Читать книгу Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket - Richard Holmes - Страница 13

IT WAS AN AGE OF TIPPLING. Captain John Peebles, commanding the grenadier company of the 42^nd Regiment in North America, recalled a cheery dinner at which 31 officers drank 72 bottles of claret, eighteen of Madeira and twelve of port, not to mention a little porter and punch by way of skirmishing. He was a serious-minded professional soldier and certainly no drunkard, but his diary is speckled with entries like that for 29 March 1777: ‘dined with our light captain and got foul with claret.’⁴⁸ Formal dinners as well as more casual gatherings were interspersed with toasts, at which those present drank the health of individuals, institutions or even sudden inspirations. The practice is remembered today in the Royal Navy’s toasts, one for each day of the week. Some are patriotic or professional sentiments like ‘Our Ships at Sea’, or more personal tributes like ‘Wives and Sweethearts’ (to which cynics add sotto voce ‘and may they never meet’.) Occasionally the communal drinking was accompanied by a song like ‘The Owl’, sung as a round, with each drinker taking a line.

To-whit, to-whoo

To whom drinks’t thou?

O knave, to thee

This song is well sung, I make you a vow

And here’s a knave that drinkest now.

By Victorian times, when some of the loucher habits of the Georgian era had been restrained, toasts remained popular, and one of the most common was ‘England, Home and Beauty’. It was drunk across the globe in garrisons and outposts summed up by Kipling’s ex-Troop Sergeant Major O’Kelly as running:

From Birr to Bareilly, from Leeds to Lahore,

Hong-Kong and Peshawur,

Lucknow and Etawah,

And fifty-five more all endin’ in ‘pore’⁴⁹

Attractive as it might be to men surrounded by Khyber rocks, South African kopjes or Chindwin teak, England, home and beauty was a most inaccurate description of the society which had spawned Hobden, his comrades, and many of their officers too.

The word England would not simply have been offensive to many of those round mess table or in barrack-room, but it would have been a poor definition of the army’s origins. For, start to finish, it was a British army, its members drawn from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And for most of the period it had a substantial foreign element, whose soldiers were induced to serve King George by financial gain, political opinion, religious belief or simply their ruler’s whim.

All major armies recruited foreign troops. Indeed, the notion of nationality itself was still evolving, and in the mid-eighteenth century Voltaire wrote that ‘the concept of a fatherland is variable and contradictory. Most of the inhabitants of a country like France do not know what it means.’ In 1751 the Prussian army of 133,000 men had only 50,000 native subjects of the king of Prussia, and just 80,000 in an army of 190,000 in 1786. The French army had German, Swiss, Italian, Irish and Scots regiments, and during the eighteenth century 12 per cent of its peacetime and 20 per cent of its wartime strength was recruited abroad. Young men were usually encouraged into foreign service by the prospect of economic betterment, but religion and family tradition also helped establish firm links between, say, Roman Catholic Irish minor gentry families and the French or Austrian armies into which so many of their sons were commissioned. Sometimes, though, enlistment followed a run of bad luck – the penniless Abbé Bastiani signed on into a Prussian regiment and rose to become one of Frederick the Great’s closest companions – and sometimes recruits were simply conned, like the young Swiss Ulrich Bräker who thought that he had gone to Berlin to become an officer’s servant but finished up ‘impressed into the notorious donner und blitzen regiment of Itzenplitz.’⁵⁰

In addition to individual recruitment, where young men became officers or signed on as soldiers after making their own way abroad, it was not uncommon for the regiments of one state to be temporarily transferred to the service of another for a suitable fee. For the American War of Independence the British army contracted with the rulers of some German states for the services of their foreign contingents. The diarist Julius Friedrich Wasmus was a company surgeon in the Duke of Brunswick’s Lieb-Regiment, which served with the British in North America. In November 1779 Captain Peebles saw two German regiments on parade, ‘the Hessian Grenadiers, dressed up and powdered, [and] the Ansbachers the finest looking troops and tallest, I ever saw, and in high discipline.’⁵¹

There was widespread agreement that France was Britain’s natural adversary. In 1759 Sir Thomas Cave of the Leicester Militia told the Marquis of Granby that ‘the spirit of the people to oppose the natural enemy of this kingdom is so great, that I had a roll of 50 volunteers offered me, every one a man of considerable property.’⁵² Sergeant Roger Lamb of the 23^rd Foot, who served in the American War and left a remarkably literate account of his experiences, when writing in 1809 described the French as ‘for many ages the professed and natural enemies of Britain.’⁵³ Indeed, some British politicians welcomed the French Revolution not simply because it represented the overthrow of despotism, but because it apparently did lasting damage to French military potential. William Windham, secretary at war in William Pitt’s government of 1783–1801, was happy to see France in ‘a situation which, more than at any other period, frees us from anxiety on her account.’⁵⁴ The courteous Lord Raglan, commander-in-chief in the Crimea, tended to refer to his Russian enemy as ‘the French’ because for the whole of his previous active service the French were the enemy.

However, until Prussia established herself as the dominant (and thus most-imitated) military nation in Europe during the Seven Years’ War, French military fashion held sway. French military terminology was widely used (even in the nineteenth century engineers spoke knowingly of demi-lunes and fausse-brayes, tablettes and orillons), and France, with her frequent experience of continental war on a large scale, was the subject of widespread imitation in drill and doctrine.

And there were many Frenchmen in the British army, even when that army’s prime function was fighting the French. The first wave arrived after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 forced many Protestants to flee the country, and another wave arrived after the Revolution. During the French Revolutionary Wars a large number of émigré units, composed of French royalists, served under British command. English law was changed in 1794 ‘to enable the subjects of France to enlist as soldiers’ and receive commissions without suffering ‘pain or penalty’ for professing ‘the Popish Religion’. Most of these units had disappeared by the Peace of Amiens in 1802, but some émigrés soldiered on after this, albeit largely in ‘British’ units. For example, many members of the York Rangers, raised in 1793 and consisting mainly of Germans with French-Irish émigré officers, were eventually incorporated into the 3rd Battalion 60th Foot, which had begun its existence by enlisting Germans for service in North America.

During the Napoleonic Wars foreign corps rose from forming 11 per cent of the army in 1804 to constituting more than 20 per cent by 1813. There was one remaining nominally French unit, the Chasseurs Britanniques, which served with Wellington in the Peninsular War. It generally behaved well in battle, but suffered such an appallingly high rate of desertion – 224 of its men absconded during 1813 – that it was not allowed to post its own pickets in case they seized the opportunity to decamp.⁵⁵ Corporal William Wheeler of the 51^st Regiment served alongside it in Spain, and was unimpressed, as he told his father in a letter.

