Neil Ramsey

Introduction: Tracing War in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture

The study of Romantic literature and culture, long concerned with the response to the French Revolution, has more recently begun to appreciate the significance of war. Drawing on this research and featuring many who have contributed to this field, the essays in this volume engage the pervasive effects of war in Enlightenment and Romantic-period culture. The period covered, from approximately 1750 to 1850, has been traditionally regarded by military historians as a relatively self-contained era in the evolution of warfare and its battlefield technologies. An era before wars began to be fully transformed by industrialisation, it represented the culmination of an early modern military revolution that saw a transformation in European war-making with the spread of firearms, artillery, fortifications and new forms of military drill.1 While in certain respects our period could be viewed as the last, distinctive phase in this revolution, it is also clear that new military techniques emerged that both enabled and demanded the kinds of massification of war that had transformative effects on society as a whole, leading to modern forms of total war. Political, economic and military historians now recognise the conflicts of the long eighteenth century as being of fundamental importance to the development of the British nation-state, creating the ‘ fiscal-military’ state linking taxation, the credit economy and state authority, and shaping national and imperial identity in terms of an antagonistic Gallic or colonised ‘other’.2

Exhibiting Discipline: Military Science and the Naval and Military Library and Museum

On 16th December 1829, Commander Henry Downes of the Royal Navy hosted a meeting at his apartments in Regent St, London, to consider the formation of the first museum dedicated to the British navy and military.1 Among those present were some of the most erudite and cultured figures associated with the British armed forces, including Sir Howard Douglas, Sir Francis Beaufort, William Henry Smyth, Samuel Bentham and Sir Robert Ker Porter. The meeting and the proposals set forth at it led to the establishment of the Naval and Military Library and Museum at Whitehall Yard in January 1832 (relocated to Inner Scotland Yard in 1833), under the patronage of William IV and the vice patronage of the Duke of Wellington.2 The Museum, the founding members were clear, was to be something quite original for the military: The United Service Museum is intended to be strictly a scientific and professional society, not a club. Neither politics, gambling, eating nor drinking enter into its design, from which the two former attributes are absolutely excluded upon principle, the latter as interfering with the established objects of the United Service Clubs. The chief aim of the institution is to foster the desire of useful knowledge among the members of the United Services and to facilitate its acquisition at the least individual or public cost.3

Reframing Regicide: Symbolic Politics and the Sentimental Trial of James Hadfield (1800)

This article considers the political significance of sentimental language in the treason trial of James Hadfield. It argues that the sentimental resolution of the trial needs to be understood in relation to the pressures of modern war on the British nation and the political instability associated with the figure of the returned soldier. The trial dispelled the threat of revolution that Hadfields attack on the king presented, but it also helped establish a new form of symbolic body politics in Britain that valorised both the king and the soldier as figures of manly self-command.