Huguenots, Jacobites, Prisoners and the Challenge of Military Remittances in Early Modern Warfare

Abstract

Early modern states faced numerous challenges in supporting their prisoners of war, not least the problems of remitting them money for their subsistence, which had to pass across hostile borders. Examining how the British state achieved this in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) shows the limits of modern scholarship on state formation and its focus on administrative reform and domestic resource mobilisation. The projection of power continued to rely on international Huguenot and even Jacobite financial networks, held together by personal trust and private interests, sometimes even while they were working for the enemy. Success was achieved because British officials were able to tap into these networks through hubs such as London, Amsterdam, Paris and Madrid, and use them to maintain the flow of money abroad.

Among the smallest but toughest challenges that the early modern European states faced in making war was subsisting prisoners. Before the early nineteenth century it was expected that states would subsist their own prisoners of war overseas, raising issues of administration and finance which have been analysed in several studies of early modern state formation. The most difficult problem, however, was in sending funds across borders between belligerents. Prisoners who were not supplied with money might die or desert, and the failure of states to maintain their own men during wartime offered valuable symbolic capital for captors: French prisoners lacked even clothes, one British writer claimed during the Seven Years War, for instance, ‘[since] the glorious success of His Majesty’s arms has so distressed the French in general that they cannot assist their friends and relations in England’.¹ While the remittance of money to prisoners of war was only one part of the challenge of maintaining them, and an even smaller aspect of the wider difficulties that states faced in making war, examining how they overcame this problem therefore casts an important light upon how these states managed in extremis. The efforts of the British fiscal-military state during the War of the Spanish Succession, which are the focus of this article, shows that they relied heavily upon international financial networks of Huguenot and Jacobite merchants, which crossed borders and were mainly accessed through major European hubs such as London and Amsterdam. State formation was thus international as well as national, and was a product of personal connections and networks as well as administrative changes.

Context

Much of the limited work on prisoners of war and the early modern state has been preoccupied with its national dimensions, part of a wider scholarship stressing, in Charles Tilly’s words, how ‘war made the state, and the state made war’.² Work on the British state between 1550 and 1850 exemplifies this tendency, which has focused mainly on the administrative and financial factors which facilitated the efficient extraction and deployment of national resources.³ Consequently the scholarship on British state formation as it relates to prisoners of war has mainly been framed in national terms as an aspect of domestic resource mobilisation.⁴ The challenge that these states faced was to raise enough money, and when this broke down for French prisoners in the Seven Years War, as noted above, Britain was able to step in and subsist French prisoners with its own resources. Erica Charters argues that ‘the ability of the British state to answer such constant demands in such various contexts demonstrates its efficient administrative structure, especially compared with the breakdown in French finances’, the same factors which repeatedly enabled British arms to succeed during the Second Hundred Years War with France between 1688 and 1815.⁵ The similar capacity of the British state in the Napoleonic War not only to support its French prisoners but also to provide charitable assistance to British prisoners in France was a source of patriotic pride for contemporaries.⁶

Studies of how resources were deployed for prisoners similarly frames the question almost exclusively in national terms. Accommodating and victualling prisoners of war presented formidable logistical challenges, and it was also necessary to provide military protection and to find ways to regulate relations between prisoners, soldiers and the wider population.⁷ By the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815 for instance there were nine purpose-built prisoner of war camps in Britain holding about 45,000 men, and over fifty hulks or converted warships holding another 15,000, the product of an immense national administrative capacity.⁸ In the Seven Years War, when prisoners were quartered in smaller numbers in local prisons or barracks, delicate negotiations were needed between local interests and British state officials.⁹ ‘The administrative differences between Britain and France accounted for their differing military outcomes’ notes Charters once again, ‘… [and] the state of prisoners of war makes this comparison explicit, with the British state ably caring for thousands of French prisoners who could not be maintained by the prisoners’ own government’.¹⁰ Transporting prisoners of war and regulating their movement on parole placed further demands on central officials and local magistrates.¹¹ Maintaining prisoners of war therefore tested the administrative capacity of national states in new ways.

