Redcoat
The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket
Richard Holmes

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers2001

Copyright © Richard Holmes 2001

Richard Holmes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by John Gilkes

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Source ISBN: 9780006531524

Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007374052

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‘Until yesterday I had not seen any British infantry under arms since the troops from America arrived, and, in the meantime, have constantly seen corps of foreign infantry. These are all uncommonly well dressed in new clothes, smartly made, setting the men off to great advantage – add to which the coiffure of high broad-topped shakos, or enormous caps of bearskin. Our infantry – indeed, our whole army – appeared at the review in the same clothes in which they had marched, slept and fought for months. The colour had faded to a dusky brick-red hue; their coats, originally not very smartly made, had acquired by constant wearing that loose easy set so characteristic of old clothes, comfortable to the wearer, but not calculated to add grace to his appearance. Pour surcroit de laideur, their cap is perhaps the meanest, ugliest thing invented. From all these causes it arose that our infantry appeared to the utmost disadvantage – dirty, shabby, mean, and very small. Some such impression was, I fear, made on the Sovereigns, for…they remarked to the Duke what very small men the English were. “Ay,” replied our noble chief “they are small; but your Majesties will find none who fight so well”.’

Captain Cavalié Mercer, Royal Horse Artillery, describing a review of the British army by the Allied sovereigns.

Paris 1815

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Epigragh

INTRODUCTION

MAPS

I THE AGE OF BROWN BESS

THAT ARTICLE THERE

SCARLET AND BLUE

TO FLANDERS, PORTUGAL AND SPAIN

RED COAT AND BROWN BESS

ENGLAND, HOME AND BEAUTY?

II ALL THE KING’S HORSES AND ALL THE KING’S MEN

SWORD AND STATE

LINE OF BATTLE

III BROTHERS OF THE BLADE

SCUM OF THE EARTH

EPAULETTE GENTRY

IV HORSE, FOOT, GUNS – AND WOUNDS

MARCHING REGIMENTS

GALLOPING AT EVERYTHING

THE NIMBLE GUNNER

CURRENCY OF WAR

V HOME FIRES

MORE LIKE PRISONS

DAUGHTERS OF THE REGIMENT

CARROT AND STICK

VI FOREIGN FIELDS

CHAIN OF COMMAND

THE TROOPER’S ON THE TIDE

THE PAINFUL FIELD

THE IMMINENT DEADLY BREACH

CAPTAINS IN OPEN FIELD

EPILOGUE

WORTHY OF REMEMBRANCE

References

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also By Richard Holmes

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

I HAVE NEVER really got on with Bertolt Brecht, but cannot deny that he had a point in asking, however rhetorically, whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon all by himself. Of course he did not, any more than Cornwall is surrendered at Yorktown on his own, Wellington won Waterloo single-handed, or Cardigan hacked down the Valley of Death at Balaclava with only his bright bay charger Ronald for company. This is not a book about great, or even not-so-great, generals, though both feature in it from time to time. And it is not about battles either, even if we are rarely very far away from them. Instead, its concern is for the raw material of generalship and the pawns of battle, the regimental officers and soldiers (and their wives, sweethearts and followers of a less defined and sometimes rather temporary status) that served in the British army in a century when it painted the world red.

Hollywood is entertainment rather than history, though its tendency to use the past as a vehicle for story telling blurs fact and fiction so that the latter assumes, however unintentionally, the authority of the former. The redcoat has recently featured on the screen in a role depressingly reminiscent of that assigned to the German army after the Second World War. Brutal or lumpish soldiers are led by nincompoops or sadists with the occasional decent fellow who eventually allows a mistaken sense of duty to win the battle with his conscience. Watch Rob Roy, Last of the Mohicans or, most recently, The Patriot, and you will wonder how this army of thugs and incompetents managed to fight its way across four continents and secure the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

That it was an army born of paradox, forged in adversity, often betrayed by the government it obeyed and usually poorly understood by the nation it served, is beyond question. It drank far too much and looted a little too often, and its disciplinary code threw a long and ugly shadow onto the early twentieth century. It sometimes lost battles: we shall see it ground arms in surrender at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781, wilt under Afghan knives on the rocky road from Kabul in 1842, and quail under Russian fire before Sevastopol’s Great Redan in 1855. Yet it very rarely lost a war. In victory or defeat it had a certain something that flickers out across two centuries like an electric current. Little of that was generated by a military organisation which was a characteristically British mixture of tradition wrapped in compromise, and fuelled by the quest for place, perquisites or status. And, important though high command was, this was an army that fought as hard when mishandled by Beresford at Albuera in 1811 as it did when commanded with genius by Wellington at Salamanca the following year. It drew its enormous tensile strength not simply from the fear of punishment and the lure of reward, though both were important, but from that elusive chemistry that binds men together in the claustrophobic world of barrack-room and half-company, officers’ and sergeants’ messes, smoke-wreathed battle line and darkling campsite. If I deplore its many faults, I love it for its sheer, dogged, awkward, bloody-minded endurance, the quality that inspired its exasperated adversary Marshal Soult to complain after Albuera: ‘There is no beating these British soldiers. They were completely beaten and the day was mine, but they did not know it and would not run.’

A word about methodology. The architecture of this book is my own, though there is no doubting the fact that I learnt how to ply my ruler and dividers a quarter of a century ago in the Sandhurst drawing office of Messrs Duffy and Keegan. Sir John Fortescue’s venerable multi-volume History of the British Army (superseded in many areas but still surprisingly useful in others) helped form a solid foundation. For the book’s framework I am fortunate in being able to rely on scholars who have provided me with the academic equivalent of RSJs, those broad, load-bearing studies, which no professional historian can do much work without. These are works by authors like Alan Guy and John Houlding for the army of the eighteenth century, Michael Glover, Ian Fletcher and Philip Haythornthwaite for Wellington’s army, and Hew Strachan, Edward Spiers and Donald Huffer for the army of the early nineteenth century.

Individual studies provide the equivalent of ducting and plumbing. Brian Robson has made the swords of the period his own, and Howard Blackmore and Christopher Roads have its small arms at their disposal. The Marquess of Anglesey has charted the fortunes of the British cavalry in his multi-volume history. Elizabeth Longford’s biography of Wellington remains unsurpassed, though Christopher Hibbert’s more recent personal history is an easier read. I cannot speak too highly of Mark Adkin’s study of the Charge of the Light Brigade, and I am grateful that need to amass suitable building materials drew me to Frank McLynn’s work on crime and punishment in Georgian England, for it was in a part of the yard not often visited by military historians.

Onto this robust structure I have bolted dozens of personal accounts, letting the men who wore the red coat speak for themselves whenever I can. I had encountered some, like John Kincaid and William Grattan, when an undergraduate, and rediscovering them many years on was like meeting a well-preserved old flame in a King’s Parade coffee-shop, and discovering that age has not wearied nor the years condemned. Others were unfamiliar. It is thanks to the Army Records Society that Thomas Browne and John Peebles feature so prominently in these pages, and to Spellmount Publishers that William Tomkinson’s Peninsula journal, to name but one of their invaluable books, has escaped from the antiquarian booksellers to which rarity had previously confined it. I have had some pieces of unaccountable good luck: discovering the manuscript Order Book of General Sir William Howe, commander in chief in North America, in the library at the Joint Services Command and Staff College at Watchfield was perhaps the most striking.

So many of the memoirs of the period were written by non-commissioned personnel that I am confident in my denial of the charge that this sort of book is simply epaulette history, giving the officer’s view. Robert Waterfield, Thomas Morris and John Cooper of the line infantry, Benjamin Harris and Edward Costello of the Rifles, and John Pearman of the light dragoons are amongst those who remind us what it was like to be ‘an atom of an army’, as one of their most articulate comrades, Thomas Pococke, actor turned reluctant private soldier of the 71st Regiment, was to put it. And of course there is the incredible John Shipp, twice commissioned from the ranks – once for spectacular bravery in the field. I have tried to provide references for all substantive quotations, and list memoirs and collected letters by the name of their writer rather than their editor: the bibliography, really a working list of books actually used, makes this clear.

