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Uniform.

to their pikes, the spearmen carried swords, and wore defensive armour on back and breast. As headgear, the round iron "pott" of the Commonwealth was soon replaced by a hat, shaped like a modern wideawake and abundantly trimmed with feathers. In imitation of the royal livery, red was the favourite, though by no means the universal, colour of the coats, usually cut long and square in the skirts; while the knee-breeches or knickerbockers (for both seem to have been worn) appear to have greatly varied in hue. Lord Wolseley considers that many of the uniforms were more practical and workmanlike than those of the present day; but this opinion can hardly apply to Charles II.'s Life Guards, whose costume is thus described:

"The privates wore round hats with broad brims and a profusion of white feathers drooping over the hind part of the brim. They wore scarlet coats richly ornamented with gold lace; sleeves wide, with a slash in front and the lace lengthwise from the shoulder to the wrist; also white collars, which were very broad, and being turned over the vest, covered the neck and spread over part of the shoulders. They wore scarlet sashes round the waist, tied behind, also large ruffles at the wrist, and long hair flowing over their shoulders. Their boots were of jacked leather, and came up to the middle of the thigh. Their defensive armour were cuirasses and iron head-pieces called 'potts'; their weapons short carbines, pistols, swords, with a carbine belt suspended across the left shoulder. They rode long-tailed horses; on public occasions the tail was usually tied up, and together with the head and mane, decorated with a profusion of ribands.”*

Drill.

The drill of the troops appears to have been very intricate, the multiplication of orders extraordinary. Thirty-seven words of command were deemed necessary to put the soldier through the drill of loading and firing his musket; nearly fifty were employed in the pike (i.e. bayonet) exercise; while no less than seventy-two separate orders were required to throw infantry into hollow square to receive cavalry. The infantry company was formed six deep, the pikemen in the centre, the musketeers on the flanks; and its chief practical evolution, in addition to forming square, consisted in "doubling," i.e. reinforcing its front, flank, and rear. The "Exercise of Horse" differed but little from that of the Foot; each squadron was drawn up in three

"Historical Records of Life Guards," p. 7.

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ranks; and “doublings" were practised with the modifications suited to the difference between infantry and cavalry. Artillery can hardly be said to have existed at this period. The garrison gunners were often civilians, who eked out their earnings at other trades with their pay of sixpence a day, and until 1682 were quite independent of martial law. In the field the guns were worked by these men, or by soldiers from infantry regiments.

Maladministration.

Since the times of the Stuarts all ranks of society have enormously improved, and nowhere is this improvement more striking than in the condition of the Army. There were no barracks; so that in the winter the troops were billeted upon the inhabitants, alike to the discomfort of the civil population and to the detriment of military discipline. The example of shameless venality set by the Court spread through the Service; the civilian officials of the War Department cheated the officers, who, in their turn, shamelessly robbed the men under their command. The system of administration lent itself to knavery of every description. The colonels contracted with Government to supply their men with clothing and accoutrements; the captains drew pay for all the soldiers whose names appeared upon the roll, and whom they could produce upon the musters periodically held to verify the officers' returns. The captains, therefore, kept numbers of paper men upon their rolls, and resorted to kidnappers to make up their numbers when a muster became imminent. In 1676 the kidnappers' nefarious trade was so much curtailed by Act of Parliament that the captains became obliged to hire men for the reviews. Arms, clothing, horses were borrowed, civilian servants dressed up and placed in the ranks; so rampant became the evil that bodies of men actually made a trade of tramping the country to let themselves out as dummy soldiers for muster parades. Bribery reigned supreme in the highest ranks of the Army; officers had to pay largely for every step in promotion, and accordingly looked to recoup themselves out of their commands. The wage of the ordinary infantry man was eightpence a day; yet by judicious manipulation of his company's accounts, the captain expected to rob his soldiers and his country to the extent of £200 a year; while the colonel who, in addition to his pay, did not clear from £200 to £600

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a year out of his regiment, was deemed a very poor man of business. Under such a system it is hardly surprising that a good class of recruits ceased to volunteer for the life-long service which was then almost universal in our Army. There was no limit of age at which men were allowed to enlist; and the standard of physical fitness for the Service must have fallen very low, for in James's reign we find an advertisement describing a deserter, "with six fingers on the left foot, on his left hand two fingers growing together, the little toe of his left foot always sticking out of his shoe."

Discipline.