The international dimensions of maintaining prisoners of war have been less closely studied. Morieux has examined, for instance, the practicalities and politics of prisoner exchanges during the eighteenth century, which were to some extent outside the sphere of administration and dependent upon the success of diplomatic negotiation.¹² The financial implications of prisoners, not just in terms of raising the necessary funds but in transmitting them from one country to another, have been almost entirely overlooked, despite an established literature noting the many and varied challenges of financial remittance for early modern states in this period.¹³ Britain, France and the Dutch Republic, for instance, were all forced to rely on extensive extra-territorial financial networks of private merchants and bankers, who were outside their immediate control and could not be replaced by formal bureaucratic structures. As part of the ‘contractor-state’, these networks instead relied on personal connections and intimacies between officials and contractors.¹⁴ In the Dutch Republic, key intermediaries were the solliciteurs-militair who managed the relationship between the Dutch state and individual regiments, many of them foreign regiments contracted out by German princes.¹⁵ This remained the case even during the last years of the Napoleonic Wars, when British armies and allies were funded by money remitted by the Rothschilds through their European networks.¹⁶ The capacity to project power therefore depended on states such as Britain having access to networks of financiers crossing national boundaries, and focussed on major financial centres or hubs such as Amsterdam, London, Paris and Hamburg.¹⁷ The supply of prisoners in foreign countries, as this article will show, was no different.

Nonetheless, states maintaining prisoners abroad faced a level of difficulty above and beyond the problem of supplying armies in the field, since it was necessary for them to remit funds across belligerents’ borders, through networks and agents who were loyal – at least in theory – to enemy states. As Élodie Duché has shown, detainees in France in the Napoleonic War could not receive money directly from Britain but had to look for roundabout routes, including banking networks in Paris and Amsterdam which had previously catered to British civilians on the Grand Tour.¹⁸ Duché’s work is suggestive of the problems of maintaining prisoners of war in the eighteenth century, but focuses on civilian detainees at the end of the period, under the exceptional conditions of the Continental System which tried to cut off contact between Britain and the Continent. It remains unclear whether this solution was typical, and how the trust that held together early modern international mercantile networks accommodated the competing tugs of national loyalties and rivalries. As much recent literature has shown, that trust was often cosmopolitan and apolitical in nature, built on kinship, friendship, shared interests and ‘good correspondence’.¹⁹ Some of my work on these networks as they connected with the British ‘contractor-state’ has emphasised though the role of patriotism and partisanship in building trust, potentially a problematic element in networks intended to transmit funds across frontiers and wartime borders for prisoners of war on opposing sides.²⁰

The remainder of this article explores the process near the beginning of the Second Hundred Years War between Britain and France, during the War of the Spanish Succession between 1702 and 1713. During this conflict France faced off against Britain, the Dutch Republic, the north German princes and the Austrian Habsburgs for control of the vacant Spanish throne, with each side supporting a Bourbon and Habsburg claimant respectively.²¹ Allegiances were complicated by ideological and religious affinities which cut across national identities, such as the diaspora of Protestants or Huguenots expelled from France after 1685, and the similar diaspora of Irish Catholics ejected from Ireland after the Glorious Revolution and the defeat of the Jacobites in 1691. When British troops were made prisoner in France and Spain, the British fiscal-military state had the challenge of finding ways to remit money to them in enemy territory, through networks of contractors not under their direct control. Looking first at France then at Spain shows that British officials, especially the Paymaster of the Forces Abroad, James Brydges, had to draw upon networks of Huguenot and Jacobite merchants that crossed national borders in order to support the troops, using a mixture of private incentives and personal pleas. The process of national state formation was therefore about more than mobilising local resources; it was also about tapping into these wider international networks and about finding ways to create trust which overcame patriotism and ideological loyalties.