My approach is thematic rather than chronological. By and large I start with big issues and move on to smaller ones, first examining the army’s size and composition, the character of the society that produced it, and the part it played in the nation’s defence policy. Thereafter I review the army’s administration and overall structure, its officers and men, and tactics of the combat arms and the effects produced by their weapons. The last two chapters consider the soldier’s daily life in peace and war respectively. Such an approach shuns easy categorisation. It is impossible, for example, to separate pay in peacetime from prize money in wartime. Any attempt to place the contribution made by women in a separate chapter might have the benefit of political correctness but would miss the point that they formed an inseparable part of the army, whether getting the Duke of York into trouble with Parliament, consoling the amorous Ensign Lord Alvanley, rising to become inspector general of the medical department while disguised as a man, or simply supporting their own men in rain and shine, and under shot and shell, from Aldershot to Amballa and the Curragh to the Crimea. So you will find them, the Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady alike, where you least expect them.

I have not written for what are unkindly termed ‘military buffs’: indeed, those who go in for the martial equivalent of train spotting will complain that I have paid scandalously little attention to the raising, disbandment, re-raising and renumbering of infantry regiments in the eighteenth century, and so I have. My comments on uniform are very broad: this is not the place to discover which regiments were fortunate enough to wear bastion-ended lace on their tunics. And as to the minutiae of ‘off-reckonings’ and ‘net-reckonings’ in regimental accounting, well, if they perplexed the great Sir John Fortescue, they can scarcely do less for me.

The general reader might appreciate some simple definitions, although the British army is not a creature that thrives on simplicity. Officers, ‘commission-officers’ to the seventeenth century and commissioned officers to later generations, held rank and authority from a commission signed by the monarch. The field marshal, a comparatively rare bird, was their most senior. There were three grades of general officers, general, lieutenant general and major general. Major generals are, confusingly, junior to lieutenant generals, partly because their rank was once ‘sergeant major general’ and partly because the lieutenant general (as implied by the word lieutenant wherever it appears) stood in for his master when required. Brigadier generals and brigadiers – terminology changed over the period – held a temporary rank from which they might be advanced or not, as the case might be, and were analogous to commodores in the Royal Navy, who were captains temporarily holding a senior appointment.

There were two sorts of colonels. What we may call colonels proper held a substantive rank from which seniority would eventually, provided they lived long enough, elevate them to join the generals. Colonels of regiments, in contrast, were usually not colonels at all but general officers acting as regimental proprietors, dispensing patronage, making a profit, and warning the young, over a glass of port, that standards were slipping. Field officers comprised lieutenant colonels and majors, while company officers were captains, lieutenants and cornets (for the cavalry), ensigns (for most of the infantry), and second lieutenants (for the artillery, engineers and a few infantry regiments). Quartermasters were regimental officers responsible for supplies and quartering, and adjutants (the term was an appointment, not a rank, and its holder would be termed correctly, ‘lieutenant and adjutant’ or ‘captain and adjutant’) assisted the regiment’s commanding officer in drill, administration – and in the case of Colonel John Wilkes MP of the Middlesex Militia, duelling.

Non-commissioned officers began with sergeant majors, grave and reverend gentlemen of whom there was one per infantry battalion, although the cavalry had one regimental sergeant major and a troop sergeant major for each of its troops. Staff sergeants were senior sergeants on the staff of regimental headquarters rather than one of its subordinate companies, and colour sergeants, a rank introduced into the infantry in 1813, ranked senior to other sergeants and had a very imposing arm badge to prove it. Sergeants were a cut above junior non-commissioned officers, corporals in most arms and bombardiers in the Royal Artillery. The appointment of a chosen man, a private soldier selected by his commanding officer to deputise for a corporal, eventually became that of lance corporal. And as to captain-lieutenants, sub-brigadiers and file-majors: well, I will explain about these worthies when they feature in my story.

The regiment, usually commanded in the field by a lieutenant colonel, was the basic building block in the infantry and the cavalry. As time went on infantry regiments tended to have more than one battalion, and in the British army these battalions, lieutenant colonels’ commands, usually fought independently from the other battalions of their regiment. In these pages I follow the convention of showing 1st Battalion 33rd Regiment as 1/33rd, while 1st Battalion 1st Foot Guards is 1/1st Foot Guards. I use 33rd Foot and 33rd Regiment, as contemporaries did, almost interchangeably: do not be concerned, for they are the same creature. The company, a captain’s command, was the main sub-unit of the infantry, and the troop was its cavalry equivalent. Cavalry troops were often paired to make squadrons. Infantry battalions and cavalry regiments were formed into brigades, and brigades into divisions, though the precise nature of this combination varied from time to time.

Pay, bounties, prize money and loot played an important part in the motivation of officers and men alike. I am constantly exasperated by authors who give no idea what money was worth in practical and comparative terms. To be told that if an item cost 100 units in 1680 then it cost 123 units in 1750 is unhelpful, and to suggest that a pound then was worth x times more than now is rarely a safe comparator across a broad range of income and expenditure. I far prefer what some have termed the ‘Mars Bar Comparator,’ which looks at the prices of staple items over the period to provide a practical idea of what money was really worth. There were twelve pence (d) to a shilling (s) and twenty shillings to a pound. A guinea was worth one pound and one shilling. And an Irish shilling, exasperating to those paid in it, was worth a penny less than an English one.

But before we consider what Ensign Alvanley paid for his claret and Rifleman Harris for his bread and cheese, there are a number of important caveats. First, the idea of subsistence wages for agricultural workers may be a misjudgement, as such folk often raised their own pigs and chickens, cultivated cottage gardens, and benefited from a trickle-down income in kind as master’s old coat became ploughman Jethro’s best, and mistress’s worn-out petticoat found a new (and possibly more exciting) incarnation as chambermaid Eliza’s drawers. Second, modern ideas of inflation have little relevance to the period in question, where inflation did not rise steadily, but went up and down, sometimes quite sharply: it rose by 36 per cent in 1800 and fell back by 22 per cent in 1802. Prices were generally quite stable except at times of particular hardship, and a pint of decent porter (a more sustaining brew than watery small beer) cost around 2d for most of the period. Finally, there were wide regional variations in pay, and in the prices of goods not easily available locally. The Midlands and the North were the ‘Silicon Valley’ of the age, where there was good money to be made always provided one was not, like the handloom weavers who formed such an important element of the Wellingtonian army, sidelined by new technology.¹

For most of our period an infantry soldier was paid a shilling a day, out of which an assortment of stoppages were deducted which might leave him with very much less. He would receive two (later three) meals a day, one of them usually including plenty of beef, bread and small beer. In 1750 a London labourer received 2s a day and a craftsman 3s. A day labourer in Gloucestershire drew is 4d but the same man picked up only 9d a day in the North Riding of Yorkshire. A mason or joiner earned 2s a day. In 1760 the weekly poor relief paid to a pauper by the parish was just is 6d. In contrast, the aristocrats of labour were respectably paid in 1790, with a chair-carver receiving £4 a week, a London compositor 24s, a London saddler 15s, a Newcastle Collier 13s 6d, a worker in the Worcester potteries 8s 7d, a Lancashire weaver 8s 7d and a woman textile worker 4s 3d.

By 1800 an agricultural worker received 10s a week, rising to 12s in 1812: in 1815 a skilled Lancashire weaver collected £2 4s 6d. In 1817 our farm labourer was receiving only 7s 6d a week, though by 1850 this had risen to 11s. A man robust enough to take work as a heavy clay digger at this time, however, brought home 2s 6d a day, which, at 15s for a six-day week, was good money for a labouring man. In 1820 a village schoolmistress earned £20 a year.

