tunstall, Admiral Byng and the Loss of Minorca (Philip Allan, London, 1928), still provides a solid fulllength study. Calcraft to Loudoun, Holwood Hill, July 1756, Bute LO 2/96/11. Wood, In the Finest Tradition, 31. Return of troops raising, Cumberland Papers, Box 46/203, MFR 678, Reel 71. Michael Blacklock, The Royal Scots Greys (the 2nd Dragoons) (Leo Cooper, London, 1971), 35. Bedford to John Forbes, Bath, 24 October 1756, GD 45/2/66. William Forbes to Hugh Forbes, [Leith?] 16 August 1756, Hugh Forbes to John Forbes, Loretto, 18 August 1756, John Forbes North American Papers, RH4/86/2; Hugh Forbes to John Forbes, Loretto, 28 August 1756, RH4/86/1. Preston to Forbes, Salisbury, 20 October 1756, Forbes to Preston, Blandford, 28 October 1756, GD 45/2/3/21, 22. Hugh Forbes to John Forbes, Loretto, 28 August 1756, RH4/86/1; John Forbes to Hugh Forbes, ‘St. Helen’s Road, Just Sailing’, 17 March 1757, James, Writings of Forbes, 3–4. Home to Forbes, London, 15 December, 1756, Broun-Lindsay Papers, NRAS 2383/3/ Bundle 210. Home to Forbes, London 29 December, 1756, London 18 January 1757, John Forbes North American Papers RH4/86/2; Home to Forbes, 27 January 1757, Broun-Lindsay

Notes

37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48

49 50

51

153

Papers, NRAS 2383/3/Bundle 210; Rigby to Forbes, Woburn Abbey, 5 January 1757, Ibid.; Roland Thorne, ‘Rigby, Richard (1722–1788)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn., Jan 2008, http://www .oxforddnb.com/view/article/23647 (accessed 23 September 2012); A. A. Hanham, ‘Baron Melcombe (1690/91–1762)’, Ibid., http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/7752 (accessed 23 September 2012). General John Campbell to Forbes [London], 3 February 1757, GD 45/10/6. John Campbell to Forbes, London, 5 February 1757, Broun-Lindsay Papers NRAS 2383/3. Brumwell, Paths of Glory, 125–126. Anderson, Crucible of War, 179. London Evening Post (London, England), 1–3 February 1757. Rigby to Bedford, Leicester Fields, 3 February 1757, in Duke of Bedford (ed.), Correspondence of John, Fourth Duke of Bedford: Selected from the Originals at Woburn Abbey (Longman, London, 1843), 231. John Campbell to Forbes, [London], ‘Wednesday Ev, Past 9’, 23 February 1757, Broun-Lindsay Papers NRAS 2328/3/Bundle 210. ‘Howe, George Augustus, third Viscount Howe (1724?–1758)’, Stephen Brumwell in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford), online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13953 (accessed October 29, 2012). Ligonier to Loudoun, 14 March 1757, Huntington LO, quoted in Whitworth, Ligonier, 213. Forbes to Loudoun, Portsmouth, 10 March 1757, Huntington LO 3006. Kate to Loudoun, 27 February 1757, Bute LO 2/101/76. John (‘Jock’) Forbes to John Forbes, ‘St. Edmunds Bury’, Suffolk, 26 March 1758, GD 45/1/91/1: Hugh Forbes to John Forbes, Edinburgh, 24 March 1757, Broun-Lindsay Papers, Bundle 210. Forbes to Loudoun, Portsmouth, 10 March 1757, Huntington LO 3006. Richard Cavendish, ‘The Execution of Admiral Byng’, History Today, Vol. 57, No. 3 (2007), http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/execution-admiral-byng is a convenient very brief summary. The best study of Byng is still, Tunstall, Admiral Byng. Barrington to Hay, War Office, 21 February 1757, Huntington LO 2876; John Knox, An Historical Journal of the Campaigns in North America, for the Years 1757, 1758, 1759 and 1760: Containing the Most Remarkable Occurrences of That Period: Particularly the Two Sieges of Quebec, &c. &c., the Orders of the Admirals and General Officers (London, 1769), 5.

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4

Pargellis, Lord Loudoun, 240. I am indebted to Mr Gregory Baginski, consultant psychiatrist with the National Health Service, for this assessment. Lord Charles Hay to Tweeddale [31 May 1745 NS], NLS Yester MS 7081. Hay to Tweeddale, Ath, 17, 22, 24 May 1745, Ibid.; Kopperman, ‘Regimental Practice’, 181 (321) and n. 371; H. A. L. Howell, ‘The Story of the Army Surgeon and the Care of the Sick and Wounded in the British Army, from 1715 to 1748’, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 22 (1914), 458; Pringle, Observations, 35.