Flanders

The Battle of Almanza in April 1707 was a disaster for the British, Portuguese and Spanish Habsburg forces. The allied army under the Earl of Galway had moved far inland from Portugal into eastern Spain to support allied forces in Catalonia, but it was caught and defeated by the French and Spanish Bourbon forces, and roughly 7,500 troops were taken prisoner.²² They were transferred to French custody and marched north into France, where they would be kept until they were exchanged. Their subsistence during this period was largely ad hoc. The commanding officer, Major General Shrimpton, reported to Brydges that many men were lacking any clothing and that the French were offering each man five or six pistoles, roughly £5, to desert and join the French army.²³ Obviously their subsistence needed to be set on a proper footing, and when Shrimpton arrived back in London on parole later that year a new arrangement was agreed.²⁴ Captain John Arnott would travel to France as the Paymaster of Prisoners, overseeing the administrative side, while Brydges would face the challenge of remitting funds into an enemy country. This required him to use his connections in Amsterdam to tap into secret Huguenot networks that stretched between the Low Countries and northern France, and which the Treasury was at that moment attempting to shut down, to find the necessary funds.

The instructions issued to Arnott by the War Office in January 1708 clearly laid out his duties and responsibilities.²⁵ He was to travel immediately to France and to lay his credentials before Michel Chamillart, the Minister of War, in order to obtain his permission to visit the British prisoners in their individual quarters across northern France. With the help of their officers he was to take a muster of all of the troops, ensure that they were being treated well, and distribute the money sent to him on their behalf. He would either receive the money directly from bankers in France as Brydges nominated them, or else draw bills of exchange on Brydges and present those bills to the bankers in Paris, who would provide him with cash in return.²⁶ In fact, Arnott only arrived in Flanders in August, and so in the meantime another officer, Captain Henry Martin, was appointed to act for him.²⁷ Shrimpton had also appointed another agent in Bayonne, Lt. John Adams, to handle the remittance of monies for prisoners being sent north from Spain.²⁸ Martin drew small amounts of money directly on Brydges’ deputy in Amsterdam, but both their roles were mainly administrative, whereas Arnott had a much broader responsibility for receiving and paying the money.²⁹ By December 1708 the details of the exchange had largely been agreed and the British troops began to be moved northward towards Brussels and Ostend for the exchange, with Arnott remaining behind to help British officers clear the debts they had run up in quarters, a process that ran into the summer of 1709.³⁰

Meanwhile Brydges had to arrange for the remittance of money from Britain to France, and drew upon various private networks to do this. The main contractor for making remittances to the Low Countries in 1707 was Sir Henry Furnese, who had already instructed his correspondents or partners in Amsterdam to remit some £8,700 to Shrimpton in Paris as a temporary measure.³¹ Brydges had other ideas. As I have shown elsewhere, his main contact in Amsterdam was the house of Messrs Vanderheiden & Drummond; John Drummond was a Scottish merchant of strongly Tory leanings, who helped Brydges carry out various private financial operations since 1706 intended to support the allied armies in Flanders and for his own private profit.³² Some of these trespassed on Furnese’s operations, leading to resentment on both sides, but strengthening the trust between Drummond and Brydges, who was constantly searching for opportunities to employ Drummond at the expense of Furnese and his correspondents. Drummond also operated as what Koenraad Jonckheere and others have called a solliciteur-culturel, sourcing artwork, collectables and various other consumables such as wine and tobacco across Europe for the benefit of wealthy connoisseurs such as Brydges, who went on to become one of Britain’s leading art collectors and patrons.³³ Indeed, the financial and the cultural overlapped, with Brydges’ deputies throughout Europe sourcing artworks and consumables for him and his solliciteurs-culturel becoming drawn into his official networks, building links of trust between all the parties involved.

It was on this basis that Brydges hoped to supply the prisoners in Paris. One of Drummond’s contacts was a wine merchant in Bayonne in south-western France, who privately supplied Brydges with wine and artwork, and advanced Shrimpton some £1,500 to subsist the prisoners during their journey north. ‘Our good friend Mr [Louis] Dulivier … seems to have drawn some bills on you [for repayment]’, Drummond told Brydges in August 1707, ‘which I doubt not you’ll take due care of, for he is a worthy honest man and will not draw more than he has actually paid’.³⁴ Shared trust therefore oiled the wheels of state, and Brydges made sure that the bills were paid and that Dulivier was not left out of pocket. Dulivier also worked with Adams to supply other prisoners passing through Bayonne, writing in May 1709 for instance that he had heard that several British regiments had been captured in Portugal and that, when they passed on their way from Madrid to Flanders to be exchanged, he would provide them too with money.³⁵ ‘This could never have been effected without a good deal of friendship and readiness in you to assist them’, Brydges replied, while also privately thanking Dulivier for continuing to send him shipments of French wine. Their relationship demonstrates how the international financial networks so vital for maintaining prisoners overseas were cemented by the personal trust between the involved parties, mediated by shared acquaintances and private obligations that transcended wartime allegiances.

