In describing how to fire in three ranks Mackay also gave the earliest known description of what was to become known as ‘locking up’. This is the manner in which the three ranks closed and inter-locked so that they could all fire together safely. Houlding suggests that this was not introduced until the 1720s.54 In this he contradicts Chandler who claims it was introduced under Marlborough, though without giving any evidence.55 Curiously, after Mackay, subsequent military writings make no further mention of it until the 1720s, when it reappears in a drill book written by Humphrey Bland.56 Prior to the introduction of locking up each man in a file had stood directly behind the man in front and, in the case of the second and third ranks, fired over the head of the man in front. Whilst the man in the front rank knelt, the man in the second rank had to stoop so that his head was below the level of the musket of the man behind him. In Mackay’s Rules the second-rank man placed his left foot between the feet of the kneeling man and the third-rank man placed his left foot between the feet of the second-rank man. This had the effect of moving each man slightly to the right of the man in front so that the third-rank man could level his musket past the shoulder of the second-rank man, who no longer had to stoop.57
When a battalion was to fire the whole line was to halt and the platoons were to fire from their position in the line. Mackay advised against advancing the platoons that were to fire ahead of the line. His argument was that doing so could result in confusion that an enemy might take advantage of.58 The importance of maintaining the line was again emphasised in Mackay’s instructions on what to do when an opposing enemy battalion was beaten:
If by a resolute continuance and close fire, the Battalion happen to break the opposite enemy, the Officers must take special care their men do not break after them, but content themselves to make the Granadeers fire amongst them to augment their Terrour and Confusion, that they may receive in good order, such of the enemy as shall come up to sustain those which you ought to have routed, This Article the more carefully to be observed that in the advancing of the Line you are subject to be flanked by the enemies Horse posted betwixt the Lines for that purpose.59
Mackay is drawing attention to the need to maintain formation and the threat to infantry in a linear formation from cavalry, not attacking frontally, but attacking a flank.
Another new departure for any English or Scots drill book was the advice on managing fire control. Mackay stressed the need for the men not to present or fire without order from their platoon commander. The reason for this being:
because if the battalion be attacked by horse, and the Commander, to avoid confusion, chosing rather to keep his fire whole, till they be very close, and then to fire by Plottons, upon a mint of the enemies squadrons, as break in upon his Battalion [he] think fit to cause it present without design of firing at that distance, sometimes makes the first rank of the squadron not only stoop short, but fall in confusion upon those that follow, but to bring the Souldiers to a custom of this last they must in Exercise be often accustomed, & commanded to present & recover their Arms without firing, telling them at the same time the reason for it, particularly at the same time of Action, and against Horse. The Commander judging it safest to manage his first fire, least their quick motion might prevent the second.60
Mackay’s rules left something to be desired in terms of sentence structure and clarity, but what he was saying was that when attacked by cavalry a battalion commander may wish to make the enemy cavalry think he was about to fire by ordering his men to present, but not fire. In these circumstances the cavalry might baulk at advancing further and cause confusion in their own ranks. This would allow the commander to reserve his first and usually most effective fire for when the cavalry came closer. There was always a danger that fire at too great a range would not be sufficiently effective to stop cavalry, who could then close with the infantry before they could reload. Mackay reinforced the importance of keeping a firm control on management of the fire with the following advice.
If the commanding Officer of a plotton, be not altogether perswaded of his Souldiers Patience and exact Obedience, as to the order of firing, to prevent a confused fire he shall march softly, according to the motions of the line, with shouldered Musquets permitting none to make ready, but such Plottons as he intends immediately shall fire.61
This advice also reinforced the suggestion that there was a very specific sequence in which the platoons were to fire. Clearly there were still concerns about the threat posed to infantry by cavalry, but there is also a confidence that, handled properly, infantry in line could defeat cavalry by firepower alone.
During the Nine Years War that followed the accession of William and Mary there were a number of instances when English or Scots infantry are recorded as making use of platoon firing, several by Edward D’Auvergne who was chaplain to the Earl of Bath’s regiment. He wrote that in August 1693, in an action near Halle, ‘Sir Bevil Granville, who commanded the Earl of Bath’s Regiment, marched up to the relief if this Lunenburg Regiment, bearing the enemies fire before he suffered any Platton of his Battalion to discharge once.’62 He also recorded the effectiveness of platoon firing. Writing about the same action he said the French ‘infantry was so harras’d by our Fire, that they seem’d unwilling at last to come to the Charge’.63 Clearly the doctrine of getting in close before firing was not just theoretical and was also found to be effective.
Platoon firing as defined at the start of this chapter and described by Mackay would seem to have been developed in Holland between 1678 and 1688 before being introduced to Britain in 1689. Thus, by the early 1690s the infantry of both England and Scotland had adopted the principles of the platoon fire delivery system and were making effective use of it. This meant that British infantry, with its penchant for the aggressive application of firepower at close range, would no longer be hampered by the need to choose between depth in formations to ensure continuous, but low-intensity fire, or a three-deep line to maximise fire but with the risk of being caught unloaded. Platoon firing in a three-deep line would mean that a British infantry battalion could manage and control the rate and intensity of its fire without changing formation.
