Hessian grenadiers
Artillery
Dragoons
Among the little principalities, one in particular gained a
special reputation for its warlike character: Hessen-Kassel, whose people were
descended from the ancient warrior Catti. Of all the princes who let out troops
for hire, those of Hessen-Kassel were the most successful, and eventually
incurred the greatest odium. Hessen had become Calvinist in 1605, and fought
consistently on the Protestant side in the Thirty Years War. Armies were
ceaselessly marching across the land or quartered in its town. The longer the struggle
lasted, the more of the people were under arms. And when the Hessian troops
were finally disbanded at the war's end, the White Regiment of General Geyso
and some other bodies of men were kept on as three Schlosscompagnies to guard
the Landgraf's palace. These units were to form the nucleus of the Hessian
Guards, the core of the Hessian army. Hessen had received subsidies for
fighting in the war, and the countryside, which was generally poor, had been
wasted. Thus it was not illogical to look on the army as a source of income. In
Germany there was a centuries old tradition that troops had to pay for their
own upkeep.
To take this course was the decision of the Landgraf Karl
(1670-1730). The European power struggle in the century following 1660 facilitated
the soldier business, for the great powers, without modern resources to
conscript and maintain armies, turned to princes like Karl, who had a steadily
growing force. By 1676 the original three companies had grown to eighteen of
foot and five of horse. Karl, however, did not initiate the new phase in the
soldier business; namely, the leasing of standing troops by a prince himself at
peace to another state at war. This was done by Duke Johann Friedrich of
Braunschweig, hiring three regiments to the Republic of Venice in the 1660s. Karl
of Hessen concluded the first agreement of the Hessian soldier trade with
Christian V of Denmark in 1677. Hessen sent ten 'compagnies' of sixteen men
each at twenty talers a man. The 3,200 talers thus paid were used by Karl to
equip his troops, for from the very beginning the country's revenues were
insufficient to support the army alone.
Nearly half of those Hessians who went failed to return with
their regiments in 1679, and the flags of the Regiments von Hornumb and Ufm
Keller still adorn the Ridderholms Church in Stockholm. Well might von
Stamford, historian of the Hessian army, write, 'This first expedition of the
fighting men of the Hessian standing army was a forbidding prelude to the
sacrifice of valiant men, which was to happen so often in subsequent times.'
In that same year Hessen profited from the war in another
way: Brandenburgers and Danes paid to be quartered there during the winter.
In 1687 Hessen-Kassel and Hessen-Darmstadt sent troops in
the service of Venice to seize Morea from the Turks. The Regiment Prinz Karl
was specially formed in Hersfeld in April 1687 of 1,000 men drawn from recruits
and from other units, for each of whom Venice paid fifty talers. This
expedition was even more costly than the Danish one. Of the 1,000 only 191
returned; of 1,000 Darmstadters only 184. Yet Negroponte was taken and the
terrible Turk thrown back.
Under the military arrangements of the German Empire, Hessen
was to contribute troops to the Upper Rhine Circle. Karl, however, began to
develop his army as that of a self-contained state. To increase this army he
continued to obtain revenues from subsidies, and although Hessen was landlocked
her best customers were maritime powers, the Venetians, Holland and England. In
1688 by the Concert of Magdeburg some 3,400 Hessians took service under William
of Orange, freeing Dutch troops for the expedition to England. Karl's troops
distinguished themselves in the Wars of the Grand Alliance (1688—97) and
Spanish Succession (1701—14) against Louis XIV. Although hiring soldiers was
profitable to the Hessian ruling house, the princes shared the perils of war
with their subjects. Five of Karl's sons were in the field, and two of them
fell in battle: Karl at Liege in 1702 and Ludwig at Ramillies in 1706. A corps
of 10,000 Hessians crossed the Alps and served with Prince Eugene in 1706-7 and
thereafter in the Netherlands. Despite various bribes offered by the French,
Karl remained loyal to the allied powers. This was not solely for financial
reasons. One notable consistency of the Landgrafs' policy was to hire their
troops exclusively to Protestant powers, for the Hessians remained stern
Calvinists.
After the treaty of Utrecht ended the wars of Louis XIV,
Karl's son Friedrich, married to the sister of Charles XII of Sweden, led an
auxiliary corps of 6,000 Hessians into Swedish service, but the intercession of
Prussia and Britain prevented them reaching the battlefields of Pomerania.