The main channel for remittance however went from Brydges in London to Messrs Vanderheiden & Drummond in Amsterdam, and then to Paris, where Drummond had arranged for the Huguenot banking house of Tourton et Guiguer to handle all the remittances.³⁶ Drummond was therefore drawing upon a secretive and highly illicit set of international financial linkages, as Tourton et Guiguer were part of the wider Huguenot financial network which supplied the French Crown with loans and remittance facilities.³⁷ ‘One of the great banking firms of the Spanish Succession conflict … [and] the essential conduit for financing the French army in Flanders’, they acted as a link between Paris and the Low Countries, and were a key part of the financial consortium led by Samuel Bernard and Jean-Pels Huguetan which – ‘[with] care and even greater secrecy than usual’ – was trying to tap into the Amsterdam markets to find cash for the French king. ³⁸ Their contact in Amsterdam was the house of Andries Pels & Sons, the agent for the Tobacco Farm in France, which held the monopoly on the import and sale of tobacco into the country in peacetime and relied on purchasing its supplies on the Dutch and British markets even in wartime.³⁹ The Farm’s chief agents in London before the outbreak of war in 1702 had been the Huguenot merchant Sir John Lambert and the house of Messrs Tourton & Guiguer, a branch of the Parisian firm.⁴⁰ Since the Tobacco Farm had a network of bureaux across northern France to handle the sale of tobacco, Tourton et Guiguer probably used these local networks to distribute funds to the British prisoners for Arnott, though unfortunately no details appear to survive giving more information on this process.⁴¹ Drummond’s access to this network was provided by Andries Pels, ‘my worthy good friend’, Drummond told Brydges, ‘… the first banquier of this place and one who has been extremely obliging to me in all the course of my business here’.⁴²

Drummond therefore used the same international Huguenot financial networks employed by the French state against Britain and its allies to maintain the British prisoners in France, even though these were networks which the British state in general, and Drummond in particular, had been trying to shut down since the beginning of the war. Writing in September 1704, he described how the French bankers and merchants depended on their connection with Amsterdam to receive back the profits of their exports to northern and central Europe, and how British tobacco merchants relied on the networks to continue selling their tobacco to France.⁴³ By taking the contract to supply prisoners, Tourton et Guiguer not only gained 1 per cent commission but also a plausible cover for their business for the French king.⁴⁴ Drummond in turn had to walk a very fine line by December 1708 of shutting down the recirculation of French bills of exchange without jeopardising the remittance of money to British prisoners.⁴⁵ What eventually put a stop to this trade was nothing that he did, but the collapse of Samuel Bernard and his network in March 1709 under the sheer pressure of his unpaid financial obligations from the French Crown.⁴⁶ Though clearly a boon for the allied war effort as a whole, this disrupted financial networks across Europe and had a direct impact upon the supply of money to prisoners.⁴⁷ Drummond was already warning Brydges on 8 March that money was scarce in France, increasing the costs of sending funds.⁴⁸ Five months later he reported that Tourton et Guiguer had collapsed, even with the £1,000 which Vanderheiden & Drummond had lent to keep them afloat, ‘[and] if they fail their brothers in London and they must in all appearance run the same fate’.⁴⁹ Fortunately the exchanges of prisoners had all been negotiated and Arnott was merely liquidating the last few debts before he returned to Britain.⁵⁰

The business of remitting money to British prisoners in France between 1707 and 1709 was therefore a small but important part of the British campaign in Flanders, but one of the most complex. Brydges was able to arrange it satisfactorily because his friendship with Drummond gave him access to a range of contacts, including the networks of the French Tobacco Farm now secretly being used to raise money for the French state in Amsterdam. These connections were reinforced by trust and by personal obligations between the parties involved, which crossed political loyalties, and new parties were integrated into these networks by the exchange of further gifts and obligations.⁵¹ Arnott used his stay in France to send several gifts of wine to Brydges, for example, and in return Brydges recommended that Arnott be appointed the deputy-paymaster for the British expedition to Quebec in 1711.⁵² For Lt. Adams, who had handled the finances while in Bayonne and ‘rendered a very just and clear account, with proper vouchers for every payment, and for his trouble in so doing hath never had any manner of consideration’, Brydges used his influence with Marlborough to get him promoted.⁵³ Armed with these personal connections, the British state was able to maintain the flow of money to its prisoners in France.

