Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes
mess table or in barrack-room, but it would have been a poor definition of the army’s origins. For, start to finish, it was a British army, its members drawn from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And for most of the period it had a substantial foreign element, whose soldiers were induced to serve King George by financial gain, political opinion, religious belief or simply their ruler’s whim.
All major armies recruited foreign troops. Indeed, the notion of nationality itself was still evolving, and in the mid-eighteenth century Voltaire wrote that ‘the concept of a fatherland is variable and contradictory. Most of the inhabitants of a country like France do not know what it means.’ In 1751 the Prussian army of 133,000 men had only 50,000 native subjects of the king of Prussia, and just 80,000 in an army of 190,000 in 1786. The French army had German, Swiss, Italian, Irish and Scots regiments, and during the eighteenth century 12 per cent of its peacetime and 20 per cent of its wartime strength was recruited abroad. Young men were usually encouraged into foreign service by the prospect of economic betterment, but religion and family tradition also helped establish firm links between, say, Roman Catholic Irish minor gentry families and the French or Austrian armies into which so many of their sons were commissioned. Sometimes, though, enlistment followed a run of bad luck – the penniless Abbé Bastiani signed on into a Prussian regiment and rose to become one of Frederick the Great’s closest companions – and sometimes recruits were simply conned, like the young Swiss Ulrich Bräker who thought that he had gone to Berlin to become an officer’s servant but finished up ‘impressed into the notorious donner und blitzen regiment of Itzenplitz.’50
In addition to individual recruitment, where young men became officers or signed on as soldiers after making their own way abroad, it was not uncommon for the regiments of one state to be temporarily transferred to the service of another for a suitable fee. For the American War of Independence the British army contracted with the rulers of some German states for the services of their foreign contingents. The diarist Julius Friedrich Wasmus was a company surgeon in the Duke of Brunswick’s Lieb-Regiment, which served with the British in North America. In November 1779 Captain Peebles saw two German regiments on parade, ‘the Hessian Grenadiers, dressed up and powdered, [and] the Ansbachers the finest looking troops and tallest, I ever saw, and in high discipline.’51
There was widespread agreement that France was Britain’s natural adversary. In 1759 Sir Thomas Cave of the Leicester Militia told the Marquis of Granby that ‘the spirit of the people to oppose the natural enemy of this kingdom is so great, that I had a roll of 50 volunteers offered me, every one a man of considerable property.’52 Sergeant Roger Lamb of the 23rd Foot, who served in the American War and left a remarkably literate account of his experiences, when writing in 1809 described the French as ‘for many ages the professed and natural enemies of Britain.’53 Indeed, some British politicians welcomed the French Revolution not simply because it represented the overthrow of despotism, but because it apparently did lasting damage to French military potential. William Windham, secretary at war in William Pitt’s government of 1783–1801, was happy to see France in ‘a situation which, more than at any other period, frees us from anxiety on her account.’54 The courteous Lord Raglan, commander-in-chief in the Crimea, tended to refer to his Russian enemy as ‘the French’ because for the whole of his previous active service the French were the enemy.
However, until Prussia established herself as the dominant (and thus most-imitated) military nation in Europe during the Seven Years’ War, French military fashion held sway. French military terminology was widely used (even in the nineteenth century engineers spoke knowingly of demi-lunes and fausse-brayes, tablettes and orillons), and France, with her frequent experience of continental war on a large scale, was the subject of widespread imitation in drill and doctrine.
And there were many Frenchmen in the British army, even when that army’s prime function was fighting the French. The first wave arrived after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 forced many Protestants to flee the country, and another wave arrived after the Revolution. During the French Revolutionary Wars a large number of émigré units, composed of French royalists, served under British command. English law was changed in 1794 ‘to enable the subjects of France to enlist as soldiers’ and receive commissions without suffering ‘pain or penalty’ for professing ‘the Popish Religion’. Most of these units had disappeared by the Peace of Amiens in 1802, but some émigrés soldiered on after this, albeit largely in ‘British’ units. For example, many members of the York Rangers, raised in 1793 and consisting mainly of Germans with French-Irish émigré officers, were eventually incorporated into the 3rd Battalion 60th Foot, which had begun its existence by enlisting Germans for service in North America.
During the Napoleonic Wars foreign corps rose from forming 11 per cent of the army in 1804 to constituting more than 20 per cent by 1813. There was one remaining nominally French unit, the Chasseurs Britanniques, which served with Wellington in the Peninsular War. It generally behaved well in battle, but suffered such an appallingly high rate of desertion – 224 of its men absconded during 1813 – that it was not allowed to post its own pickets in case they seized the opportunity to decamp.55 Corporal William Wheeler of the 51st Regiment served alongside it in Spain, and was unimpressed, as he told his father in a letter.
Want of room in my last prevented me from informing you that 9 men of the Chasseurs Britanniques Regt were shot for desertion. This Corps was originally formed of French loyalists, but the old hands are dropping off and they are replaced by volunteers from the French [prisoner of war] prisons. A great number of these men enter our service for no other purpose than to go over to their army as soon as an opportunity offers (and who can blame them). The consequence is the major part of the Corps cannot be trusted. I wish they were at the Devil or any where else, so that we were not plagued with them…56
Other foreign corps included the Calabrian Free Corps, the Ceylon Light Dragoons, the Piedmontese Legion and even the fustanella-clad Greek Light Infantry. In the great Swiss tradition of mercenary service, the Swiss regiments of Meuron, Roll and Watteville served throughout the war. The latter was roughly handled in the siege of Fort Eirie in 1814: on 15 August 83 of its men disappeared when a mine was exploded and another 24 were killed and 27 wounded. Two days later a vigorous American sortie captured another 128 officers and men.
The Brunswick-Oels Corps was known, from the colour of its uniforms, as the Black Brunswickers, or, from their skull and crossbones badge, as the ‘Death or Glory Men’. It was raised in 1809 by the Duke of Brunswick, whose father had been killed commanding the Prussian force at Jena-Auerstadt three years before. After a period in Austrian service it marched across Europe, and was evacuated by the Royal Navy and taken into British pay. It fought in the Peninsula (Wheeler complained that it was ‘almost as bad’ as the Chasseurs Britanniques) and during the Hundred Days Campaign of 1815, and the duke himself was killed at Quatre Bras.
The biggest and best of the many foreign corps was the King’s German Legion. This had its origins in the Hanoverian army, which had fought alongside the British during the eighteenth century – not surprisingly, for since the accession of George I in 1714 kings of England were also rulers of Hanover. The French overran Hanover in 1803, and the Convention of Lauenberg disbanded the Hanoverian army but allowed its members to emigrate and to bear arms against the French once they had been properly exchanged with French prisoners of war. The British government did not accept this provision, and so, instead of incorporating Hanoverian units intact, as it might otherwise have done, it raised a unit known first as The King’s Germans and then as The King’s German Legion, abbreviated to KGL.
The Legion contained line and light infantry, hussars, dragoons and artillery. It grew rapidly in size, and peaked in June 1812 when over 14,000 officers and men were serving in it. Many of its officers and almost all its rank and file were German, although some British officers joined it, for a