Chapter 4
William III and the Nine Years War
At the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 there was little difference between the drill and tactical doctrine of the French Army and the armies of England and Scotland, as shown by the 1685 edition of An Abridgement of the English Military Discipline.1 Yet the reign of William III and the war that followed was a period of considerable improvement for the English and Scots armies where the foundations were laid for the development of the fighting capabilities that Marlborough would later employ so effectively. Furthermore, for most of the Nine Years War this was done without the assistance of Marlborough who, despite playing a major role in the revolution in support of William, was out of favour with William from 1691 and did not hold a military command again until the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1702.
Through the course of the Nine Years War platoon firing developed from the form introduced in 1689, adapting and changing in response to the significant changes in the weapons used by British infantry during this period. These developments, however, are not readily identifiable. Following the publication in 1690 of The Exercise of the Foot with the Evolutions, and its 1693 Scottish edition with Mackay’s Rules, there was no official, printed drill produced until 1728.2 There was also a scarcity of eyewitness accounts to allow a comparison of theory with practice and few of these writers concerned themselves more than occasionally with the detail of drill and tactics. Some provided nothing, such as Captain Blackader, whose work was little more than an account of his own piety.3 Despite this it is possible to produce a broad description of the developments of the last decade of the eighteenth century and to analyse their implications and impact.
The period of the Nine Years War was one of considerable change for the British army as, in common with other European armies, it
exchanged the matchlock musket and the pike for the flintlock musket and the bayonet. During the same period bandoleers were phased out and replaced by cartridges, although priming from the cartridge was not yet introduced. The disadvantages of the matchlock musket when compared to the firelock have already been discussed, but the firelock’s advantages can be summarised as being more-certain ignition and quicker to load. When combined with the use of cartridges the firelock could achieve a rate of fire half as fast again as with the matchlock.4 Despite these advantages the French were particularly slow to change and it has been suggested that this was because they were preoccupied with the attack, in which they considered firepower to be less important than in defence.5 The gradual disappearance of the pike as a weapon of British infantry also meant that, eventually, half has many men again would be armed with muskets. Put simply, this increase in the number of muskets and the rate of fire meant that, when compared to a unit of the same size from the English Civil War, an infantry unit at the end of the seventeenth century had the potential to generate in excess of double the firepower.
The narrative of these changes in equipment is far from clear, consisting of piecemeal changes carried out during the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first few years of the eighteenth century and as finance allowed. Chandler, however, does give an account that is sufficient to grasp the outline and further, more technical, details are to be found in Blackmore’s British Military Firearms.6 What neither writer does and it is really outside the scope of Blackmore’s book, is to analyse what these changes meant for the firepower generated by British infantry. The departure of the pikeman also meant that a reorganisation of the battalion was necessary and, consequently, changes in the organisation of platoon firing. The pike, however, was slow to disappear as there were difficulties with its replacement, the bayonet, which quickly became apparent.
Platoon firing was a relatively new development for the Dutch as well as the English and Scots and the battle of Killiekrankie in July 1689 was the first opportunity for its use, against a Jacobite army of Highlanders. The infantry of a small government army under the command of Lieutenant General Hugh Mackay was a combination of three English regiments and three regiments from the Scots Brigade in Dutch Service. In accordance with his own Rules of War, Mackay’s infantry were drawn up three deep and the battalion commanders were ordered to ‘begin their firing at the distance of 100 paces by platoons to discourage the approaching Highlanders meeting with continual fire’.7 This was an unusually long range at which to open fire and the reason for this was a combination of the nature of the early bayonet and Mackay’s understanding of the way Highlanders fought, advancing at speed to get to hand-to-hand combat. As Mackay himself observed, ‘if a battalion keep up [reserve] his fire till they [the Highlanders] be near to make sure of them, they are upon it before our men can come to their second defence, which is the bayonet in the musle of the musket.’8 By opening fire at a longer range than usual, and then keeping up a ‘continual fire’ by platoon firing, Mackay hoped to give his infantry time to inflict casualties by fire and to fix their bayonets before the enemy closed to hand-to-hand combat. Mackay’s own account described the fire of some of his infantry: ‘Hastings, the General, and Levin’s regiments, which made the best fire and all the execution; particularly the General’s battalion made a great fire being well exercised thereto by his brother, who, being his lieutenant colonel, commanded the battalion.’9 However, the fire of the infantry, even in platoons, was insufficient to stop the charge of the Highlanders and Mackay’s infantry was broken and overrun.