Spain

These connections were tested to an even greater extent in Spain after the equally catastrophic battles of Brihuega and Villaviciosa in December 1710.⁵⁴ The British force under James Stanhope and its allies were defeated during their retreat from Madrid, and were held as prisoners in Spain for over a year rather than being sent northwards to Paris. Whereas Paris was a major European financial hub with relatively easy access to Paris and London, the same was not true of Madrid, and Guy Rowlands has pointed out that even the French state therefore had very great trouble remitting money to its armies in Spain.⁵⁵ ‘The French trading presence and the stronger places of the Spanish commercial world did not easily map onto the needs of military funding’, he notes, since it was strongest in the Atlantic ports of Seville and Cadiz, ‘but it was Madrid that French money needed to reach … [and] Madrid, not normally abundant in cash anyway, was the only important commercial centre in the Spanish interior, and the lack of integration was palpable’.⁵⁶ Furnese had experienced equal difficulties remitting funds to allied armies in Barcelona, due partly as well to the weakness of his financial networks there.⁵⁷ Providing Stanhope and his prisoners with funding was therefore an unprecedented challenge, which was met in much the same way, by exploiting the illicit Jacobite financial networks that ran between London, Paris and Madrid to help fund the allied prisoners. Once again, personal trust and a set of shared private interests helped to transmit funds across wartime boundaries despite the competing political loyalties involved.

The agents that Brydges used were the banking house of Arthur & Crean in Madrid. Jacobites expelled from Britain after the Glorious Revolution in 1688 had settled across Europe, especially France and Spain, and required banking services which overlapped with those already serving the Catholic Irish merchants who had been settled in these regions for some time.⁵⁸ ‘Arthur & Crean’s operation in Madrid was part of a larger financial concern that played a crucial role in maintaining Jacobite solvency abroad’, notes Thomas O’Connor, and built on the links that Sir Francis Arthur had with the banking houses of his brother Daniel Arthur in Paris and step-brother Daniel Arthur in London.⁵⁹ In peacetime they had handled cash for Irish merchants involved in the wine trade between the Canary Islands, Bordeaux and Britain, and those in Seville and Cadiz involved in the colonial trade, and the remittance of cash between Jacobites living in Paris and Madrid. They were therefore the commercial and ideological mirrors of the Huguenot networks noted earlier, with networks likewise held together by the trust created by their shared religious, political and national loyalties, which also helped to build connexions with merchants in Catholic countries such as Spain. Just as major Huguenot financiers were still prepared to work for the French Crown, ‘banking operations like Crean’s actually carried little ideological freight’, notes O’Connor, ‘and when it came to money were both dynastically and religiously indifferent’.⁶⁰ Indeed, during the brief allied occupation of Madrid in 1706, Furnese had supplied the troops there through Arthur & Crean, via their agent in London, Sir William Hodges, a British merchant who had traded with Spain for several decades and was one of the directors of the Bank of England.⁶¹

