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Lives of General John Burgoyne Norman S. Poser
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To Judy and Suzy
Acknowledgments
I am enormously grateful to the librarians who assisted me with cheerful efficiency in the research for the book. They include Jean Davis at Brooklyn Law School Library, Moira Goff at the Garrick Club Library, Barbara Bieck at the New York Society Library, and Mary Painter of the Blackburn (UK) with Darwen Library and Information Service. I also wish to thank the librarians at the New York Public Library, British Library, J.P. Morgan Library, New York Historical Society, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The members of the writing group at the Lotos Club gave me helpful criticism of several chapters of the book. They are Diana Benet, Peter Friedman, Steve Greenwald, Yvonne Korshak, Rick Petersen, Paula Powell, Robert Ravitz, Ed Schiff, Gloria Shafer, and Renee Summers.
Others who gave me valuable advice and assistance include Professor Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy of the University of Virginia Law School; Dr Stephen Lloyd, curator of the Derby Collection at Knowsley Hall; and Jim McIntyre, editor of the Journal of the Seven Years War Association. My niece Margaret Poser helped me find illustrations for the book, and my longtime friend Jeffrey Knight gave me useful and interesting information about the clubs on St James’s Street, including Brooks’s and its betting book.
Above all, I thank my daughter, Susan Poser, and my wife, Judy Cohn, both of whom maintained a continuous and active interest in my research and writing. They both read drafts of every chapter, some of it more than once, and gave me many helpful and perceptive comments and suggestions. Our discussions of the book as it progressed were wonderfully productive. Words cannot adequately express how much I appreciate their patience and devotion to the project.
From the Battlefield to the Stage
Introduction
No British general has been more written about than John Burgoyne, not even the great commanders Marlborough or Wellington, who won victory after victory.1 By contrast, most people have heard of Burgoyne for one critical event in his life, the surrender of his army at Saratoga, New York, in 1777, regarded as the turning point in the American Revolutionary War. This humane, ambitious, patriotic, sensual, sociable, proud, brave, and sometimes reckless man deserves to be remembered for more than being the cause or scapegoat of one of Britain’s worst military disasters.
My purpose in this book is to paint a full and convincing picture of Burgoyne in the context of the culture and politics of eighteenthcentury Britain. He was an active member of Parliament for thirty years and a playwright whose works, successfully produced at Drury Lane, London’s leading theatre, took a humorous but penetrating look at the social life of which he was a part. The mildly erotic verse he enjoyed writing must have delighted his friends. He proved his bravery and leadership ability on European and American battlefields, and he socialized in London’s elite gambling clubs and fashionable drawing rooms. Although his formal education ended at the age of fifteen, he had the easy familiarity with classical literature expected of an English gentleman.
My interest in Burgoyne began by accident. I was doing research at the J.P. Morgan Library in New York for a book on the eighteenth-century London stage when I came across a letter Burgoyne wrote to David Garrick, manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, about a play he had written. Was the author some minor playwright with the same name as the well-known general, who was trying to persuade Garrick to produce his play? But no: it soon became clear to me that the writer of the letter – and the play – was indeed General Burgoyne of Saratoga.
The letter, which to my knowledge has never been published, came from the pen of no ordinary general or, for that matter, no ordinary playwright. It shows a generous character: he wanted his share in the profits to go to a theatrical charity. Nor did he desire any personal publicity, unless it would help the play’s popularity. The play, The Maid of the Oaks, was performed that year (1774) at Drury Lane and was followed by three more of his plays, also produced there successfully.
Political power in eighteenth-century Britain was held by an oligarchy of about two hundred immensely wealthy landowning families. A man could hardly rise to the top in politics or the military unless he belonged to, or married into, one of these families. Burgoyne’s connection with the Stanley family – the earls of Derby – shaped his life and career. Burgoyne, who came from a military, not aristocratic, family, joined the Stanleys in a dramatic fashion: he eloped with Charlotte, the Eleventh Earl’s youngest daughter. Although he was ambitious and gained immeasurably by the connection, it would be a mistake to be too cynical; it was a love marriage that lasted for twenty-five years until Charlotte’s death. Once the earl became convinced of Burgoyne’s good character, impeccable manners, formidable ambition, and high intelligence, he enthusiastically welcomed him into his family and provided him with the influence and money required to further his career. After Burgoyne died, the young Twelfth Earl of Derby (Burgoyne’s nephew by marriage) provided his son with the care and education that enabled him to become, like his father, a British army general.