The punishments for military offences were barbarous, and their legality was at least doubtful, for no parliamentary sanction was given to the proceedings of courts martial until the year 1689, when the first Mutiny Act was passed. A soldier was liable to be hanged or shot, or even burned at the stake, for incendiarism. For blasphemy his tongue might be bored through. He could be sentenced to branding or to "running the gauntlet" of his regiment, as well as to imprisonment or whipping by drummers. His officers and sergeants had power to beat him. Among minor punishments two were much in vogue. One was "riding the wooden horse," where the culprit was scated for hours astride of a pointed beam, his legs dragged downwards by weights of 60 lbs. fastened to each foot. The second was "tying head and heels"; the victim was made to sit on the ground with one firelock "under his hams, and another over his neck, which are forcibly brought almost together by means of a couple of cartouche-box straps. In this situation, with his chin between his knees, has many a man been kept till the blood gushed out of his nose, mouth, and ears, and ruptures have also too often been the fatal consequences, and a worthy subject lost to the Service or rendered incapable of maintaining himself when the exigencies of the State no longer required his duty."* Notwithstanding the severity of these punishments, discipline, especially under James II., was distinctly bad. All ranks were arrogant towards civilians; officers claimed to be above the civil power, mutinies were frequent, desertions wholesale. As an instance of the former military crime the following extract from contemporary correspondence is interesting:

* Walton, "History of British Standing Army," p. 572.

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'A drummer of the Duke of Albemarle's, at Blackheath, being got drunk, and for it carrying to the horse (i.e. being carried to ride the wooden horse), the soldiers got together, and declared they saw no reason to punish him for what the officers had never been free from since their coming thither, and then took him from them, and rudely treated their officers, Col. Vane having a musket presented to his breast, and great disorder had like to have happened; but every Captain drawing off his men it was at last appeased, and the offenders to be punished according to the military orders now published.'

Parliament, jealous of the standing army, sought to impair the King's authority over it. By a curious anomaly in the Articles of War drawn up by

Parliament and

the Army. James, it was specified that no punishment amounting to loss of life or limb be inflicted in time of peace; consequently deserters and mutineers were tried before the civil power; and upright judges, recognising the undefined legal position of the troops, raised and maintained as they were in defiance of Parliamentary remonstrance, declined to pronounce sentence of death upon soldiers convicted before them of mutiny and desertion. The efforts of James to turn his Army into an Irish and a Papist force only served to increase its demoralisation.

Experience in the Field.

There is little to say about the land wars of this period. The constant fighting round Tangier served as a school of arms for the troops engaged; and the campaigns against the Dutch gave our men an opportunity of studying the art of war side by side with the French, then deemed the best troops in Europe. The battle of Sedgemoor, where Monmouth was crushed, was remarkable only as an instance of the grand fighting qualities of the British peasant. The yokels had for the most part served in the Militia, and had thus acquired some rudimentary knowledge of drill; many of the troops were newly raised; there was therefore far less difference between the civilians and the soldiers than would now be the case. But it must be remembered that the troops were led by professional officers; the rebels by religious fanatics. Yet the western ploughmen and miners bravely held their own for more than an hour against James's regular army, and only fled when their ammunition ran short and their flank was turned. Here was the

* Camden Soc., 1874, i. 86-87; and Scott, "British Army," iii. 308.

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raw material of that army with which a few years later Marlborough won Blenheim and Oudenarde, and gained for England a leading position among the great powers of Europe.

IT has been mentioned that as early as 1653 Blake employed on board ship small-arm men (p. 269), who may be said to have done duty as marines. W. LAIRD CLOWES. These were, however, engaged as a temporary

The Navy.

The Rise of the Marines.

ineasure. The first regular marine force, known as the Lord High Admiral's Regiment, was not established until 1664, soon after the Restoration. This regiment has some claims to be regarded as the lineal ancestor of the present Royal Marines, for, although it soon ceased to exist, and although the various marine organisations which followed it also ceased to exist ere the present force was created, the new organisations were always in some measure built up from parts of the personnel of the older ones, and thus what may be called "the marine tradition," often weak, but never entirely broken, really runs back as far as the beginning of the reign of Charles II.

The reign was one of almost continuous naval activity. Numerous expeditions were fitted out against

Naval Activity.

the piratical states on the African coast of the Mediterranean, and, in addition, there were the second and third Dutch Wars, the former really begun in 1664though not formally declared till 1665-and lasting till 1667; and the latter begun in 1671, and ending in 1674. Our possession, in the Mediterranean of Tangiers, and in the East of Bombay (both portions of the Queen's dowry), greatly enlarged the sphere of English interests, and obliged us to keep large forces, and to withstand formidable attacks in waters where we had previously had no territory at stake. Tangiers proved very costly, and although, if it had been retained, it would have been of the greatest value to the Empire as a naval station, it was weakly evacuated in 1683. Bombay was held. We had already acquired important commercial interests in India, but only with the acquisition of Bombay did we begin the territorial foundation of our great Indian Empire. And the capture in 1664 of New York by Sir Robert Holmes's squadron gave us new interests in America, while the same