In 1760 a large tot (probably a quarter pint) of cheap gin cost 1d and beer was 2d a pint: if one was drinking simply for effect, as so many were, then liquor was not simply quicker but cheaper. A dozen bottles of claret cost £1. A bread and cheese supper cost 3d, a dinner of cold meat, bread, cheese and beer 7d, and a slap-up meal in a chophouse, with a steak smoking enticingly at its centrepiece was 1s. A cheap room cost 2s a week to rent, a smart town house on Grosvenor Square was £300 a year, and a prosperous merchant in Colchester might house and feed his wife, four children and servants for £350 a year. 6s 6d bought a sturdy gown for a servant girl, and £8 a year, all found, hired her for a year. A clerk’s suit cost £4 10s and a gentleman’s £8 8s.

In 1762 James Boswell, whose father gave him an allowance of £25 every six weeks, stayed in Queen Street, Westminster – ‘an obscure street but pretty lodgings’ – for £22 a year. He paid the Jermyn Street sword-cutler Mr Jeffreys five guineas for a handsome silver-hilted small-sword; a ‘low brimstone’ girl demanded 6d to permit him to ‘dip my machine in the Canal’, and his surgeon charged him five guineas to cure the resultant gonorrhoea. Lord Alvanley, who had similar weaknesses but more money with which to indulge them, gave five guineas for one night with the blonde and well-upholstered Mrs Dubois in 1808. I hope that she was worth what a working man could only have regarded as absurdly conspicuous expenditure.

A quartern loaf (weighing 41b 50z) cost 6d or 8d in 1790 but 15d or 16d in 1801, though it had dropped to 9d in 1830 and was 1s in 1850. In 1796 model cottages cost £58 in wood or £66 in brick. It cost about 30s to £2 a year to rent a cottage in 1790 and £5 to £10 a year in 1824. In 1815 a coat cost £1 7s 1d in Chelsea and shoes were 7s a pair. A lady’s good serge suit was £1 in 1850. In 1859, a clean unskilled labourer in London, taking home 18s a week, would spend 4s of it on bread, 1s 2d on beer, 3s 6d on meat and potatoes, 1s 6d on butter and cheese, 6d on wood and candles, 1s on coal, 2s 6d on clothes and shoes, 2s on rent and 10d on soap and sundries. In 1813 the standard infantry musket cost around £2, and it is high time that we turned our attention to these artefacts of walnut, brass and steel and to the men who used them.

MAPS

I THE AGE OF BROWN BESS

THAT ARTICLE THERE

HE HAS NOT SHAVED this morning. And from the look of things he shaved neither yesterday nor the day before. Ginger stubble sprouts from a sun-tanned face, with red-rimmed blue eyes and a mouth whose teeth stand anyhow, like a line of newly raised militia. Bushy sideburns, ending in a forward sweep just below the ear, emerge from a battered black shako fronted with an oval brass plate and topped with a white over red pom-pom which has seen better days, and many of them. His red coat, waist-length in front, with short skirts at the back, is closed by ten pewter buttons, grouped in twos, with a broad oblong of white worsted lace framing the button holes. Its high collar and deep cuffs are yellow, and trimmed with more white lace. The effect is not improved by the fact that collar and coat-front alike are flecked with small burns made by gunpowder. Around his neck is knotted a piece of material which is now unquestionably black, though it might be that it started out much lighter. Grey trousers, knees and seat patched with cloth which has an uncanny resemblance to that worn by Franciscan friars, hang loose, without benefit of gaiter, over square-toed black boots.

His name is Ezekiel Hobden, Hobden to officers, NCOs and most private soldiers but Zeke to a favoured few. On his attestation form he signified his intention ‘to serve His Majesty until I be legally discharged’ with a bold cross, alongside which a Justice of the Peace and another witness (who has helpfully included Esquire as part of his signature to make the point) have appended their names. He used to be a plough-boy from the gentle downlands above Alresford in Hampshire, but a row with his master and an evening’s drinking saw him take the King’s shilling in Winchester. Now his old calling is like some half-remembered dream, although when he sees Portuguese peasants ploughing their red soil he still recalls the plodding team in front and the rich dark earth rolling from the coulter behind. Had he ever heard of Shakespeare he would agree that ‘things without remedy should be without regard’, but today it will be enough for him to be alive come sunset.

He stands 5ft 6ins tall – taller than many of his comrades – and now he himself is a beast of burden. Broad buff-leather cross belts meet on his chest, with an oval plate at their intersection; thinner buff straps run down from his shoulders and across his chest, and a brown leather strap lies across his right shoulder with the thick canvas belt of a haversack alongside it. We can see, even from the front, the edges of his black canvas pack, and the grey greatcoat strapped on top of it stands well above his shoulders. A black cartridge box hangs at his right hip, and bayonet-scabbard and round wooden water bottle at his left.

His hands have the same worn-leather hue and texture as his face, and their short finger-nails are black-edged. They bear a dozen new cuts and old scars, and his right thumb is thickened with a mighty callous. His left hand hangs loosely by his side, while his right – thumb and forefinger apart – rests lightly on the bright steel barrel of his upright musket. Its 39-inch barrel is tipped with a bayonet, sixteen inches of triangular steel, its point level with his shako-plate.

There is an animal tang about him which even that fine natural deodorant, the pervasive wood-smoke, cannot conceal. In part, it stems from the fact that he has worn the same jacket for six months and it smells powerfully of old sweat laced with the bad-egg stink of black powder, the muddy odour of the pipe-clay which whitens his belts, and the sharper nip of the brick-dust which, dampened by water, brings the metalwork of his musket and the brass of his accoutrements to a shine. It must be said, though, that not much polishing has gone on of late. He has only worn his heavy linen shirt for a week, and so may hope to get another week or more from it yet, but our nose tells us that it is already past its best, and is not much helped by the fact that, long tails tucked in between his legs, it doubles as underwear. Even when clean it was not entirely sweet: the soap used to wash it was made from mutton-fat, and the gentlest scent of roast lamb mingles with the other smells. He cleaned his teeth this morning, using the well-chewed end of a green twig as a brush, but these efforts cannot conceal the facts that there were onions in his supper and rum after it.

To left and right, in a line 250 yards long, stand similar figures. And similar is the word, for they are by no means uniform: there is infinite variety in the injury sustained by shakos and the nature and quality of the patches on clothes. One man has lost his shako altogether, and wears an incongruous round black hat. He does not look his best, and not simply because of this sartorial defect: we may confidently assume that the missing item will not redound to his advantage. The men stand shoulder to shoulder, elbows touching, in two ranks a pace apart, in ten distinct company groups. Each company has about fifty private soldiers and corporals, with three officers, two sergeants and a drummer or two. Some of these worthies stand alongside their companies, while others, the file-closers, lurk behind the second rank. There is some movement amongst the captains, who command the companies: three of them have left their stations on their companies’ right and are pacing about in front. One has had a word with the soldier in the round hat, and is stalking down the ranks intent on further mischief.

The officers carry slim, straight gilt-hilted swords and show their status by crimson silk sashes, knotted over their left hips, and their rank by fringed epaulettes. Some have pistols tucked into their sashes or slung in open-topped leather holsters. The sergeants have simpler swords and also wear sashes, but theirs bear a broad central stripe of the same hue as collar and cuffs. They carry half-pikes, whose broad blades tip nine-foot ash hafts.

