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