Page 140 - Wish Stream Year of 2017

known to his fellow officers, who
treated him more kindly, knowing
now as they did that he had beg-
gared himself paying off a debt of
honour (gambling debts were not
legally enforceable, but considered
as debts of honour by gentlemen).
However, Le Marchant remained a
junior Ensign with no real prospects
of promotion, so took an oppor-
tunity to relocate to England, sell-
ing his commission in the ‘Royals’
and purchasing a cornetcy in the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons. Being already a superb horseman and swordsman, Le Marchant had no difficultly adapting to the cavalry.
At that time, the Inniskilling’s junior officers were notoriously ill-disciplined, considerably worse than the average cavalry regiment of that time where discipline was often quite lax anyway, and were not on speaking terms with their com- manding officer, LtCol Francis Eliott. Le March- ant very sensibly declined to have any part in this disloyalty, and was therefore favoured by Colonel Eliott, being given the command of an escort to King George III during one of his frequent visits to Weymouth in Dorset. The King was surprised to find such a young and junior officer command- ing his escort, but nevertheless struck up a good rapport with him, to the extent that he soon became a firm favourite of the King who prom- ised to promote him to Lieutenant at the earliest opportunity. This was one of the ways in which an officer was able to get promotion without payment; another was to fill a vacancy caused by the death of an officer on the battlefield.
The King, at that time being in the midst of his frequent bouts of illness, might well have forgot- ten this promise, had Le Marchant not also come to the favourable notice of Sir George Yonge, the British Secretary at War, who was staying in Weymouth with the King during the Parliamen- tary recess. Sir George pressed Le Marchant’s case for promotion and he was granted a lieu- tenancy in the 2nd (The Queen’s) Regiment of Dragoon Guards, known as the ‘Bays’. At the same time, also through Sir George Yonge, Le Marchant’s paintings from Gibraltar had started to circulate and be admired at Court, particularly by the King, and this procured him frequent invi- tations from the Royal circle, which raised him further in the King’s esteem. So socially, and in his career, Le Marchant was now on an upward trajectory, so to speak!
Marriage
Fortunately, in his personal life, his father relented and Le Marchant mar- ried Mary (Polly) Carey in the drawing room of her parents’ home (La Bigote- rie), as was the custom of the day, in St Peter Port, Guernsey on 29th Octo- ber 1789. He was 23, which was still very young (officers in the Army often waited until they were in their forties to marry), and in 1791 their second child, Carey, was born. There had been an
earlier child, John, born in 1790 who sadly died in infancy. It was a highly successful marriage, with both remaining absolutely devoted to each other up to Mary’s unfortunate early death in 1811.
War with post-revolutionary France
After three years in the Bays, Le Marchant pur- chased a captaincy in the Regiment and during that time was also reunited with his wife, Mary. But in 1793 he received orders to join the Allied Army on the Continent to take part in what became known as the Flanders Campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars, pitting Anglo- Hanoverian, Dutch, Hessian, Imperial Austrian and Prussian troops against the Army of post- revolutionary France. During the campaign, Le Marchant and Mary corresponded with each other on a frequent and regular basis. Many of these letters survive today.
Due both to the recent peace enjoyed by Brit- ain and also to the ‘enthusiastic amateur’ sta- tus of officers who were able to purchase their commissions, the British officers were mainly wholly ignorant of their duty! The long peace in particular had generated indifference to military discipline and, in some cases, open insubordi- nation by more junior officers to their command- ing officers. The Commander-in-Chief of the campaign was no less than the King’s second son, the Duke of York. Much has been written by military historians about the Flanders Campaign, and the lack of success by the Allies (particu- larly by the British) so suffice to say that it was Le Marchant’s experiences both as a regimental officer with the Bays leading a squadron into bat- tle (particularly when he noted at first hand the superior skill and training of the Austrian cavalry), and also acting as a staff officer (Brigade Major) to General Harcourt and his cavalry brigade, that convinced him of the most urgent need, not only to greatly improve the fighting effectiveness of the British cavalry, but even more importantly for
It was a highly successful marriage, with both remaining absolutely devoted to each other...
138 HISTORICAL