There is clearly something different about the two companies on each flank. In both cases their sergeants carry muskets and their officers curved sabres. The soldiers wear lace-embellished wings on their shoulders and the officers a more elaborate version in gold braid. The right flank company sports white shako pom-poms, for these are the battalion’s grenadiers, and the white commemorates the smoke of the grenades their forefathers threw. They are noticeably bigger men than their comrades in the other companies, and have an unmistakable air to them. At the other end of the line the pom-poms are green: this is the light company, containing the battalion’s best shots. Although its soldiers may lack the swagger of the grenadiers, there are several keen-eyed countrymen amongst them, and we may just see – as, indeed, one of the file-closing sergeants already has – that a hare’s paw is protruding from one man’s haversack. There has already been murder this morning, and there will be more before nightfall.

Behind the file-closers stand the drummers, grouped behind their companies, yellow tunics faced with red and laced with much white worsted. In the centre rear are two mounted officers, a major, the battalion’s second-in command, on the right and the adjutant, the commander’s personal staff officer, on the left. Further back stand a dozen pioneers, equipped with shovel and axe. The ‘band of music’ stands to the rear, but today the musicians have laid aside their instruments and are ready to act as stretcher-bearers, although their stretchers are simply sewn blankets looped between two stout poles. The battalion’s surgeon and his assistant, in dour anticipation of business to come, have unpacked their instruments from their mule and have blankets and water to hand.

In the centre the battalion’s colours jut sharply above the line. Both are of embroidered silk. One, the king’s colour, is the Union flag, and the other, the regimental colour, is the now-familiar yellow with the national flag in the upper corner where it joins the staff. The regiment’s number, wreathed in laurel, is in the colour’s centre. The pike is tipped by a spear point, now ornamental, from which hangs a long double tassel. Although at present the colours rest with their butts on the ground, the two young officers who bear them have broad shoulder-belts, with a strategically situated metal-lined pouch to support them when they are carried.

And young is indeed the word. The ensign bearing the Regimental colour cannot be more than sixteen, and seems in the grip of some powerful emotion. He is as white as a sheet, and though he is standing stiff and straight he is swallowing more than a boy ought. His comrade with the king’s colour is altogether more cheery. He is a big lad, and has already outgrown his tunic: lanky wrists and grubby shirt-cuffs protrude from its sleeves, and it is tight across his chest. His beefy face wears an unconcerned grin, and he seems to have enjoyed a whispered joke with the non-commissioned officer to his rear. Behind each officer stands a pike-armed sergeant: the one behind the regimental colour has inched forward till he is nearly touching its ensign, and is whispering, between clenched teeth: ‘Steady sir, steady: waiting is the hardest part, and ‘twill all be well when the ball opens.’

The officer who we might suppose has something to do with opening the ball is the lieutenant colonel commanding the battalion. He is a surprisingly young man – no more than thirty – on a little chestnut mare, standing on the gentle crest about a hundred yards in front of his men. He looks intently into the valley on its far side and occasionally glances to his left where, 400 yards away, his brigade commander, responsible for another three battalions all tucked in behind the same slope, sits astride his horse with two other mounted officers.

Although Hobden and his five hundred comrades cannot see what is happening on the other side of the hill, they can certainly hear it For half an hour now the distant popping of musketry has swollen to an almost continuous roar, interspersed with the thump of cannon. There is a good deal of shouting, the occasional anguished yell, and, more particularly of late, the clear notes of a bugle. Some minutes ago a cannon ball skidded over the crest, its force almost spent, sending up a shower of gravel as it bounded its way to a halt away to the battalion’s left. Wounded men, in red, dark green and Portuguese grey homespun, have been drifting back over the ridge for some time. Some are going well, limping along with sticks or walking briskly with a bound-up arm, but there are already some chilling sights: one man comes past slowly, wordlessly clutching his belly, and another has lost part of his face to a vicious sword-cut. The noise intensifies, and separate drumbeats soon coalesce into a steady sound. One of the officers present, unversed in musical minutiae of flams and paradiddles, will later describe it as: ‘the rum dum, the rum dum, the rum dum dummadum dum dum.’ It becomes louder and louder. Old soldiers exchange knowing glances, and some risk a sergeant’s ire by muttering ‘look sharp, for here comes here comes old trousers,’ their nickname for the pas de charge, the call beaten by the drummers accompanying French infantry going forward at the quickstep. There are soldiers on the crest-line now, riflemen in dark green, moving in pairs, one kneeling to fire into the valley while his comrade scurries back. The British skirmishers, who have borne the brunt of the fighting so far, have been driven in.

The brigade commander doffs his cocked hat, and waves it unmistakably. The colonel turns his horse, walks it easily back to his battalion, and halts in front of the front rank. ‘Thirty-Seventh,’ he shouts, and officers and men respond by bracing up, swords and muskets tight in between body and right arm. ‘Battalion will shoulder…Arms!’ On the last word muskets are tossed across the body so that their brass butt-plates now rest in the left hand, and the ensigns raise their colours, dropping their staffs into the pouches on their colour-belts. ‘By the centre…March.’ And they step off, as one man, with the left foot, boots swinging low over the earth in 30-inch steps at 75 paces to the minute. The drums tap out the step as the line moves forward, men looking in to the centre to get their dressing from the colours, file closers chivvying here and there to ensure that the rear rank stays well closed up.

As the battalion crosses the crest it is greeted by a vision of hell. Clouds of thick smoke, the product of a battle between opposing skirmishers which the enemy seems to have won, cannot conceal the fact that the valley is full of blue-clad French troops, now coming on, up the slope, in thick columns. And they are coming on in the bravest style, their drummers hammering out the pas de charge, officers shouting encouragement, and men whooping ‘Vive L’Empereur‘. One little spark is actually marching backwards, his shako raised on his sword-point, yelling that the Emperor will reward those who fight bravely. The nearest French column is three full battalions strong, stacked company behind company on a two-company front, fifty yards wide and almost twice as deep. The voltigeurs – equivalent of the 37th’s light company – have been skirmishing ahead of the column and some now begin to peck away at the British line from close range: with the clatter of a tinker’s pack one front-rank redcoat drops his musket, briefly kneels over it and then falls flat. The French grenadiers are leading their regiment, just as their British equivalents would be if the roles were reversed. They are big, stern men with red ornaments to their shakos, a forest of facial hair and the glitter of military dandysim: gold earrings, and silver ornaments on their clubbed hair. At least one British soldier is frankly shocked: ‘Their hats, set round with feathers, their beards long and black, gave them a fierce look. Their stature was superior to ours; most of us were young. We looked like boys; they looked like savages.’¹ The French are used to winning, and indeed think that they have all but won today. They have brushed aside some British riflemen and Portuguese caçadores, and there seems to be very few of the enemy to their front.

Raising his voice against the din, the colonel gives a long drawnout preparatory command of ‘Thirty-Seventh’ and follows it three paces later, with ‘Halt’. The drums cease on the instant, lending emphasis to the order, and the battalion stands steady, looking down, across open ground speckled with scrub oak and cork trees, at the head of the oncoming column only 300 yards away. The colonel rides round the right flank of his battalion, and takes station just behind the colours. It is not until the French have come another hundred yards, though now, very evidently, a little more slowly than before, as the moral effect of the line’s steadiness makes itself felt, that he shouts ‘Front rank: Make ready’. The drummers beat the short roll of the ‘preparative’; captains step back behind the second rank; the front rank’s muskets come up, still perpendicular, but now with the left hand to the walnut fore-end and the right just below the lock, with those callused thumbs resting on the flint-gripping jaws of the musket’s cock. The soldiers of the second rank step half a pace forward and to their right, in a movement called ‘locking on,’ so that, when their turn comes to fire, they will have space to do so.

The column is now less than a hundred yards away. Many features of its members can be clearly seen now. Its colonel has the cross of the Legion of Honour, and is having trouble with his horse, but keeps it going straight with short reins and sharp kicks. His officers and NCOs are desperately urging their men to close up: ‘Serrez les rangs, serrez!’ For they know what is coming: it is too late – and too close to that line – to meet fire with fire, and so if they are to succeed the sheer momentum of their mass must not be lost. They are only fifty yards away, close enough now to see now that their enemy’s commander has a thin face and a sharp nose, when the command ‘Present…Fire’ rings out The British front rank fires a volley of shattering precision. Its muskets were carefully loaded in safety behind the crest: their flints and priming alike are fresh. Without delay the colonel orders: ‘Front rank: load and prime. Rear rank: Make ready…Present…Fire.’