Want of room in my last prevented me from informing you that 9 men of the Chasseurs Britanniques Regt were shot for desertion. This Corps was originally formed of French loyalists, but the old hands are dropping off and they are replaced by volunteers from the French [prisoner of war] prisons. A great number of these men enter our service for no other purpose than to go over to their army as soon as an opportunity offers (and who can blame them). The consequence is the major part of the Corps cannot be trusted. I wish they were at the Devil or any where else, so that we were not plagued with them…⁵⁶

Other foreign corps included the Calabrian Free Corps, the Ceylon Light Dragoons, the Piedmontese Legion and even the fustanella-clad Greek Light Infantry. In the great Swiss tradition of mercenary service, the Swiss regiments of Meuron, Roll and Watteville served throughout the war. The latter was roughly handled in the siege of Fort Eirie in 1814: on 15 August 83 of its men disappeared when a mine was exploded and another 24 were killed and 27 wounded. Two days later a vigorous American sortie captured another 128 officers and men.

The Brunswick-Oels Corps was known, from the colour of its uniforms, as the Black Brunswickers, or, from their skull and crossbones badge, as the ‘Death or Glory Men’. It was raised in 1809 by the Duke of Brunswick, whose father had been killed commanding the Prussian force at Jena-Auerstadt three years before. After a period in Austrian service it marched across Europe, and was evacuated by the Royal Navy and taken into British pay. It fought in the Peninsula (Wheeler complained that it was ‘almost as bad’ as the Chasseurs Britanniques) and during the Hundred Days Campaign of 1815, and the duke himself was killed at Quatre Bras.

The biggest and best of the many foreign corps was the King’s German Legion. This had its origins in the Hanoverian army, which had fought alongside the British during the eighteenth century – not surprisingly, for since the accession of George I in 1714 kings of England were also rulers of Hanover. The French overran Hanover in 1803, and the Convention of Lauenberg disbanded the Hanoverian army but allowed its members to emigrate and to bear arms against the French once they had been properly exchanged with French prisoners of war. The British government did not accept this provision, and so, instead of incorporating Hanoverian units intact, as it might otherwise have done, it raised a unit known first as The King’s Germans and then as The King’s German Legion, abbreviated to KGL.

The Legion contained line and light infantry, hussars, dragoons and artillery. It grew rapidly in size, and peaked in June 1812 when over 14,000 officers and men were serving in it. Many of its officers and almost all its rank and file were German, although some British officers joined it, for a young man without money or interest could often gain a commission more easily in the KGL than in a British unit It was reduced in size after the peace of 1814, as many non-Hanoverians were discharged in preparation for the return of the whole corps to Hanover, where it was to form the nucleus of the new Hanoverian army. However, Waterloo intervened, and the KGL fought there with distinction, with the defence of the farm complex of La Haye Sainte by Major George Baring’s 2nd Light Battalion KGL adding fresh laurels to an already distinguished reputation. The KGL was disbanded after the Napoleonic Wars, though many of its officers and men went home to serve in the Hanoverian army while a few transferred to other British units.

The KGL was held in wide respect. On the battlefield its performance was undoubtedly in the first rank. In 1812, at Garcia Hernandez, near Salamanca, KGL cavalry broke a French battalion in square, drawn up on ground well-suited to infantry, without the assistance of other arms, one of the few recorded examples of such an achievement. Afterwards Sergeant Edward Costello of the 95th Rifles watched the Germans ride past with their prisoners and testified that their courage was matched by magnanimity.⁵⁷

I never before saw such severe-looking sabre cuts as many of them [the prisoners] had received; several with both eyes cut out, and numbers had lost both ears…The escort consisted chiefly of the Germans that had taken them prisoners, and it was pleasing to behold these gallant fellows, in the true spirit of glory, paying the greatest attention to the wants of the wounded.

Off the battlefield, KGL cavalry was renowned for its outpost work. The KGL dragoons developed a warm relationship with the Light Division – which they called the ‘Lighty Division’ – and it was axiomatic that, while a British dragoon might hurtle through camp without occasioning comment, if a German galloped up men stood to their arms and looked to their priming, because it was bound to be a serious matter.

Edmund Wheatley was commissioned into the 5th Line Battalion KGL in 1813, although he came from nowhere more Hanoverian than Hammersmith. He thought that:

The Germans bear excessive fatigues wonderfully well, and a German will march over six leagues [18 miles] while an Englishman pants and perspires beneath the labour of twelve miles; but before the enemy a German moves on silently but mechanically, whilst an Englishman is all sarcasm, laughter and indifference.

He felt, however, that relations between officers and men were not as good as in the British army, partly because: ‘The officers do not hesitate to accompany a reproof with a blow and I cannot imagine any man in so dejected a situation as to bear patiently corporal chastisement.’⁵⁸

Yet there could be no doubting these officers’ personal bravery. At Waterloo, Wheatley’s commanding officer, Colonel Baron Ompteda, was given a suicidal order by the Prince of Orange. He told his second in command to ‘try and save my two nephews’, who were serving with him, and led his battalion in a gallant but impossible charge against French infantry in the garden of La Haye Sainte, the farm complex in Wellington’s centre. His action was so brave that French officers struck up their men’s muskets with their swords to prevent them from shooting him. But he jumped his horse over the garden hedge and laid about him: ‘I clearly saw his sword strike the shakoes off,’ remembered Captain Charles Berger. Wheatley was knocked out in the hand-to-hand fighting: ‘I looked up and found myself, bareheaded in a clay ditch with a violent headache. Close by me lay Colonel Ompteda on his back, his head stretched back with his mouth open, and a hole in his throat.’⁵⁹

KGL cavalry were skilled horsemasters. In the Peninsular War Lieutenant George Gleig of the 85^th Regiment watched a party of cavalry ride past:

consisting of the 12th and 16th Light Dragoons, and two regiments of heavy Germans; nor could we help remarking that though the 12th and 16th Dragoons are both of them distinguished corps, the horses of the foreigners were, nevertheless, in far better order than those of our countrymen. The fact, I believe, is that an Englishman…never acquires that attachment for his horse which a German trooper experiences. The latter dreams not, under any circumstances, of attending to his own comfort till after he has provided for the comfort of his steed. He will frequently sleep beside it through choice, and the noble animal seldom fails to return the affection of his master, whose voice he knows, and whom he will generally follow like a dog.⁶⁰

Captain Cavalié Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery agreed, writing of the Waterloo campaign that:

Affection for, and care of, his horse, is the trait, par excellence, which distinguishes the German dragoon from the English. The former would sell everything to feed his horse; the latter would sell his horse itself for spirits, or the means of obtaining them.⁶¹

