POLITICAL HISTORY turned northwards and went in pursuit through Lichfield, Uttoxeter, and Cheadle, ' over the most dreadful country.' 83 From Lichfield Cumberland wrote to Newcastle : They march at such a rate that I can't flatter myself with the hopes of overtaking them, though I set out this morning in a march of at least thirty measured miles. 331 It was to be some time before he caught them up. The general feeling of the county in this rebellion seems to have been to the Hanoverian dynasty. The country people cheerfully brought their horses to the duke's army, and when he was pursuing the Pretender the country gentlemen did the same, 332 nor does the invading army seem to have attracted any number of Staffordshire recruits worth mentioning. Sir Richard Wrottesley, a staunch Whig and Hanoverian, armed his servants and tenantry for George II, and his father-in-law, Lord Gower, was raising forces on the same side in the north of the county, but the rebels retreated before they had a chance of proving their courage. 333 Jacobites, on the other hand, like the Giffards and Astleys, in the same fashion as their fellows in the rest of England, ' spilt their wine more than their blood ' for the Stuart cause. 33 * No doubt their loyalty to the Stuarts was weakened by the fact that the Pretender had called the French to help him ; they were Englishmen first and Jacobites after, but the chief reason was perhaps that Walpole had given the country a long period of peace and prosperity. The estates of the country gentlemen had thereby increased largely in value, 335 and they were not likely to upset a rule which gave them so much benefit. The early military history of the county has been set forth in the fore- going pages, and we will complete it by a brief account of the regular and auxiliary forces since the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the year 1705 was raised the first regular battalion of infantry connected with Staffordshire, when Parliament, encouraged by the campaign of Blenheim, voted six new regiments, of which the one connected with this county alone, and originally known as Lillingston's Regiment, exists to-day. 336 It did not partake in the glories of Marlborough's wars, for in 1706 it went to the West Indies, and is said to have remained there for sixty years, during which detachments served at the capture of Guadaloupe in 1759 and of Martinique in iy62. In 1745 it was, like the rest of the British forces at home and abroad, in a miserably neglected condition ; at St. Kitts not forty per cent, of the 330 Contemporary Account of the Rebellion (Bod. Lib.), 63. 331 Ewald, Life of Prince Charles Stuart, 1 84. *** Contemporary Account as before. 833 Coll. (Salt Arch. Soc. New Ser.), vi (2), 347. 334 The chaplain at Okeover, Jeremiah Kitching, gives an amusing account of the exactions of the Pretender's troops : ' Upon Tuesday night we had five lay with us, and upon Friday night as they returned from Derby four lay with us and about seven o'clock at night came three horsemen and said they wanted armour and plundered the house and stables and barns and the church : and they have taken your best saddle trimmed with gold lace, and your lady's bridle and two other saddles . . . and upon Saturday morning came three ruffians . . . and pick the servants' pockets of their money and my silver tobacco box ' ! Coll. (Salt Arch. Soc. New Ser.), vii, 112. 335 Morley, Walpole, 133. "* Fortescue, Hist, of Army, , 450. 07 Lawrence Archer, Brit. Army, 3 1 7. 267