In just over thirty seconds each rank has fired two volleys, a total of two thousand musket balls at a range so close that even the unreliable Brown Bess musket is hitting a mass target about once in every ten shots. The head of the column falls like corn before the reaper. Its colonel, an attractive target – not least to the man in the round hat, who has his own views on officers, British or foreign – has half a dozen fatal wounds within seconds. As men in the front ranks fall, their comrades further back are exposed to the winnowing blast of musketry. Men trip over the dead and dying. Some, deaf to the shouts of their own officers and NCOs, who know that if they are to win it will be by shock, not fire, stop to fire back, and others strive frantically to position themselves behind those in front.

A few brave souls get as far as the British line. One thrusts hard, musket flung out to the full stretch of his right arm, with all his weight behind it. His bayonet grazes the side of a front-rank man and jams deep in his pack. Before the Frenchman can recover it, the rear-rank man shoots him in the chest from such close range that his coat smoulders. Although the volleys are still quite regular and accurate, there are signs that this will not last; some men fire at threatening close-range targets as they present themselves, and others fire on the word of command; but, almost dazed by the noise and concussion, they seem to have little regard for where their shots are going.

The colonel’s voice and another drum-roll interrupt the firing. ‘Now, Thirty-Seventh, I am about to give the word to charge. Three cheers for the king.’ There are three harsh, barking cheers: on the word ‘Charge…bayonets’ the muskets come down to hip level, held across the body. Then the men are off down the slope, bounding over the dead and dying. There is a brief flurry of bayonet fighting where line meets the wreckage of the column, but most Frenchmen do not stay to meet the steel. A good number, huddling in a nervous clump, surrender. Most surrenders are accepted with good nature, but one man deliberately bayonets a Frenchman who offers no resistance but, stunned by the horror around him, is slow to drop his musket. The rest are away, running, free of musket and pack, and so much faster than their pursuers.

The colours move quickly down the slope, the pale ensign now wild with excitement, his sergeant, pike thrust out in front of them, again urging steadiness, but this time with a different cause. The action has had its tragedies, even for the victors. The king’s colour is now borne by a sergeant and back up the slope, in a thin tide-line of redcoated bodies, its fat-faced ensign lies flat on his back with a blue hole in his forehead and the back blown off his head. There will be a Gloucestershire vicarage for which Christmas will not be the same this year. The surgeon and his mate are busy bandaging and probing. Of the eighteen British wounded five, with bullet-wounds to the abdomen, are probably beyond hope. Three must have smashed limbs amputated, and are more likely to die than survive. The remaining ten have a variety of injuries – one unlucky fellow has had his jaw broken by the French colonel’s horse, kicking out in its death-throes as he rifled its saddlebags – but will live to fight another day.

At the foot of the slope the line rallies on the colours and the companies reform. Private Hobden, face and uniform smutty with powder-smoke, and mouth black with gunpowder from biting open his cartridges, pockets a gold watch and crucifix eased from a Frenchman’s pocket. He has also found a buckwheat pancake in someone’s discarded shako, and chews it quietly as he picks up his dressing, touching elbows to left and right, and squinting up to see the colours catching the first rays of sun to break through the smoke.²

Seven years later, in April 1815, a few weeks before the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was walking in a Brussels park with the radical diarist Thomas Creevey. Creevey asked the Duke how he thought the coming battle would go.

‘By God! I think Blücher and myself can do the thing.’

‘Do you calculate upon any desertion in Bonaparte’s army?’

‘Not a man, from the colonel to the private…We may pick up a marshal or two, perhaps, but not worth a damn.’

‘Do you reckon upon any support from the French king’s troops at Alost?’

‘Oh! Don’t mention such fellowsl No: I think Blücher and I can do the business.’

Just then a lone British infantryman appeared, walking about the park and gawping at the statues: Hobden, perhaps even Sergeant Hobden, although rather less scruffy then when we last met him.

‘There,’ said the Duke, pointing at the red-coated figure. ‘It all depends on that article there whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.’³

This book is about ‘that article there’, the redcoated soldier of the British regular army, like Ezekiel Hobden of the 37th Regiment. And it is about Hobden’s father and son as well, for my period opens with the start of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 and ends with the Indian Mutiny just over a century later. During it the British infantry-man wore a red coat in battle and carried the muzzle-loading flintlock musket known (though the first printed reference to the name is not found till 1785) as Brown Bess. This weapon had several variants. Most encountered today were mass-produced during the Napoleonic Wars, and are the India pattern, introduced into the British service in 1794 by large-scale cession from the East India Company when arms manufacturers, domestic and foreign, were unable to keep pace with the demands of war against Revolutionary France.⁴ The first Brown Besses appeared in the late 1730s, and the last were carried – although they were by then long obsolete – by some combatants in the Crimean War of 1854–56 and even the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58.

SCARLET AND BLUE

THE FRAMEWORK INTO WHICH Hobden’s army fitted was clear by 1760. It was to change little until the eve of the First World War, and its influence has persisted well into our own times. The army’s two main functions were twisted closely together like the strands of a rope. It had a continental role, which it exercised alongside allies and against opponents with both of whom, but for the colour of their coats, it often had much in common. With the continental commitment came a regard for formalism in drill and dress, and an emphasis on the scientific aspects of war like fortification, siegecraft and artillery. In its continental role the British army fought as part of a coalition: two of its greatest generals, Marlborough and Wellington, commanded more non-British than British troops in their biggest battles. But although the British sometimes tugged with a greater weight on the allied chain of command than their numerical contribution seemed to justify, there was no escaping the fact that theirs was a tiny army by the standards of continental war. In the late eighteenth century ‘His Sardinian Majesty could boast an army equal in size to that of King George I.’⁵

Into this was wound a colonial thread, in which practicality ranked higher than precedent, dress and discipline tended to be looser, and there were more raids and ambushes than pitched battles. Even when there was no colonial campaigning, the outposts of empire needed garrisoning. In the early eighteenth century several regiments served abroad for twenty-five unbroken years, and the unlucky 38th Regiment spent 1716 to 1765 on the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. A system of unit rotation was instituted in 1749, and although the demands of war interfered with its measured operation, it was at least a start. Yet it was not to prevent the 67th Regiment from spending 1805–26 in India and then setting off in 1832 for Gibraltar, the West Indies and Canada, where it remained till 1841. Some foreign postings were more lethal than any battle: the 38th Regiment lost 1,068 men, most of them to disease, in seven years in the West Indies, and during the 1740s even regiments in the relatively benign Gibraltar lost seventeen per cent of their strength each year.

The continental and colonial functions were never wholly distinct, any more than they were in the 1960s, when a unit serving in the British Army of the Rhine might find itself sent half a world away to fight an insurgent enemy in paddy-field or rubber plantation. Nor were the techniques and organisations of European and colonial campaigning always separate, as two brief examples show. First, the main impetus for raising light troops was colonial, but such soldiers had a useful part to play in Europe. Second, the export of European military techniques meant that both India and North America witnessed sieges and battles as formal as anything the British army encountered on the continent. Lastly, domestic tasks wove a third skein into the rope. The army had a crucial role in the preservation of public order, all the more so in the absence of an effective police force. It was also repeatedly involved in ‘coast duty’, assisting Revenue officers in their war on smuggling.