Immediately after he heard the news in December 1710, Furnese asked Arthur & Crean to supply Stanhope and the prisoners with 20,000 dollars or about £4,300. ‘I cannot express the affliction I am in for your misfortune and that of our army in Spain’, he told Stanhope, ‘… [and] my particular esteem and respect for you moves me to do what lieth in my power that you may be supplied’.⁶² This was a private transaction though, and the Treasury yet again ordered Brydges to put the whole business upon a formal footing, such as arranging a contractor to remit £5,000 per month to the prisoners by bills of exchange.⁶³ ‘If they can be drawn by your means I shall very readily join in endeavouring to promote it’, Brydges told Drummond, showing once again his determination to promote the interests of his friends in Amsterdam.⁶⁴ As in Flanders, the key official was to be the Paymaster of Prisoners, and Brydges sent a copy of Arnott’s instructions to Stanhope with instructions to select an appropriate person.⁶⁵ Stanhope appointed Col. Clement Nevill, ‘a person who understands accounts very well, and as proper I believe for that business as any man I know’, and Brydges managed to get the Treasury to confirm this choice.⁶⁶ Both Brydges and Stanhope agreed that he faced formidable challenges. ‘Upon the good character you give him I’ll do all I can to serve him’, Brydges noted, ‘[and] I am fully persuaded from what I have already seen of him you have not been mistaken in your choice … I know very well the nature of his business must be so troublesome and difficult in the execution of it as to entitle him to all fitting encouragement’.⁶⁷

The key part of Nevill’s role involved working closely with Arthur & Crean, and them in turn with Sir John Lambert, a Huguenot financier already noted earlier, who obtained the contract from the Treasury to remit the money to Spain in January 1712.⁶⁸ The motives which induced them, as Irish Catholic Jacobites, to undertake this on behalf of the British state are unclear, but they may have hoped – like their Huguenot counterparts – that the contract would not only provide a degree of profit but also provide a legitimate cover for corresponding with their contacts in Britain. For Arthur, he may also have hoped that it would enable him to return home. He told Stanhope in February 1711 that ‘I am more than ready to leave this country … and should soon see my own’, if an outstanding legal matter could be settled.⁶⁹ He had been banker to Sir William Godolphin, a Catholic convert in Madrid who had died in 1696 with his estate in dispute, and Arthur wanted Godolphin’s heirs not to sue him for the assets left in Spain, ‘wherein I never meddled’. In September he also married a woman from a Jacobite family in Britain, ‘a woman of good fashion … [and] the most loyal in the world for the King [James III]’, one Jacobite envoy later noted.⁷⁰ ‘She must certainly have a great value for matrimony and Sir Francis’, Nevill snidely wrote to Stanhope, ‘since she has taken a journey from Northamptonshire through France for those enjoyments’. A mixture of personal factors and private interests therefore encouraged Arthur in particular to take on the business of supplying the allied forces, and helped to build trust between parties on different sides of the war.

Between them, Nevill and Arthur & Crean had two functions. As in Flanders, they organised the remittance of funds from Madrid to the towns where the individual contingents of prisoners were quartered, a business frustrated by the fact that the Spanish authorities did not allow Nevill to correspond with them directly.⁷¹ Arthur & Crean therefore handled this business for him, and remitted funds directly using their network of contacts within Spain.⁷² Unfortunately here too very little detail survives, but what does is suggestive. For instance, Stanhope was quartered initially in Valladolid, about 200 km or 125 miles north-west of Madrid. Arthur & Crean nominated as their agent Don Alexandro de Espada, ‘the richest man in that city’, who advanced them up to £2,000.⁷³ For the troops in Logroño, about 300 km or 190 miles north-east of Madrid, they provided Nevill with a letter to Don Manuel Ignacio Remon, the alcalde mayor or municipal magistrate, or in his absence the corregidore or royal magistrate there, ‘desiring either of them to assist Your Excellency with what money they can spare’, hinting at the range of their own private networks within Spain.⁷⁴ In return they faced substantial risks. In February 1711, for instance, Arthur warned Stanhope that ‘this innocent correspondence and my supplying the money for your subsistence may be made a crime’, and he had been forced to travel to the court at Madrid and buy off courtiers with loans.⁷⁵ ‘I am sorry that your kindness in supplying us is likely to cause you the least uneasiness’, Stanhope replied, ‘which I think very unjust, for I never yet heard that it was not allowed to prisoners in any nation to have money remitted to them, and I think ‘tis for the advantage of the country to have so much money spent in it’.⁷⁶