It was entirely typical of the period that during the fighting in Spain the KGL sometimes found itself fighting Germans serving in units of Napoleon’s ally, the Confederation of the Rhine. On one occasion a member of the KGL was shocked to discover ‘mine own broder’ among the enemy dead. And as Napoleon’s star fell, some German princelings ordered their men to change sides: in December 1813 Colonel August von Kruse, acting on secret instructions from his sovereign, took his 2^nd Nassau Infantry Regiment into the British lines and announced his change of allegiance.⁶²

But for all the foreign corps, good, bad and indifferent, the redcoated heart of the army was British. At the time of the American War of Independence, 60 per cent of its rank and file were English, 24 per cent Scottish and 16 per cent Irish. Officers were more evenly distributed, with 42 per cent English, 27 per cent Scottish and 31 per cent Irish.⁶³ In this context the description English subsumes Welsh as well, and from the early eighteenth century the 23rd Regiment proudly styled itself Royal Welsh Fusiliers (the spelling was letter changed to the distinctive Welch). However, in March 1807 only 146 of its 991 NCOs and men actually hailed from Wales. This did not prevent the regiment from celebrating St David’s Day in style, and having a regimental goat traditionally ridden into the officers’ mess at the climax of the St David’s Day dinner by the smallest of the drummers. Thomas Henry Browne, commissioned into the 23^rd in 1805, fought in the Peninsula first as a regimental officer and then on the staff, and died a general in 1855. On 1 March 1808 he celebrated St David’s Day at sea on his way to Canada ‘in the best manner our situation would permit’. He observed that normally each officer was required to eat a leek:

The older Officers in the regiment, and those who have seen service with it in the field, are favoured only with a small one, and salt. Those who have before celebrated a St David’s day with the regiment, but have only seen garrison duty with it, are required to eat a larger one, without salt, and those unfortunates, who for the first time, have sat in Mess, on this their Saint’s day, have presented to them the largest leek that can be procured, and unless sickness prevents it, no respite is given, until the last tip of its green leaf is enclosed in the unwilling mouth; and day after day passes before the smell and taste is fairly got rid of…We could not of course, on board our little ship, render all the honours due to the day, but we had every thing dressed in Onions, and drank an extra glass of grog on the occasion.⁶⁴

As far as the Royal Artillery was concerned, over the period 1741–1815 it was only during 1776–79 that a bare majority of artillery recruits came from England. Both before and after this more came from Ireland: 42 per cent in 1795–1810, for instance, at a time when another 21 per cent was Scottish.⁶⁵ The high percentage of Irish recruits is surprising when one considers that between 1763 and 1801 there was a separate corps in existence, the Royal Irish Artillery, in which Englishmen were not allowed to enlist. The worsening economic situation in Ireland increased the proportion of Irish recruits towards the end of our period: in 1830 42.2 per cent of the army was Irish and 13.6 per cent Scots. This meant that not only were the fifteen infantry regiments which actually bore Irish affiliations composed largely of Irishmen, but several ‘English’ regiments also had many Irish in their ranks. In 1809 34 per cent of the NCOs and men in the 57th (East Middlesex) regiment were Irish, and in the 29th (Worcestershire) the proportion rose from 19 per cent in 1809 to 37 per cent in 1811.⁶⁶

The regional pattern of enlistment changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the great famine of 1846 the proportion of Irish recruits began to fall, with emigration to the United States coming to replace enlistment into the British army. In 1870 27.9 per cent of the army was Irish, dropping to 15.6 per cent in 1888 and 9.1 per cent in 1912, roughly proportionate to Ireland’s proportion of the population of the United Kingdom. The proportion of Scots – 7.7 per cent in 1879 and 7.8 in 1912 – remained more static, but significantly it fell below Scotland’s proportion of the United Kingdom’s population. Alongside a shift away from rural Scotland and Ireland as recruiting grounds went a growing tendency to recruit the English urban unemployed, and by the early twentieth century only eleven per cent of recruits were agricultural labourers. The effect was similar in microcosm. The Black Watch (42^nd Regiment) drew 51 per cent of its recruits from the Highlands in 1798, but only nine per cent in 1830–34 and just five per cent in 1854. Like other Highland regiments, it was driven to seeking more and more of its soldiers from the Lothians and Glasgow.⁶⁷

Although the definitive swing towards urban recruiting occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, the robust, malleable and deferential countryman was never as plentiful as recruiting sergeants might have wished. A sergeant major of the 28th Regiment told the 1835 Royal Commission on military punishment that:

There are no men so good soldiers as the man who comes from the plough. We would never take a weaver while they were there. [Townsmen] require all the means in the power of their officers…to teach them that subordination is the first duty of the profession into which they have entered.⁶⁸

While around 25 per cent of Royal Artillery recruits gave the trade of labourer on enlistment between 1756 and 1779, thereafter there was a massive jump in the percentage of weavers enlisting, so that they outnumbered even day-labourers.

The army of our period contained a far higher proportion of Scots and Irish officers and men than was to be the case at the end of the nineteenth century, and this was very evident to those who served in it – and fought against it. Highland regiments, recruited from Gaelic-speaking countrymen living north of the Highland line, wore the kilt. Even when it was replaced by trousers on active service in North America – Captain Peebles’ journal reveals a constant preoccupation with getting hold of sufficient material to make ‘trowsers’ for his company – their bonnets marked them out as Scots. Following the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 Scots were unpopular in England: indeed, for much of our period the term ‘North British’ was used in place of ‘Scots’ in regimental designations, thus ‘Royal North British Dragoons’ to describe Scotland’s only cavalry regiment, the Royal Scots Greys.

After Culloden (1746) the carrying of arms and the wearing of Highland dress was proscribed by law, but joining a Highland regiment enabled a man to do both – and, indeed, to escape the destitution that threatened his countrymen as sheep drove out men during the Highland clearances. The enlistment of Highlanders also represented a good bargain for the government. It gave legitimate scope to a martial spirit that might otherwise have been used against it, and coincided conveniently with the growing need to find light infantry for North America. As Colonel William Stewart, a leading advocate of light infantry, was to observe, ‘being less spoiled and more hardy than [other] British soldiers, [they were] better accustomed for active light troops.’⁶⁹

The senior Highland regiment, the 42^nd (Black Watch), gained its baptism of fire at Fontenoy in 1745, the year before Culloden. Other Highland regiments were raised for the Seven Years’ War but disbanded after it. More were raised for the American War of Independence, and all but two were disbanded after that. Thus although Highland regiments played a distinguished part in these conflicts, most were unable to trace continuous existence deep into the eighteenth century. The high regimental numbers of the Highland units which eventually became permanent during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (like the 71^st Highland Light Infantry, the 78^th Highlanders [the Ross-Shire Buffs] and the 79^th Cameron Highlanders), and consequent lack of seniority in the Army List contrasted with the unshakeable pre-eminence of the 1st Foot – the trousered Royal Scots – recruited, like other lowland regiments, from the largely English-speaking lowlands of Scotland.

