Fusiliers Read online

  Fusiliers

  How the British Army Lost America but Learned to Fight

  MARK URBAN

  To those who serve honourably

  in unpopular wars

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Chapter One: The March from Boston, Nineteen April

  Chapter Two: The Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Eve of Revolution

  Chapter Three: The Fight at Lexington and Concord

  Chapter Four: Bunker Hill

  Chapter Five: Boston Besieged

  Chapter Six: Escape From Boston

  Chapter Seven: The Battle for New York

  Chapter Eight: The Campaign of Concluded

  Chapter Nine: The Campaign Opens

  Chapter Ten: The March on Philadelphia

  Chapter Eleven: The Surprise of Germantown

  Chapter Twelve: Winter in Philadelphia

  Chapter Thirteen: British Grenadiers

  Chapter Fourteen: The World at War

  Chapter Fifteen: The Divided Nation

  Chapter Sixteen: The War Moves South

  Chapter Seventeen: The Battle of Camden

  Chapter Eighteen: Into North Carolina

  Chapter Nineteen: Greene Offers Battle

  Chapter Twenty: The Beginning of the End

  Chapter Twenty-One: Yorktown

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Going Home

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Home Service

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Army Re-Born

  List of Illustrations

  Notes on Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  A 1776 sketch by Richard Williams showing a proposed light company uniform for the 23rd. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

  The opening engagement of the wars in Lexington Green, where poor British troop discipline may have contributed to the outbreak of hostilities. © Corbis.

  Frederick Mackenzie in later life. © Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum, Caernarfon.

  George Baynton, painted in the mid-1780s in splendid Fusiliers dress uniform. © Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum, Caernarfon.

  Thomas Saumarez, one of the longest-serving officers of the 23rd during the American war. © Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum, Caernarfon.

  Caricature of Robert Donkin. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Earl Cornwallis, admired by many of his officers for his aggression on the field and his desire to protect the army’s honour. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  George Washington was not a great battlefield commander but a superior strategist to William Howe during the key campaigns of 1776–7. © Corbis.

  Harry Calvert, painted in his twenties. © Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

  Britain’s failure at Bunker Hill lampooned. © Library of Congress, Washington DC.

  The opening of the battle of Germantown, with British troops around Cliveden Manor (detail). © Valley Forge Historical Society, USA; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  A detail from a Richard Williams sketch of Boston during the siege of 1775. © The British Library, London.

  British troops seizing Rhode Island in 1776 (detail), one of the impressive amphibious operations launched by the Howe brothers. © National Maritime Museum, London.

  The French flagship, Languedoc, dismasted in a storm and left at the mercy of British ships, here the Renown. © Library of Congress, Washington dc.

  A later view of British soldiers storming one of Yorktown’s outer redoubts. © Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, USA, Howard Pyle Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  The taking of the British ship Romulus in Chesapeake Bay. © National Maritime Museum, London.

  The march to Yorktown’s surrender field, drawn by an artist who witnessed the scene (detail). © Chateau de Versailles, France, Lauros, Giraudon; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Maps

  The route towards Concord followed by the 23rd Fusiliers,

  The battle of Bunker Hill,

  The Boston siege lines,

  The disposition of the 23rd at Long Island,

  The British attack at Bound Brook,

  Brandywine, the British flank attack,

  Principal sites of the southern campaigns,

  The battle of Camden,

  The 23rd’s line of action at Guilford Courthouse,

  The troop dispositions at Yorktown,

  Preface

  The British army’s struggle to prevent American independence was undoubtedly one of its most significant campaigns. Not only did the outcome produce one of the great seismic shifts of global history, but it also marked a vital learning experience, the necessary shock required to launch the defeated forces on a path towards reform.

  I freely confess that studying the battle for America has been a passion since childhood. It even motivated my first real steps in historical research, clutching a newly issued National Army Museum reader’s ticket at the age of sixteen. The fact that the contest ended in the British losing thirteen colonies simply increased its romance to me. And, if the fighting took place on a much smaller scale at Brandywine or Saratoga in 1777 than at Waterloo thirty-eight years later, this simply served to underline the intimacy of those earlier battles.

  While the epic victories of Wellington’s army in the peninsula have long riveted British readers, an understanding of the carnage of Bunker Hill or triumph at Camden is in fact a vital prerequisite to discovering why the redcoat did so well against Napoleon’s armies. The fact that the narrative of Fusiliers continues until early 1809, when that of my earlier book, Rifles, begins, is quite deliberate.

  Whereas Rifles described the campaigns of that elite and rather unusual corps, the 95th or Green Jackets, the story told in these pages is that of a red-coated regiment of the line, the 23rd or Royal Welch Fusiliers. In this sense the experiences of those soldiers fighting in America is more representative of the late eighteenth-century army and soldiering as a whole than that of the riflemen.