Britain’s military policy was determined as much by the physical location of the British Isles as by the wishes of their rulers. As Admiral Earl St Vincent told the House of Lords: ‘I do not say the French cannot come: I only say they cannot come by sea.’ The dual need to defend Britain from invasion and protect her overseas trade had encouraged the development of a navy which, by 1689, was the equal of the Dutch and the French, and during the eighteenth century the Royal Navy confirmed a predominance it was not to lose till the twentieth. It was able to do so primarily because Britain, with no land frontier with a potentially hostile foreign power, was able to devote the lion’s share of her defence expenditure to the fleet. There were no fortress-lines to build, improve and maintain, and no need to sustain a large army in time of peace. The strategist Basil Liddell Hart was later to identify ‘a distinctively British practice of war, based on experience and proved by three centuries of success.’⁶ Naval dominance ‘had two arms, one financial, which embraced the subsidising and military provisioning of allies; the other military, which embraced sea-borne expeditions against the enemy’s vulnerable extremities.’⁷ Scholars have rightly pointed out that this is strategic theory rather than military history, and that Britain has not always had continental allies to fund, or the liberty simply to engage the enemy’s peripheries. Yet if it does rough justice to history, it underscores the great truth that ‘all British armies have relied on sea power, even when deployed on the European continent in the main theatre of war.’⁸

This is a major reason for the British ambivalence about soldiers so well summed up by Rudyard Kipling in ‘Tommy’. It was often difficult to persuade the electorate that there was any real need for them. Sailors were another matter, for trade depended on secure sea-lanes, and sailors were, for so much of the time, out of sight and out of mind. Not so soldiers, who were an ever-present feature of Georgian and Victorian society. There were times when a sense of real and present danger swung the opinion of the public squarely behind its army. It is sometimes the apparently superficial that makes the point. During the American War, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, threw herself with enthusiasm into helping her husband with the militia of Derbyshire, where he was lord lieutenant. She then raised a female auxiliary corps, and the Morning Post reported: ‘Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire appears every day at the head of the beauteous Amazons on Coxheath, who are all dressed en militaire; in the regimentals that distinguish the several regiments in which their Lords etc., serve, and charms every beholder with their beauty and affability.’⁹ In 1795, with fears of French invasion rife, some fashionable Scots ladies turned out à l’Amazone in red coats with military cuffs and epaulettes, and Highland bonnets. English ladies took to velvet dresses of ‘rifle-green’ and the women of Neath petitioned the prime minister to be allowed to form their own home-defence regiment.

There are in this town about two hundred women who have been used to hard labour all the days of their lives, such as working in coalpits, on the high road, tilling the ground, etc. If you would grant us arms, that is light pikes…we do assure you that we could in a short time learn our exercise…I assure you we are not trifling with you, but serious in our proposal.¹⁰

The Prime Minister himself, Lord Addington, even appeared in Parliament in his militia uniform. Quasi-military dress again became popular during Napoleon’s hundred days in 1815, and one of Thackeray’s characters, dressed as a pseudo-officer to accompany the formidable Becky Sharpe to Brussels, hastily civilianises himself when he thinks the French have won. But all too often public opinion agreed with the mother of the future Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, who joined the army as a private soldier in 1877. She told her son that she would rather bury him than see him in a red coat.

The Royal Navy’s strength made large-scale invasion of Britain all but impossible – although, as we shall see shortly, it could not prevent the occasional French descent on Ireland. It enabled Britain to mount frequent amphibious operations. The first part of Thomas More Molyneux’s Conjunct Operations, published in 1759, reviewed 68 overseas operations since the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, seven of them great expeditions involving more than 4,000 men. Just over half had failed, and Molyneux devoted the second part of his book to telling his readers how such operations might be managed better in the future. He maintained that Britain’s geographical position, large navy and small army gave her a natural proclivity for operations like this, but also argued, as a veteran of Sir John Mordaunt’s ill-starred raid on Rochefort in 1757, that amphibious success demanded both specialised troops and equipment.

Amphibious operations were a feature of the age. Some were triumphant, like Wolfe’s attack on Quebec in 1759. James Wolfe had blockaded the Marquis de Montcalm in Quebec, but could see no way of achieving a decisive result before winter set in. He summoned his brigadiers to ask for their views, and they resolved on an amphibious attack on the Anse du Foulon, west of the city, where a narrow track led up to the Plains of Abraham. On the night of 12–13 September Captain McDonald, a French-speaking Scots officer, bluffed the French sentry on the track, and by dawn Wolfe’s ten battalions were drawn up on the plain. Montcalm’s men came on in three columns, and were met by an opening volley at a mere 40 yards, one of the most destructive in military history, which stopped them in their tracks. The British fired one more volley and charged, unaware that their youthful commander – he was only 32 – was dying. Montcalm, too, was mortally wounded, and Quebec surrendered on 18 September.

But some other amphibious operations were disastrous. In August 1809 a fleet of 235 armed vessels, 58 of them men-of-war, under Admiral Sir Richard Strachan, escorted 44,000 troops under Major General Lord Chatham to the low-lying malarial Dutch island of Walcheren. The expedition had two aims: first, to capture Antwerp, described by Napoleon as ‘a pistol pointed at the heart of England’, and second, to provide a diversion by an offensive on the Danube by Britain’s Austrian allies. Chatham’s army, stuck fast on the island, lost 218 men in action, but 4,000 died of sickness and another 11,000 were ill when they were evacuated: many suffered from recurring fever for years. Ensign William Thornton Keep of the 77th Regiment told his father that Flushing, the island’s capital, was ‘a most diabolical place’. On 11 September 1809 he reported that ‘the increase of sick is beyond all precedent’: his regiment alone had 22 officers ill.

We hear of a change of the Ministry. It is to be expected after so disastrous a result of things…had the Ministers been informed of the unhealthiness of this place, different measures would doubtless have been adopted. It seems extraordinary that they were not, as it is proverbially the place of transport for the Military Delinquents of France, and they sent us here at the very time of year in which the fever prevails.

Keep became so ill that he had to resign from the army, though he recovered sufficiently to rejoin, becoming an ensign in the 28th Regiment in 1811.

Without sea power the American War of Independence simply could not have been fought at all, and at its close the Royal Navy’s strong grip weakened. It is a measure of the army’s understanding of the fundamental importance of seapower that Captain John Peebles of the 42nd Regiment, although only a junior regimental officer, clearly recognised how things stood on 6 October 1781.

The Fleet are busy making the necessary repairs, and completing their water and provisions, and are expected to be ready about the 12th inst., when the Troops will embark upon board the Ships of War agreeable to a distribution given out for that purpose, in order to make a Spirited exertion for the relief of Lord Cornwallis and on which probably depends the fate of America and the superiority of the Sea.¹¹

His men boarded HMS London from their transports with the easy familiarity that came from having done the same thing half a dozen times before and with an unswerving Georgian regard for seniority: ‘the troops went on board by seniority of Companies, and were disposed on the middle and lower decks, six to a mess between the guns.’¹² But on the 24th they took on board a Negro pilot who had escaped from Yorktown on the 18th. He reported that there had been an armistice that day, for Cornwallis had asked for terms. Peebles was to be proved right. Although the war rumbled on, the loss of Yorktown marked the end of major operations, and the Royal Navy’s loss of superiority off the Chesapeake that autumn was just as conclusive as Peebles had predicted.