This suspicion of Highlanders, useful on active service but less desirable in peacetime, had deep roots in an English population badly frightened by the Forty-Five with a long retained latent fear of a Jacobite revival with French bayonets at its back. When James Boswell went to see ‘Love in a Village’ at Covent Garden on 8 December 1762 two uniformed officers of Lord John Murray’s Scots regiment, just returned from Havana – taken from the Spaniards after a costly siege – were hissed and pelted with apples to cries of ‘No Scots! No Scots!’ ‘I wish from my soul that the Union was broke,’ said one, ‘and we might give them another Bannockburn.’ ‘And this is the thanks we get,’ added the other, ‘to be hissed when we come home…If it was the French, what could they do worse?’ The first then slipped into a comfortable vernacular which Boswell, a fellow Scot, knew well: ‘But if I had a grup o yin or twa o the tamd rascals I sud let them ken what they’re about.’⁷⁰

Neither lowland Scots nor Irish regiments were as easily distinguished as kilted Highlanders, though Regimental colours and individual appointments like shoulder-belt plates usually bore a harp for Irish regiments and a thistle for Scots. The 71st Highland Light Infantry went one better: although officers and men wore trousers, its unique head-dress was a blue Highland bonnet, complete with broad diced band, blocked into shako shape. The spread of tartan into all Scots regiments did not come until much later, when a combination of royal interest in Scotland and the novels of Sir Walter Scott meant that Scotland, ‘from being a tiresome frontier province, became fashionable’.⁷¹ Most lowland regiments had acquired pipers by the 1850s, and by 1881 they had tartan trews, Highland doublets and an appropriate Scots head-dress. It was the apotheosis of the Highlander from a potential rebel, useful for dealing with the King’s enemies in distant forests, he had become a martial pillar of the Victorian establishment.

Ambivalence also surrounded the far more numerous, though less easily identifiable, Irish. They were accused by Englishmen of being dirty and verminous, ‘a standard accusation against those at the bottom of the social heap’. They were resented as a source of cheap labour, suspected because they were alleged to support the exiled Stuarts, and because they owed allegiance to the Pope. Thus they were ‘treacherous in all three spheres: economic, political and religious.’⁷² They were the butt of frequent jokes. When General William Howe, commander-in-chief in North America, evacuated Boston in 1776, an officer was detailed to scatter crow’s feet – sharp four-pronged irons that always lay with one point up – in front of the town gate. ‘Being an Irishman,’ sniggered an English officer, ‘he began scattering the crowfeet about from the gate towards the enemy, and of course had to walk over them on his return, and was nearly taken prisoner.’⁷³ It was not always safe to chuckle at such jests. The eccentric Lord Hervey entered a coffee-house to find his way barred by a man who ostentatiously sniffed the air and declared: ‘I smell an Irishman.’ Hervey snatched a carving-knife from a nearby table and slashed off the man’s nose, remarking sweetly: ‘You’ll not smell another.’

The battlefield performance of Irish soldiers, whether serving in Irish regiments or in nominally English units, mocked the cliché. One of the most enduring battlefield descriptions of the period speaks of 1/27th (Enniskillen) lying literally dead in square at Waterloo. In the Peninsula the 88th (Connaught Rangers) had a fighting record which placed it amongst the bravest of the brave. Lieutenant William Grattan (a distant relative of the Irish opposition leader Henry Grattan) watched the 88th getting ready to assault the great breach at Ciudad Rodrigo. The fortress was one of the keys to routes between Spain and Portugal, and Wellington besieged it early in 1812. His heavy guns battered two breaches into its walls, and on the night of 19 January his infantry carried the town by storm at dreadful cost. For a description of experienced infantry preparing for battle Grattan’s account can scarcely be bettered:

…each man began to arrange himself for the combat in such a manner as the fancy of the moment would admit of – some by lowering their cartridge-boxes, others by turning theirs to the front in order that they might more conveniently make use of them; others unclasping their stocks or opening their shirt collars, and others oiling their bayonets, and more taking leave of their wives and children…⁷⁴

Before going forward the regiment was addressed by Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton, its divisional commander.

‘Rangers of Connaught, it is not my intention to expend any powder this evening. We’ll do this business with the cold iron.’ I said before [writes Grattan] the soldiers were silent – so they were, but the man who could be silent after such an address, made in such a way, and in such a place, had better have stayed at home. It may be asked what did they do? Why what would they do, or what would any one do, but give the loudest hurrah he was able.⁷⁵

On another occasion Grattan turned round to look at the men of his company as they advanced on a French regiment, drawn up ready to receive them, and ‘they gave me a cheer that a lapse of many years has not made me forget, and I thought that that moment was the proudest of my life.’⁷⁶

Grattan was full of praise for the Irish soldier. ‘He can live on as little nourishment as a Frenchman,’ he wrote; ‘give him a pipe of tobacco and he will march for two days without food and without grumbling; give him, in addition, a little spirits and a biscuit, and he will work for a week.’⁷⁷ There lay the rub, for give him more than a little and he could become beastly drunk. But even then, suggests Grattan, he had his advantages: ‘The English soldier is to the full as drunken as the Irish, and not half so pleasant in his liquor.’⁷⁸ Captain George Napier of the 52nd was an Englishman, with none of Grattan’s family connections with Ireland, but he still found the Irish irresistible. A drunken rogue in his company, Private John Dunn, walked seven miles to see Napier and his brother in his field hospital in Spain.

I’m come to see how you and your brother is after the wounds…And sure I thought you was kilt. But myself knew you wouldn’t be plaised if I didn’t folly on after the villains, so I was afeard to go pick you up when ye was kilt, long life to you!

Napier noticed that Dunn’s arm was bandaged.

Why sure it’s nothing, only me arrum was cut off a few hours ago below the elbow joint, and I couldn’t come till the anguish was over a bit. But now I’m here, and thank God your honour’s arrum is not cut off, for it’s mighty cruel work; by Jasus, I’d rather be shot twinty times.

Napier then asked after Dunn’s brother, a soldier in the same company.

I seed him shot through the heart alongside wid me just as I got shot myself…but, captain, he died like a soldier, as your honour would wish him to die, and sure that’s enough. He had your favour whilst he lived, God be with him, and he’s gone now.

