Standing Army Controversy

The Standing Army Controversy (1697–1699) was a major political and ideological debate in England following the Treaty of Ryswick that ended the Nine Years' War, concerning whether England should maintain a permanent army during peacetime.

Background

Prior to the English Civil War, England lacked a permanent military force, relying instead on locally organized militia, noble levies and hired European mercenaries. Oliver Cromwell’s professional New Model Army of around 50,000 men were militarily effective but politically contentious, leading to its disbandment after the Restoration in 1660.^[1] Charles II established four regiments of guards, forming the basis of a permanent British Army. This force expanded under James II to 37,000 men in 1688. Although the Bill of Rights 1689 required parliamentary consent for a peacetime standing army, in 1694 under William III numbers increased to 94,000.^[2][3]

Standing armies were also portrayed as an aid to other monarch's moves to absolutism as in Robert Molesworth's An Account of Denmark, as it was in the Year 1692.^[4]

Protoganists

In 1697 John Trenchard and Walter Moyle wrote a pamphlet An Argument, Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government^[5] which started the controversy. Other Radical Whigs such as Andrew Fletcher and John Toland argued through pamphlets that a standing army endangered England’s constitutional balance^[6] through corruption,^[7] royal absolutism and threats to civil liberty. There was probably coordination between the pamphlet authors.^[8] There was also a Tory majority in Parliament determined to reduce costs who had in 1698 reduced the English army to 7,000 English born subjects.^[9] Pro government Whigs like Daniel Defoe and the Lord Chancellor John Somers defended a limited peacetime force was necessary for national security^[10] and that parliamentary control of taxation meant there would be parliamentary control over the army.^[8]

Aftermath

The army cuts undermined William's ability to negotiate on equal terms with France, and despite his intense mistrust, he co-operated with Louis XIV in unsuccessful attempts to agree a diplomatic solution to the Spanish succession.^[11]

The controversy shaped enduring English and American Country Party^[12] and liberal distrust of standing armies, and helped to bring the naturally opposed Tories and Radical Whigs into a later alliance, the Country Party, against the Court Party of the Whig leadership.

References

1. Macaulay 1849, p. 174.
2. Chandler 2003, pp. 46–57.
3. Barnett 1970, pp. 90–98, 110–25.
4. Robbins 1959.
5. Schwoerer 1965, p. 190.
6. Schwoerer 1974, p. 1.
7. Pococock 1965, p. 566. sfn error: no target: CITEREFPococock1965 (help)
8. Robbins 1959, p. 103.
9. Schwoerer 1974, p. 156.
10. Schwoerer 1965.
11. Falkner 2015, p. 37.
12. Bailyn 2017, p. 36.

Sources

• Barnett, Correlli (1970). Britain and Her Army, 1509–1970: A Military, Political and Social Survey.
• Bailyn, Bernard (2017). The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Fiftieth Anniversary ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674975651.
• Chandler, David G., ed. (2003). The Oxford History of the British Army.
• Falkner, James (2015). The War of the Spanish Succession 1701–1714. Pen and Sword Books. ISBN 978-1473872905.
• Gregg, Edward (1980). Queen Anne (Revised) (The English Monarchs Series) (2001 ed.). Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300090246.
• Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1849). The History of England from the Accession of James the Second. Vol. 1 (1st ed.). London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. OCLC 1069526323.
• Pocock, J. G. A. (October 1965). "The Standing-Army Controversy in England: 1697–1699". The William and Mary Quarterly. 22 (4). Institute of Early American History and Culture: 549–583. doi:10.2307/1922910. JSTOR 1922910.
• Robbins, Caroline (1959). The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Schwoerer, Lois G. (1965). "The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy". Huntington Library Quarterly. 28: 189–212.
• Schwoerer, Lois G. (1974). 'No Standing Armies!' The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-1563-8.