154 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Notes Hay to Tweeddale, Ath, 17, 22, 24 May 1745, NLS Yester MS 7081. Quoted in Spain, ‘Hay’, ODNB. St. James’s Evening Post, 26 October 1745: ‘On Thursday Night, Lord Charles Hay Was Taken Ill at His House in Grosvenor Square and Continues So’; Annals, 30 December 1745, Alexander Hume Campbell to his brother Hugh, Earl of Marchmont, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Polwarth, 5, HMC, 67 (1961). Jonathan R. Dull, The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2005), 78–80. Forbes to Loudoun, Portsmouth, 10 March 1757, Huntington LO 3006. Pitt to Loudoun, Whitehall, 17 July 1757, original with a copy attested ‘A True Copy’ by Hopson, Huntington LO 3964 A and B. Dull, French Navy, 78–81; John Knox, An Historical Journal of the Campaigns in North America for the Years 1757, 1758, 1758 and 1760: Containing the Most Remarkable Occurrences of That Period: Particularly the Two Sieges of Quebec, &c. &c., the Orders of the Admirals and General Officers (London, 1769), 6–8. Julian Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War, Vol. I (Kindle edition, Pickle Partners, 2013), locations 2690–2735; Knox, Historical Journal, 17–18. Christopher French, ‘The Journals of Christopher French’, Library of Congress Mss 17, 453, Volume I, 74–75; Knox, Historical Journal, 15–16, 20, 29–30. Forbes to Major General Hopson, 15 July 1757, LO 3949. W. W. Webb, “Saunders, Richard Huck- (1720–1785),” rev. Jeffrey S. Reznick, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (OUP, Oxford, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb .com/view/article/24703 (accessed 7 February 2014); Huck to Forbes, New York, 7 November 1757, GD 45 2/23/1. Christopher French, ‘Journals’, 76, 77. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun, 240–241. Evidence enclosed with Loudoun to Holdernesse, New York, 1 September 1757, Cumberland Papers. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun, 241. A copy of the minutes of the council of war is at WO 34/101/181. Knox, Historical Journal, 23. Loudoun to Holdernesse, Halifax, 5 August 1757 (copy), NLS Yester, MS 7089. Hay, ‘Narrative relating to my being put under Arrest by the Adjutant General on Saturday August the 6t betwixt Nine & Ten at Night’, NLS Yester Papers MS 7089, f. 38. Hay, ‘Narrative’, f. 38. Hay ‘Narrative’, f. 38. BL Add. 35894, ff. 28–39. The court martial proceedings are in the Hardwicke Papers at BL Add. 35894, ff. 28–39. Hay, ‘Narrative’, f. 38. Ibid., 38v. Ibid., 38 v–39; Knox, Historical Journal, 24. French, ‘Journals’, Tuesday 16 August 1758. George Ross to Forbes, Conduit Street, London, 10 November 1757, GD 45 2/20/4; Hay to Cumberland, Halifax, 18 September 1757 (copy), Yester Papers 7089. Alexander Murray to Forbes, Halifax, 10, 24 October 1757, GD 45 2/25/1, 2 Alexander Murray to Forbes, Halifax, 7 February 1758, GD 45 2/25/3 Alexander Murray to Forbes, Halifax, 24 October 1757, GD 45 2/25/2; Hopson to Forbes, Halifax, 25 December 1757, GD 45/2/32/32.

Notes 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

155

Barrington to Hay, War Office, 5 September 1757 (Duplicate) NLS Yester MS 7082, f. 142. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun, 335–357. Quoted in Ibid., 338. London Evening Post, 20–24 September 1757; Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle 23–26 September, 21–24 October 1757. George Ross to Forbes, Conduit Street, 13 August 1757, GD 45/2/20/1. Brumwell, Paths of Glory, 131–136. George Ross to Forbes, Conduit Street, 10 September 1757, 10 November, GD 45/2/20/2, 4.

Chapter 9 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13 14

15 16

Forbes to Bouquet, Philadelphia, 27 June 1758, Forbes to Abercromby, Philadelphia 27 June 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 125, 127. French, ‘Journals’, 76–85. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun, 201–202. Loudoun to Holdernesse, docketed ‘at sea’ in August 1757 (copy), Bute LO 2/101/4. Forbes’ draft is preserved as an insert. The papers actually sent are enclosed with Loudoun to Holdernesse, New York, 1 September 1757, Cumberland Papers; Forbes to [Ligonier], New York, October 1757–February 1758, RH 4/86/2. Forbes to [Ligonier], New York, October 1757–February 1758, RH 4/86/2. Arthur Morris to Forbes, Albany, 11 September 1757, GD 45/2/21/1; French, ‘Journals’, 1, 85–96. Arthur Morris to Forbes, Fort Edward, 19 September 1757, GD 45/21/2. Daniel K. Richter, ‘Johnson, Sir William, First Baronet (1715?–1774)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, Jan 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14925 (accessed 31 Oct 2014): Finlan O’Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (Faber, London, 2005), esp. Ch.18. Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 1675–1815 (UCL Press, London, 1998), 1–3; Anderson, Crucible of War, 156–157. Julia Osman, ‘Pride, Prejudice and Prestige: French officers in North America during the Seven Years’ War’, in Mark H. Danley and Patrick J. Speelman (eds.), The Seven Years’ War: Global Views (Brill, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2012), 193–200. Brumwell, Redcoats, 22; Anderson, Crucible of War, 219. John Dingwall to Forbes, St James’s Street, London, 26 April 1757, John Forbes North American Papers RH 4/86/2; The declaration of James Ayton of the estate of John Forbes, ‘sworn 1 December 1760’, PROB 31/448/51. Ayton’s trade can be confirmed from Forbes to Loudoun, Ghent 16 May 1745, Huntington LO 11518. Forbes to [Ligonier], New York, October 1757–February 1758, RH 4/86/2. Arthur Forbes to John Forbes, Pittencrieff, 17 December 1756, 25 March 1757. Broun-Lindsay Papers NRAS 2383/3 Bundle 210; Daniel Forbes to Arthur Forbes, Kingston on Hudson’s River, 5 December 1757. Daniel Forbes to Arthur Forbes, Kingston on Hudson’s River, 5 December 1757. Forbes to [Ligonier], New York, October 1757–February 1758, RH 4/86/2; ‘Scroll of Instructions for Lord Howe’, New York, December, 1757, James, Writings of Forbes, 18–19.