The incident made a lasting impression on Napier, who told his sons: ‘whenever you see a poor lame soldier, recollect John Dunn, and never pass him coldly by.’⁷⁹

A common thread of nationality linked Irish soldiers, and Irish regiments greeted one another with enormous and characteristic enthusiasm. Fanny Duberly was married to the paymaster of the 8th Royal Irish Hussars, and accompanied him to the Crimean War. During operations around Varna on the Black Sea, before the army reached the Crimea, she watched a British division on the march.

The Rifles marched first, next followed the 33rd, playing ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’ and cheerily enough the music sounded across our silent valley. The 88th Connaught Rangers gave a wild Irish screech (I know no better word) when they saw their fellow countrymen in the 8th Royal Irish Hussars and they played ‘Garry Owen’ with all their might…⁸⁰

Sarah Anne Terrot, a nurse in the same campaign, paid tribute to Irish humour. ‘I began operations on the filthy and shattered leg of an Alma Irishman,’ she wrote, ‘who shouted out “Och!” the blessing of the touch of a woman’s hand; she touches my poor leg so tinder and gentle.’⁸¹ Tom Burns, another Irishman, answered a doctor’s enquiry as to whether he could feel a splinter of bone being probed for in his leg with: ‘Not a bit.’ After the doctor had walked off glumly, fearing the worst, he told the nurse: ‘If the doctor asks me a fool’s question, I am determined to give a rogue’s answer, as if he could dig away in my leg, to try to tear out my bones, and I not feel it.’⁸² Nurse Terrot compared her patients in national categories:

There was a great variety of characters among the patients – the heavy clumsy English ploughboy, the sharp street-bred London boy, the canny cautious Scot, the irresistibly amusing Irishman with his brogue and bulls. Certainly estimable as they were the Scotch were in general the least attractive patients – silent, grave, cold and cautious, there were none so winning as the Irish, with their quick feeling and ready wit.⁸³

Yet the uncomfortable fact remained that Ireland was a country under occupation by the very army in which Irishmen – officers and soldiers alike – played such an important role. In the last analysis the Irish state rested upon British military power.⁸⁴ Prime Minister Lord North wrote in 1775 that the authorities there ‘depend so much on the protection and assistance of the military force, who are in constant employment under the command of the civil magistrate for the carrying on of every part of the police of the kingdom, which could not be carried on without it.’⁸⁵ We must retain a sense of perspective, because the civil authorities across the whole of the United Kingdom frequently had recourse to military support in an era when violent unrest was frequent. And until the terrifying outbreak of 1798, eighteenth century Ireland was remarkably quiet. In the summer of 1745, when the army was at full stretch, finding garrisons in the Mediterranean, campaigning in Flanders and about to campaign in Scotland, the garrison of Ireland was a mere four battalions of foot and six regiments of cavalry.

Yet there was an added difficulty. Whenever Britain found herself at war with France or Spain, she faced the prospect of a descent on Ireland, in which French or Spanish troops would form the rallying-point for disaffected Irishmen. Regiments were sent to Ireland when the risk of invasion loomed: three regiments of foot went there in early 1727 when Spanish invasion seemed likely, and returned once the threat had passed. In November 1759 the Prime Minister warned the Marquis of Granby, commanding the British contingent in Germany, that the French fleet was at sea, ‘to invade this country or Ireland’. Accordingly, Prince Ferdinand, the allied commander was to ‘get any Troops he can – Swiss, German deserters or regular German troops – in order to increase and strengthen his Army…But English we have not to send.’⁸⁶

The most dangerous potential invasion came in December 1796 when a substantial French fleet carrying 12,000 soldiers under General Lazare Hoche slipped past the British blockade, but was prevented by bad weather from disgorging its troops: as the nationalist leader Wolfe Tone put it, England had not had such an escape since the Armada. During the great rebellion of 1798 a much smaller force under the French General Joseph Humbert landed at Killala, on the Mayo coast, and beat Lieutenant General Gerard Lake in an episode which lived on in folklore as ‘the races of Castlebar’. But just as co-ordination of operations within Ireland was a major reason for the rebels’ failure, so inability to persuade the French that a major and timely invasion might prove decisive was another. Humbert’s force was too little and too late, and the rebellion – ‘the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite wars and the Great Famine’ – was put down with the loss of perhaps 30,000 lives.⁸⁷

Given this background, it is perhaps surprising that Irish regular regiments, and individual Irish soldiers in English regiments, remained as loyal as they did. The one significant lapse came when the 5th or Royal Irish Regiment of Dragoons, which helped suppress the 1798 rebellion, was infiltrated by nationalists, who plotted to murder the regiment’s officers. The plot was discovered and the regiment was disbanded at Chatham on 8 April 1799, leaving a hole in the Army List that was not filled until the 5th Royal Irish Lancers was raised in 1858. In 1922 the 5th was amalgamated with the 16th Lancers to form the 16th/5th, the lack of numerical logic being explained by fact that the 5th, despite its senior number, was in fact the junior regiment.

The ambivalent position of Irish soldiers, so many of them Roman Catholics in a Protestant army, and loyal servants of a state against which their countrymen periodically rebelled, was not lost on leaders and comrades alike. Yet the 32nd (Cornwall) Regiment found no difficulty in linking its own motto with that of the Irish rebels in its regimental song:

Erin Go Brough go hand in hand with

One And All.

And some Irishmen showed their loyalty in the most extreme fashion. When Chef d’Escadron O’Flyn, an Irish officer in French service, was captured by the 16th Light Dragoons near Ciudad Rodrigo in 1811, he was pistolled on the spot by his countryman Private Fitz-Patrick. Lieutenant Thomas Brotherton heard the story from Fitz-Patrick himself: ‘The fellow said he was an Irishman, which the dragoon could not hear and allow him to escape alive.’⁸⁸ Many Irishmen in the army managed to balance their own instinctive nationalism with a practical loyalty for the army they served in, and saw nothing wrong in singing rebel songs as they marched to do the bidding of a government in which they had no personal interest. And when it came to fighting they had few peers.

So much, then, for England. Our affection for the elegant and well-proportioned artefacts of the Georgian past can all too easily persuade us that British society of the period embodied a similar pleasing symmetry. Yet of course it did not. Georgian society, like that of the Regency and early Victorian age that followed, was marked by tensions between elegance and ugliness, town and country, industry and agriculture. These were reflected in an army which brought together noblemen and the sweepings of the urban gutter, sons of rising bourgeois, who had set the seal on new status by buying their boy a commission, and unemployed weavers; ardent royalists and rabid (though wisely covert) republicans; serious-minded Presbyterians and devout (though necessarily discrete) Roman Catholics.

