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The Honourable Robert Edward Clifford was serving as a commissioned officer in Louis XVI's army in France when the French Revolution began. As a devout Catholic he found it impossible to remain in the army and serve the Revolution. He returned to England where his knowledge and experience gained at first-hand of French military science and cartography were put to good use by leading British army and naval com- manders as the planned Napoleonic assault on Britain was being developed. At this time it was the French who had ascended to the apex of Europe's military culture. Moreover, it was they who had made the greatest strides in the application of cartogra- phy to the logistics of an army in movement and who had assumed the mantle of European leadership in the realm of scientific map-making. In contrast, the procrastina- tion of the British in implementing a national survey, so admirably explored in Professor E. G. R. Taylor's researches, led to a lack of suitable maps at this vital moment in our history. Subsequently, with the threat of invasion diminishing after 1805, the prolific map-publishing firm ofJohn Cary was to benefit most from Robert Edward Clifford's cartographic skills as it endeavoured to keep abreast of the frequent changes in national boundaries and to illustrate the cartographies of victory and defeat. |
