The Recruiting Officer - a historical note

In 1706 - the year this play premiered - Great Britain did not yet exist. Scotland and England had shared the same monarch for just over a century, but with that Scottish Stuart dynasty spluttering to a close they had still not formally been united into one nation. All that was to change with 22 July that year with the Treaty of Union, passed the following year by the two countries’ parliaments to create something called Great Britain. At the same time, with the February 1706 Regency Act, that Stuart dynasty was facing up to its own extinction by rewriting the normal rules of succession.

Those rules of succession had already been suspended once before less than thirty years ago in 1680 to eject the Catholic James II and call in his daughter Mary and her husband William. William and Mary had been succeeded by Mary’s sister Anne but now all Anne’s children were dead. Thus the Regency Act leap-frogged her closer but Catholic heirs to give the British crown to a suitably Protestant German princess, Anne’s first cousin Sophia, Electress of Hanover. William was the Prince of Orange, effective head of state of the Dutch Republic and sworn enemy of Louis XIV’s France. Thus William and his supporters the Whigs were keen to pull Britain and its armed forces into the continental wars she had previously kept at arm’s length.

The Act and Treaty of Union were not entirely popular moves in Scotland, still smarting from the Glencoe Massacres, and among Catholics in Farquhar’s Ireland, where William’s victory at the Boyne was still a recent memory. In both places there was still strong support for a Stuart to succeed Anne, even if that was James II’s Catholic son James. This James, the ‘Old Pretender’, would in 1708 make an abortive attempt to invade Scotland with support from Britain’s most powerful enemy, France, and six years later would ignite Scotland’s first full-scale Jacobite rebellion against Britain’s first Hanoverian monarch, George I. In such a context, Brazen accusing Balance of being a Jacobite sounds less like a joke and more a modern-day neo-conservative asking ‘are you with us or with the terrorists?’.

So Farquhar was writing in a time of foment, both for Britain and for Ireland, where Farquhar’s fellow Protestants were jumpy about a Franco-Jacobite invasion. Back in London, however, there was still high support of the government and the ongoing foreign war, the War of the Spanish Succession. William III and the Whigs were doing their best to capitalise on fears of French ‘universal monarchy’ (world domination, in modern parlance) and to metamorphose Britain’s century-old reliance on its navy to a foreign policy based firmly on its army. However, British suspicion of a standing army from the Civil War years was still deep-rooted and had been one of the factors in James II’s fall. This meant recruiting officers were not popular figures, as Farquhar well knew, having been one himself – Plume may be a flattering self-portait and the author’s recruiting drives might even have taken him through Shrewsbury, then a major market town and a staging post on the London-to-Ireland coach-and-sea route via Holyhead. What is certain is that it was his failure as an officer and a recruiter which had driven him back to writing for the stage – had he been a success as a recruiter, we might never have had ‘The Recruiting Officer’. Recruiting Acts attempted to mop up the urban and rural poor but protect those in what we would call reserved occupations such as mining, but there were more than enough loopholes for figures like Kite to exploit.

However, while those armies stayed safely abroad and saw success, they proved more popular, especially with an increasingly literate and media-hungry populace of armchair generals like Balance. Even a yokel like Bullock might be taken in by ‘a tale of a great fight between the Hungarians and the Irish’, an accurate reflection of the cosmopolitan nature of Marlborough’s force and recruiting in British-ruled Ireland. Their officers, however, were still aristocrats – even without marrying Melinda, the duel-phobic Brazen must have been well off already to afford both his commission and the £20,000 he has “spent … in the service”. Officers might rise higher by experience or merit, but the vast majority got their post by purchasing it from the government, a system only introduced 40 years earlier. This meant that rising from a volunteer among the other ranks to that of officer by merit alone as Plume claims to have done was at best highly unlikely and in most cases pie in the sky, especially for his artisan-class Shropshire recruits without the requisite money or influence. The recruiter’s promises of travel were more justified, from the lands of the ‘infidels’ in East Europe, Turkey and the Mediterranean, to Britain’s growing West Indian colonies, via the battlefields of Germany and the Netherlands – if one did not die of fever on a troop ship, tropical disease or French cannon shot first.

Though the majority of his army consisted of his German allies’ troops rather than British ones, Marlborough’s campaigns had advanced British troops further into continental Europe than they had for 400 years. His spectacular victory at Blenheim two years before the play’s premiere was still news and patriotism at fever pitch, even though the setbacks of the war’s final years and the government’s resulting fall were both just over the horizon. The war had even given the public the cause celebre of Kit Cavanaugh or Mother Ross, a woman soldier in a real-life breeches role that foreshadowed Sylvia’s cross-dressing. Ross was a Protestant Jacobite who had followed her husband into the army, fought in the infantry and dragoons, duelled over a woman, seen action at Blenheim and only been found out when treated for a fractured skull at the battle of Ramillies, less than two months after the play premiered. She was later presented to Queen Anne and became the first ever female resident of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea.

This meant that there was a ready audience for Farquhar’s rambunctious tale of two wily, lusty and roistering recruiters and their friends, lovers and yokel victims. It premiered on 8 April 1706 and was published less than a month later, seeing 512 performances by the end of the 18th century. Yet, after just one more masterpiece – ‘The Beaux Stratagem’ – and just over one more year of life, Farquhar was dead. Like the British nation of 1706, British drama of 1706 was also in flux, with Restoration comedy dying out in 1717 with ‘Three Hours After Marriage’. For all its hints of the new comic century to come, Farquhar’s work remained all but forgotten for the next two hundred years. But perhaps Farquhar and his alter ego would indeed have the last laugh. For British comedy of the 18th century would reach its apogee in the form of another Irishman, Sheridan, who would write into being another Captain, who might be seen as the heir to Plume and his creator - Captain Jack Absolute.