156 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Notes Forbes to [Ligonier], New York, December 1757, RH 4/86/2. Forbes to Loudoun, New York, 19 February 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 45–46: Forbes to [Ligonier], New York, October 1757–February 1758, RH 4/86/2. Forbes to Loudoun, 14 February 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 43. Forbes to Loudoun, 19 February 1758, Ibid., 45–46. Anderson, Crucible of War, 222–225. Forbes to Loudoun, New York, 27 February 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 48. Anderson, Crucible of War, 209; Mante, Late War, 104. Hugh Wallace to Forbes, New York, 25, 27 April 1758, GD 45 2/31/3, 4. James Masterton to Forbes, Dublin, 5 January 1758, GD 45 2/32/37. James Abercromby to Forbes, New York, 16 January 1758, GD 45/2/39/4; Richard Huck to Forbes, Hertford [Connecticut], 22 February 1758, GD 45/2/23/2. Forbes to Loudoun New York, 10, 21 December, 3, 4, 5, 15, 27 February 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 21, 27, 39, 40, 45, 48; Forbes to [Ligonier], New York, December 1757, RH 4/86/2; ‘Directions for General Forbes’, n.d. GD 45/2/77; Paul E. Kopperman, ‘The Medical Dimension of the Braddock and Forbes Expeditions’, Pennsylvania History, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Summer 2004), 257–283, esp. 262, suggests he was bedridden. Alexander Murray to Forbes, Halifax, 10 October, 7 February 1757, GD 45/2/25/1,3; Arthur Morris to Forbes, Albany, 13 December 1757, GD45/2/21/10; Robert Mowbray to Forbes, Charleston, South Carolina, 10 December 1757, GD 45/2/22/37; John Darby to Forbes, Albany, 18 December 1757, GD 45/2/32/26; P. Burton to Forbes, London, 14 March 1757 GD45/2/32/2; Unsigned memorandum concerning Gage’s proposed regiment [c. December 1758] and unsigned memorandum concerning operations in North America, RH 4/86/2; Forbes to [Loudoun], New York, 10 December 1757, James, Writings, 23; Brumwell, Redcoats, 59, 228–229. Murray to Forbes, Halifax, 14 February 1758, GD 45/2/25/4. Anderson, Crucible of War, 259–260; Forbes to Loudoun, New York, 4 February 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 37–39. Plan of operations on the Mississippi, Ohio &c (draft) n.d., John Forbes North American Papers RH 4/86/2. Ross to Forbes, Conduit Street [London], 10 November, 10 December 1757, GD 45/210/4, 5. Forbes to Loudoun, New York, 4 March 1757, Proctor, Writings of Forbes, 54–55. Colley, Britons, 132–133. Brumwell, Redcoats, Chapter 6, passim. Anderson, Crucible of War, 233–236. George Ross to Forbes, Conduit Street [London], 30 December 1757, 9 January 1758, GD45 2/20/6,7a. Invoice dated 12 April, GD 45/2/69/4.

Chapter 10 1 2 3

Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 April 1758. Forbes to Loudoun, Philadelphia, 23 April 1758, Huntington LO 5813. Forbes to Abercromby, Philadelphia, 20 April 1758, RH4.86; Memorial to the Lords of the Treasury, Philadelphia 18 January 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 65, 281.

Notes 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32

157

Forbes to Sharpe, Philadelphia, 2, 12, 25 May 1758; ibid., 79, 80, 99. Forbes to Loudoun, Philadelphia, 23 April 1758, Huntington LO 5813; Abercromby, [Philadelphia] 20, 22 April 1758 AB 175,185. Forbes to Abercromby, Philadelphia, 24 April 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 72. Forbes to Sharpe, [New York, 4 April, 1758], ibid., 64; Forbes to Abercromby, [Philadelphia, 22 24 April, 1 May 1758], AB 185, 198 221. Oliphant, Cherokee Frontier, Chapter 1 passim. David B. Trimble, ‘Christopher Gist and the Indian Service in Virginia, 1757–1759’, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 64, No. 2, (April 1956), 145, 147; Oliphant, Peace and War, 49. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 166–167; Forbes to Abercromby, Carlisle, 9 July 1758, AB 428. Johnson to Denny (copy), Fort Johnson, 21 July 1758, John Forbes North American Papers RH 4/86/2. Forbes to Denny, Philadelphia, 20 April 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 66–67. Forbes to Abercromby, 24 April 1758, AB 198. Forbes to Denny, Philadelphia, 21 April, 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 67; Forbes to Abercromby, Philadelphia, 22 April 1758, AB 185. Forbes to Abercromby, Philadelphia, 22 April 1758, AB 185. Forbes to Denny, Philadelphia, 21 April 1758, Proctor, Writings of Forbes; Forbes to Abercromby, Philadelphia, 22 April 1758, AB 155. Forbes to Johnson, Philadelphia, 4 May 1758, Johnson Papers, 9, 898; Forbes to Abercromby, Philadelphia, 4 May 1758, AB 230. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 165–166. Campbell, Royal American Regiment, 53, 158. Bosomworth to Loudoun, Williamsburg, 23 February 1758, Huntington LO 5651. Bosomworth to Forbes, 8 April 1758, John Forbes North American Papers RH 4/86/1; Abercromby to Forbes, New York, 25 April 1758; ibid. Forbes to Bouquet, Carlisle, 17 July 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 150; West is identified from the accounts submitted by Bosomworth at RH 4/86/1. See also Cubbison, Defeat of the French, Appendix A; locations 4065–4230. Forbes to Bouquet, Philadelphia, 27 June 1758, BP 2, 135–137, BL Add 21640, f. 70. Glen to Forbes, South Carolina 29 March 1758, GD 45 /2//44/1. Oliphant, Peace and War, Chapter 1 passim; Forbes to Bouquet, [Philadelphia, 10 June 1758], James, Writings of Forbes, 112. Byrd to James Glen, Winchester, 23 June 1758, GD 45/2/44/3b; Byrd to Forbes, Keowee, 30 April 1758, John Forbes North American Papers RH 4/96/2; Byrd to Keowee Lyttelton, ‘1 May 1758’ in Marion Tinling (ed.), The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia 1684–1776 Volume II (University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 1977), 550–651. Forbes to Pitt, Philadelphia, 17 June 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 118. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 129–132. Loudoun to Johnson, New York, 16 January 1758, LO 5410. Forbes to Abercromby, [Philadelphia] 22 April, 7 June 1758, AB 185; Abercromby to Forbes, 4 May 1758, WO 34/44, f. 213; Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 163–163, 167–168. Forbes to Israel Pemberton, [Philadelphia] Wednesday evening, 31 May 1758, Friendly Association Papers HC11-21147_01. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 162–163.