The contrast was nothing if not visual: between the half-moon silver-gilt gorget, engraved with the royal arms, that officers wore at their throats, and the scarlet tunic, so often sweated to destruction, that it rested on; and between the blue and gilt blade of the sabres carried by the officers of the flank companies and the brain-biting sharpness of their edge. Those gold-laced officers’ tunics cost more than guineas, for tailors often went blind:

of all colours scarlet, such is as used for regimentals, is the most blinding, it seems to burn the eyeballs, and makes them ache dreadful…everything seems all of a twitter, and to keep changing its tint. There’s more military tailors blind than any others.

And the blue and gilt blades caused casualties long before they were drawn in anger: goldsmiths became asthmatic and paralytic because of the fumes of mercury they inhaled at their work.

There can be no better example of the contrast than Brown Bess herself. She was made in the gunmaking district of Birmingham, or the teeming hamlets around the Tower of London. Parts were usually manufactured separately, in hundreds of one-room workshops, where whole families filed away at locks and shaped walnut stocks. Yet even the India pattern, a war economy weapon deemed by modern collectors to lack the grace of earlier models, is more than a simple killing-machine. A double line is chiselled around the edge of the lock-plate; the brass trumpet-mouthed pipes that hold the ramrod have ornamental fluting, and the trigger-guard sweeps out, in front of the trigger itself, into an elegant acorn-shaped finial. In short, it is an artefact in the best of Georgian taste, but designed to impel a lead ball into the body of an enemy.

It was an era of rapid and unsettling change. Britain’s population was growing, after setbacks in the 1720s, and its distribution had begun to alter. In 1750 the population was about 5.8 million. It had risen to some 6.4 million by 1770, and almost 8 million twenty years later. By 1831 it was just over 24 million, and was well over 27 million in 1851. Throughout the period just over half the population of Great Britain lived in England, with Ireland containing around half as many inhabitants as England until the mass emigration of the nineteenth century reduced this proportion. Although London contained perhaps 10 per cent of Britain’s inhabitants in 1750, the balance was shifting away from the south towards the Midlands and the north as industry expanded and Britain’s burgeoning agriculture (about 2.5 times as productive as that of France) enabled the population of these growing towns to be fed.

By 1801 about 30 per cent of the population of Britain lived in towns, a far higher proportion than elsewhere in northern Europe. Towns like Manchester and Glasgow grew fast, with an emphasis on cleanliness and order as medieval centres were pulled down, jumbled lanes making way for straight streets and spacious squares, with piped water and sewerage. London was already bigger than Paris or Naples, and by 1750 it had overtaken Constantinople. Foreign and domestic visitors alike were astonished at the spacious houses of great magnates, the elegant symmetry of streets and squares, the Royal parks – Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Green Park and St James’s Park – the well-stocked shops of Covent Garden and Ludgate Hill, and the pleasure-gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh.

Yet even the most naive visitor could scarcely have been unaware of the contrast between polite London and the reverse of the medal. Simply getting there was not easy. The appalling roads of early Georgian England were infinitely improved as the century wore on and turnpike trusts repaired and maintained roads which could be used on payment of a toll. Provincial centres like Exeter, Manchester and York, three days away from London in the 1720s, could be reached in little more than 24 hours by 1780. However, travel remained uncomfortable and dangerous. Highwaymen were the aristocrats of crime: when James MacLaine was awaiting hanging in 1750, 3,000 people visited him in his cell in Newgate prison in a single day, and John Rann (‘Sixteen String Jack’) went to the gallows in 1774 in a new suit of pea-green, fine ruffled shirt and huge nosegay, and danced his last jig before an appreciative audience.

Robbers like this were bold and vexatious. Prime minister Lord North was robbed in 1774, and ten years earlier the Bath stagecoach was ambushed between Knightsbridge and Hyde Park Corner. In 1771 five ladies and gentlemen on their way back from Vauxhall by river were boarded by ruffians near Westminster Bridge and had their watches and purses taken. On a less dramatic scale, shoplifters, pickpockets and hat-snatchers abounded: an account of 1764 complained that by midnight ‘the public streets began to swarm with whores and pickpockets.’⁸⁹ César de Saussure, a French visitor, found little to chose between sport and riot.

The populace has other amusements…such as throwing dead dogs and cats and mud at passers-by on certain festival days. Another amusement which is very inconvenient to passers-by is football…in cold weather you will sometimes see a score of rascals in the streets kicking at a ball and they will break panes of glass and smash the windows of coaches and also knock you down without the smallest compunction: on the contrary they will roar with laughter…

The English are very fond of a game they call cricket. For this purpose they go into a large open field and knock a ball about with a piece of wood. I will not attempt to describe the game to you, it is too complicated: but it requires agility and skill and everyone plays it, the common people and also men of rank.

Great cities had great slums, sometimes on their fast-expanding fringes, where countrymen arrived in the (generally vain) hope of making their fortune, and sometimes in the gaps between redevelopment. Conditions in these warrens were appalling.

From three to eight individuals of different ages often sleep in the same bed, there being in general but one room and a bed for each family…The room occupied is either a deep cellar, almost inaccessible to the light, and admitting of no change of air, or a garret with a low roof and small windows, the passage to which is close, kept dark, and filled not only with bad air but with putrid excremental effluvia from a vault [cess-pit] at the bottom of the staircase.⁹⁰

The rustic who made his way to town had often been dispossessed by the steady enclosure of the countryside, part of it the result of parliamentary enclosure acts in the second half of the eighteenth century, but at least as much resulting from a slower and quieter process which was already long in train. Its general effect was to replace the small yeoman proprietors with a far steeper rural pyramid, in which large farmers, themselves often the tenants of gentry landlords, employed, as landless labourers, men whose fathers had once farmed their own land. This process paralleled a similar development in the towns, as individual artisans were swallowed up in large-scale enterprises, their loss of status being accompanied by dependency on ‘new men’. They were sometimes philanthropic, like Robert Owen, who added an institute and community centre to mills built by his father-in-law at New Lanark, but often they were more concerned with their profits than their workers.

Three industries rose head and shoulder above all others: coal, iron and textiles. Between 1750 and 1800 coal production doubled as steam pumps enabled miners to reach deeper, richer seams. Railways, their trucks drawn by horses at the start of our period but by steam engines before its close, took coal to the rivers and canals which carried so much of the country’s heavy freight. The construction of a canal from Worsley to Manchester in 1761 initiated a canal-building boom that saw over 2,500 miles built by the time that the railway moved centre stage. In mid-century coke became widely used for smelting iron, and cast iron items, which came straight from the factory and did not require the attentions of finery, mill and smithy, became increasingly popular. In the 1780s Henry Cort patented the processes of puddling and rolling, in which molten iron was first stirred to allow the sulphurous gasses to escape and then rolled to remove remaining impurities. War fuelled the demand for iron: in the decade from 1788 the output of pig iron in Britain doubled, and by 1806 it had doubled again.