Seapower underpinned the Peninsular War in the middle of the period and the Crimean at its end. In India it was decisive in enabling the British to seize the coastal bases upon which their future success was to depend: it was no accident that the three Presidencies comprising British India were governed from the ports of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Well might George Thomas write in 1756 that: ‘A fine harbour…in the hands of Europeans might defy the force of Asia.’¹³

Finally, the Royal Navy made its own distinctive contribution to war on land. Early in the Indian Mutiny, Lieutenant Arthur Moffat Lang of the Bengal Engineers welcomed the arrival of:

100 sailors of the Shannon with four 24-pounders. It was grand to see Jack Tars again, with their loose large-collared blue shirts, loose blue trousers, straw hats with white covers, black ribbons and ‘Shannon’ on the bands; they carry musket and bayonet. They seem strangely out of place. Rolling about up here, using their sea-language, cursing the niggers, driving bullock gharis and swearing because ‘she tacks about and backs and fills so.’¹⁴

In the same conflict Lieutenant William Alexander-Gordon of the 93rd Highlanders saw one of these 24-pounders breaching the walls of the Secunderbagh at Lucknow ‘with a fine fellow of a negro AB [able seaman]…doing the duty of two or three of the regulation number of gunners.’ The gun was manhandled forward under heavy fire, bullets hitting it ‘with a noise like that which a crowd of school boys might make throwing stones at an empty saucepan.’¹⁵ The soldiers who painted the globe the colour of their coats did so under the navy’s protecting wing.

TO FLANDERS, PORTUGAL AND SPAIN

DURING THE AGE OF BROWN BESS the British army took part in five major wars: the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), the American War of Independence (1775-83), the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and the Crimean War (1853-56). It fought the Seven Years’ War as an ally of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Operations against the French and their Indian allies in North America began in 1754, absorbed much of Britain’s military effort and helped initiate far-reaching tactical change. French possessions in Canada were snapped up, with Wolfe’s capture of Quebec in 1759 as the brightest star in a year of victories still remembered in the naval march ‘Heart of Oak,’ first heard in David Garrick’s play Harlequin’s Invasion

Come cheer up my boys ‘tis to glory we steer

to add something more to this wonderful year…

In India, too, there were successes, with Robert Clive’s defeat of the pro-French ruler of Bengal at Plassey in 1757 and Lieutenant General Sir Eyre Coote’s victory at Wandeswash in 1759 bringing much of India under the control of the British East India Company. On the continent of Europe, where the British always fought as part of a coalition force, their fortunes were more mixed. The Duke of Cumberland, George II’s son, was badly beaten at Hastenbeck in 1757, but a British force played a notable part in the victory at Minden in the annus mirabilis of 1759.

It is worth pausing to consider just what these battles were like for the men who fought in them. At Minden, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick with 41,000 Anglo-German soldiers faced Marshal Contades with 51,000 Frenchmen. What made the battle unusual was that it was decided by an attack on a vastly superior force of French cavalry by six British regiments, launched as the result of a linguistic misunderstanding. Hospital Assistant William Fellowes of the 37th Foot wrote that:

The soldiers and others, this morning, who were not employed at the moment, began to strip off and wash their shirts, and I as eagerly as the rest. But while we were in this state, suddenly the drums began to beat to arms: and so insistent was the summons that without more ado we slip’t on the wet linen and buttoned the jackets over the soaking shirts, hurrying to form line lest our comrades should depart without us. There was a keen wind blowing at the time, and with my wet shirt and soaking coat, it was an hour or more before I could find any warmth in me. But the French warmed us up in good time; tho’ not, you may be sure, as much as we warmed them!¹⁶

Lieutenant Montgomery of the 12th Foot described the advance, with the redcoats stepping out to the rub-a-dub-dub-dub of the drums, and through:

a most furious fire from a most infernal Battery of 18 18-pounders…It might be imagined that this cannonade would render the Regt incapable of bearing the shock of unhurt troops drawn up long before on ground of their own choosing, but firmness and resolution will surmount any difficulty. When we got within about 100 yards of the enemy, a large body of French cavalry galloped boldly down upon us; these our Men by reserving their fire immediately ruined…These visitants being thus dismissed…down came upon us like lightning the glory of France in the Persons of the Gens d’Armes. These were almost immediately dispersed…we now discovered a large body of Infantry…moving directly on our flank in Column…We engaged this Corps for about 10 minutes, kill’d them a good many, and as the Song says, the rest then ran away.

The next who made their appearance were some Regt’s of the Grenadiers of France, and as fine and terrible looking fellows as I ever saw. They stood us a tug notwithstanding we beat them to a distance…we advanced, they took the hint and run away.¹⁷

Montgomery added a postscript. The noise of battle frightened the regimental sutler’s pregnant wife into premature labour: ‘She was brought to bed of A Son, and we have christened him by the name of Ferdinand.’

The Seven Years’ War was ended by the Treaty of Paris, a triumph for Britain, who gained territory at French expense. But France was soon to have her revenge. A constitutional dispute, focusing on the right to tax, led to war between Britain and her North American colonies in 1775. Although the British won a costly victory that year at Bunker Hill, just outside Boston, and, indeed, won the majority of the war’s pitched battles, they were unable to inflict a decisive defeat on George Washington’s Continental army, and their strength was eroded by repeated small actions in a landscape that was often decidedly hostile. France, heartened by the surrender of an army under Lieutenant General John Burgoyne at Saratoga in October 1777, joined the war. In 1781 Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis, commanding British forces in the southern states, was besieged at Yorktown by Washington and his French allies. Admiral de Grasse’s fleet prevented the Royal Navy from intervening, and in October Cornwallis surrendered in what was the greatest British military humiliation until the fall of Singapore in 1942. The Peace of Versailles ended the conflict, depriving Britain of many of the gains achieved in the Seven Years’ War.

France’s victory was dearly bought, for her finances collapsed under the strain of the war. Her government’s attempt at reform led to the summoning of the Estates General in 1789 and began the slide into revolution. War broke out between revolutionary France and old monarchical Europe in 1792, and Britain was drawn in the following year. The French Revolutionary Wars saw Britain’s Prime Minister, William Pitt, assemble two successive anti-French coalitions, but with little success. Overall the war’s pattern was clear enough. There was little to check the French on land, and they overran the Low Countries, scarcely inconvenienced by the intervention in 1793-95 of a British force under the Duke of York, although a French expedition to Egypt ended in failure. At sea, however, the Royal Navy was supreme, and by 1801 the war had run its course, with neither side able to do serious damage to the other, and peace was ratified at Amiens in 1802.

It did not endure for long, and war broke out again the following year. Napoleon Bonaparte, an artillery officer who had risen to eminence by a mixture of stunning military success and deft political opportunism, had become ruler of France, and in May 1804 he assumed the imperial title, gaining popular approval for a new constitution by a plebiscite. By 1812 he had defeated all the major continental powers save Britain, imposing the ‘Continental System’ designed to prevent British commerce with Europe. But that year he over-reached himself by invading Russia. His former enemies, sensing that the tide had turned, took the field against him, and in 1814 was beaten and forced to abdicate. The following year he staged the dramatic revival of the Hundred Days, but was decisively defeated by the British and Prussians at Waterloo, and abdicated once more, this time for good.

During the Napoleonic Wars Britain’s principal theatre of operations was the Iberian Peninsula where a British force, from 1809 under the command of General Sir Arthur Wellesley, later created Duke of Wellington, operated from its base in Portugal against French armies which always outnumbered the British but were constrained by a broader conflict against a hostile population. The British army fought a dozen major battles and endured several painful sieges. The battle of Albuera, on 16 May 1811, came about when a British, Spanish and Portuguese army under Lieutenant General Sir William Beresford blocked Marshal Nicolas Soult’s attempt to disrupt his siege of the French-held fortress of Badajoz.