A noble connection gave Burgoyne the means necessary for success; to this he added his own talents and ambition. As a young colonel commanding a cavalry regiment in Portugal in the Seven Years War, he proved his bravery and returned home a national hero. As a military leader he was far ahead of his time. Unlike most other commanding officers of the day, Burgoyne believed soldiers should be treated humanely; he hated flogging, the punishment of choice in the armies of Europe, including the British. He shaped the men under his command into an efficient fighting force. He treated the officers and men he led with firmness, tempered by kindness and understanding, and so earned their love, even in defeat.
Burgoyne’s devotion to his men was not just talk. When he and his army were held captive by the Americans after the surrender at Saratoga, an American officer made an unprovoked attack on one of Burgoyne’s soldiers with a bayonet. Burgoyne persuaded the American general in charge of the prisoners to court-martial the officer. Instead of delegating the prosecution to a junior officer, Burgoyne took on the task himself.
As a member of Parliament, Burgoyne supported the rule of law, fought the corruption of the East India Company, and advocated religious toleration. He voted with the government on most matters, but on issues that he regarded of great importance to his country he voted his conscience.
In peacetime Burgoyne made a tour of Prussia, Austria, and France to study the military situation of these countries – and it seems he did a little spying on the side. The report he made to the prime minister when he completed the mission reveals the wide range of his interests, from mundane (though not unimportant) matters such as the soldiers’ clothing, to issues of international concern such as the possibility of a new war in central Europe.
Burgoyne’s London was the unmatched centre of the Western world. It was said at the time that “the parallelogram between Oxford-street, Piccadilly, Regent-street, and Hyde Park encloses more intelligence and human ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world has ever collected in such a space before.”2 In London, Burgoyne was in his element. He loved its theatres, taverns, clubs, and fashionable drawing rooms. He would have agreed with Samuel Johnson’s dictum that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”3
Burgoyne was the most sociable of men. He counted among his friends many leaders of Britain’s political, artistic, and intellectual life, including philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke, political leader Charles James Fox, portrait painter Joshua Reynolds, actor-manager David Garrick, historian Edward Gibbon, playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, biographer James Boswell, and architect Robert Adam. His friendship with the Duc de Choiseul, one of France’s greatest
statesmen, lasted for thirty years, even while their two countries were at war with each other.
Burgoyne was ambitious, perhaps to a fault: like many others in eighteenth-century Britain, he used his family connections shamelessly to obtain preferment. His other personal flaws were those common to many upper-class Englishmen of this time. In an era when gambling was a national passion, he frequented Brooks’s Club on St James’s Street, which has been called the “greatest gambling den” in London.4 He was not only a skilled card player but was willing to lay a wager with a friend or acquaintance on almost any contingent event. Despite his close and loving relationship with his wife, he had a reputation as a womanizer, which he confessed to in a private memorandum and in his will.5 He loved wine, especially champagne, if that can be called a weakness, but there is no evidence that he overindulged to an extent that it affected his judgment or behaviour. He was a proud man who could act with barely suppressed fury if he detected an insult. During a hotly contested election campaign, he appeared in the hustings carrying two loaded pistols and paid a large fine for inciting violence.
And of course, there was Saratoga. The problem here is that there is almost too much information rather than too little. The main facts are not seriously in dispute. Burgoyne led an army of 7,400 British and German soldiers and Native American warriors from Canada into the rebellious North American colonies in June 1777; and four months later he surrendered the exhausted remnants of his army to the overwhelming forces of American general Horatio Gates at Saratoga in upstate New York.
