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the monarch, employees of the Ordnance received their instructions from the Board. This was similar to the Navy, who operated under the thumb of the Board of Admiralty. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Ordnance’s responsibilities were beginning to separate into two principal areas: artillery and engineering. On 16 May 1717 this polarisation was made official. Two companies were raised in the Board of Ordnance: the Royal Artillery and the Corps of Engineers. Guns and cannons were the business of the first; fortifications and harbours that of the second, whose rank and file were known as the Sappers. The intellectual sophistication of the Ordnance’s staff meant that the Engineers and the Artillery were later jointly known as ‘the scientific corps’.
    Map-making was a responsibility, albeit a minor one, of both Ordnance companies. And it was also the concern of another separate body within the Board of Ordnance, which was tucked away in the White Tower at the heart of the Tower of London’s complex. Here a Drawing Room could be found, in which a host of map draughtsman busied themselves. Comprised of civilians, not military men, from 1777 onwards young draughtsmen would train here from the age of eleven or twelve, receiving instruction in the conventions of military surveying and in mathematics, especially in trigonometry and geometry. To the Engineers, which David Watson entered, map-making was especially pertinent as a way of describing sites for fortifications . A Royal Warrant of 1683 stipulated that a military engineer ‘ought to be well skilled in all parts of the mathematicks, more particularly in Stereometry, Altimetry, and Geodesia, to take Distances, Heights, Depths, Surveys of Land, Measure solid bodies’ and to ‘keep perfect draughts of every fortifications, forts and fortresses of our Kingdom’. Over the course of the eighteenth century the Board of Ordnance’s employees produced a collection of large-scale surveys of specific spots in the country that were demarcated for the erection of forts and harbours.
    For the senior officers involved in computation and advanced scientific techniques, its day-to-day work was mentally stimulating and could offer opportunities for travel across Great Britain, Europe, America, Canada and sometimes even further afield. Engineers had no choice but to roll up their sleeves and ‘get their hands dirty’, so the Corps often attracted those to whom practical work and fresh air were more important than dignity and reputation. It was a small operation and places were extremely limited, so prospective engineers with influential personal connections like David Watson exploited their advantage to the full.
     
    A FTER ATTAINING a sought-after place in the Corps of Engineers, David Watson was delighted to find himself posted to Flanders in June 1743 to support King George II’s troops in the War of the Austrian Succession.Now in middle age, nearly forty years old, Watson was buoyant. He boasted a tall, athletic frame, large watchful eyes, a geometrically pleasing profile and a neat, determined mouth. Confident of his own abilities, and at ease in the presence of power, Watson achieved a degree of fame in Flanders by helping the King and his 25-year-old son William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, achieve a resounding victory against the French at the Battle of Dettingen. The Secretary of State for Scotland’s private secretary reported excitedly that, although ‘we do not live in an age, or in a land of Heros’, nonetheless ‘Mr Watson has gained universal character in Flanders’. But Watson’s sojourn did not last long.
    When the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion broke out, military commanders were initially reluctant to move soldiers deployed on the Continent back to Britain. But as Charles Edward Stuart’s army penetrated deeper into England, one panicky diplomat emphasised the severity of the situation. ‘The Pretender’s son [has] near 3,000 rebels with new