158

Notes

33 34 35

Ibid., 164–165. Forbes to Abercromby, [Philadelphia, 15 June 1758], AB 356. Forbes to bouquet, [Philadelphia], 16 June 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 115; Forbes to Loudoun, Philadelphia, 17 June 1758, LO 5853; Forbes to Abercromby, Philadelphia, [27] June 1758, AB 319.

Chapter 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

Forbes to Bouquet, Philadelphia, 27 June 1758, BP 2, 136; Brumwell, Redcoats, 197–198. Forbes to Stanwix, Philadelphia, 29 May 1758 (copy), WO 34/35, f. 7; Forbes to Abercromby, Philadelphia, 7 June 1758, AB 334. Forbes to Loudoun, Philadelphia, 17 June 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 120. Halkett to Bouquet, Carlisle, 23, 31 July 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 154, 161. Halkett to Bouquet, Carlisle, 7 August 1758, BP 2, 322. Forbes to Bouquet, Carlisle, 9 August 1758; Glen to Forbes, Raestown, 8 August 1758, RH 4/86/2. Forbes to Abercromby, Carlisle, 4 [August] 1758, AB 501. Forbes to Peters, Shippensburg, 28 August [1758]; James, Writings of Forbes, 193. Forbes to Abercromby, Shippensburg, 4 September 1758, AB 610. Forbes to Pemberton, Fort Loudoun, 9 September 1758, Friendly Association Papers, HC11-22o72_01. Forbes to Pitt, Carlisle, 10 July 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 141, CO 5/50, 583–587. Forbes to Bouquet, Carlisle, 23 July 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 156–157. Rhor’s report on the road, [c.31 July 1758], BP 2, 294. Forbes to Bouquet, Carlisle, 14 July 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 145. Forbes to Bouquet, Carlisle, 23 July 1758; ibid., 156. Washington to Halkett, 2 August 1758, Theodore J. Crackel (ed.) The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, ed. (University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, Charlottesville, FL, 2008). http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu.ezproxy.londonlibrary .co.uk/founders/default.xqy?keys=GEWN-print-02-05-02-0284&mode=deref Forbes to Bouquet, Carlisle, 9 August 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 170–171. Forbes to Abercromby, Carlisle, 11 August 1758, AB 527. Bouquet to Washington, Bouquet to Forbes, Raestown 31 July 1758; Bouquet to Washington, [Raestown, c. 9 August 1758], BP 2, 291,343. Forbes to Bouquet, Raestown, 17 September 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 212–214. Cubbison, Defeat of the French, locations 406–417. Forbes to Pitt, Fort Loudoun, 6 September 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 205. Forbes to Bouquet, Carlisle, 14, 23 July 1758; Halkett to Bouquet, 31 July 1758; Forbes to Abercromby, Carlisle, 3, 7 August 1758; ibid., 146, 158, 161, 167–169. Forbes to Abercromby, Carlisle, 11 August 1758; ibid., 173. Forbes to Pitt, Fort Loudoun, 6 September 1758; ibid., 204–205; Forbes to Sharpe, New York 21 March, Philadelphia 2, 12, 25 May, 20 June 1757; ibid., 79, 90, 99, 123; Forbes to Pitt, Philadelphia, 17 June 1758; ibid., 117. Forbes to Bouquet, Shippensburg, 18 August, 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 180. Forbes to Bouquet, Raestown, 17 September 1758; ibid., 212. Forbes to Abercromby, Shippensburg, 4 September 1758, AB 610; Forbes to Pitt, Fort Loudoun, 6 September 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 202–206.