But ‘textiles were the power which towed the glider of industrialisation into the air.’⁹¹ The wool trade had long been important, as so many stunning English churches built or improved with wool money, and now all too often dwarfing their tiny congregations, show. Cotton was more amenable to machine production, and the growth of slavery in the American south made raw material abundant. From the 1750s a spate of new inventions, like John Kay’s flying shuttle, James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, and Samuel Crompton’s mule, improved both the spinning of individual threads of cotton and then its weaving into finished cloth. The first inventions made individual handloom weavers more productive, and increased their income at a time of growing demand. But subsequent developments first began to bring individual processes together in small factories, and then, after Edmund Cartwright patented the power loom in 1785, saw the conversion of the whole cotton industry to the factory system. The process was gradual: there were only 2,400 power looms in use by 1814, 45,500 by 1829, and 85,000 in 1833. Similar developments, which often used the same machinery, also revolutionised the woollen industry.

The social impact of this change was enormous. Eighteenth-century Britain grew into a more polarised society. Improvements in literacy and communications made comparisons between rich and poor both frequent and striking: ‘The extravagant life-style of a ruling elite which seemed to live in a blaze of conspicuous consumption, and also the more modest but cumulatively more influential rise in middle-class standards of living, made the inequalities of a highly commercial, cash-based economy glaringly plain.’⁹² The politics of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had focused on the relationship between monarch and parliament, and latterly on the issue (much more than simply dynastic, for it involved political and religious questions) of the Hanoverian succession and Jacobite claims to the throne.

The dominant political issue of our period, however, was the nature of parliamentary representation. Until the first great Reform Act of 1832 the starkest polarity lay in the mismatch between a House of Commons which reflected the structure of medieval England and the fast-changing nation it ruled. The franchise was limited to men with the appropriate property qualification: only one man in seven had the vote in England, but a mere one in 44 in Scotland. Some constituencies, ‘pocket boroughs’, were in the pocket of the local magnate and dutifully returned him or his nominee; others, ‘rotten boroughs’ had a tiny number of electors whose bribery or coercion was facilitated by the fact that they voted in public. There was no relationship between parliamentary representation and population. In 1801 the 700,000 inhabitants of Yorkshire returned two county and 26 borough MPs, while Cornwall, with 188,000 people, had two county and 42 borough MPs. The tiny Cornish boroughs of Grampound and Tregony returned two members apiece, while Birmingham, Manchester and Bradford were unrepresented. The Norfolk constituency of Dunwich had gradually receded into the North Sea, but its fishy inhabitants were duly represented by two members. Few doubted that some sort of reform was essential: the difficulty was how it could be kept within constitutional bounds.

The pressures generated by agricultural and agrarian change found political expression as radicals, within parliament and outside it, demanded reform. The same pressures helped encourage the masses – designated ‘the crowd’ by sympathetic witnesses and ‘the mob’ by the more conservative – to riot with frequency and abandon.⁹³ Often their outbursts had a direct economic cause. The silk-weavers of Spitalfields rioted in 1719–20 in protest against the import of cheap and cool foreign calico, and in 1774 English haymakers fought pitched battles with immigrant Irish harvest workers.

Innovation provoked physical opposition by those who felt threatened by it. In 1736 a collier was hanged for turnpike-cutting, the 1760s saw several serious clashes between weavers and soldiers, and in 1836 an upsurge of loom-breaking in East Lancashire, as the installation of power-looms gained full momentum, required the commitment of troops and culminated in a pitched battle at Chatterton. Other rioters had political motivates, though they often found themselves seconded by the disadvantaged and by simple opportunists. When John Wilkes, a well-to do journalist, MP and militia colonel, attacked the government over its use of general warrants, which permitted arbitrary arrest, and then demanded that the debates of the House of Commons should be published, he was supported not only by many of ‘the middle and inferior’ sort of men, but also by rural gentry and urban bourgeoisie. The authorities recognised that such rioters could not be treated as if they were disaffected coal-heavers or weavers. Juries, by definition middle-class, were not only inclined to acquit them, but, worse still from the government’s point of view, to convict magistrates who ordered the military to fire and the troops who actually did so.

The Gordon riots of 1780 were far more serious than the Wilkesite disturbances twenty years before. Lord George Gordon gained widespread support, much of it from the ‘middling sort’ of men, in his demand for the cancellation of the 1778 Toleration Act which had removed some legal constraints imposed on Roman Catholics. After the Commons rejected his petition, the crowd of supporters in Parliament Square was swollen by weavers and others. When a battalion of footguards opened a path to Parliament to allow its harassed denizens to escape, the mob embarked upon an orgy of violence, first burning the Catholic chapels belonging to foreign embassies, the only ones legally allowed to exist. The rioters then turned their attention to the law’s visible manifestations, destroying the houses of prominent politicians and magistrates, sacking Newgate jail, releasing all its prisoners, and looting and then burning a large Catholic-owned gin distillery. The government eventually cracked down hard, bringing over 11,000 regular troops into the capital. More than 300 rioters were killed, mainly by gunshot wounds, although some perished from drinking neat alcohol, or when buildings collapsed on them. Twenty-five were hanged on specially constructed gallows near the scenes of their crimes: seventeen of them were eighteen and three under fifteen. ‘I never saw children cry so,’ said one onlooker. Lord George himself, tried for high treason, was swiftly acquitted.

The Gordon riots terrified most middle-class radicals, who favoured political reform but feared the mob. And while the riots can be viewed as an anti-Catholic outburst which ignited the mindless violence often close to the surface of British society, there is indeed a good case for seeing them as ‘the nearest thing to the French Revolution in English history.’⁹⁴ The mob attacked only rich Catholics, and then assaulted the visible symbols of governmental authority.

The French Revolution first attracted those who favoured political reform but swiftly alienated most of them by its growing violence. Its outbreak was widely welcomed in England, for France, a traditional enemy, was widely believed to be the very fount of tyranny. Well might Wordsworth proclaim:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

But to be young was very heaven!

But in October 1790 Edmund Burke’s pamphlet Reflections on the French Revolution warned that the Revolution’s growing extremism might spread to England, resulting in the total overthrow of the established order, and the majority of public opinion soon came to regard Revolutionary France with horror and disgust. The government capitalised on this to clamp down heavily on the radicals, although even their ‘Corresponding Society’ – which did indeed have links with French revolutionary politicians – was ‘more foolish and fantastic than violent’. In 1792 the government first prohibited ‘seditious writings’, and then called up the militia, claiming that insurrection was imminent, and bringing conservative members of the opposition into its camp. The demand for reform was effectively stifled for the duration of the war with France, which lasted, with two brief breaks, till 1815.

