Kevin Linch

Defining Soldiers: Britain’s Military, c. 1740-1815

This article offers a critique of the methodology of military history. The question of what constitutes a ‘soldier’ is usually taken for granted, but history of Britain’s military between the wars of the 1740s and the end of the Napoleonic Wars suggests that current definitions are inadequate. By focusing on the themes of language, law and citizenship, life cycles, masculinity, and collective identity, this article proposes new ways of thinking about ‘the soldier’. In so doing, it suggests that military historians should rethink the relationship between the military and society, and engage further with the methodologies of social and cultural history.

An ‘Unpleasant Dilemma’: The Portsmouth Volunteers and the Limits of Loyalism, 1803-5: The Portsmouth Volunteers and the Limits of Loyalism

This article takes up Matthew McCormack’s appeal for the closer scrutiny of loyalism across the eighteenth century through a case study of the Portsmouth Volunteers at the height of the 1803-5 invasion scare. The part-time military forces of the town were riven by a dispute between its officers and the garrison’s military governor that ultimately shattered the unit. By utilising the extensive correspondence regarding the case, this article argues that loyalism had robust legalist and associational features which were employed as a bastion against the potential of unbridled military control inherent within mass mobilisation.

The Politics of Foreign Recruitment in Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

In 1815, the Duke of Wellington took command of a multinational army that comprised British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops in the culmination of the 20-year conflict with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Such was the contribution of non-British troops to the victory at Waterloo that a recent revisionist history of the campaign has rechristened it ‘The German Victory’.1 Alongside the regiments of the British Army present at Waterloo were units from allied nations, including Hanover, Brunswick, the new Kingdom of Holland and a separate Prussian Army. Also present within Wellington’s army was the King’s German Legion (KGL), a corps of Hanoverians that had been created when the electorate was overrun by the French in 1803, and there were other links between the allied troops and the British Army. The Brunswick army contained a nucleus of men from the Brunswick regiment which, like the KGL, had found its way into the pay of the British Army as a foreign regiment. As with much of the history of transnational recruitment, Britain’s extensive use of foreign troops was a product of manpower demands yet they were maligned despite their significant numbers and involvement in the war.

Britain’s Struggle with France

When Sir Arthur Wellesley and a small British force landed in Mondego Bay just outside Lisbon in August 1808, there was little thought about what the consequences might be. This was the first act of Britain’s Peninsular War and the next few years turned out to be very unlike the previous century of intermittent conflict between Britain and France. By 1809 the British government had developed a peninsular strategy, whereby it sought to continue the war against Napoleon by supporting the Portuguese and Spanish whilst gradually building up its military presence in Iberia. It was a long struggle, and British, Portuguese and Spanish troops finally entered France in early 1814, five and a half years after the Mondego landing.1

Conclusion: Britain and Wellington’s Army

The vignette of the reduction of the 2/73rd in 1817 recounted in Chapter 1 exemplifies how the history of the British Army of this period has been dominated by Wellington, the Peninsular War and Waterloo. This has come at the expense of an exploration of the fundamental elements of Britain’s war machine and how they were adapted and supplemented to meet the demands of the Napoleonic Wars. In the particular case of the 73rd, although the 2/73rd’s involvement in Waterloo (which earned the regiment the Waterloo battle honour) merited a separate paragraph in the 73rd’s volume of the Historical Records, the disbanding of the second battalion receives merely a passing mention. It is only an aside in relation to the fact that the first battalion, then in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), was reinforced by its former members.1

Patterns of Recruitment: The Regional Response

The recruitment of the British Army, and of the militia that was used to supplement the strength of British forces, was not uniformly spread between 1807 and 1815. There were significant yearly variations in yield and in the location of enlistments. The system of combining ordinary recruiting by bounty with militia transfers to support the army did not draw evenly upon the male population of the United Kingdom. This is unsurprising as, having established a recruitment policy through militia transfers and seen it pass through Parliament, these policies then had to be implemented at a local level. At the same time, the army was still finding men in its traditional way, using recruiting parties offering bounties to enlist, and had considerable latitude about where these parties were sent. In effect, there was a pattern of mobilization which demonstrated the success, or otherwise, of the government’s recruitment policy and the efforts of the Horse Guards to fill the ranks of the army. This manifested itself in the national composition of the army - the proportions from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland - and in regional responses to the call for men to join up.

Ballots and Bounties: The Politics of Recruitment

In 1807, William Windham, the ex-Secretary for War of the Talents government,1 declared that the recruitment of the army was an issue that ‘naturally branched into a variety of views, that it might well serve as a standing dish to the House for some time, and that they would always find plenty to say on it’.2 Although said in jest, and was well received as such in the House of Commons, his jibe was an accurate reflection of the parliamentary debates on recruitment from 1807 to the end of the war. Government intervention to maintain the army meant that politics and party circumstances influenced policy. Between 1803 and 1811, the UK’s various ministries tried five different methods to strengthen the army and replace the mounting casualties, symptomatic of the fact that finding men for the army was a divisive issue during the Napoleonic Wars.

The Legacy of the Peninsular War

By the end of the Peninsular War, the British government and the military had changed significantly. It is often contended that this military machine was disbanded from 1815, albeit in a slightly drawn-out process with Wellington commanding an army of occupation in France and the war in North America.1 This is certainly true in terms of the physical aspects of the army, namely the number of soldiers it had, but the transformation wrought by Britain’s 20-year war with France, and particularly the Peninsular War, continued to influence the British Army and its place and standing in British society. This founded a long and enduring legacy from the Peninsular War, which affected the shape of the British Army and the way it was thought about and conceived from that point onwards into the Victorian era and beyond.

‘A Citizen and Not a Soldier’: The British Volunteer Movement and the War against Napoleon

The massive conscription-based armies raised by Napoleonic France forced all European states to consider how to increase their military manpower, and Britain was not an exception in this regard. Moreover, manpower demands in Britain were fuelled in the 1790s by a fear of insurrectionary movements, or at the very least domestic disturbance. In both these areas the British Army had traditionally provided the government with its ‘internal defence’ force, but in also acting in an imperial role and as an offensive expeditionary force, the army was liable to be dangerously overstretched.1 These manpower demands, the increased threat of invasion, and the titanic nature of the struggle between Britain and France during the period 1793–1814 led the government to create a mass part-time army for home defence. This posed all sorts of questions for the government and local authorities over the discipline, organisation, and military role of such a force. As significant as government grappling with the problem of mass mobilization was the impact this had on the men themselves. For the first time, a large proportion of the male population was brought, however tenuously, into some form of armed service at the behest of the state. Exploring the impact of mass mobilization on the identity of those who joined Britain’s part-time forces demonstrates that these men often took into these new forces assumptions about terms and conditions drawn from civilian life, illustrating the fragile and subtle border between the civilian and the soldier, which was under constant negotiation throughout the period.