Notes

159

Chapter 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Paul David Nelson, General James Grant: Scottish Soldier and Governor of East Florida (University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 1993), 6–16. Halkett to Bouquet, Carlisle, 10 August 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 172; Forbes to Abercromby, Carlisle, 11 August 1758, AB 527. Oliphant, Cherokee Frontier, 59–60 and Chapters 4–6 passim. Forbes to Bouquiet, Shippensburg, 28 August 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 189. Nelson, James Grant, 19. Ibid., 1, 10. Forbes to Bouquet, Raestown, 23 September 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 219; Forbes to Abercromby, Raestown, 8 October 1758, AB 736. Nelson, James Grant, 21–22. Forbes to Abercromby, Raestown, 21 September 1758, AB 709; Forbes to Bouquet, Raestown, 23 September 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 220. Forbes to Abercromby, Raestown, 21 September 1758, AB 709. Forbes to Bouiquet, Raestown, 23 September, 10 October 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 220, 228; Forbes to Abercromby, Raystown, 8 October 1758, AB 736. Grant to Abercromby, Raestown, 21 September, 16 October 1758, AB 709. Forbes to Bouquet, Raestown, 23 September, 15 October 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 220–221, 229–230. Stephen to Washington, Loyalhannon, 9 September 1758, George Washington. Papers; Forbes to Bouquet, Raestown, 23 September 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 219–220. Forbes to Bouquet, Raestown, 23 September 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 219–220. Forbes to Abercromby, Raestown, 8 October 1758, AB 736. Ibid.; Forbes to Bouquet, Raestown, 10 October 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 228. Forbes to Abercromby, Raestown, 16 October 1758, AB 767; Forbes to Pitt, Raestown, 20 October 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 237–239. James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (Norton, New York, 1999), 65. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 178–182. Ibid.; Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung 1700–1763 (Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York, 1949), Chapter XV, passim. Forbes to the Shawnees and Delawares on the Ohio, 9 November 1758, Forbes to Kings Beaver and Shingas, 9 November 1758, James, Writings of Forbes, 251–253. Forbes to Abercromby, Raestown, 24 October 1758, AB 788; Forbes to Bouquet, Raestown, 25 October 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 248. Forbes to Abercromby, Raestown, 21 September 1758, AB 709; Kopperman, ‘Forbes Expedition’, 262–263. Forbes to Abercromby, Raestown, 16, 24 October 1758, AB 767, 788; Forbes to Peters, Raestown, 16 October 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 235–236. Forbes to Burd, New Camp, 20 miles west of Loyalhannon, 19 November 1758; ibid., 256. Ibid.; Oliphant, Cherokee Frontier, 67. Forbes to Burd, ‘New Camp, 20 miles west of Loyal Hannan’, 19 November 1758, Writings of Forbes, 256–258; Bosomworth to Forbes, Raestown, 7 December 1758, GD 54/2/89/2; Attakullakulla to William Henry Lyttelton, Governor of South Carolina, 20 March 1759, Lyttelton Papers, Reel 2.

160 29

30 31

32 33

34

Notes Washington to Fauquier, camp at fort Duquesne, 28 November 1758, Washington Papers Colonial series Volume 6; Forbes to Abercromby, ‘Fort Duquesne Now Pittsburgh’ 26 November 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 262. Cubbison, Defeat of the French, locations 3665–3721. Forbes to Abercromby and Amherst, ‘Fort Duquesne Now Pittsburgh’, 26 November 1758, Forbes to Denny, ‘Fort Duquesne, or Now Pittsburgh’ 26 November 1758; Forbes to Pitt, Pittsburgh, 27 November and Philadelphia, 21 January 1759; James, Writings of Forbes, 262–265, 267–269. James, Writings of Forbes, 262–265, 267–269. ‘Letter from General Forbes’ Army’, Pittsburgh, 28 November 1758. Pennsylvania Gazette, 14 December 1758, reprinted in BP 2., 613–614; Cubbison, Defeat of the French, locations 3653–3665. Forbes to Bouquet, Bouqet Camp, 4 December 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 270.

Chapter 13 1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13

Forbes to Bouquet, Bouquet Camp, 7 at night, 4 December 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 270. Halkett to Bouquet, Tombach Camp, 28 December 1758, 4 December 1758, ‘7 at night’; ibid. Armstrong to Bouquet, Fort Bedford, 27 December 1758, BP 2, 646–647; Halkett to Bouquet, ‘Camp at the foot of the East Side of Alleganey’, 29 December 1758; James, Writings of Forbes, 271–272. Halkett to Bouquet, Fort Bedford, 31 December 1758, 4 January 1759; James, Writings of Forbes, 273, 274; Forbes to Amherst, Lancaster, 13 January 1759; ibid., 278. Halkett to Bouquet, Fort Loudoun, 4 January, Carlisle 8 January, ‘The Halt’ 14 January 1759; ibid., 274–275, 276–277, 279–280. Forbes to Amherst, Shippensburg 6 January 1759, Lancaster,13 January, Philadelphia 18, 26, 28 January 1759; James, Writing of Forbes, 275, 278–279, 282–283, 283–285, 286–287. Forbes to Bedford, Philadelphia, 21 January 1759, GD 45/2/91/7 f. 22; Forbes to Amherst, Philadelphia, 7 February 1759; ibid., 288–289. GD 45/2/69/6. Forbes to the Treasury, [Philadelphia, 18 January 1759], James, Writings of Forbes, 280–282. Memorial relative to the Services and Expenses of the Late Brigadier General John Forbes, in his Expedition to the Ohio, 1759, from Major Halkett, brigade major on the Expedition, RH 15/38/81/1. Forbes to Amherst, Philadelphia, 18, 26, 28, 30 January, 7 February 1759; James, Writings of Forbes, 282–291. Hugh Forbes to John Forbes, Loretto, 6 October 1758, GD 45/2/91/4. Last will and Testament and Probate of Will, [Philadelphia], 13 February, 24 March 1759, GD 45/2/97; copy in James, Writings of Forbes, 299–300. Account and other papers in the executry of Brigadier Gen. John Forbes, 1759–1774, GD 45/2/98; ‘Memorandum for Mr. Forbes Relative to the Services & Expences of His Brother Brigadier Genl John Forbes’, RH 15/38/81/2; ‘The Declaration of James Ayton of the Estate of John Forbes’, sworn 1 December 1760, 448 PROB 31/448/51;

