BRITISH OTHER RANKS IN THE FRENCH REVOLOUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC WARS - PART TWO
KING GEORGE’S OTHER RANKS – PART TWO
One of the problems in the early days of the war with France was that the regular army was in direct competition for recruits with the Army of Reserve and its various types of units – the Militia, the Fencibles, the Volunteers and the Yeomanry. There were two types of militia. The Regular Militia, established by various Militia Acts of 1802, 1803 and 1808, was a conscript force based on counties composed of eligible males (aged eighteen to thirty and, theoretically at least, Protestant) selected by ballot. On payment of a fine ranging from £20 to £30, a man could find a substitute to do his service for him. The Regular Militia were full-time, could serve only in the United Kingdom and were intended to be a home defence force to allow regular troops to be sent abroad. Men served for five years, after which they were exempt until their turn came round again. The finding of substitutes was widespread and of the 26,085 men embodied in 1810, only 3,129 were those who had been drawn at the ballot; all the rest were substitutes. The Local Militia, originally founded in 1808 when there was an (unrealistic) fear of invasion, was a voluntary part-time force restricted to service within its own county, and whose members were required to carry out twenty-eight days’ military training a year. The Fencibles were part of the regular army, composed of full-time volunteers who tended to be either over age, recovering from wounds or otherwise ineligible for general service, but whose regiments were required to serve only within the United Kingdom. The Volunteers were exactly that: a part-time force established in 1808 and whose members were exempt from conscription into the Regular Militia. Although increasingly absorbed into the Local Militia, the Volunteers lingered on and eventually became the Territorial Force, the Territorial Army and, from 2013, the Army Reserve. The Yeomanry were part-time local cavalry, first raised during the invasion scare of the 1790s, and in most regiments of which members provided their own horses. It was generally officered by the landed gentry of the area and frequently used to restore law and order in an age when there was no properly organised police force.
When the Militia was originally established, its members were forbidden to enlist into the regular army, but this rule was rescinded in 1805 and from then on the militia was one of the best sources of recruits; indeed by Waterloo almost 50 per cent of private soldiers were ex-militiamen. A militia soldier could not join as a regular until he had served one year in the militia, and the great advantage for the regular army was that they not only got a better type of recruit but he had already received military training. In many cases a militia regiment would be paraded and representatives of various regular regiments who sought recruits would extol the advantages of their various corps and hope to persuade the listeners to join. Many of them did, although more often than not they joined not their supposedly local regiment but another, perhaps on the ‘grass is greener’ principle. One of the attractions of transferring from the Militia to the regular army was the bounty, larger than that for recruits who had no military training, and which varied from £16 to £40 depending on the state of army manning at the time.
A thoroughly unsatisfactory method of obtaining recruits was by privatising the process to civilian contractors, who would provide the numbers needed for a fee. Known as ‘crimpers’, many of the persons who got the contract by submitting the lowest tenders were of very dubious natures and on the borders of criminality. It was in their interests to obtain as many men as possible in the shortest time at the lowest cost, and this included bribing doctors and magistrates to pass men who were totally unsuitable for military service. The men were often of very poor quality and crimpers were not above kidnapping vagrants and orphans and keeping them under lock and key before persuading or forcing them to take the shilling, and then cheating them out of much of their bounty. Once enlistment from the Militia was authorised, however, the responsibility for finding recruits was much less likely to be contracted out to crimpers, and by 1815 they had virtually disappeared.
Although most regiments had in theory a local affiliation to a particular county, this had little effect on its composition. Regiments recruited where they could and a majority of recruits came from the disadvantaged parts of the kingdom where there were few alternatives as an escape from poverty. There were very large numbers of Irish soldiers, and not only in Irish regiments. When Thomas Graham, assisted by Rowland Hill, raised the 90th Perthshire Regiment of Foot, many of its soldiers did indeed come from Perthshire, but in 1796 out of a total strength of 746 Other Ranks, 165 were English and ninety-five were Irish. At Waterloo in the 71st Highlanders eighty-three men were English and fifty-six Irish. Looking at the muster rolls of the regiments that embarked for the Waterloo campaign, a very large number of the men had Irish names. Some may, of course, have been of families long resident in Liverpool or in other colonies of Irish émigrés, and some may have enlisted under false names, but from contemporary accounts it does seem that at least 20 per cent and perhaps considerably more of the soldiers of the British army at this time were Irish, and Catholic. The Protestants of the North do not appear to have enlisted as readily as their economically less favoured southern countrymen, still the case in both world wars, when conscription was not applied to Ireland. Although it was an offence for a soldier to attend a Catholic church service in England (but not in Ireland), Wellington had always allowed his men to attend when abroad, provided, he said, that they were not there ‘merely to gawk’. There can be little doubt that it was the religious make-up of his army that persuaded the Protestant Anglo-Irish Wellington to support Catholic emancipation, and to force it through against the wishes of the king and much of the nobility when he was prime minister in 1829.
The other group over-represented in the ranks of the army were the Scots, and while many were indeed soldiers of economic necessity, they tended to be better behaved and more amenable to discipline than the Irish, who had a distressing tendency to get drunk and indulge in mindless violence. Scottish society was less mobile than that in England and many Scottish regiments were still officered by local men, whom the soldiers knew. It was said that if a Scottish soldier misbehaved, the worst punishment that could be inflicted was to have his name posted on the door of the kirk back home.
The army at the time was not, therefore, in any sense representative of the nation, in the way that Napoleon’s army was, although it was composed of a wide spectrum of backgrounds. Apart from the criminal element, there were apprentices running away from a hard master, boys fleeing over-strict parents, farmhands bored behind the plough, swains crossed in love and those escaping a shotgun marriage, shop assistants, shepherds, weavers, the urban unemployed and, in at least one case, a failed actor. There were even a few gentlemen rankers; men of education and breeding who had fallen on hard times, usually through gambling or drink or both, and who enlisted as the only alternative to starvation or to escape their creditors. Very few made good, but could be useful as writers of letters for their illiterate comrades, or as company clerks (one per company), although few were employed as such owing to the temptation to embezzle the company accounts, the keeping of which was the responsibility of the clerk.