  Many readers may ask, why the 23rd? There are two reasons. First, the Fusiliers were involved in the first fight, at Lexington in 1775, and campaigned right through to Yorktown in 1781 when the British venture finally came to grief. Their campaigns therefore provided a narrative that mirrors the wider story. The second is that there are enough first-hand accounts emanating from the 23rd to bring the regiment to life, and this is a very rare thing for that period. Some regiments, such as the 5th, boast excellent archival material rarely used by historians but left the American battlefield halfway through that conflict. One or two others, such as the 43rd, served as long in America as the 23rd but left no substantial personal accounts to speak of.

  Two soldiers of the 23rd are very well known to specialists of this period: Serjeant Roger Lamb, one of the earliest British rankers to publish memoirs, and Frederick Mackenzie, adjutant of the Fusiliers at Lexington. I knew that in order for this account to be worth writing I would have to find much more than these two accounts – for in any case Lamb only entered the 23rd three years into the war, and Mackenzie left regimental service soon after the war started, being employed in a series of staff jobs.

  There were many times, as I began the process of digging into the 23rd’s campaigns, when I wondered whether the necessary weight of historical documents still existed, and whether my quest would end in failure. For while Wellington’s campaigns against Napoleon produced literally hundreds of printed memoirs or journals from survivors, there is no more than a handful from the much smaller number of men who fought across the Atlantic.

  An initial success gave me the incenti
ve to carry on. For while searching for material on another subject, I discovered that at a country seat north of London the Verney family still possessed an unpublished journal and autobiography of an officer named Harry Calvert. He served as a young subaltern in the 23rd, joining the regiment in 1779, fighting through the Carolinas and ending up captured at Yorktown. Here was a start then, an account unknown even to historians specialising in this subject. The lesson of the Calvert find was that dozens of haystacks would have to be searched to produce some more glinting needles of testimony.

  Little by little the search of obscure archives began turning up letters – documents more useful in many ways than journals since they are more immediate and less dry. I discovered some prolific letter-writers like the lieutenant colonel who commanded the 23rd for most of the war, or a captain who ran its recruiting operation in Britain. Many of these messages were dull or businesslike of course, but some gave vital insight into the hopes and fears of the men I wished to write about. As one find grew upon another, the Duke of Northumberland’s papers yielded a string of letters from a young officer on service with the 23rd keen to do his duty, while the National Archive at Kew yielded up a correspondence with a disillusioned old Fusilier equally determined to avoid it. So I ended up with dozens of letters from officers in the regiment that are not only previously unpublished but have been little if ever used by other historians.

  In the course of searching for letters, I encountered some great runs of them from men not in the 23rd: Richard Fitzpatrick, a foppish Guards officer; Francis Hutcheson, a lugubrious staff man; or Richard Dansey, a fire-eating light-infantry officer. Their insights have been used to illustrate more general points about service in that army.

  The result of this research is an account that I hope readers will find quite different from any published before, providing depth in getting under the skin of one regiment as well as breadth in consulting a great range of testimony. I tried in setting out on this task to read every firsthand British military account of the American War of Independence that I could find. Of course some more may lurk in archives, but I pursued every journal or letter I became aware of. When examining the 23rd’s campaigns, naturally I used primary accounts from the American side too or from the point of view of Britain’s German mercenaries. Nevertheless, this is unapologetically a British-army-centred version of these events.

  Inevitably there are differences of perspective between a Briton and an American investigating this conflict. Its history has usually been written by the victor. The story of the revolution is a font of national mythology for writers in the United States. Sadly, even the better ones tend to stick to the enemy-image of the redcoat as a brutalised robot, marching on inept orders. They tend to overestimate British military efficiency at the beginning of the war, and underestimate it at the end. Inventive leadership, enthusiasm, and bravery are virtues that many American writers expect to find only in the ranks of Washington’s army. Consequently they have never looked particularly hard for material in the British archives that challenges their stereotype of the enemy. Certainly, I found myself frustrated during years of searching for a book that addressed the redcoats’ experience of the war, telling me about the fortunes of a single group of men or the effect of this long painful fight on the army’s development.

  As for the distortions in British telling of this history, these tend to emerge from political and class dynamics. Since the war was a cause supported enthusiastically only by ultra-Tories it has often been portrayed by the Whig or liberal school of history as a gigantic act of folly. More recently, social antagonism has guaranteed a ready reception for representations of the British officer-class in this period as useless upper-class twits. All of this ignores the subtle workings of the eighteenth-century army. The story of the 23rd reveals them – how senior officers arranged the promotion of those who could not afford to purchase higher ranks or that the dividing line between the ranks and commissioned class was a good deal more fluid than it became later, in Wellington’s times.

