Catriona Kennedy

John Bull into Battle: Military Masculinity and the British Army Officer during the Napoleonic Wars

A dominant theme in recent scholarship on gender and war has been the tendency of societies to value military masculinity and its associated attributes more highly than the forms of masculinity associated with civic virtue.2 In this narrative the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are accorded a pivotal role, the mass mobilization required by the war effort contributing, it is argued, to the production of a newly virilized and martial model of gendered national identity.3 In France, the conflation of citizen and soldier following the revolution led to an identification of military service with political rights and an emphasis on the horizontal and fraternal bonds that united men as ‘brothers-in-arms’ within the republican army.4 Similarly, the reform of the Prussian army that followed its catastrophic defeat at the hands of Napoleon in 1806 constructed Prussia as a ‘manly’ nation and introduced a new cult of valorous and sacrificial heroism.5 Unlike France and Prussia, Britain during this period saw neither the introduction of mass conscription nor the expansion of political rights, but the size of the armed forces did increase massively through voluntary enlistment into the regular army and the proliferation of national defence units. This militarization of British national life, Linda Colley argues, encouraged an ethos of ‘heroic endeavour and aggressive maleness’ and fed into a conception of Britain as an ‘essentially “masculine” culture … caught up in an eternal rivalry with an essentially “effeminate” France’.6

‘Womanish epistles?’ Martha McTier, female epistolarity and late eighteenth-century Irish radicalism

Abstract This article examines the epistolary practice of Martha McTier, the sister of the Ulster Presbyterian radical and founding member of the United Irishmen, William Drennan. Drawing on literary analyses of the eighteenth-century epistolary form and Jürgen Habermass account of the development of the public sphere, it argues that through her personal correspondence McTier was able to construct herself as a political subject, engaging in the oppositional discourse of the radical public sphere. The public reputation which McTier earned as a letter-writer and the fact that her correspondence was subject to government surveillance in the build-up to the 1798 Irish rebellion challenges the designation of the female letter as an essentially private medium, concerned with the personal and domestic, and suggests a more fluid relationship between women, letter-writing and the public and private spheres

From the Ballroom to the Battlefield: British Women and Waterloo

In 1823 the English novelist Fanny Burney, in fulfilment of her promise to make a comprehensive record of certain episodes for posterity, began to compile an account of her days in Brussels at the time of the Battle of Waterloo.1 Although she originally intended merely to transcribe the letters which she had sent to her husband during this period, she soon abandoned the task. ‘The rising of my memory so interlards every other sentence’, she wrote, ‘that I shall take my Letters but as outlines, to be filled up by my recollections’.2 The flood of recollection set in train by Burney’s narrative revisiting of Brussels in June 1815, gives some sense of the enduring impact of this eventful period in her life, and in her account she vividly conveyed the chaos and terror that engulfed the city as the Coalition and Napoleonic armies fought nearby. While the presence of British women, such as Burney, in the vicinity of Waterloo has found a place in conventional narratives of the battle, such accounts have tended to focus on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball held on the eve of the contest, with the much represented scene of gallant British officers taking leave of tearful women acting as a prelude to the main action: the battle itself.3 The Duchess’s ball also famously features in one of the best-known literary accounts of Waterloo, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848). Yet, rather than moving sequentially from the ballroom to the battlefield, Thackeray’s narrative remains focused on the women who stayed in Brussels during the battle, and the entire campaign is filtered through the female characters’ responses and experiences. Although Thackeray’s decision not to include a description of the battle of Waterloo inVanity Fair has led the novel to be described as ‘War and Peace without the war’, it can also be read as a tacit recognition that the events which the British women in Brussels lived through were also an integral part of the experience of war.4

Military Ways of Seeing: British Soldiers’ Sketches from the Egyptian Campaign of 1801

Kennedy examines the maps and sketches officers and soldiers produced of the Egyptian coast near Alexandria during the British expedition of 1801 to analyse how these soldiers saw and represented the peoples and landscapes they encountered on campaign and the ways in which personal and professional identities and experiences informed these representations. British pictorial representations of this expedition have received little attention in comparison to the extensive visual record left by the French occupation of 1798–1801, and this chapter reconsiders the assumed connection between topographical representation and colonial appropriation in light of this under-exploited visual evidence.

Bringing the War Back Home

While the French army drove across Europe bringing war and revolutionary upheaval to millions, the British and Irish civilian experience of war and invasion, with the exception of the short-lived French invasion of the west of Ireland and a brief landing in Wales, was largely confined to the personal and public imaginary. The war was brought home to Britons in other ways - by the militarization of everyday life; through the letters of friends and relatives fighting abroad; and in press reports, literature and drama - but the central activities of war (killing, wounding, requisitioning and occupation) tended to remain beyond their immediate experience. Distanced from the brutality of war, British civilians were able to enjoy its vicarious excitements, an abdication of moral responsibility sharply exposed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’. Yet while Coleridge’s poem appears, at first glance, to promote anti-war sentiments, it is in fact a warning against national complacency at a time of crisis, when a French invasion appeared terrifyingly imminent. According to Coleridge, Britons needed to exert their imaginations to apprehend the terrible fate that would befall them if war genuinely came home, so that they could prepare to‘repel the impious foe!’