Their other, equally risky, function was to receive money from Britain and to make arrangements when it failed to arrive on time. The period was one of financial crisis; Arthur noted in March 1711 that ‘money grows extreme scarce here through the prohibition of trade with Holland … so I shall be much straightened and obliged to take other measures that you and the quarters may be supplied’.⁷⁷ Even more damaging was the failure of the British state, in the midst of its own financial crisis, to answer the bills that Stanhope was drawing on them from Madrid.⁷⁸ ‘I wonder the Lords of the Treasury should have so little regard to the public credit in Spain’, Arthur told Stanhope when news arrived in March 1711.⁷⁹ Clement Nevill reported in September that only £6,000 had been paid to Arthur & Crean for the past nine months, ‘which entirely disables the bankers from supplying the troops any further, though to do Sir Francis justice, he is willing to lay down the last shilling, and seems to be more concerned to think of the troops wanting than that his bills are unpaid’.⁸⁰ Stanhope embarked on a concerted lobbying campaign which led the Treasury to agree in January 1712 to set aside £7,500 per month for the prisoners and to make a contract with Sir John Lambert, as noted above, to remit these funds to Spain.⁸¹

To bridge the gap, Francis Arthur drew upon his own personal resources to increase those of Arthur & Crean. In April 1711 he complained that he had had advanced about £50,000 of his own money upon the bills ‘and I have troubled my friends so much that I can find no more credit to raise money to give Col. Nevill … though I pawn my plates and jewels’.⁸² In September, as the Treasury continued to ignore demands for the payment of these bills, Nevill reported that ‘under these crosses and disappointments I can never sufficiently acknowledge the goodness of Sir Francis, who had promised me some small remittances for the troops … to keep them from starving’.⁸³ Indeed, although Nevill thought that there might be some other money available from other bankers in Madrid, ‘I could have no thought of taking it, least it might do them [i.e. Arthur & Crean] a prejudice’. As Stanhope explained to Robert Harley, the head of the Tory ministry – and his political opponent – in June 1712, they had ‘generously supported us hitherto by being continually in advance of very great sums … [and] exert[ed] themselves for Her Majesty’s service’, and were therefore due support from the Treasury.⁸⁴ ‘My Lord, … what English shall return to England from hence owe their preservation to these gentlemen’, he added, warming to his theme, ‘nor could any other persons have served us, which Your Lordship will easily believe when I assure you that even they, who have very good interest at this Court of Madrid, have run no small hazard from hence by their supplying us’.

Although the Treasury contract in January 1712 briefly promised relief, Nevill noted that it was barely enough for their needs, and their problems only increased as the British state neared bankruptcy and remittance contractors in Amsterdam such as Messrs Vanderheiden & Drummond fell, evidencing the wider problems in the system.⁸⁵ ‘We are in a miserable condition’, Stanhope told Brydges in February, ‘… [and the officers] will starve if remittances do not come, and if Sir Francis Arthur be not encouraged to continue to supply us’.⁸⁶ He pressed Brydges to lobby for funds, and wrote directly to the Treasury to plead for some ‘just compensation’ to be offered to Arthur & Crean to encourage them to continue to advance funds. Lambert ordered Arthur & Crean in May 1712 to draw no further bills, since there was no chance of payment, and although Nevill continued to press Arthur for money, ‘all I could gain of him was a promise to try if he could procure some little money of his own to keep the prisoners from starving, for that none was to be expected from the company, meaning his partner Mr Crean’.⁸⁷ The crisis only eased in July once the Treasury released some £30,000 to enable the prisoners to be brought home, which allowed Nevill, like Arnott had done before, to discharge officers’ debts in quarters and begin moving the prisoners northwards to the coast so that they could be evacuated.⁸⁸ A relationship of trust between British officers and their Catholic, Irish and Jacobite enemies had therefore enabled Britain to meet the needs of its prisoners, a trust which reflected shared interests and overrode their mutual antagonisms.

