Lieutenant George Gleig of the 85th Regiment watched a party of cavalry ride past:
consisting of the 12th and 16th Light Dragoons, and two regiments of heavy Germans; nor could we help remarking that though the 12th and 16th Dragoons are both of them distinguished corps, the horses of the foreigners were, nevertheless, in far better order than those of our countrymen. The fact, I believe, is that an Englishman…never acquires that attachment for his horse which a German trooper experiences. The latter dreams not, under any circumstances, of attending to his own comfort till after he has provided for the comfort of his steed. He will frequently sleep beside it through choice, and the noble animal seldom fails to return the affection of his master, whose voice he knows, and whom he will generally follow like a dog.60
Captain Cavalié Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery agreed, writing of the Waterloo campaign that:
Affection for, and care of, his horse, is the trait, par excellence, which distinguishes the German dragoon from the English. The former would sell everything to feed his horse; the latter would sell his horse itself for spirits, or the means of obtaining them.61
It was entirely typical of the period that during the fighting in Spain the KGL sometimes found itself fighting Germans serving in units of Napoleon’s ally, the Confederation of the Rhine. On one occasion a member of the KGL was shocked to discover ‘mine own broder’ among the enemy dead. And as Napoleon’s star fell, some German princelings ordered their men to change sides: in December 1813 Colonel August von Kruse, acting on secret instructions from his sovereign, took his 2nd Nassau Infantry Regiment into the British lines and announced his change of allegiance.62
But for all the foreign corps, good, bad and indifferent, the redcoated heart of the army was British. At the time of the American War of Independence, 60 per cent of its rank and file were English, 24 per cent Scottish and 16 per cent Irish. Officers were more evenly distributed, with 42 per cent English, 27 per cent Scottish and 31 per cent Irish.63 In this context the description English subsumes Welsh as well, and from the early eighteenth century the 23rd Regiment proudly styled itself Royal Welsh Fusiliers (the spelling was letter changed to the distinctive Welch). However, in March 1807 only 146 of its 991 NCOs and men actually hailed from Wales. This did not prevent the regiment from celebrating St David’s Day in style, and having a regimental goat traditionally ridden into the officers’ mess at the climax of the St David’s Day dinner by the smallest of the drummers. Thomas Henry Browne, commissioned into the 23rd in 1805, fought in the Peninsula first as a regimental officer and then on the staff, and died a general in 1855. On 1 March 1808 he celebrated St David’s Day at sea on his way to Canada ‘in the best manner our situation would permit’. He observed that normally each officer was required to eat a leek:
The older Officers in the regiment, and those who have seen service with it in the field, are favoured only with a small one, and salt. Those who have before celebrated a St David’s day with the regiment, but have only seen garrison duty with it, are required to eat a larger one, without salt, and those unfortunates, who for the first time, have sat in Mess, on this their Saint’s day, have presented to them the largest leek that can be procured, and unless sickness prevents it, no respite is given, until the last tip of its green leaf is enclosed in the unwilling mouth; and day after day passes before the smell and taste is fairly got rid of…We could not of course, on board our little ship, render all the honours due to the day, but we had every thing dressed in Onions, and drank an extra glass of grog on the occasion.64
As far as the Royal Artillery was concerned, over the period 1741–1815 it was only during 1776–79 that a bare majority of artillery recruits came from England. Both before and after this more came from Ireland: 42 per cent in 1795–1810, for instance, at a time when another 21 per cent was Scottish.65 The high percentage of Irish recruits is surprising when one considers that between 1763 and 1801 there was a separate corps in existence, the Royal Irish Artillery, in which Englishmen were not allowed to enlist. The worsening economic situation in Ireland increased the proportion of Irish recruits towards the end of our period: in 1830 42.2 per cent of the army was Irish and 13.6 per cent Scots. This meant that not only were the fifteen infantry regiments which actually bore Irish affiliations composed largely of Irishmen, but several ‘English’ regiments also had many Irish in their ranks. In 1809 34 per cent of the NCOs and men in the 57th (East Middlesex) regiment were Irish, and in the 29th (Worcestershire) the proportion rose from 19 per cent in 1809 to 37 per cent in 1811.66
The regional pattern of enlistment changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the great famine of 1846 the proportion of Irish recruits began to fall, with emigration to the United States coming to replace enlistment into the British army. In 1870 27.9 per cent of the army was Irish, dropping to 15.6 per cent in 1888 and 9.1 per cent in 1912, roughly proportionate to Ireland’s proportion of the population of the United Kingdom. The proportion of Scots – 7.7 per cent in 1879 and 7.8 in 1912 – remained more static, but significantly it fell below Scotland’s proportion of the United Kingdom’s population. Alongside a shift away from rural Scotland and Ireland as recruiting grounds went a growing tendency to recruit the English urban unemployed, and by the early twentieth century only eleven per cent of recruits were agricultural labourers. The effect was similar in microcosm. The Black Watch (42nd Regiment) drew 51 per cent of its recruits from the Highlands in 1798, but only nine per cent in 1830–34 and just five per cent in 1854. Like other Highland regiments, it was driven to seeking more and more of its soldiers from the Lothians and Glasgow.67
Although the definitive swing towards urban recruiting occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, the robust, malleable and deferential countryman was never as plentiful as recruiting sergeants might have wished. A sergeant major of the 28th Regiment told the 1835 Royal Commission on military punishment that:
There are no men so good soldiers as the man who comes from the plough. We would never take a weaver while they were there. [Townsmen] require all the means in the power of their officers…to teach them that subordination is the first duty of the profession into which they have entered.68
While around 25 per cent of Royal Artillery recruits gave the trade of labourer on enlistment between 1756 and 1779, thereafter there was a massive jump in the percentage of weavers enlisting, so that they outnumbered even day-labourers.
The army of our period contained a far higher proportion of Scots and Irish officers and men than was to be the case at the end of the nineteenth century, and this was very evident to those who served in it – and fought against it. Highland regiments, recruited from Gaelic-speaking countrymen living north of the Highland line, wore the kilt. Even when it was replaced by trousers on active service in North America – Captain Peebles’ journal reveals a constant preoccupation with getting hold of sufficient material to make ‘trowsers’ for his company – their bonnets marked them out as Scots. Following the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 Scots were unpopular in England: indeed, for much of our period the term ‘North British’ was used in place of ‘Scots’ in regimental designations, thus ‘Royal North British Dragoons’ to describe Scotland’s only cavalry regiment, the Royal Scots Greys.
After Culloden (1746) the carrying of arms and the wearing of Highland dress was proscribed by law, but joining a Highland regiment enabled a man to do both – and, indeed, to escape the destitution that threatened his countrymen as sheep drove out men during the Highland clearances. The enlistment of Highlanders also represented
