twinty times.
Napier then asked after Dunn’s brother, a soldier in the same company.
I seed him shot through the heart alongside wid me just as I got shot myself…but, captain, he died like a soldier, as your honour would wish him to die, and sure that’s enough. He had your favour whilst he lived, God be with him, and he’s gone now.
The incident made a lasting impression on Napier, who told his sons: ‘whenever you see a poor lame soldier, recollect John Dunn, and never pass him coldly by.’79
A common thread of nationality linked Irish soldiers, and Irish regiments greeted one another with enormous and characteristic enthusiasm. Fanny Duberly was married to the paymaster of the 8th Royal Irish Hussars, and accompanied him to the Crimean War. During operations around Varna on the Black Sea, before the army reached the Crimea, she watched a British division on the march.
The Rifles marched first, next followed the 33rd, playing ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’ and cheerily enough the music sounded across our silent valley. The 88th Connaught Rangers gave a wild Irish screech (I know no better word) when they saw their fellow countrymen in the 8th Royal Irish Hussars and they played ‘Garry Owen’ with all their might…80
Sarah Anne Terrot, a nurse in the same campaign, paid tribute to Irish humour. ‘I began operations on the filthy and shattered leg of an Alma Irishman,’ she wrote, ‘who shouted out “Och!” the blessing of the touch of a woman’s hand; she touches my poor leg so tinder and gentle.’81 Tom Burns, another Irishman, answered a doctor’s enquiry as to whether he could feel a splinter of bone being probed for in his leg with: ‘Not a bit.’ After the doctor had walked off glumly, fearing the worst, he told the nurse: ‘If the doctor asks me a fool’s question, I am determined to give a rogue’s answer, as if he could dig away in my leg, to try to tear out my bones, and I not feel it.’82 Nurse Terrot compared her patients in national categories:
There was a great variety of characters among the patients – the heavy clumsy English ploughboy, the sharp street-bred London boy, the canny cautious Scot, the irresistibly amusing Irishman with his brogue and bulls. Certainly estimable as they were the Scotch were in general the least attractive patients – silent, grave, cold and cautious, there were none so winning as the Irish, with their quick feeling and ready wit.83
Yet the uncomfortable fact remained that Ireland was a country under occupation by the very army in which Irishmen – officers and soldiers alike – played such an important role. In the last analysis the Irish state rested upon British military power.84 Prime Minister Lord North wrote in 1775 that the authorities there ‘depend so much on the protection and assistance of the military force, who are in constant employment under the command of the civil magistrate for the carrying on of every part of the police of the kingdom, which could not be carried on without it.’85 We must retain a sense of perspective, because the civil authorities across the whole of the United Kingdom frequently had recourse to military support in an era when violent unrest was frequent. And until the terrifying outbreak of 1798, eighteenth century Ireland was remarkably quiet. In the summer of 1745, when the army was at full stretch, finding garrisons in the Mediterranean, campaigning in Flanders and about to campaign in Scotland, the garrison of Ireland was a mere four battalions of foot and six regiments of cavalry.
Yet there was an added difficulty. Whenever Britain found herself at war with France or Spain, she faced the prospect of a descent on Ireland, in which French or Spanish troops would form the rallying-point for disaffected Irishmen. Regiments were sent to Ireland when the risk of invasion loomed: three regiments of foot went there in early 1727 when Spanish invasion seemed likely, and returned once the threat had passed. In November 1759 the Prime Minister warned the Marquis of Granby, commanding the British contingent in Germany, that the French fleet was at sea, ‘to invade this country or Ireland’. Accordingly, Prince Ferdinand, the allied commander was to ‘get any Troops he can – Swiss, German deserters or regular German troops – in order to increase and strengthen his Army…But English we have not to send.’86
The most dangerous potential invasion came in December 1796 when a substantial French fleet carrying 12,000 soldiers under General Lazare Hoche slipped past the British blockade, but was prevented by bad weather from disgorging its troops: as the nationalist leader Wolfe Tone put it, England had not had such an escape since the Armada. During the great rebellion of 1798 a much smaller force under the French General Joseph Humbert landed at Killala, on the Mayo coast, and beat Lieutenant General Gerard Lake in an episode which lived on in folklore as ‘the races of Castlebar’. But just as co-ordination of operations within Ireland was a major reason for the rebels’ failure, so inability to persuade the French that a major and timely invasion might prove decisive was another. Humbert’s force was too little and too late, and the rebellion – ‘the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite wars and the Great Famine’ – was put down with the loss of perhaps 30,000 lives.87
Given this background, it is perhaps surprising that Irish regular regiments, and individual Irish soldiers in English regiments, remained as loyal as they did. The one significant lapse came when the 5th or Royal Irish Regiment of Dragoons, which helped suppress the 1798 rebellion, was infiltrated by nationalists, who plotted to murder the regiment’s officers. The plot was discovered and the regiment was disbanded at Chatham on 8 April 1799, leaving a hole in the Army List that was not filled until the 5th Royal Irish Lancers was raised in 1858. In 1922 the 5th was amalgamated with the 16th Lancers to form the 16th/5th, the lack of numerical logic being explained by fact that the 5th, despite its senior number, was in fact the junior regiment.
The ambivalent position of Irish soldiers, so many of them Roman Catholics in a Protestant army, and loyal servants of a state against which their countrymen periodically rebelled, was not lost on leaders and comrades alike. Yet the 32nd (Cornwall) Regiment found no difficulty in linking its own motto with that of the Irish rebels in its regimental song:
Erin Go Brough go hand in hand with
One And All.
And some Irishmen showed their loyalty in the most extreme fashion. When Chef d’Escadron O’Flyn, an Irish officer in French service, was captured by the 16th Light Dragoons near Ciudad Rodrigo in 1811, he was pistolled on the spot by his countryman Private Fitz-Patrick. Lieutenant Thomas Brotherton heard the story from Fitz-Patrick himself: ‘The fellow said he was an Irishman, which the dragoon could not hear and allow him to escape alive.’88 Many Irishmen in the army managed to balance their own instinctive nationalism with a practical loyalty for the army they served in, and saw nothing wrong in singing rebel songs as they marched to do the bidding of a government in which they had no personal interest. And when it came to fighting they had few peers.
So much, then, for England. Our affection for the elegant and well-proportioned artefacts of the Georgian past can all too easily persuade us that British society of the period embodied a similar pleasing symmetry. Yet of course it did not. Georgian society, like that of the Regency and early Victorian age that followed, was marked by tensions between elegance and ugliness, town and country, industry and agriculture. These were reflected in an army which brought together noblemen and the sweepings of the urban gutter, sons of rising bourgeois, who had set the seal on new status by buying their boy a commission, and unemployed weavers;