Who should be blamed for the defeat? Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have debated this question for the past 250 years. Was Burgoyne the man who lost America by his recklessness or his lack of the skills and experience required of a general, or was he a scapegoat for the incompetence and bad decisions of others? Should the principal blame for the British defeat be pinned on General William Howe, who abandoned Burgoyne’s army in upstate New York, leaving it to face overwhelming American forces alone? Or should it rest on Lord
George Germain, the secretary of state for the colonies, who allowed Burgoyne and Howe, commanding the only two sizable British armies fighting the American colonists, to be separated and out of touch with each other? Howe and Germain, both of them younger sons of noblemen, escaped unpunished after Saratoga; Burgoyne, connected by marriage to a noble family but not himself a nobleman, was effectively ostracized by the king and his ministers.
Finally, was this a war that Britain could not win even if all the generals and government ministers involved in planning and fighting the war had been totally competent? Given the difficulty of suppressing a largely hostile population spread out over more than 1,100 miles of mostly wilderness; the problems of conducting a war at a distance of 3,000 miles; the lack of Loyalist support; and, not least, the tactical skill and ideological zeal of the colonists, Britain might well have lost the war even if it had won all the battles it fought.
As indicated above, Burgoyne has been much written about. There are at least seven biographies and one novel.6 The first biography, by the journalist Edward De Fonblanque, written at the request of his granddaughters, was published in 1876.7 While it has the drawback, common to many authorized biographies, of glossing over or ignoring his subject’s flaws, it has proved invaluable to Burgoyne’s later biographers, including this one, because it reprints many letters he wrote and received, the originals of which have since disappeared.
The next Burgoyne biography that I know of, by F.J. Hudleston, then librarian of the British War Office, came out in 1927.8 As to be expected, the author is knowledgeable on military subjects, and he spices up the book with numerous amusing and interesting digressions. The main problem with this highly readable book is that, although it contains a ten-page bibliography, it lacks footnotes or endnotes.
Between 1973 and 1983 no fewer than five Burgoyne biographies appeared.9 There has been nothing since then, except for chapters devoted to Burgoyne in books on Revolutionary War generals, as well as many books and articles on the Saratoga campaign.
Despite Burgoyne’s celebrity, there are large gaps in our knowledge about his ancestry, his childhood, his first days in the army, the years he
spent as a socialite and gambler in London, and the five years he and his wife spent in France and Italy. And there is scarcely any information available about the actress and singer Susan Caulfield, with whom Burgoyne had four children out of wedlock after the death of his wife.
One of his earlier biographers, James Lunt, notes that there is an “absence of any original letters and memoranda [by Burgoyne]. The most diligent search has failed to disclose anything of real value.” Lunt concludes that Burgoyne’s descendants, to suppress information about their illegitimacy, destroyed their father’s personal correspondence.10
The scarcity of source material has led Burgoyne’s previous biographers to offer differing – and sometimes inconsistent – versions of some of the important events of his life and even to serve up, as facts, conclusions that have no basis in contemporaneous sources. I note a few examples of these questionable assertions in the book, one of which I will mention here. More than a century after Burgoyne’s death, George Bernard Shaw invented the nickname “Gentleman Johnny” for the semi-fictional John Burgoyne he created in the play The Devil’s Disciple, having first discarded “Frosty Fred.”11 But at least one Burgoyne biographer writes that Burgoyne’s soldiers called him that a hundred years earlier.12
As to Burgoyne’s character, his biographers disagree so much that it is hard to believe they are describing the same man. A twentiethcentury writer had this to say: “[H]is irresistibly charming manner; his genial, kindly nature, his unquestioned reputation for courage –were impeccable credentials in every circle.”13 On the other hand, the biographer Richard Hargrove concluded that Burgoyne had few gifts as a politician; lacked a brilliant mind; gave incoherent and pompous speeches; was an ineffective field commander; depended on his wife’s family connections; and appeared to the public as a buffoon.14
The lack of solid information posed a difficulty for someone writing a new life of Burgoyne. In my own research I found a few of Burgoyne’s hitherto unpublished letters, but Lunt was surely correct when he concludes that much valuable source material has been lost or, more likely, destroyed by his descendants. The difficulty cannot be ignored or glossed over; the reader is entitled to know what is known and what is not. In this book I avoid arbitrarily filling in the blanks where
evidence is lacking or disputed. In such instances I make the problem clear and state my own view, based on the historical context and my judgment as to the reliability of the available sources. Burgoyne was an extraordinary man who led an event-filled life; the authentic story is worth telling; it needs no embellishment.
