Interaction and Perception in Anglo-German Armies: 1689-1815

Interaction and Perception in Anglo-German Armies: 1689-1815 Mark Wishon Ph.D. Thesis, 2011 Department of History University College London Gower Street London 1 I, Mark Wishon confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 ABSTRACT Throughout the ‘long eighteenth century’ Britain was heavily reliant upon soldiers from states within the Holy Roman Empire to augment British forces during times of war, especially in the repeated conflicts with Bourbon, Revolutionary, and Napoleonic France. The disparity in populations between these two rival powers, and the British public’s reluctance to maintain a large standing army, made this external source of manpower of crucial importance. Whereas the majority of these forces were acting in the capacity of allies, ‘auxiliary’ forces were hired as well, and from the mid-century onwards, a small but steadily increasing number of German men would serve within British regiments or distinct formations referred to as ‘Foreign Corps’. Employing or allying with these troops would result in these Anglo- German armies operating not only on the European continent but in the American Colonies, Caribbean and within the British Isles as well. Within these multinational coalitions, soldiers would encounter and interact with one another in a variety of professional and informal venues, and many participants recorded their opinions of these foreign ‘brother-soldiers’ in journals, private correspondence, or memoirs. These commentaries are an invaluable source for understanding how individual Briton’s viewed some of their most valued and consistent allies – discussions that are just as insightful as comparisons made with their French enemies. Although their impressions borrowed from many prevalent stereotypes, especially in analyses concerning national character, these soldier- authors had a unique perspective and their writings reflect this. These men belonged to the soldiering profession, and this solidarity among military men would often focus their attention away from national or cultural distinctions, and towards defining how their allies adhered to the common ideal of a good soldier. The result was that though the British public may have maintained a derogatory attitude towards German soldiery, Britain’s own military men – due to shared identities and experiences – viewed them far more favourably. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people to thank for their help during the research and composition of this project; this brief list will only touch the surface. Firstly, I wish to thank my supervisor Stephen Conway for his assistance, insight and patience. Our regular meetings were of the greatest utility to this project, and never ceased to inspire me. I would also like to thank Juilian Hoppit, who helped guide me towards this topic, which remains as interesting and exciting to me today as when it was first being formulated. I am also deeply appreciative of the help, comments and advice I received from Axel Körner throughout my time at UCL. The staff at the British Library have always been accommodating, and made that wonderful establishment a second home for me. I would also like to thank the staffs of the National Archives, National Army Museum, and those of the various archives across southern England I visited. My time in the Scottish National Archives and National Library were particularly fruitful thanks to the kind assistance of the people there. Further abroad, I am appreciative of the help received from the various archivists of the Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover and Staatsarchiv Marburg, the very helpful and organized librarians at the Murhardsche Landesbibliothek in Kassel, and the staff of the Huntington Library. I would also like to extend my gratitude to those responsible for permitting access to the various family papers consulted in this work. Of course, access to many of these archives was owed in no small part to the generous funding of the UCL Graduate School, and I am eternally grateful to Dr. Carol Chattaway and the committee members of the Richard Chattaway Scholarship, which made possible a number of forays to archives outside of London, at a time when I was largely confined to the metropolis. Last, and most importantly, I wish to thank my parents, for their support: financial, psychological, and emotional. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………………………………………………………………………….…..……: 3 Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………..……...: 4 Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………..……: 6 Introduction………………………………………………………………………….....: 7 Chapter I, National Character and Transnational Professionalism: 26 Chapter II, German Allies……………………………….………………………….: 57 Chapter III, German Auxiliaries……………………………………………….…: 99 Chapter IV, Case Study 1 – The ‘Hessians’ in America………………….: 138 Chapter V, Germans in the British Army……………………………………..: 182 Chapter VI, Case Study 2 – King’s German Legion.……………………….: 221 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….……..………: 258 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………...: 267 Graph: Germans within the British Army………………………………………………..: 192 5 ABBREVIATIONS CUP: Cambridge University Press HMC: Historical Manuscripts Commission JSAHR: Journal for the Society of Army Historical Research ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OUP: Oxford University Press Add. MS Additional Manuscripts (British Library) CO: Colonial Office Papers WO: War Office Papers CKS: Centre for Kentish Studies HL: Huntington Library HRO: Hampshire Record Office HSTAH: Niedersächsische Hauptstatsarchiv, Hannover HStAM: Hessische Staatsarchiv, Marburg MBK: Murhardsche Bibliothek Kassel NA: National Archives, Kew NAS: National Archives of Scotland NLS: National Library of Scotland WSRO: West Sussex Record Office 6 INTRODUCTION ‘Now every thing is so totally unlike England you cannot conceive & which hurries one home to be absorbed in reflection’1 So wrote the English officer William Knollys in a letter to his mother while on military campaign in Flanders in 1793. During his time in the Low Countries, Knollys, the self-styled Lord Wallingford, was every day encountering new places and being immersed in an environment that – while not as foreign as he would have us believe – nevertheless gave him a greater appreciation of his own Englishness. After one such evening of being ‘absorbed in reflection’, he confided to his family, ‘the more I see of foreign customs, the more plainly I feel the sterling good sense of our own Constitution.’2 Knollys, and so many other British officers and soldiers like him, gained a better understanding of his own culture and nation by encountering others while on campaign, where they would not only interact with the local inhabitants, but also a whole variety of men from other nations with whom the British were so often allied. One of the most common subjects for such comparisons were the German allies and auxiliaries fighting alongside the British Army, a point of commentary recurrent in Wallingford’s letters and with scores of other British soldiers over the last century. Not only were these comparisons valuable in gaining insight into their own Britishness, but these soldiers would also formulate opinions of their fellow-soldiers within German armies, providing a unique perspective that, crucially, would be far different from the opinions of their countrymen back home. Utilizing the personal writings of the soldiers themselves, this thesis will examine these deliberations and what they tell us will reveal a great deal about the 1 Hampshire Record Office (HRO) 1M44/110 fol. 66, Lord Wallingford to his mother, near Tournay, December 3rd 1793. 2 Knollys went by Lord Wallingford while his father remained alive, and then became, unofficially, the 8th Earl of Banbury. HRO 1M44/110 fol. 66, Lord Wallingford to his mother, near Tournay, December 3rd, 1793.; Victor Stater, ‘Charles Knollys’, in Rev. Timothy J. McCann, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). 7 relationships between British and German soldiers in the long eighteenth century, the military associations of these two polities, the encounters of their individual soldiers and the opinions born out of those interactions. Soldiers were some of the more well-travelled members of British society, and an examination of their thoughts and experiences will shed greater light on the relations between the British and German polities and British opinions of Germany in the eighteenth century, which have been to this point dominated by studies of grand tourists, politics, foreign policy, and the press. In recent decades, scholars have tried to obtain a deeper appreciation of the lives of military men (and women), and their relationships with the nation at-large. We know more about the daily routines, experiences and motivations of eighteenth century soldiers due to these historical inquiries, but there has been very little written about their relationships with their allies – a crucial aspect of military life, which has more often only been addressed, obliquely, by historians of politics and foreign policy. In wars, it hardly needs saying: enemies are made. But friendships are also created, and ‘strange-bedfellows’, here created by the spectre of a hegemonic French monarchy, were perhaps not as strange as they have been portrayed. The seemingly ubiquitous presence of ‘Germans’ fighting alongside the British Army was no accident, for they were very much a part of the British way of warfare in the

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