It was one of the hardest infantry contests of the entire period. Soult fixed Beresford’s attention by feinting at the village of Albuera, in the Allied centre. He then unleashed a massive attack against Beresford’s right flank, where a Spanish division swung round to face the threat and fought gallantly, buying valuable time. A British infantry brigade under Lieutenant Colonel John Colborne – one of the stars of the age, who was to become a field marshal and a peer – moved up to support the Spaniards. It was locked in a firefight with enemy infantry when French hussars and Polish lancers fell on its open flank, at the very moment that a sudden cloudburst drenched the mens’ muskets so that they would not fire. Lieutenant George Crompton of the 66th Regiment told his mother of the catastrophe that ensued. It was:

the first time (and God knows I hope the last) I saw the backs of English soldiers turned upon the French…Oh, what a day was that. The worst of the story I have not related. Our Colours were taken. I told you before that the 2 Ensigns were shot under them; 2 Sergeants shared the same fate. A Lieutenant seized a musket to defend them, and he was shot to the heart: what could be done against Cavalry?¹⁸

Two fresh British brigades then came into line, and Captain Moyle Sherer of the 34th Regiment relates how the powder smoke, so utterly characteristic of these battles, was snatched away for a moment to reveal:

the French grenadier caps, their arms, and the whole aspect of their frowning masses. It was a momentary, but a grand sight: a heavy atmosphere of smoke again enveloped us, and few objects could be discerned at all, none distinctly…This murderous contest of musketry lasted long. We were the whole time progressively advancing and shaking the enemy. At a distance of about twenty yards from them, we received orders to charge; we had ceased firing, cheered, and had our bayonets in the charging position, when a body of the enemy’s horse was discovered under the rising ground, ready to take advantage of our impetuosity. Already, however, the French infantry, alarmed by our preparatory cheers, which always indicate the charge, had broke and fled.¹⁹

Perhaps five hundred yards to Sherer’s right was Ensign Benjamin Hobhouse of the 57th Regiment, which was engaged in a prodigious close-range firefight.

At this time our poor fellows dropped around us in every direction. In the activity of the officers to keep the men firm, and to supply them with the ammunition of the fallen, you could scarcely avoid treading on the dying and the dead. But all was firm…Tho’ alone, our fire never slackened, nor were the men in the least disheartened…Our Colonel, major, every captain and eleven subalterns fell; our King’s Colours were cut in two, our regimental ones had 17 balls through them, many companies were without officers…²⁰

Lieutenant Colonel William Inglis, hit in the chest by grapeshot, lay in front of the colours and encouraged his men by shouting ‘Die hard, 57th, die hard’. The 57th Regiment and its post-1881 successor the Middlesex Regiment, were to be proudly known as Diehards.

Finally, the Fusilier brigade – two battalions of 7th Royal Fusiliers and one of 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers – arrived to clinch the victory. In the ranks of 1/7th was Private John Spencer Cooper, an avid student of military history who had enlisted in the Volunteers in 1803 at the age of fifteen and transferred to the regulars in 1806. His book Rough Notes of Seven Campaigns, written up when Cooper was 81, gives a soldier’s view of the battle.

Under the tremendous fire of the enemy our line staggers, men are knocked about like skittles, but not a step backward is taken. Here our Colonel and all the field-officers of the brigade fell killed or wounded, but no confusion ensued. The orders were ‘close up’; ‘close in’; ‘fire away’; ‘forward’. This is done. We are close to the enemy’s columns; they break and rush down the other side of the hill in the greatest moblike confusion.²¹

The word ‘moblike’ goes to the very heart of the matter. As the French columns disintegrated, so Soult’s army reverted to the shoal of individuals in which all armies have their origin, and to which, but for the efforts of drillmasters, leaders, and steadfast comrades, they return all too easily. Soult told Napoleon that he had been robbed of victory. ‘The British were completely beaten and the day was mine, but they did not know it and would not run.’ Well might Sir William Napier, himself a Peninsular veteran, celebrate ‘that astonishing infantry’.

Britain’s command of the sea, re-emphasised at Trafalgar in 1805, enabled her to mount smaller expeditions. Sometimes these were successes, like the descent on Copenhagen in 1807, and sometimes failures, like the disastrous Buenos Aires expedition of 1806–7. The epoch had a tragic adjunct. An Anglo-American conflict – ‘the War of 1812’ – had begun promisingly for Britain with the repulse of an American attack on Canada and the temporary seizure of Washington, but ended in British defeat at New Orleans in January 1815, a battle fought before news of a negotiated peace reached North America.

It was not until 1854 that the British army faced its first major post-Napoleonic trial, and the final major war of our period, when an Anglo-French force, with its British contingent under General Lord Raglan, invaded the Crimea in an effort to take the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. The Allies won an early victory on the River Alma in September and beat off two Russian attacks on their siege lines at Balaclava and Inkerman. After a dreadful winter on freezing uplands, they took the outworks that dominated Sevastopol and forced the Russians to withdraw the following summer.

There was sporadic fighting in India throughout the period. In 1764 the British strengthened their grip on Bengal at the battle of Buxar, and in 1799 Tipoo Sultan, ruler of Mysore, was killed when the British stormed his capital Seringapatam. There were three wars against the fierce Mahrattas, whose confederacy sprawled across central India, and in the second (1803–5) they were beaten, with the future Duke of Wellington striking the decisive blow at Assaye (1803). The Pindaris, piratical freebooters who lived on the fringe of the Mahratta armies, were beaten in 1812–17, and a third Mahratta war in 1817–19 saw the British extend their power to the borders of the Punjab and Sind.

In 1838 the governor-general of India, Lord Auckland, decided to install a pro-British ruler, Shah Shujah, on the throne of Afghanistan to provide a bulwark against the threat of Russian expansion. The advance to Kabul went well, but in the winter of 1841–42 there was rising against Shah Shujah. The British and Indian force, weakly commanded, retired from Kabul towards Jellalabad, but was cut to pieces as it did so: only one man, Dr Bryden, managed to reach safety.

Better fortune attended the next expansionist step, and in 1843 the British annexed Sind. This brought them into conflict with the martial Sikhs, rulers of the Punjab. In the first Sikh War (1845–46) the British won hard-fought battles at Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal and Sobraon. When hostilities broke out again in 1848 the British had the better of a scrambling battle at Chilian wallah and a decisive clash at Gujerat, and went on to annex the Punjab.

Brown Bess was now almost a thing of the past, superseded from 1842 by a musket ignited by a percussion cap, which was far more reliable than the flintlock, and from 1853 by a percussion rifle. Ironically it was the introduction of this rifle into the Indian army that helped produce the last conflict of the period. The rifle’s paper cartridge was lubricated with grease, and rumours that this was the fat of pork (unclean to Muslims) or cattle (sacred to Hindus) induced some soldiers of the Bengal army to refuse the cartridges and precipitated the Indian Mutiny in March 1857. The mutineers took Delhi, and overwhelmed a British force at Cawnpore, where the survivors were massacred. Lucknow, capital of the princely state of Oudh, held out, and was eventually relieved after the British had taken Delhi by storm in September 1857.

The Mutiny was the last time that Brown Bess was carried in battle by British soldiers. Lieutenant Richard Barter, adjutant of the 75th Foot, – ‘the Stirlingshire Regiment, good men and true as ever had the honour of serving their Queen and Country’ – describes how a hundred men from his battalion were issued with the new rifle, ‘all the rest of the regiment retaining old Brown Bess’. But the new weapon was not deemed a success, and ‘the men, with few exceptions, contrived to get rid of their rifles and in their place picked up the old weapons of their dead comrades.’²² Hobden would surely have approved.

Brown Bess had held sway for more than a century. But within a decade she was as obsolete as the longbow, superseded first by percussion weapons and finally by breech-loading rifles in a process of accelerating technical innovation. There were other major changes too: the purchase of commissions was abolished in 1871, and the regimental system was recast shortly afterwards to produce county regiments, with two regular battalions (the 37th joined the 67th (South Hampshire) Regiment to produce the Hampshire Regiment) linked to form a new regiment which would normally have one battalion at home and another abroad. The process was not popular, and traditionalists demanded the return of ‘our numbers wreathed in glory.’ In 1884 Colonel Arthur Poole angrily declared that he could not possibly attend a Hampshire regimental dinner. ‘Damned names,’ he wrote, ‘mean nothing. Since time immemorial regiments have been numbered according to their precedence in the Line…I will not come to anything called a Hampshire Regimental dinner. My compliments, Sir, and be damned.’²³

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