Their credit note could be sold, but only at 40 per cent discount. Many workers
also lost their jobs in the dockyards near London.^128 At parliament’s insistence,
in the wake of the ‘No Standing Army’ debate, the army was reduced even more
drastically, and with perhaps more serious consequences.^129 Some of the sailors
would almost certainly have signed on to merchant ships eventually. Soldiers
had no such prospects, though parliament at least recognized their need for
work as a basic problem—eventually—by passing a statute in May 1699 that
allowed ex-soldiers to set up in their trades whether they had finished their ap-
prenticeships or not.^130 Some regiments were discharged near where they had
been raised. And all demobilized soldiers were given two weeks’ subsistence
money to help them return home; significantly, they were ordered to travel in
groups of no more than three to prevent gangs from forming. But large numbers
of troops were discharged in 1697 and 1698 near London, and drifted to the cap-
ital in search of work since their discharge money (and the three shillings they
got for turning in their swords) could not long sustain them. The demobilization
included the English army in Flanders of close to 30 , 000 troops, which was
brought home and paid off largely in the south-east. As a consequence, it has
been said, ‘London and the home counties were inundated’ with demobilized
soldiers, though relief came with the rapid recruitment of the army that began
in the summer of 1701 , in anticipation of the war that began in Europe in the
following year.^131
An even larger army was discharged in 1713 and after, following the War of
Spanish Succession in which Marlborough had led a huge English army in
Europe.^132 Already at the end of 1712 there were complaints about the ‘great
number of soldiers lately disbanded and lying about the streets’. An army of
75 , 000 in 1711 was reduced to a force of 8 , 000 in England four years later.^133 The
troops were given their arrears of pay more expeditiously at this demobilizationIntroduction: The Crime Problem 47(^128) John Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III, 1688 – 1697 : Its State and Direction(Cambridge, 1953 ),
617 – 18 (quote at 617 ).
(^129) Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies!’: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England(Balti-
more, Md., 1974 ), ch. 8.
(^130) Childs, British Army of William III, 204.
(^131) Ibid., 185 – 205 (quote at 203 ). Elsewhere, Childs argues that disbandments before 1697 —that is,
those between 1660 and 1688 —had been ‘relatively orderly’ and were not accompanied by crime waves.
He shows how different those disbandments had been from that of 1697 – 9 , with which he is principally
concerned in this article. He makes the valid point that, with respect to levels of prosecutions for prop-
erty crime, the experience of the Nine Years’ War was different from those that followed in the eight-
eenth century. Prosecutions ran at a high level throughout the 1690 s (as we have seen) and thus while the
disbandment after 1697 could be thought to have made a bad situation worse, it cannot have been the
only cause of the crime wave that accompanied the peace (‘War, Crime Waves and the English Army’,
12 – 14 ; quote at 13 ).
(^132) According to a retrospective calculation of troops voted by parliament and demobilized at the con-
clusion of wars between 1689 and 1869 (made for parliament in 1868 – 9 ), just over 100 , 000 soldiers and
sailors had been discharged by 1700 following the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War, and more than
150 , 000 at the end of the War of Spanish Succession fourteen years later (House of Commons Parlia-
mentary Papers, 1868 – 9 , xxxv, 693 – 704 ).
(^133) H. C. B. Rogers, The British Army of the Eighteenth Century( 1977 ), 19 – 20.
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