GEORGIAN ARMY LISTS.*
THE death of Queen Anne found the British Army reduced almost to vanishing point. The numbers borne on the British establishment did not reach the meagre total of 10,000 men, while the Irish establishment reckoned barely half that figure. The policy of hasty disarmament, however, which followed the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht, soon underwent a reversal. The factors which dictated the military policy of the opening years of George L's reign were the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, Alberoni's conduct of the external affairs of Spain, and the menacing attitude of Charles XII. of Sweden. These dangers led to a considerable increase of the British Army, and thus we find twenty-one new regiments of horse and foot raised in July, 1715, and thirteen more added to the Irish establishment in the following year. The military preparations of the Whig ministry were, however subject to no less violent fluctuations than those of their pre- decessors. The thirteen Irish regiments were all disbanded within a year and a half, and by the end of 1718 the British establishment had been reduced by eleven regiments.
In a prefatory chapter on "The Early Georgian Era" Mr. Dalton makes some mention of these matters. Unfortu- nately his account is by no means complete, nor is it easy to follow through a maze of somewhat irrelevant anecdote. Thus, no information is given about the subsequent career, or even the names, of the twenty-one regiments raised in 1715, though presumably the eleven regiments disbanded in 1718 were of their number; and in any case there are discrepancies between the lists of regiments disbanded as variously given in the British Establishment table, 1715, in the table of Supplementary Commissions, 1715-1719, and in the prefatory chapter. Moreover, what little is to be gleaned about the army from Mr. Dalton's account is inextricably entangled with a mass of information about such matters as " Doggett's Coat and Badge," how many times Bolingbroke bowed in doing homage to King George, the identity of the lady who figured as Lady Mayoress in the Lord Mayor's procession of 1714, anecdotes about the escape of Jacobite prisoners who have no other claim to be rescued from oblivion, anonymous letters, petitions, and much more of the same sort.
The reader who bases his expectations upon the title of this book is not unlikely to be disappointed. "George the First's Army" sounds attractive, but there is little in Mr. Dalton's work to satisfy the student of military history or of the development of British military policy, or to assist research into the growth of the armed forces of the British Crown. The book is planned as a work of reference, of which the principal contents are various lists relating to the officers of the army during the period from 1714 to 1719. The lists are supplemented by short biographical notes in the case of some of the more distinguished officers, but for the most part only the senior regimental officers are considered worthy of notice in this way. From the point of view of com- piling a useful book of reference it would seem to be essential that the lists should be annotated as fully as possible—especially when the number of similar names and the vagaries of spelling in the originals are considered. There is, indeed, in a prefatory note, a general reference to the annotated lists in Mr. Dalton's series of English Army Lists and Commission Registers, 1661-1714, but as that work is in six volumes, and as the present lists contain no detailed references to it, the note is not of much assistance.
George the First's Army, 1714-1727. By Charles Dalton, F.B.G.S. Vol. I. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd. fkle. net.]
Prefixed to the Commission Lista is a series of short bio- graphical sketches, whose subjects were officers of more or less distinction in the early years of the eighteenth century. Some of these are very slight, and amount to little more than a bare record of services. The greater number of the articles are not new, having been contributed to various periodicals between 1888 and 1903; but there is printed for the first time an interesting letter from the Duke of Argyll, written just before the battle of Sheriffmuir in justification of his conduct of the operations against Mar.
The book is handsomely got up, and the illustrations decidedly call for a word of praise.
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