Notes

14

161

The declaration of George Ross of the estate of John Forbes, Sworn 3 December 1760. Brought in 8 January 1761, PROB 31/448/68; The Declaration of Arthur Forbes, Exhibit 1760/737, PROB 31/446/737; Testament Dative and Inventory, Edinburgh commissary court CC8/8/119, 9 August 1762. [Lieutenant] James Grant to Bouquet, Philadelphia, 20 February 1759; James, Writings of Forbes, 300.

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Index Abercromby, Major General James 95, 102–3, 105, 106, 110, 112, 113, 114, 117–18, 122, 123, 125, 131, 132, 134, 136 Abercromby, James, 42nd Foot 89, 97 Aix-La-Chapelle 37, 43, 44, 66 Albany 72, 78, 98, 101, 102–3, 116 Albemarle, Lord. See Keppel, William Anne Amherst, Jeffrey 6, 53, 57, 106, 118, 132, 136, 137, 140–1 Anderson, Helen 13, 27 Anderson, Robert 27 Anson, George 75, 93 Antwerp 48, 59, 60, 64, 66 Argyll, Dukes of. See Campbell, Archibald; Campbell, John Armstrong, John 126, 139 Ath 5, 59, 84 Atkin, Edmond 111, 113–14 Attakullakulla (the Little Carpenter) 115–16, 133, 134–6 Austrian Netherlands (Flanders) 31–7, 43, 46, 50, 66. See also Ghent; Fontenoy; Rocoux; Lauffeldt Austrian troops 46, 50, 54, 60 Balcarres, Earl of. See Lindsay, James Barrington, William Wildman Shute, Viscount 28, 93 Bedford. See Russell, John Beggar’s Benison 25–6 Bergen-op-Zoom 64, 66 Black, Jeremy 13 Blandford 28, 69, 76–9 Bosomworth, Abraham 114–16, 135 Bouquet, Henry 114–15, 121–2, 124–7, 129, 130–2, 134, 136–7, 139–40 Braddock, Edward 1, 2, 15, 72–3, 107, 113 road built by 124–5, 127, 132 Bradstreet, John 101–2, 105

Breda 26, 59–63, 65–7 Bristol 28, 71, 94 British Coffee House 13, 26–7, 48, 73 Bruges 36, 59 Brussels 37, 43, 44, 48, 55, 59 Buchanan, John 23–4, 37, 42, 52 Burd, James 126 Byng, John 75–6, 81–2, 85, 88–90, 93 impact of death of 105, 130, 137, 152 Byrd, William 87, 111–12, 114–16, 121, 124–6, 130, 132, 136 Campbell, Archibald, third Duke of Argyll 11, 70 Campbell, James of Lawers 4, 18, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 37, 41–2, 43, 46, 48–56 Campbell, John, second Duke of Argyll 11, 21 Campbell, Lieutenant General John 70, 78, 79–80 Campbell, John, Earl of Loudoun 4, 6, 22, 25–7, 34, 36, 44–5, 47–8, 56, 60, 62, 66, 69–70, 73–4, 76, 79–82, 85–94, 97–114, 117, 122, 129–30, 137, 139, 141 Carlisle (Pennsylvania) 111, 115, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130 Carlyle, Dr. Alexander 10, 11, 13, 24, 27 Catawbas 6, 107, 111, 113, 133, 134, 135, 136 Charles, Prince of Lorraine 38, 42, 43, 46, 60 Christchurch 1, 6, 17, 108 Cope, Sir John 36, 42, 47, 84–5 Cork 80, 81, 82, 86 Crawford, Earl of. See Lindsay, John Crissé, Lancelot Turpin de, Count 6, 17, 97, 121 Croghan, George 72 Cubbison, Douglas 136

170

Index

Culloden 9, 10, 57, 60, 85 Cumberland, William Augustus, Duke of 5, 48, 49–56, 62–6, 70, 73, 74, 78, 85, 90, 92, 94, 100, 106, 110, 118, 123 Dalrymple, John, Earl of Stair 14, 22, 35–7, 39–42, 57, 62, 150 Darcy, Robert, Earl of Holdernesse 90, 97 Defoe, Daniel 12–14 Delaware nation of Indians 118–19, 126, 131, 134 Delaware 12 Delaware River 109 Denny, William 1, 109, 112–13, 117–18, 133–4, 136 Dettingen, battle of 14, 40–3, 47, 48, 54 Dinwiddie, Robert 72 Dodington, Bubb 78 Dorchester 28, 69 Dorset 24, 27, 28, 69, 74, 79, 80 Dunfermline 2, 4, 9–10, 12–17, 22, 85 Dutch 10, 24, 31–2, 34–7, 42–3, 46, 49–51, 53–4, 59–65 Easton, treaties of 6, 112, 118, 131, 133–4, 136 Edinburgh 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 23, 24, 25, 27, 48, 70, 76, 84, 87 Essex 4, 27, 34, 43 Fife 4, 9, 12–15, 22, 25–6, 27, 80, 137 Fontenoy, battle of 6, 16, 48–55, 57, 59, 83–4, 129 Forbes, Arthur (brother) 4, 10–11, 13–14, 17, 24, 36, 48, 74, 76–7, 81, 98, 100–1, 141–2 Forbes, Daniel 100–1 Forbes, Duncan (brother, deceased) 10 Forbes, Duncan (grandfather) 9 Forbes, Duncan, Lord President of the Council (cousin) 11, 14, 15, 36 126, 141–2 Forbes, Hugh (brother) 10–11, 13–15, 17, 24, 47, 48, 55–6, 76–7, 81, 86, 100–1, 103, Forbes, John (father) 4, 9, 10–11