Chapter 1
Early Days
John Burgoyne was born on 4 February 1723,1 supposedly in a house on Park Prospect, a street facing St James’s Park in Westminster, London, where all three branches of the British government, king, Parliament, and law courts, were within easy walking distance of each other.2 For most of his life, he would live, work, and play in that neighbourhood; and he would be buried in Westminster Abbey.
Burgoyne was fortunate in the time and place of his birth. During his lifetime, Britain would become a global superpower, with an empire rivalling that of ancient Rome. The loss of the North American colonies, in which Burgoyne would play an unfortunate role, was the nation’s only major setback. Advances in science and technology fuelled British industry and brought the nation to the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Expanding commerce brought unparalleled prosperity to its people, making them the wealthiest in the world.3
Although Britain could scarcely be called a democracy – only onesixth of the males and none of the females had the vote – its population enjoyed more freedom, including freedom of the press, than any other in Europe. A constitutional monarchy that placed limits on the power of the king, equality under the law, and a degree of religious toleration – Roman Catholics still were under severe restrictions; and Protestant dissenters, such as Methodists and Quakers, experienced political disabilities – ensured political stability and provided a favourable climate for economic growth.
Political power was divided between the monarch and Parliament, as it had been in previous centuries; but now the king’s power was becoming more circumscribed. He still had the power to choose his
ministers, but he could no longer ignore the wishes of Parliament. In practice, an oligarchy of about two hundred enormously wealthy noble landowning families supplied most of Britain’s political leaders. One of these families was the Stanleys, the hereditary earls of Derby, with whom Burgoyne was to become closely linked in his personal and political life.
These political and economic developments were accompanied by changes in British society. It was an age that valued the concept of sensibility, which is defined as “an openness to emotional impressions.”4 The historian Roy Porter celebrates the “British Enlightenment” as a period that saw “new mental and moral values, new canons of taste, styles of sociability and views of human nature.”5 In clubs, taverns, assembly halls, and other venues, politicians, writers, artists, lawyers, architects, philosophers, noblemen, and military officers gathered to converse, gamble, and eat and drink. Men dominated this world, though elite women played an increasingly important role in polite society.6 Burgoyne, an eminently sociable man, flourished in this environment, to which he contributed an urbane presence.
Burgoyne’s family members did not belong to the nobility, but they were a far cry from being ordinary citizens. Legend has it that Burgoyne’s family could trace its ancestry back to the fourteenth century, when John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster,7 granted John Burgoyne (many of the male Burgoynes were named John) property near London with these words:
I, John of Gaunt, Do give and do grant, To Johnny Burgoyne, As the heirs of his loyne, Sutton and Potton
Until the world’s rotten.8
A sixteenth-century ancestor named Robert Burgoyne was one of the commissioners who implemented King Henry VIII’s takeover of the monasteries when England left the Catholic Church in the sixteenth
century. As his reward, he was given valuable country properties, which gave the family the social status of county magnates.9
The family’s fortunes received an additional lift in the seventeenth century, when King Charles I, badly needing money, gave Burgoyne’s great-great-grandfather the title of baronet. Burgoyne had to pay the king the substantial sum of £1,095 for the honour. A baronet had the right to put the title of “Sir” in front of his name; the title was hereditary, meaning that under the English system of primogeniture it passed down from generation to generation to the baronet’s eldest son. Baronets were not noblemen, but they ranked above ordinary commoners. Being the second son of a baronet, Burgoyne’s father, also named John, did not inherit the title; but even he, and his son, the subject of this biography, enjoyed some social standing because they were members of a baronet’s family.