  When writing I was at first tempted to quote these protagonists with their eighteenth-century spelling intact, but at length I realised it would just be too confusing. I have allowed myself the odd exception, such as ‘serjeant’ rather than the ‘sergeant’ more widely used today. The 23rd’s title provides a case in point about inconsistency in period spelling. Some spelled it ‘Welsh’, whereas others used the archaic ‘Welch’ that the regiment considers correct today. As for ‘Fusiliers’ it can be found as Fuziliers, Fuzileers and even Fusileers. My editor did not share my early enthusiasm for giving this book the title ‘Fuziliers’.

  Unearthing the story of this regiment has required a far larger archival research project than that needed for the 95th Rifles. Those kind members of the Royal Welch Fusiliers regimental family – Major General Jonathon Riley, Major Nick Lock, as well as archivists Brian Owen and Anne Pedley – who wanted to help could only do so to the limited extent that the archive at their disposal permitted. Instead I would have to investigate dozens of archives, and in some cases rely on a legion of researchers to undertake those tasks that geography or time prevented me from carrying out in person.

  Those that I engaged professionally were: Brendan Morrissey (an author on this period in his own right, who collated the information in the 23rd’s regimental muster lists for me); Susan Ranson, who copied out the important finds in the Verney Papers; Ellen Poteet, who spared me the journey to the important Clements collections in Ann Arbor Michigan; Jayne Stephenson, who worked on Lancashire records; and Roger E. Nixon, who topped up my research at Kew. I must thank Sir Hugh Verney and the Clayton House Trust for giving permission to reproduce those important Harry Calvert finds.

  A further contingent gave freely of their expertise: John Montgomery at the RUSI Library; John Spencer; Gary Lind; William Spencer; Duncan Sutton; David Brown; Donald Graves; Scott Miskimon; Ron McGuigan; and James Collett-White. During my visit to the 23rd’s southern battlefields Charles and Judy Baxter were fabulous hosts; Nancy Stewart, Diane Depew and Chris Bryce also gave generously of their time. Among that great band of living history enthusiasts in the States, Will Tatum, Jay Callaham, Robert Sulentic and Don Hagist gave great support.

  In getting the job of writing done Peter Barron was very helpful allowing me leave from Newsnight, Jonathan Lloyd did his magic as my agent, as did Julian Loose and Henry Volans at Faber and Paula Turner. Behind the scenes, trying to talk the author out of his study and back into the twenty-first century were my beloved wife Hilary, daughters Isabelle and Madeleine and son Sol.

  ONE

  The March From Boston, 19 April 1775

  Or the Anxious Mission of the 23rd Fusiliers

  It was around 9 a.m. when the long column of redcoats snaking its way out of Boston crossed the Neck. The British were late and, in the business they had been ordered to do that day, an hour might make the difference between success and disaster.

  Soon they were over the Neck and into the rebellious hinterland, leaving behind their base, a city almost surrounded by its watery moat where they had come to feel secure. They were plunging into a country where alarm bells rang, calling thousands of men to arms, ready to oppose the King’s troops.

  There were 1,200 soldiers in the British column. At its head, the brigade commander sat astride his horse. After him tramped two regiments of foot, a battalion of marines and, near the back, the 23rd Regiment, perhaps the most celebrated British corps on the American station, also known as the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

  Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie, adjutant of the 23rd, was not in the best of moods that morning. Orders to assemble the brigade at 7.30 a.m. had in one case been delivered to the wrong officer, resulting in the marines arriving one hour late. Mackenzie did things by the book, a middle-aged officer confined in low rank but with all the wisdom of thirty years’ hard service. He knew how important the delay might prove, since they were being sent to support another British column that was already fiftee
n or sixteen miles away at a place called Concord, deep in territory controlled by their most ardent opponents.

  The eight companies of Fusiliers marching beside Mackenzie that bright morning mustered around 350 men of all ranks. Two other companies of the 23rd had left Boston the previous night on what was meant to be a secret mission. Mackenzie was already worrying that the preparations made to seize weapons from the rebels inland had been conducted so clumsily that the entire countryside would be alarmed.

  The route towards Concord followed by the 23rd Fusiliers

  Mackenzie’s fears were confirmed as the redcoats marched through Roxbury, the first village on their route towards Concord, for he realised that ‘few or no people were to be seen; and the houses were in general shut up’. Word had indeed been spread by the rebels of the impending British expedition to Concord, and the people of Massachusetts awaited the outcome with dread.

  The soldiers passed white clapboard houses, pleasant groves of trees, duckponds and taverns. Their brigade commander, on a previous outing, altogether less fraught, had admired the landscape, believing that nature and hard work had produced something in New England that excelled even the work of England’s most celebrated gardener: ‘It has everywhere the appearance of a park finely laid out. Mr [“Capability”] Browne here would be useless.’