Forbes, Brigadier General John birth 11 commissions 18, 24, 35, 47, 57, 69, 80, 106 death 1–3 debts and creditors 3, 70, 74, 76–8, 80, 100–1, 142 education 17–18 military surgeon 14, 18, 23–4 Native Americans 6 and sex 3, 24–5 tactical and strategic ideas 6, 17, 97, 99, 101–3, 121 Forbes, John aka ‘Jock’ (nephew) 3, 13, 72–3, 77, 81 forts (British) Bedford 131, 139 Cumberland 110, 118, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128 Edward 98–9, 101–2 Frederick 103, 123, 124 Herkimer 100 Ligonier 22, 131, 133 (see also Loyalhannon) Loudoun 114, 129–30, 139 Oswego 76, 99, 101 Pittsburgh (former Fort Duquesne) 1, 136 William Henry 98, 99 forts (French) Carillon (Ticonderoga) 101–2, 105, 106, 109, 118 Crown Point 101–2, 105, 118 Duquesne 21, 73, 105–7, 117, 126–37, 139–40 Frontenac 101, 105 Niagara 101 Presqu’Ile 140 Venango 92, 140 Fox, Henry 73, 76, 93 France. See also Dettingen; Austrian Netherlands; New France and Europe 32–3, 34, 36–7, 42 invasion threat from 31–3, 74–5 naval power 31–2, 43–5, 85–7 Frankfort-on-Main 39 Freemasonry 4 French, Christopher 87–9, 98

Index George I 12, 21 George II 14, 22, 28, 34, 35, 37–42, 45, 80, 85, 94 Ghent 13, 36, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 59 Glen, Alexander 4 Glen, James 4, 71, 115–16, 122, 135, 142 Glen, Thomas 104 Graham, Elizabeth 9, 12 Graham, Marion 9 Grammont, Duc de 40–1 Grant, Major James 6, 126, 129–32, 134, 136, 142, 145 Grant, James (surgeon) 142 Grassins, French irregulars 50, 51, 55, 59 Halifax, Earl of. See Montagu Dunk, George Halifax, Nova Scotia 71, 73, 79, 86–8, 93, 97, 98, 100, 104–5 Halifax, Yorkshire 28 Halkett, family of Pitfaranne 15 Halkett, Francis 4, 17, 73, 97, 104, 106, 109, 110, 122, 125, 126, 129, 132, 136–7, 140–1 Halkett, James (elder) 15 Halkett, James 15, 73 Halkett, Peter 4, 16, 24, 73 Hanover 12, 20, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 94 Hanoverian Succession 20–1 Hanoverian troops 35, 36, 37, 40–1, 43–4, 50–1, 53–4, 61–2 Hardwicke, Earl of. See Yorke, Philip Hardy, Rear Admiral Sir Charles 106 Hay, Lord Charles 4, 14, 16, 18, 25, 34, 36, 53–4, 70, 72–3, 78, 79–106, 137, 139–40, 142 Hay, John, Marquess of Tweeddale 4, 10, 13–16, 35, 70–1, 85, 92 Hay, Sir Robert 4, 18, 33 Holburne, Vice Admiral Sir Francis 86, 87, 89–91, 93–4 Holdernesse, Earl of. See Darcy, Robert Home, William, Earl of 48, 66, 70, 77–8 Honeywood, Philip 33, 42 Hopson, Peregrine Thomas 71, 79, 82, 87, 89, 92–3 Howe, George Augustus, Viscount 80, 82, 101–2, 105–6 Huck, Richard 87, 103, 107

171

Ingoldsby, Richard 51–3, 55–6 Ireland 3, 20, 49, 77–8, 94 Jacobites 9, 12, 15–16, 18, 20–2, 25, 34, 44, 47, 57, 59–60, 76, 84–5, 126 Johnson, Sir William 98, 99, 111, 112, 117 Kate, aka K.E. and Kat 13, 26, 60, 80–1 Keith, Robert 5, 36, 62, 66 Kent 4, 27, 34, 44, 69, 74, 79 Keppel, William Anne, Lord Albemarle 5, 59, 65–6 Kitanning 126 Knocke 46 Knox, John 87, 89 Lauffeldt 63–4 Laurel Hill 121, 123, 132, 139 Lawrence, Charles 91, 105 Lewis, Andrew 130–1 Liège 61–2 Ligonier, Jean Louis (Sir John) 5–6, 26, 36, 42–3, 47, 50, 53–4, 57, 59, 60–6, 77–8, 80, 87, 94, 97, 100, 103–4, 106, 122 Lille 43, 46 Lindsay, James, fifth Earl of Balcarres 22, 34, 47–8 Lindsay, John, Earl of Crawford and Lindsay 15–16, 22, 25, 45, 52–5, 69 London 9, 11, 13, 15, 19, 26–8, 33, 35, 43–4, 48, 56, 59, 60, 66, 69–70, 72–4, 77–80, 84, 87, 90, 93–5, 100, 102, 121, 129–30, 140–1 Loretto 11, 76, 81, 141 Loudoun. See Campbell, John Louisbourg 57, 59, 66, 79, 81, 86–94, 104–7, 118, 132 Lowenthal, Count 59, 63–4, 66 Loyalhannon 127, 131–6 Lyttelton, Richard 77–8 Lyttelton, William Henry 112 Maastricht 61, 63–4, 66 MacDougall, George 22, 57, 69 Manchester 72 Mansfield, Baron. See Murray, William Maria Theresa 33, 35–7, 39, 42–3, 45, 66