Many of the male members of Burgoyne’s family were army officers. While periods of peace were kind to much of the population, this was seldom true of military men, many of whom were placed on half-pay.10 Burgoyne’s father was said to have been an army captain, who married an heiress, Anna Maria Burneston.11 Addicted to gambling, he squandered a large part of his wife’s fortune and fell into debt. There is evidence that Burgoyne senior and Anna Maria separated in 1757 and that he died in a debtors’ prison eleven years later.12 In those days, a debtor could be committed to prison until his or her debts were paid – more on this later. We do not know whether Burgoyne was in touch with his father or gave him financial help at that time.13
Anna Maria Burgoyne was not just rich, she was said to be “exceedingly beautiful.”14 She attracted the attention of Robert Benson, a wealthy politician. For two years during the reign of Queen Anne (1711–13), he held the important office of chancellor of the exchequer, after which he was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Bingley. Bingley had several connections to the Burgoyne family. They rented their home from him; he lent money to Burgoyne’s father to pay his creditors; and Bingley was Burgoyne’s godfather when he was baptized in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, the day after his birth.15
When Bingley died in 1731, his will gave rise to much speculation and gossip. He left Burgoyne’s mother, Anna Maria, an annuity of £400
(equivalent to about US $90,000 in 2021) for the rest of her life, an estate in the country, and the lease of the Burgoynes’ home in London; and he cancelled the debts that Burgoyne’s father owed him. He left the remainder of his considerable estate to Harriet, his only child born in wedlock; but if Harriet died unmarried, the remainder would go to the young John Burgoyne, on condition he change his name to Benson.16 Since the elder Burgoyne was still alive when Bingley died, it is highly likely that he was aware of Bingley’s relationship with his wife.17
As it turned out, Harriet did marry, preventing Burgoyne from receiving the remainder of Bingley’s estate; but rumours were started by Bingley’s widow and circulated by the gossipmonger Horace Walpole and others that Bingley was Burgoyne’s father.18 It is impossible to know the truth, but the contents of the will suggest that Bingley may have had an intimate relationship with Anna Maria and also that Burgoyne was Bingley’s son. Edward de Fonblanque, Burgoyne’s authorized biographer, while denying the rumour as a “calumny,” states that the story of Burgoyne’s illegitimacy was generally accepted at the time.19 If it is not true, it is difficult to understand why Bingley would have made such a generous provision in his will to Anna Maria and why he all but adopted her son posthumously, subject only to the claims of his one legitimate heir.
Since Burgoyne was born while his parents were legally married, John senior was legally his father. Still, the contents of the will were known publicly at the time, and Burgoyne must have been aware of the question raised as to his paternity.20 Given the tolerant attitude towards illegitimacy that prevailed among the upper classes at the time, it is unlikely that it ever bothered him. As we will see, Burgoyne himself acknowledged the four children that he fathered out of wedlock after his wife died.