The bayonet was to have a considerable impact on firepower as it replaced the pike, allowing pikemen to become musketeers, but initially its use was fraught with difficulties. It had made its appearance early in the second half of the seventeenth century and in its early form was of the type known as a plug bayonet, which was simply a dagger with a grip of a small enough diameter to be pushed into the muzzle of a musket. There were a number of drawbacks to this type of bayonet – the main one was that, once in place, the musket could not be fired, as experienced by Lieutenant General Mackay at Killiekrankie in 1689. In defence of Mackay and his unfortunate infantry it must be said the Highland charge continued to be a problem for British infantry up to the battle of Culloden in 1746. Mackay claimed that he subsequently developed a bayonet that attached to the barrel with a pair of rings that slid over the muzzle.10 He mentioned in his Rules of War a bayonet that ‘fixt without the muzzles of their Pieces’, which would suggest that he wrote the Rules between Killiekrankie and his death in 1692.11
Brigadier General James Douglass, in his manuscript military manual Schola Martis or the Arte of War . . . as Practised in Flanders, in the Wars, from Anno 1688 to An: 1714, also wrote of the problems of using the plug bayonet: ‘we could never make use of them till all our shot was spent and then we fixed the wooden hafts within ye caliber of our muskets which was of so little consequence that ye least strok upon ye barall would make them presently fly out whereof I have been often witness.’12 Subsequently the plug bayonet was replaced by the socket bayonet, something for which Douglass claimed credit. As a captain at the battle of Landen in 1693 he claimed to have captured a French socket bayonet and had it copied for the use of his own grenadier company.13 Instead of a wooden handle the socket bayonet had a tubular sleeve that fitted over the outside of the musket barrel. A zigzag slot in the socket engaged on a lug on the barrel, securing it in place and giving rise to the ‘bayonet fitting’. This allowed the musket to be loaded and fired with the bayonet fitted and meant that it was also more firmly attached.
At the same time as the bayonet was developing and being introduced it was also being discovered that infantry did not necessarily require pikemen to defend themselves against cavalry attacks. The vulnerability of infantry to cavalry was a major consideration for as long as cavalry rode horses. The response in the seventeenth century was twofold. Firstly there was the pike, usually some five metres long, that could present a steel-tipped hedge to attacking cavalry, holding them off beyond the reach of the horseman’s sword or lance. Secondly there were complex formations, in which the pikemen formed an all-round defence with the musketeers sheltering under the pikes or between or behind the pikemen. However, as already shown, musketeers in the English Civil Wars were quite capable of defending themselves against cavalry without resorting to such formations. Despite this the various editions of the Abridgement of Military Discipline all contained directions for forming hollow squares of pikemen surrounded by musketeers and gave detailed instructions on how to organise the firing of a square. What was missing from the instructions, however, was any actual mention of cavalry and how to deal with an attack by them.
Mackay’s Rules, in contrast, contained a considerable amount of advice on how to deal with cavalry, and without resort to defensive formations based on pikemen. The key element of Mackay’s advice was that the infantry should reserve their fire until the attacking cavalry ‘be very close and then to fire by Plottons’.14 In contrast to earlier drill books Mackay’s Rules make no mention of forming any sort of battalion square to defend against cavalry, nor were there any accounts of this happening during the Nine Years War. Mackay’s Rules represented the common tactical doctrine of the three armies under William’s control – English, Scottish and Dutch – and just how effective platoon fire could be against cavalry was demonstrated at the battle of the Boyne in 1690 when Jacobite cavalry attacked William’s Dutch Guards who were leading the attack across the Boyne and had no pikes. The Guards were isolated on the enemy side of the river and had no protection from any natural obstacle such as a hedge or ditch. William was, according to an eyewitness, extremely concerned: ‘But when he saw them stand their ground and fire by platoons, so that the horse were forced to run away in great disorder, he breathed out . . ., and said he had seen his Guards do that which he had never seen foot do in his life.’15 William’s comment that he had never seen such an action befo
re is further evidence of the novelty of platoon firing.
The battle of the Boyne, a victory for William over the Jacobite army of James II, was one of the first occasions on which platoon firing was successfully tested in battle. Only days before, another trial of platoon firing had occurred in Flanders at the battle of Fleurus where Dutch infantry under Field Marshal von Waldeck defeated a French force. Here the Dutch infantry demonstrated the ability of platoon firing to deal effectively with both infantry and cavalry.
For after they [the Dutch infantry] were abandoned by the horse, they also sustained the charge of French cavalry and infantry, and being attacked in front, flank, and rear, all at once, yet remained firm, unbroken and impenetrable: they let the enemy’s horse approach within pistol shot of them, and then discharged with such an unconcerned and steady aim, that the whole squadron seemed to sink to the ground, scarce thirty of the whole squadron number escaping: and this course they so accustomed themselves to observe, that at length they laughed at the enemy. The French, on the other side were so confounded with the execution done upon them, that they fled as soon as the Dutch began to present their muskets.16
Destructive and Formidable: British Infantry Firepower 1642-1756 Page 7