coincided conveniently with the growing need to find light infantry for North America. As Colonel William Stewart, a leading advocate of light infantry, was to observe, ‘being less spoiled and more hardy than [other] British soldiers, [they were] better accustomed for active light troops.’69
The senior Highland regiment, the 42nd (Black Watch), gained its baptism of fire at Fontenoy in 1745, the year before Culloden. Other Highland regiments were raised for the Seven Years’ War but disbanded after it. More were raised for the American War of Independence, and all but two were disbanded after that. Thus although Highland regiments played a distinguished part in these conflicts, most were unable to trace continuous existence deep into the eighteenth century. The high regimental numbers of the Highland units which eventually became permanent during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (like the 71st Highland Light Infantry, the 78th Highlanders [the Ross-Shire Buffs] and the 79th Cameron Highlanders), and consequent lack of seniority in the Army List contrasted with the unshakeable pre-eminence of the 1st Foot – the trousered Royal Scots – recruited, like other lowland regiments, from the largely English-speaking lowlands of Scotland.
This suspicion of Highlanders, useful on active service but less desirable in peacetime, had deep roots in an English population badly frightened by the Forty-Five with a long retained latent fear of a Jacobite revival with French bayonets at its back. When James Boswell went to see ‘Love in a Village’ at Covent Garden on 8 December 1762 two uniformed officers of Lord John Murray’s Scots regiment, just returned from Havana – taken from the Spaniards after a costly siege – were hissed and pelted with apples to cries of ‘No Scots! No Scots!’ ‘I wish from my soul that the Union was broke,’ said one, ‘and we might give them another Bannockburn.’ ‘And this is the thanks we get,’ added the other, ‘to be hissed when we come home…If it was the French, what could they do worse?’ The first then slipped into a comfortable vernacular which Boswell, a fellow Scot, knew well: ‘But if I had a grup o yin or twa o the tamd rascals I sud let them ken what they’re about.’70
Neither lowland Scots nor Irish regiments were as easily distinguished as kilted Highlanders, though Regimental colours and individual appointments like shoulder-belt plates usually bore a harp for Irish regiments and a thistle for Scots. The 71st Highland Light Infantry went one better: although officers and men wore trousers, its unique head-dress was a blue Highland bonnet, complete with broad diced band, blocked into shako shape. The spread of tartan into all Scots regiments did not come until much later, when a combination of royal interest in Scotland and the novels of Sir Walter Scott meant that Scotland, ‘from being a tiresome frontier province, became fashionable’.71 Most lowland regiments had acquired pipers by the 1850s, and by 1881 they had tartan trews, Highland doublets and an appropriate Scots head-dress. It was the apotheosis of the Highlander from a potential rebel, useful for dealing with the King’s enemies in distant forests, he had become a martial pillar of the Victorian establishment.
Ambivalence also surrounded the far more numerous, though less easily identifiable, Irish. They were accused by Englishmen of being dirty and verminous, ‘a standard accusation against those at the bottom of the social heap’. They were resented as a source of cheap labour, suspected because they were alleged to support the exiled Stuarts, and because they owed allegiance to the Pope. Thus they were ‘treacherous in all three spheres: economic, political and religious.’72 They were the butt of frequent jokes. When General William Howe, commander-in-chief in North America, evacuated Boston in 1776, an officer was detailed to scatter crow’s feet – sharp four-pronged irons that always lay with one point up – in front of the town gate. ‘Being an Irishman,’ sniggered an English officer, ‘he began scattering the crowfeet about from the gate towards the enemy, and of course had to walk over them on his return, and was nearly taken prisoner.’73 It was not always safe to chuckle at such jests. The eccentric Lord Hervey entered a coffee-house to find his way barred by a man who ostentatiously sniffed the air and declared: ‘I smell an Irishman.’ Hervey snatched a carving-knife from a nearby table and slashed off the man’s nose, remarking sweetly: ‘You’ll not smell another.’
The battlefield performance of Irish soldiers, whether serving in Irish regiments or in nominally English units, mocked the cliché. One of the most enduring battlefield descriptions of the period speaks of 1/27th (Enniskillen) lying literally dead in square at Waterloo. In the Peninsula the 88th (Connaught Rangers) had a fighting record which placed it amongst the bravest of the brave. Lieutenant William Grattan (a distant relative of the Irish opposition leader Henry Grattan) watched the 88th getting ready to assault the great breach at Ciudad Rodrigo. The fortress was one of the keys to routes between Spain and Portugal, and Wellington besieged it early in 1812. His heavy guns battered two breaches into its walls, and on the night of 19 January his infantry carried the town by storm at dreadful cost. For a description of experienced infantry preparing for battle Grattan’s account can scarcely be bettered:
…each man began to arrange himself for the combat in such a manner as the fancy of the moment would admit of – some by lowering their cartridge-boxes, others by turning theirs to the front in order that they might more conveniently make use of them; others unclasping their stocks or opening their shirt collars, and others oiling their bayonets, and more taking leave of their wives and children…74
Before going forward the regiment was addressed by Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton, its divisional commander.
‘Rangers of Connaught, it is not my intention to expend any powder this evening. We’ll do this business with the cold iron.’ I said before [writes Grattan] the soldiers were silent – so they were, but the man who could be silent after such an address, made in such a way, and in such a place, had better have stayed at home. It may be asked what did they do? Why what would they do, or what would any one do, but give the loudest hurrah he was able.75
On another occasion Grattan turned round to look at the men of his company as they advanced on a French regiment, drawn up ready to receive them, and ‘they gave me a cheer that a lapse of many years has not made me forget, and I thought that that moment was the proudest of my life.’76
Grattan was full of praise for the Irish soldier. ‘He can live on as little nourishment as a Frenchman,’ he wrote; ‘give him a pipe of tobacco and he will march for two days without food and without grumbling; give him, in addition, a little spirits and a biscuit, and he will work for a week.’77 There lay the rub, for give him more than a little and he could become beastly drunk. But even then, suggests Grattan, he had his advantages: ‘The English soldier is to the full as drunken as the Irish, and not half so pleasant in his liquor.’78 Captain George Napier of the 52nd was an Englishman, with none of Grattan’s family connections with Ireland, but he still found the Irish irresistible. A drunken rogue in his company, Private John Dunn, walked seven miles to see Napier and his brother in his field hospital in Spain.
I’m come to see how you and your brother is after the wounds…And sure I thought you was kilt. But myself knew you wouldn’t be plaised if I didn’t folly on after the villains, so I was afeard to go pick you up when ye was kilt, long life to you!
Napier noticed that Dunn’s arm was bandaged.
Why sure it’s nothing, only me arrum was cut off a few hours ago below the elbow joint, and I couldn’t come till the anguish was over a bit. But now I’m here, and