172

Index

Maryland 2, 71, 107, 110, 127 Masterson, James 26, 80 Mi’kmaw 71 Minorca 31, 75–6, 86 Mohawk nation 99–100 Mohawk Valley 98–101 Montagu Dunk, George, Earl of Halifax 71, 73, 93 Montague, John, fourth Earl of Sandwich 5, 62, 66, 70–1, 76–8 Montcalm 79, 98–9, 101 Montgomery, Archibald 6, 126, 132 Monypenny, Alexander 25–6, 87–8, 91–2 Mordaunt, Sir John 94, 107 Morris, Arthur 98, 104, 140 Murray, Alexander 87–8, 93, 104–5 Murray, William, Baron Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice 27, 93, 97

Pitt, William 6, 34, 76, 79, 81, 92–4, 97, 100, 105–6, 116, 126, 136, 140 Pittsburgh 1, 136–7 Portsmouth 33, 74, 80–1, 85 Post, Christian Frederick 117–18, 134 Preston, George 35, 43, 48, 71, 76–8 Prevost, James 74, 100 Privy Garden 27, 79 Quakers 109, 116–17

Ohio Company 72 Nations 112, 116–18, 121, 134, 136, 139–40 Valley 1–2, 72, 107, 111, 121, 123–5, 134, 142 Ostend 35–6, 44, 59, 67 Oudenarde 36

Raestown 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 131, 133, 134, 139 Rangers 86, 88, 97, 104 regiments (key) Royal American Regiment 74, 80, 100–1, 106, 109, 110, 114, 118, 119 Scots Greys (Royal North British or 2nd Dragoons) 1, 4, 5, 18, 19–25, 27–9, 33–7, 41, 45, 47–8, 57, 59, 62, 64, 67, 69–70, 72–3, 74, 75, 76 17th Foot 1, 79, 80, 81, 86, 98, 140 77th Foot 86, 109, 110, 119, 126, 129, 130–1, 139–40 religion 1, 5, 10, 13, 16–17, 19–21, 26–7, 34, 39, 92, 140 Richbill, Edward 80 Rigby, Richard 78–9 Rocoux 61–2 Rogers, Robert 86, 97 Ross, George 70 Rothes, Earl of 32, 70 Russell, Charles 5, 45, 65–6 Russell, John, fourth Duke of Bedford 35, 59, 62, 70, 71, 74, 76, 77–80, 94, 131, 140

Pargellis, Stanley 83 Pemberton, Israel 109, 117, 123 Pennsylvania 2, 71, 76, 105, 107, 110, 112, 116–17, 121–2, 126, 128, 132, 134, 140–1, 143, 145 Pennsylvania Gazette 2–3 Philadelphia 1, 3, 5, 7, 17–18, 107, 109–10, 112–15, 117–19, 121–2, 137, 139–41 Pisquetomen 117–18, 134 Pittencrieff 4, 9–10, 12, 13, 17, 24, 48, 76, 80, 81, 141

Sackville, Lord George 93 St. Clair, James 60 St. Clair, Sir John 72, 73, 110, 112–13, 123–4, 126–7, 129, 131, 139, 141 Sandwich. See Montague, John, fourth Earl of Saxe, Maurice de 43–4, 46, 48–9, 51, 54, 59–64, 66 smuggling 27–8, 34 Sharpe, Horatio 110, 127 Shawnees 2, 6, 73, 116–18, 131, 134, 136, 159 Shingas 117

Namur 60–1 New York city 86, 87, 90, 92, 93, 97, 102, 103, 105, 109, 117, 119, 140, 141, 143 colony 6, 71–2, 79, 97–9, 101–2, 112 Nieuport 59 Noallies, Duc de 39–40, 42 North Carolina 2, 107, 110–11

Index South Carolina 4, 31, 109–15 Stephen, Adam 126, 132 Sussex 4, 27, 34, 69, 74 Tamanqua 117 Teedyuscung 112, 117, 118, 133–4 Thomson, Charles 117 Virginia 2, 72, 76, 87, 105, 107, 110–11, 114–16, 119, 121, 124, 126, 134–5 Wade, Ferrell 113 Wade, Field Marshal George 22, 33, 43, 46, 47, 48

173

Waldeck, Prince of 60, 61 Walpole, Sir Robert, ministry of 14, 15, 27, 32, 34–5 Washington, George 6, 72, 111–12, 121, 123, 124–6, 127, 132, 142 Webb, Daniel 98–9 West, George 80, 87, 102 Wiltshire, riots in 28–9 Windsor Forest camp 33 Wolfe, James 79, 106, 118 Yorke, Philip, Earl of Hardwicke 93 Yorkshire 22, 28, 33