When Burgoyne was ten, his parents enrolled him in Westminster School. After a year, for reasons that are unknown, they took him out of the school, but he returned there a year later. In all, he was a Westminster student for about five years.21 Since the school was close by their home, it is likely that he was a “day boy” who lived at home and walked to school. Although Westminster was eclipsed by Eton later in the century, in the early eighteenth century it was England’s leading
boys’ school and the training ground of the elite. Westminster’s student body during this period included many who later distinguished themselves in politics, the arts, and the military, including poet William Cowper; politician and judge Lord Mansfield; historian Edward Gibbon; religious leader and hymn writer Charles Wesley; two prime ministers, the Duke of Newcastle and the Marquess of Rockingham; Warren Hastings, the ruler of colonial India; and numerous generals and admirals.22
When Burgoyne entered Westminster School the school had a new headmaster, forty-nine-year-old John Nicoll, who had been assistant headmaster for nineteen years. Nicoll was an extraordinary educator, especially for that era. A deeply religious clergyman, he was known for his humanity, scholarship, and urbanity.23 A former pupil called him “a Master not only of dead languages, but also of living manners.”24 Unlike most schoolteachers, he did not rely on corporal punishment to preserve discipline; it would be sufficient if a boy confessed to his misconduct and showed repentance. Richard Cumberland, a future playwright who attended Westminster School a few years after Burgoyne, wrote in his memoir:
Dr. Nichols [sic] had the art of making his scholars gentlemen; for there was a court of honor in that school, to whose unwritten laws every member of our community was amenable, and which, to transgress any act of meanness that exposed the offender to public contempt, was a degree of punishment, compared to which the being sentenced to the rod would have been considered as an acquittal or reprieve.25
A historian of the school writes that, although some teachers stuck to the more traditional ways of disciplining boys, “Nicoll’s rule was a democracy tempered by affection.”26
The core of the Westminster curriculum was Greek and Latin literature.27 When Cumberland’s father took him to the school to be admitted as a student, Nicoll asked Cumberland then and there to translate texts by the Greek epic writer Homer and the Roman poet Horace. Nicoll was pleased with the boy’s performance but advised
him not to speak in too declamatory a style because “my boys will call it conceited.”28 To supplement the classics, Nicoll introduced new subjects, including English grammar and composition. He supervised a system of private tutorials, under which the most accomplished of the older boys were paid to oversee the work of the younger ones. Some of these student tutors would return to the school to continue this work during their university vacations.29
All was not study at Westminster. The student body, numbering about five hundred, was known for hijinks, tomfoolery, and practical jokes. A few years after Burgoyne attended the school, a fashionable young lady arrived in a sedan chair and asked Nicoll to show her around the school. As Nicoll took her from classroom to classroom, they were followed by a bunch of boys barely able to suppress their laughter. A short time later, the headmaster was dismayed to see his visitor being doused by the boys under the pump in Dean’s Yard, the quadrangle where the students played football. It turned out the lady was actually one of the boys, the future Marquess of Rockingham, who was twice to become prime minister of Britain, dressed in a petticoat and hoop skirt.30
It would be a mistake to underestimate the influence of Westminster School on Burgoyne. This, his only formal education, gave him a command of the English language that served him well both as a politician, playwright, and army officer. While some of his speeches in Parliament were criticized as verbose, their style was in the fashion of the time. In any case, his military orders and reports were uniformly clear and to the point. And sometimes they exposed his classical education. In a report to the government describing one of the battles at Saratoga, he wrote tersely: “The darkness preventing a pursuit, the prisoners were few.”31 A sentence with that concise structure could only have been written by someone whose study of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars as a boy still left an impression on his mind.32
Nicoll’s psychological method of motivating his students left a permanent stamp on the young Burgoyne. As a regimental commander, he rejected the savage discipline of soldiers that was standard in armies of the day and instead treated his men as human beings, not as automatons to be whipped even for minor offences. More fundamentally, a
good argument can be made that Nicoll’s example and influence when Burgoyne was a boy played a major role in shaping his character as a man.
Burgoyne did not stay long at Westminster School, nor did he distinguish himself there. He left at age fifteen, to follow a military career in his family’s tradition.
Chapter 2
Army, Elopement, Exile
When Burgoyne left Westminster School to join the army, it was not as a lowly private soldier but as an officer. It was not unusual in eighteenth-century England for teenagers to hold army commissions.1 Time-honoured custom dictated that army commissions were a career of choice for the younger sons (and the sons of younger sons) of noblemen and baronets, while the army’s sergeants, corporals, and private soldiers came from the rest of the population.2 Besides, the Burgoynes were a military family: as noted earlier, his father reportedly had been an army captain; a cousin, Sir John Burgoyne, was an eighteenth-century army general who served in India; and Burgoyne’s own son and grandson continued the military tradition.