Prisoners of War

These verses written by Samuel Oakes, a Royal Marine imprisoned in France, provide a moving depiction of the prisoner of war’s plight. The intensification of conflict in this period and the consequent transformation in the conventions governing the exchange of prisoners of war meant that Oakes, alongside thousands of British soldiers, sailors and civilians, endured a captivity of much greater duration than had been the norm in previous European wars. Many did, as Oakes feared, die before they saw their home again.Oakes’ lament is an example of a text intimately shaped by the context in which it was produced. An acrostic, the first letter of each line spells out the site of the unfortunate prisoner’s captivity: Givet Prison. It is part of a corpus of accounts structured by the experience of imprisonment in the period 1793 and 1815. While the number of British prisoners in France was comparatively small - an estimated sixteen thousand - many wrote poetry, kept journals or published retrospective memoirs of their experiences. Relatively little recent attention has been paid to these texts: the last major study was published over fifty years ago.2 Yet prisoner of war narratives foreground several issues critical to our understanding of the ambivalence of wartime identities. Imprisonment undermined detainees’ personal identity as they lost many of the status signifiers they enjoyed at home or in their professional life; it also involved the imposition of a collective identity as military and civilians alike were classified as agents of the British armed nation.

Combat and Campaign

The morning on which his regiment departed for the Peninsula was one Lt Sullivan would never forget. The troops marched out of Hyde Barracks to crowds of spectators cheering and huzzaing, waving their handkerchiefs and hats in an effusion of patriotic enthusiasm.‘Every man’, he wrote,‘seemed inspired to pluck a laurel for his rising country … the thunders of applause and the blessings of the multitude bestowed upon us - surpassed everything I ever witnessed’. Yet, he continued ‘I can scarcely bring myself to write the last few lines - oh how differently did my hopes & thoughts turn out to what I had anticipated’.1 In Sullivan’s account written after two years campaigning, the jubilant scenes and buoyant expectations that preceded his first expedition acquire an air of unreality: the youthful soldier filled with optimism is barely recognizable to the Peninsular veteran, the two selves separated by the experience of war. In this narrative arc from innocence to experience we can find several seemingly familiar elements of the soldier’s tale: the sense of estrangement from the pre-war self; the move from optimism to disillusionment; and the ironic clash between the expectation and the reality of war.

Conclusion: A Waterloo Panorama

In the weeks and months following the battle of Waterloo, flocks of British tourists descended upon the battleground. Having followed from afar the contests that ravaged the continent, here was an opportunity to encounter the tangible remnants of battle, to experience with greater immediacy both the glory and destruction of war. In keeping with the era’s vertiginous sense of the past rapidly receding beneath the wheels of history, Waterloo was soon subject to accelerated historicization. Tourists hastened to see it before it vanished into the realm of the distant and unknowable past. Once there, however, many were struck by the sheer quantity of books and loose pages that lay scattered amongst the detritus of war and‘literally whitened the surface of the earth’, as one observer put it. These were letters, pages of novels and bibles, and sheets of music that had fallen from soldiers’ knapsacks. Many of the tourists could not resist making their own inscriptions on this famous site. On the walls of the Hotel de la Belle Alliance, where Wellington’s meeting with the Prussian General Blucher marked the victory of the coalition forces, James Simpson and his travelling companion inscribed a verse from The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), Walter Scott’s patriotic tribute to Wellington’s Peninsular success.1

Travellers in Uniform

In a letter of 1810 Lady Harriet Elliot, daughter of Lord Minto, turned her thoughts to the campaign in the Iberian peninsula, in which many of her acquaintances were engaged. ‘If the Spanish Business has been unprofitable in other respects’, she observed: it has at least given an opportunity to many of our young men to leave Bond Street and Newmarket and see a little of the world, and I should think that traveling into a Country so new to everyone as the greater part of Spain at a time when their attention & interest is excited by the Scenes that have been passing there, would be more useful to a young man, than a winter at Paris or Vienna was formerly.1

Becoming Soldiers and Sailors

In November 1808, seventeen-year-old William Thornton Keep left his family in London to begin a career in the army. His departure had been marked by ‘tears’ and‘tender embraces’ as he set off‘to encounter the world and scenes so entirely new to me’. Keep had never travelled further than Windsor and during the coach journey to Winchester, where he was to join his regiment, he sat in silent reflection, anxiously clutching a bag of treats prepared by his mother. His route into the garrison-town took him through the medieval entrance gate and he imagined the warriors that had passed under the same arch in the age of chivalry, an age which, he observed, ‘could not have excelled … what is going on here in our present war with Bonaparte’. Once inside the gates he was immediately struck by the military figures that filled the streets, the Band‘in their fanciful apparel’ and the officers and soldiers saluting each other as they passed.1