Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes
and timely invasion might prove decisive was another. Humbert’s force was too little and too late, and the rebellion – ‘the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite wars and the Great Famine’ – was put down with the loss of perhaps 30,000 lives.87
Given this background, it is perhaps surprising that Irish regular regiments, and individual Irish soldiers in English regiments, remained as loyal as they did. The one significant lapse came when the 5th or Royal Irish Regiment of Dragoons, which helped suppress the 1798 rebellion, was infiltrated by nationalists, who plotted to murder the regiment’s officers. The plot was discovered and the regiment was disbanded at Chatham on 8 April 1799, leaving a hole in the Army List that was not filled until the 5th Royal Irish Lancers was raised in 1858. In 1922 the 5th was amalgamated with the 16th Lancers to form the 16th/5th, the lack of numerical logic being explained by fact that the 5th, despite its senior number, was in fact the junior regiment.
The ambivalent position of Irish soldiers, so many of them Roman Catholics in a Protestant army, and loyal servants of a state against which their countrymen periodically rebelled, was not lost on leaders and comrades alike. Yet the 32nd (Cornwall) Regiment found no difficulty in linking its own motto with that of the Irish rebels in its regimental song:
Erin Go Brough go hand in hand with
One And All.
And some Irishmen showed their loyalty in the most extreme fashion. When Chef d’Escadron O’Flyn, an Irish officer in French service, was captured by the 16th Light Dragoons near Ciudad Rodrigo in 1811, he was pistolled on the spot by his countryman Private Fitz-Patrick. Lieutenant Thomas Brotherton heard the story from Fitz-Patrick himself: ‘The fellow said he was an Irishman, which the dragoon could not hear and allow him to escape alive.’88 Many Irishmen in the army managed to balance their own instinctive nationalism with a practical loyalty for the army they served in, and saw nothing wrong in singing rebel songs as they marched to do the bidding of a government in which they had no personal interest. And when it came to fighting they had few peers.
So much, then, for England. Our affection for the elegant and well-proportioned artefacts of the Georgian past can all too easily persuade us that British society of the period embodied a similar pleasing symmetry. Yet of course it did not. Georgian society, like that of the Regency and early Victorian age that followed, was marked by tensions between elegance and ugliness, town and country, industry and agriculture. These were reflected in an army which brought together noblemen and the sweepings of the urban gutter, sons of rising bourgeois, who had set the seal on new status by buying their boy a commission, and unemployed weavers; ardent royalists and rabid (though wisely covert) republicans; serious-minded Presbyterians and devout (though necessarily discrete) Roman Catholics.
The contrast was nothing if not visual: between the half-moon silver-gilt gorget, engraved with the royal arms, that officers wore at their throats, and the scarlet tunic, so often sweated to destruction, that it rested on; and between the blue and gilt blade of the sabres carried by the officers of the flank companies and the brain-biting sharpness of their edge. Those gold-laced officers’ tunics cost more than guineas, for tailors often went blind:
of all colours scarlet, such is as used for regimentals, is the most blinding, it seems to burn the eyeballs, and makes them ache dreadful…everything seems all of a twitter, and to keep changing its tint. There’s more military tailors blind than any others.
And the blue and gilt blades caused casualties long before they were drawn in anger: goldsmiths became asthmatic and paralytic because of the fumes of mercury they inhaled at their work.
There can be no better example of the contrast than Brown Bess herself. She was made in the gunmaking district of Birmingham, or the teeming hamlets around the Tower of London. Parts were usually manufactured separately, in hundreds of one-room workshops, where whole families filed away at locks and shaped walnut stocks. Yet even the India pattern, a war economy weapon deemed by modern collectors to lack the grace of earlier models, is more than a simple killing-machine. A double line is chiselled around the edge of the lock-plate; the brass trumpet-mouthed pipes that hold the ramrod have ornamental fluting, and the trigger-guard sweeps out, in front of the trigger itself, into an elegant acorn-shaped finial. In short, it is an artefact in the best of Georgian taste, but designed to impel a lead ball into the body of an enemy.
It was an era of rapid and unsettling change. Britain’s population was growing, after setbacks in the 1720s, and its distribution had begun to alter. In 1750 the population was about 5.8 million. It had risen to some 6.4 million by 1770, and almost 8 million twenty years later. By 1831 it was just over 24 million, and was well over 27 million in 1851. Throughout the period just over half the population of Great Britain lived in England, with Ireland containing around half as many inhabitants as England until the mass emigration of the nineteenth century reduced this proportion. Although London contained perhaps 10 per cent of Britain’s inhabitants in 1750, the balance was shifting away from the south towards the Midlands and the north as industry expanded and Britain’s burgeoning agriculture (about 2.5 times as productive as that of France) enabled the population of these growing towns to be fed.
By 1801 about 30 per cent of the population of Britain lived in towns, a far higher proportion than elsewhere in northern Europe. Towns like Manchester and Glasgow grew fast, with an emphasis on cleanliness and order as medieval centres were pulled down, jumbled lanes making way for straight streets and spacious squares, with piped water and sewerage. London was already bigger than Paris or Naples, and by 1750 it had overtaken Constantinople. Foreign and domestic visitors alike were astonished at the spacious houses of great magnates, the elegant symmetry of streets and squares, the Royal parks – Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Green Park and St James’s Park – the well-stocked shops of Covent Garden and Ludgate Hill, and the pleasure-gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh.
Yet even the most naive visitor could scarcely have been unaware of the contrast between polite London and the reverse of the medal. Simply getting there was not easy. The appalling roads of early Georgian England were infinitely improved as the century wore on and turnpike trusts repaired and maintained roads which could be used on payment of a toll. Provincial centres like Exeter, Manchester and York, three days away from London in the 1720s, could be reached in little more than 24 hours by 1780. However, travel remained uncomfortable and dangerous. Highwaymen were the aristocrats of crime: when James MacLaine was awaiting hanging in 1750, 3,000 people visited him in his cell in Newgate prison in a single day, and John Rann (‘Sixteen String Jack’) went to the gallows in 1774 in a new suit of pea-green, fine ruffled shirt and huge nosegay, and danced his last jig before an appreciative audience.
Robbers like this were bold and vexatious. Prime minister Lord North was robbed in 1774, and ten years earlier the Bath stagecoach was ambushed between Knightsbridge and Hyde Park Corner. In 1771 five ladies and gentlemen on their way back from Vauxhall by river were boarded by ruffians near Westminster Bridge and had their watches and purses taken. On a less dramatic scale, shoplifters, pickpockets and hat-snatchers abounded: an account of 1764 complained that by midnight ‘the public streets began to swarm with whores and pickpockets.’89 César de Saussure, a French visitor, found little to chose between sport and riot.
The populace has other amusements…such as throwing dead dogs and cats and mud at passers-by on certain festival days. Another amusement which is very inconvenient to passers-by is football…in cold weather you will sometimes see a score of rascals in the streets kicking at a ball and they will break panes of glass and smash the windows of coaches and also knock you down without the smallest compunction: on the contrary they will roar with laughter…
The English are very fond of a game they call cricket. For this purpose they go into a large open field and knock a ball about with a piece of wood. I will not attempt to describe the game to you, it is too complicated: but it requires agility and skill and everyone plays it, the common people and also men of rank.
Great cities had great slums, sometimes on their fast-expanding fringes, where countrymen arrived in the (generally vain) hope of making