George I of England made a new agreement to secure the services of 12,000
Hessians to protect his throne against the Pretender. When Britain joined the
Quadruple Alliance in 1726, she once again hired the soldiers of Hessen to
fulfil her continental obligations. By a treaty of 1727 she paid an annual
retainer of £125,000 to have first call on the Hessians' services. Britain was
rapidly becoming the Landgrafs' best customer. For the first time the term
Soldatenhandel was applied to the Hessian princes' dealings. By 1731 the
Hessians had become such an established part of British foreign policy that
Horatio, first Baron Walpole, dubbed them 'the Triarii of Great Britain, her
last Resort in all Cases, both in Peace and War; both at Home and Abroad;
howsoever ally'd, or wheresoever distress'd!' Objections to hiring the Hessians
were not made against subsidy treaties in themselves; they were grounded on
expediency: against the cost, against introducing foreigners into the kingdom,
against sacrificing Britain's interests for those of the Despicable Electorate.
Lord Strange was one amongst many who said it was contrary to the law of the
Empire, for the Hessians might find themselves at war with their sovereign, the
Emperor. He might as well have saved his breath. In 1731, a time when Britain
was at peace, Sir Robert Walpole obtained a vote of £241,259 1s 3d for keeping
12,094 Hessians in readiness for British service. Nor was the Emperor likely to
condemn the commerce in soldiers. He was a customer, and most of his
theoretical subjects were in the market like Hessen. It was scarcely surprising
that the learned professors of Wiirttemberg, Rostock, and Helmstedt all proved
conclusively in their theses that the princes had the legal right to aid
foreign powers and that German fighting men were permitted by the law of the
Empire to go into their service.
In actual practice all British ministries resorted in
wartime to employing mercenaries. The arguments in favour of hiring the
Hessians were that as trained troops they could be ready much more quickly than
Britain could recruit and train men; that Hessen's geographic location put her
close to any probable seat of war; and most compelling of all, but one never
admitted, that Britain's own military establishment at the beginning of any war
did not inspire confidence. The most eloquent example of Britain's
eighteenth-century dependence upon continental mercenaries is Pitt, who
condemned paying subsidies in violent speeches for years and voted against the
treaties of 1755 with Russia and Hessen-Kassel. Yet during the Seven Years War
he paid out subsidies not only to Frederick of Prussia, but also to maintain
'His Brittanic Majesty's Army in Germany', an army composed mainly of Hessians,
Hannoverians, and Brunswickers; and at the end of the war he boasted that he
had conquered America in Germany.
The Landgraf Karl died in 1730. His eldest son Friedrich, then
King of Sweden, and nominally Landgraf, was a gallant warrior and lover, but
politically insignificant. His brother Wilhelm, Statthalter of Hessen and de
facto ruler, continued his father's policy. His aims were to enrich Hessen's
military chest with British subsidies, maintain the traditional alliance with
Protestant Prussia, already re-affirmed once in a treaty of 1714, and obtain
possession of the County of Hanau, promised to Hessen by a treaty of 1648,
whenever the existing ruling house should expire. In the War of the Austrian
Succession Wilhelm was thrown into a dilemma, for his paymaster Britain was
opposed to Prussia and allied with the Catholic Habsburgs, who had not
recognized Kassel's right to Hanau and supported a Darmstadt claim instead. A corps
of 6,000 Hessians was already serving in British pay when in 1744 Wilhelm
supported Karl VII, Bavarian candidate for the Imperial crown, in return for
the promise of an Electorship and territorial gains. His support included 6,000
men for Karl's army. Similarly Wilhelm reaffirmed the treaty of alliance with
Prussia in 1744.
Thus there occurred the extraordinary spectacle of Hessian
troops at war simultaneously on both sides: in British pay garrisoning
fortresses in the Low Countries and in the Bavarian army in southern Germany. A
secret clause in theory prevented the two contingents facing each other on the
battlefield. Nevertheless, the double agreement caused bad feeling later, not
least because the treaty with Bavaria included a 'blood money' clause: for
every dead man Wilhelm was to receive 36 florins, for a dead horse 112 florins
and 30 krone, and for a dead horse and rider together 150 florins. Three wounded
were to count as one dead. It was just as well that the Bavarians were
defeated, Karl VII died, and the Hessian corps in Bavaria was saved from
captivity by a speedy declaration of neutrality. They were still interned in
Ingolstadt for six weeks before being allowed to return to Hessen. In 1745
Wilhelm renewed the British subsidy treaty, so that henceforth Hessians were
available only to England. This apparent double-dealing shocked later
historians, but it was nothing extraordinary in the age of cabinet diplomacy,
and when Wilhelm died in 1760 Frederick of Prussia wrote to his successor, 'Germany
has lost its most valuable prince, his land a father, and I my truest friend.'
No comments:
Post a Comment