The final challenge occurred once the troops were actually in motion, since it would be necessary for Arthur & Crean to provide funds in Bayonne, on the French side of the Pyrenees, to subsist the troops until the transports arrived to return them home. ‘I must beg leave upon this occasion to recommend ourselves to you that you will crown your own works and not render ineffectual all the supplies you have so kindly advanced to us hitherto’, Stanhope told Arthur, ‘… [and] I can only tell you there is nothing you can propose to be for your service which I will not most zealously solicit at home [for] I flatter myself I shall not be refused anything reasonable for persons who have so eminently served our Queen and Country’.⁸⁹ To Nevill he confided that ‘notwithstanding the difficulties these gentlemen make of advancing us money upon this occasion I believe they would be unwilling that we should endeavour to find credit elsewhere, even when in France’, and ordered him to try Arthur & Crean first, ‘[for] as long as these gentlemen are willing to be concerned, ‘tis highly reasonable they should have the preference.⁹⁰ The bankers eventually agreed to provide the money at Bayonne and nominated an Irish Catholic merchant, Richard Barry, who was part of their network of trusted Jacobites; he bought weapons for the Irish regiments in Spanish service and later sourced guns and swords in 1717 and 1718 for the ill-fated Jacobite rising in Scotland sponsored by Spain.⁹¹

In 1712 however Barry was all compliance, writing to Stanhope in July that he had started to encash the £4,000 in bills he had received, despite the loss of Britain’s credit overseas – ‘as poor and disorderly as the Spaniards are, I see they pay better than either this Kingdom or Britain, which is somewhat strange’ – and the issues of remittance.⁹² ‘Here’s none can draw on London, for want of commerce this long time with England’, so Barry weighed up the benefits of redrawing via Bordeaux or Paris. In return, and demonstrating the looseness of ideology already noted above and the role of private interests in structuring these networks, he asked Stanhope’s help to be appointed the British consul at Bayonne.⁹³ ‘Tis honourable … to be in a station to render one’s country some service’, he told Stanhope, ‘… [and] I don’t know whether my religion may not be an obstacle, yet ‘twas none to … several others in other ports, all of the R[oman] C[atholic] religion and some of ‘em not even born subjects of Britain’. Indeed, the ideological character of the network was so loose that Barry was later found to have betrayed the Jacobites in 1718; he had fed information about the arms he had bought for them to Stanhope, now head of the Hanoverian ministry in Britain, pointing either to an underlying patriotism or to a flexible attitude that took more account of private interests than political loyalties.⁹⁴ Either way, it demonstrates both the strength and the limitations of the unlikely networks of trust upon which the British state relied to support its prisoners.

Conclusion

‘This [letter] serves chiefly and indeed only to represent to you how very kind Sir Francis Arthur and his partner Mr Crean have been to us in furnishing us with such large sums’, Stanhope told Brydges in April 1711, ‘as … without their assistance the officers must have perished and … the private men … must have taken on with the enemy, whereas thank God they have hitherto most of them stayed with us, though dispersed over Spain’.⁹⁵ The delicate financial linkages connecting the bankers in Madrid with Brydges in London were therefore of the utmost importance. ‘I need not represent to you how much it is for the Queen’s service that so many old soldiers should be preserved for the service’, Stanhope added, ‘nor how much it is for our country’s reputation to see that at such a distance from home we are punctually paid … since we cannot expect to keep our men any longer than we can pay them’. The solutions that Brydges found for the British fiscal-military state help to nuance existing narratives about early modern state formation as a predominantly national process. Even once money had been raised, it was necessary to find ways to remit this money behind enemy lines, which made states reliant upon the financial networks which crossed these borders. The dependence of Stanhope upon a network of Irish Catholics with Jacobite loyalties was no more or less improbable than the continued use of Protestant Huguenots by the French Crown after 1685, and indicative of the importance of wider financial networks in the operation of early modern states. As these networks were outside any direct control, officials such as Brydges had to employ the same methods used to build trust between merchants, using shared private interests that overrode or submerged political and religious loyalties. The growth of bureaucracies for resource mobilisation was therefore paralleled by the persistence of private networks serving states based on personal trust and private interests.

Biography

Aaron Graham is a Research Associate at the Faculty of History in the University of Oxford, on the ERC-sponsored project ‘The European Fiscal-Military State, 1530–1870’, where he is responsible for the London case study. He has held postdoctoral research fellowships at Oxford and University College London. His work focuses on politics, government and finance in Britain and the British Empire between 1660 and 1850. Currently, he is working on the role of London as a ‘hub’ in the European fiscal-military system during this period, and its changing function as a supplier of money and manpower for European war-making.

Funding Statement

This work was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant number 787504.

Disclosure statement

No conflicts of interest to declare.