To become an army officer, Burgoyne or his family had to purchase his commission. Under a system adopted from Spain in the sixteenth century and not abolished until 1871, about two-thirds of all British army officers up to the rank of lieutenant colonel purchased their commissions, the rest being obtained by seniority, patronage, or distinguished service.3 Because a commission had monetary value, a man who decided on a military career was making an investment in the same way as another man might invest in government bonds or a share in a business.4
To acquire a commission, a prospective officer had to find an officer who was about to retire or to be promoted, and pay him a sum of money for his commission.5 By Burgoyne’s time, a complex procedure had evolved: the officer who was promoted would pay the man he was replacing the difference between the value of a commission in his own rank and the next higher rank.6 An officer who wished to sell
his commission was required to offer it first to the most senior officer in his regiment in the rank just below his own. The commission of an officer who was killed in battle expired along with its owner, except that the family of one who died heroically might be permitted to sell his commission.7
Despite regulations fixing the price of commissions, the actual prices paid depended largely on supply and demand. Commissions were expensive: only a wealthy man, or one with a wealthy relative or patron, could aspire to a career as an army officer. In the 1770s, a commission for the lowest officer rank in an infantry regiment cost £400 (equivalent to roughly US $90,000 in 2021); for a commission in the cavalry, the cost was three times as much.8 The cost of commissions in the higher officer ranks was considerably higher; for a lieutenant colonel, for example, it was £3,500 in the infantry and £4,700 in the cavalry.9 In addition, a new officer had to spend another £200 or so on clothing, weapons, and other equipment.10 Despite the expense, the purchase system was popular with officers: the price of commissions rose steadily during the eighteenth century – faster than the cost of living – and when the officer sold the commission at the end of his career the proceeds provided him a retirement fund.11
The purchase system undoubtedly kept some talented but not wealthy men from entering the army or, once in the army, from being promoted to a higher rank. Still, it worked better than one might expect. Many of the men who bought commissions came from a social class who were accustomed to command, were serious about their military duties, and were willing to invest substantial sums of money in their careers.12 The success of the British army in battle after battle in Europe’s eighteenth-century wars is some evidence that, despite its flaws, the purchase system had its merits.
The available information about Burgoyne’s early military career is sketchy and to some extent contradictory. According to most accounts, he bought his commission in 1737 or 1738 in a regiment of Horse Guards, an elite unit whose official mission was to protect the royal family.13 Probably for this reason, the regiment’s barracks were located near the royal residence of St James’s Palace and the govern-
ment offices in Whitehall.14 The commission probably cost Burgoyne’s family about £1,000.15 The training he received was within his regiment; Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy, was not founded until 1741, and even then it trained only engineering and artillery officers.
Most likely bored by the Horse Guards’ largely ceremonial duties and seeking more excitement and chance of promotion, Burgoyne was drawn to the cavalry, just as a young soldier today might be attracted by the mobility and glamorous reputation of an armoured or airborne unit. In 1743 or 1744 he exchanged his Horse Guards commission for a commission with the rank of cornet (the lowest officer rank) in a regiment of dragoons, cavalry soldiers who rode horses but usually fought on foot. He was promoted to lieutenant on 22 February 1745, and to captain five months later.16 It is unclear whether he had to purchase the promotions and, if he did, where the money came from.17 It may have come from his mother. It has been said that Burgoyne experienced his first taste of warfare as a junior officer fighting the French in the War of the Austrian Succession, a European conflict that lasted from 1740 to 1748, but there is no definite proof of this.18
In eighteenth-century England, an ambitious man without great wealth or a high position in society needed the help of a person or family as a patron or sponsor. Burgoyne found his in the Stanley family. As a student at Westminster School, Burgoyne may have met James Smith-Stanley, known as Lord Strange, the son and heir of Edward Stanley, 11th Earl of Derby.19 Even if they met as schoolboys, it is unlikely they became close friends at that time as some have asserted, since they were separated by an age difference of six years,20 Strange being sixteen when Burgoyne entered the school at the age of ten. But regardless of when Burgoyne and Strange first met or when they became friends, Burgoyne’s personal life and career were soon to be inextricably bound up with the Stanley family.
The Earl of Derby was the head of one of the wealthiest and most influential families in England. Both the 11th Earl and his son, Lord Strange, increased the family’s wealth by marrying heiresses.21 The Stanleys’ country seat was Knowsley Hall, in Lancashire in the north of England, ten miles from the port city of Liverpool. Knowsley consisted
