Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes

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      A lieutenant colonel was appointed shortly afterwards. He was Robert Fettiplace, of Swinbrook Park, just east of Burford in Oxfordshire, happily not too far from the Worcestershire boundary. The son of Thomas Bushell, a substantial landowner of Cleeve Prior in the county, he had adopted the name Fettiplace on marrying Diana, daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Fettiplace Baronet, the previous owner of Swinbrook. In 1775, when Lieutenant Colonel Fettiplace decided to soldier no more, he was replaced by Thomas Dowdeswell of Pull Court near Tewkesbury, eldest son of the Right Hon William Dowdeswell MP and his wife Bridget, youngest daughter of Sir William Codrington Baronet. Lieutenant Colonel Dowdeswell was married to a baronet’s daughter, was a JP and DL for his county, and had been a captain in 1st Foot Guards.¹²

      A similar pattern extends across Britain, with militia commissions congruent with social standing, and the entire apparatus of raising and administering the militia wholly characteristic of the way the country was run. There was also a very clear Westminster connection. Most regiments of English and Welsh militia were commanded by peers, and the best of them took their responsibilities very seriously. Colonel Lord Riversdale of the South Cork Militia built a barracks for his regiment, on his own land at Rathcormac, at his own expense. When the South Cork was disembodied after the Napoleonic wars and there was little chance of the men finding work, he allowed many of them to join the regular army, although this was officially discouraged. The regiment proved true to its nickname ‘The Long Corks’ when, at its disembodiment parade on St Patrick’s Day 1816, the mens’ average height was found to be 5ft 11in. The radical politician and journalist John Wilkes was a committed patriot, and had travelled home from university at Leiden in 1745 to join a loyal association training to defend the capital against the Jacobites. Two years later he became a substantial landowner by marrying an heiress, thus coming within the qualification for senior militia rank. Although he was frequently at odds with the government, and had a highly coloured private life, he was a serious-minded colonel of the Buckinghamshire Militia, though his practice of using his adjutant as second in his duels was an unwise merging of military and civil.

      Captains and subalterns, with their smaller property qualifications, were more modest figures. The historian and MP Edward Gibbon served as a militia officer between 1759 and 1770, including a period of embodied service during the Seven Years War. He always thought that the Hampshire captain had taught the historian something of value. The novelist Jane Austen, living at Chawton on the main road from Guildford to the garrison town of Winchester, was familiar with militia regiments as they marched through, or were quartered in the surrounding villages. George Wickham, the closest Pride and Prejudice comes to a villain, was a militia officer, eventually posted off to the north to hide his disgrace. Jane’s brother Henry served as a captain in the Oxfordshire militia in 1793–1801, and he acted as regimental agent for several militias (the Devonshire, Nottinghamshire, and North Devonshire among them) before his bank failed in 1816 and he resorted to that perennial stand-by of the educated man down on his luck, and became a curate, following in his father’s footsteps. Militia officers, like their regular counterparts, were given to duelling, and the Worcester Militia’s first training session ended with two subalterns falling out at Stourbridge, ‘but fortunately without a fatal termination’.

      In many respects the militia’s social composition resembled that of the regular army, with poor men officered by richer ones. In 1852 the Marquess of Salisbury observed of one applicant for a commission, that employment by the General Screw Steam Navigation Company was an ‘insuperable obstacle’ to military advancement. Property qualifications made it all but impossible for a man to work his way through the ranks to a commission, and so the militia was more socially excusive than the regular army, which always had a significant proportion of ranker officers. In the eighteenth century men were forbidden to shift from the militia into the regular army, for by doing so they left a gap, which the parish then had to fill. During the Napoleonic wars, when there was an ever-increasing appetite for men who could serve abroad, militiamen were offered bonuses to transfer, or sometimes treated so harshly during their embodied service that joining the regulars came almost as a relief:

      The Militia would be drawn up in line and the officers or non-commissioned officers from the regiments requiring volunteers would give a glowing description of their several regiments, describing the victories they had gained and the honours they had acquired, and concluded by offering a bounty. If these inducements were not effective in getting men then coercive measures were adopted: heavy and long drills and field exercises were forced upon them: which became so oppressive that to escape them, the men would embrace the alternative and join the regulars.¹³

      Militia officers were offered free regular commissions if they could inveigle specified numbers of militiamen into signing on as regulars. George Simmons, from a family of impoverished gentry, managed to persuade a hundred men of the Royal South Lincolnshire Militia, of which he was assistant surgeon, to transfer into the regular army. He was rewarded with a regular commission in the crack 95th Rifles, and enjoyed a lively time in the Peninsula, ending up as a lieutenant colonel. By the end of the nineteenth century, when service in the militia was wholly voluntary, it had become a way for young men to test their aptitude for military service, and was ‘little more than a recruiting vehicle for the regular army, into whose ranks some 35 per cent of its members passed each year’.¹⁴ After the abolition of the purchase of regular commissions in 1871 a young man could still obtain a militia commission, which did not require him to attend Sandhurst. Then, provided he could pass the examination, he could transfer to the regular army: two future field marshals, John French and Henry Wilson, gained their regular commissions this way.

      In sharp social contrast to the militia were the volunteers. They were raised in times of great national emergency, like the Jacobite invasions of 1715 and 1745, and the threat posed by revolutionary France saw the first great wave of volunteering. Volunteer units were often middle class, their ranks filled with men who would have bought themselves out of militia service, giving the cartoonist James Gillray the unmissable opportunity of pouring meaty-bottomed tradesmen into tight breeches. Units were sometimes raised by the efforts of great families, in just the way that Bevil Grenville would have understood. Hugh Percy, 2nd Duke of Northumberland, had been (as Lord Percy) a professional soldier: a captain in the 85th Foot at seventeen, he fought at Minden and in North America. Percy left the army as a lieutenant general, and inherited his dukedom in 1786. Responsible, as lord lieutenant of Northumberland, for his county’s militia, he also raised the Percy Tenantry Volunteers from his own extensive estates. When he died in 1817 it was reported that the entire force was ‘paid and in every respect maintained in arms at the sole expense of this patriotic nobleman’. Infantry companies and cavalry troops were recruited from specific villages: the 1st and 2nd Barrisford Companies came from the parishes of Simonburn, Stamfordham and Kirkwhelpington, and the Guzance and Thirston Company from Felton Parish. The Percy Tenantry Volunteers numbered around 1,500 men, supported by the two three-pounder guns of its Volunteer Horse Artillery, based at Alnwick, the duke’s seat.

      The Percy Volunteers mirrored the area’s social fabric, with bigger tenant farmers officering the local companies, farmworkers shouldering their muskets, and the duke’s directing hand on the reins. Volunteer units raised in London were tiny by comparison, and rejoiced in names like the Temple Association, the Hackney Volunteers, the Guildhall Light Infantry, and the Bread Street Ward Volunteers. Often the city’s hierarchy led the way, with the same prominent citizens that summoned public meetings to raise volunteers emerging as the new unit’s officers. Volunteer officers were often elected by the unit as a whole, and democracy did not always obey the dictates of local hierarchy. It was also noticeable that volunteers, most of whom had to buy their own uniforms, tended to favour cutting-edge light infantry fashion (with no shortage of frogging), sometimes selecting blue precisely because regular infantry wore red, and so there was no chance of a heroic cheesemonger in the Poplar and Blackwall Volunteers being mistaken for a private in the umpteenth Foot. There were different terms of service: the Frampton Volunteers in Gloucestershire were prepared to deal with the French up to eight miles from their home village, but for the Hitchin Association in Hertfordshire just three miles was the limit.¹⁵ СКАЧАТЬ