Although reform again became a pressing political issue after Waterloo, working-class agitation never really joined hands with parliamentary radicalism, and urban resentment at the Corn Laws (which worked in favour of the landed interest by keeping corn, and thus bread, prices artificially high) was not shared by agricultural workers whose livelihood depended on their employers’ prosperity. As a result, the ruling elite never found itself facing a coalition of opposition which might conceivably have brought it down.

Yet there was agitation aplenty. In 1819 soldiers trying to arrest radical leaders at a reform demonstration in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, became violently entangled up in the crowd in the ‘Peterloo Massacre’. The following year witnessed a weavers’ rising in Scotland and the half-baked Cato Street Conspiracy – a plot to assassinate the Cabinet – in England. In the 1820s the falling price of woven cotton and unemployment amongst handloom weavers produced great suffering in Yorkshire and Lancashire. One weaver, William Thom, urged his readers to:

Imagine a cold spring forenoon. It is eleven o’clock. The four children are still asleep. There is a bed cover hung before the window to keep within as much night as possible: and the mother sits beside the children to lull them back to sleep whenever shows any inclination to awake – the only food in the house is a handful of oatmeal – our fuel is exhausted. My wife and I were conversing in sunken whispers about making an attempt to cook the oatmeal when the youngest child woke up beyond his mother’s powers to hush it again to sleep. He fell a-whimpering and finally broke out in a steady scream, rendering it impossible to keep the rest asleep. Face after face sprang up, each saying ‘Mother!’ ‘Mother!’ ‘Please give us something.’ How weak a word is sorrow to apply to feelings of myself and my wife during the rest of that forenoon…I look to nothing but increasing labour and decreasing strength in interminable toil and ultimate starvation. Such is the fate of nine tenths of my brethren.⁹⁵

In 1826 a serious outbreak of rioting amongst handloom weavers in Lancashire was put down by troops. Six civilians were shot during the disturbances, eight rioters were transported to Australia for life, and 28 more received various terms of imprisonment

In 1830, during a wave of agrarian unrest, the diarist Charles Fulke Greville wrote that:

London is like the capital of a country desolated by cruel war or foreign invasion, we are always looking out for reports of battles, burnings and other disorders. Wherever there has been anything like fighting, the mob has always been beaten, and has shown the greatest cowardice. They do not, however, seem to have been actuated by a very ferocious spirit, and it is remarkable that they have not been more violent and rapacious.⁹⁶

Like so many of his ilk he feared revolution, and was clear that the struggle was defined on class grounds. ‘On Monday as the field which had been out with the King’s hounds were returning to town, they were summoned to assist in quelling a riot in Woburn, which they did: the gentlemen charged and broke the people…’⁹⁷

The passing of the great Reform Bill in 1832 did not end agitation. Although it removed many of the defects of the unreformed parliamentary electoral system, there remaining glaring anomalies – the 349 electors of Buckingham returned as many MPs as the 4,172 electors of Leeds – and the House of Commons remained dominated by landed interests. There was widespread support for the People’s Charter, a petition which demanded manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, equal electoral districts, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs, payment for MPs, and annual parliaments. Chartist feeling ran high in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and gained much of its strength from Ireland, where the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 had only blunted nationalist demands. The economic upsurge of the mid 1840s drew most of Chartism’s teeth, and its last revival, a monster petition delivered in 1848, fell miserably flat when it emerged that thousands of signatures were faked.

The British army in the age of Brown Bess was the product of a society showing all the strains of population explosion coupled with radical changes in both industry and agriculture. Crime was common and its punishment potentially savage, with the pillory and the gibbet as spectacles of popular entertainment. As time went on society became more orderly: Robert Peel’s reorganisation of the London police in the 1820s was followed by improvements in policing outside the capital, and the growth of street numbers for houses made it easier for wanted men to be tracked down. Sanitation, too, improved, but it remained sporadic and epidemics were rife: the cholera outbreak of 1832 probably killed 31,000 people in Britain, and A.C. Tait, a future archbishop of Canterbury, lost five of his seven children to scarlet fever in 1856.

The men who filled the army’s ranks came increasingly from an urban working class whose living conditions were only latterly improved by the burgeoning of the nation’s wealth. They were led by scions of the ruling elite, although, as we shall see, the officer corps showed a flexibility which characterised society more generally: if the period ended by emphasising the importance of the prosperous middle classes, so too did the army. And while the army’s most spectacular achievements were on foreign fields, it was always in demand to extinguish home fires, ignited by King Mob in the towns and Captain Swing in the countryside. For instance, while Sergeant Thomas Morris of the 73^rd Regiment wrote with feeling about Waterloo, he was scarcely less concerned about a riot in Birmingham two years later, which highlighted the problem faced by soldiers called to act in support of the civil power.

The high constable went with us, and proceeded to read the riot act. On some brickbats and stones being thrown at us, our brave captain gave orders to load, and then gave direction that we should fire among the mob, when the high constable interposed, and said. ‘There was no necessity for that yet.’ ‘Sir,’ said our officer, ‘if I am not allowed to fire, I shall take my men back.’ The constable’s patriotic answer deserves to be recorded. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you are called out to aid and assist the civil power, and if you fire on the people without my permission, and death ensues, you will be guilty of murder, and if you go away, without my leave, it will be at your peril.’⁹⁸

Above all it was an army born of paradox. It fought hard, and generally with success, in defence of an order in which most of its members had scant personal interest, and which showed as little regard for them once they had returned to civilian life as it did before they first donned red coats. Though it was not immune from political sentiment and genuine patriotic fervour, it fought because of comradely emulation, gutter-fighter toughness, regimental pride and brave leadership, laced with a propensity to drink and plunder, and buttressed by a harsh disciplinary code.

It overcame the most brutal trials. When Wellington stormed Badajoz in 1812 his success cost him 4,000 British and 1,000 Portuguese, and the carnage in the breach beggars description. Lieutenant Robert Blakeney of the 28^th Regiment tells how:

gallant foes laughing at death met, fought, bled and rolled upon earth; and from the very earth destruction burst, for the exploding mines cast up friends and foes together, who in burning torture gasped and shrieked in the air. Partly burned they fell back into the inundating water, continually lighted by the incessant bursting of shells.

He went on to describe the ladders some of the stormers had ascended as ‘warm and slippery with the blood and brains of many a gallant soldier.’⁹⁹ In wondering how men were able to endure experiences like this, we must remember that they had been forged in the crucible of social change, endemic violence and economic deprivation; this harsh background bred hard men.