approach is thematic rather than chronological. By and large I start with big issues and move on to smaller ones, first examining the army’s size and composition, the character of the society that produced it, and the part it played in the nation’s defence policy. Thereafter I review the army’s administration and overall structure, its officers and men, and tactics of the combat arms and the effects produced by their weapons. The last two chapters consider the soldier’s daily life in peace and war respectively. Such an approach shuns easy categorisation. It is impossible, for example, to separate pay in peacetime from prize money in wartime. Any attempt to place the contribution made by women in a separate chapter might have the benefit of political correctness but would miss the point that they formed an inseparable part of the army, whether getting the Duke of York into trouble with Parliament, consoling the amorous Ensign Lord Alvanley, rising to become inspector general of the medical department while disguised as a man, or simply supporting their own men in rain and shine, and under shot and shell, from Aldershot to Amballa and the Curragh to the Crimea. So you will find them, the Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady alike, where you least expect them.
I have not written for what are unkindly termed ‘military buffs’: indeed, those who go in for the martial equivalent of train spotting will complain that I have paid scandalously little attention to the raising, disbandment, re-raising and renumbering of infantry regiments in the eighteenth century, and so I have. My comments on uniform are very broad: this is not the place to discover which regiments were fortunate enough to wear bastion-ended lace on their tunics. And as to the minutiae of ‘off-reckonings’ and ‘net-reckonings’ in regimental accounting, well, if they perplexed the great Sir John Fortescue, they can scarcely do less for me.
The general reader might appreciate some simple definitions, although the British army is not a creature that thrives on simplicity. Officers, ‘commission-officers’ to the seventeenth century and commissioned officers to later generations, held rank and authority from a commission signed by the monarch. The field marshal, a comparatively rare bird, was their most senior. There were three grades of general officers, general, lieutenant general and major general. Major generals are, confusingly, junior to lieutenant generals, partly because their rank was once ‘sergeant major general’ and partly because the lieutenant general (as implied by the word lieutenant wherever it appears) stood in for his master when required. Brigadier generals and brigadiers – terminology changed over the period – held a temporary rank from which they might be advanced or not, as the case might be, and were analogous to commodores in the Royal Navy, who were captains temporarily holding a senior appointment.
There were two sorts of colonels. What we may call colonels proper held a substantive rank from which seniority would eventually, provided they lived long enough, elevate them to join the generals. Colonels of regiments, in contrast, were usually not colonels at all but general officers acting as regimental proprietors, dispensing patronage, making a profit, and warning the young, over a glass of port, that standards were slipping. Field officers comprised lieutenant colonels and majors, while company officers were captains, lieutenants and cornets (for the cavalry), ensigns (for most of the infantry), and second lieutenants (for the artillery, engineers and a few infantry regiments). Quartermasters were regimental officers responsible for supplies and quartering, and adjutants (the term was an appointment, not a rank, and its holder would be termed correctly, ‘lieutenant and adjutant’ or ‘captain and adjutant’) assisted the regiment’s commanding officer in drill, administration – and in the case of Colonel John Wilkes MP of the Middlesex Militia, duelling.
Non-commissioned officers began with sergeant majors, grave and reverend gentlemen of whom there was one per infantry battalion, although the cavalry had one regimental sergeant major and a troop sergeant major for each of its troops. Staff sergeants were senior sergeants on the staff of regimental headquarters rather than one of its subordinate companies, and colour sergeants, a rank introduced into the infantry in 1813, ranked senior to other sergeants and had a very imposing arm badge to prove it. Sergeants were a cut above junior non-commissioned officers, corporals in most arms and bombardiers in the Royal Artillery. The appointment of a chosen man, a private soldier selected by his commanding officer to deputise for a corporal, eventually became that of lance corporal. And as to captain-lieutenants, sub-brigadiers and file-majors: well, I will explain about these worthies when they feature in my story.
The regiment, usually commanded in the field by a lieutenant colonel, was the basic building block in the infantry and the cavalry. As time went on infantry regiments tended to have more than one battalion, and in the British army these battalions, lieutenant colonels’ commands, usually fought independently from the other battalions of their regiment. In these pages I follow the convention of showing 1st Battalion 33rd Regiment as 1/33rd, while 1st Battalion 1st Foot Guards is 1/1st Foot Guards. I use 33rd Foot and 33rd Regiment, as contemporaries did, almost interchangeably: do not be concerned, for they are the same creature. The company, a captain’s command, was the main sub-unit of the infantry, and the troop was its cavalry equivalent. Cavalry troops were often paired to make squadrons. Infantry battalions and cavalry regiments were formed into brigades, and brigades into divisions, though the precise nature of this combination varied from time to time.
Pay, bounties, prize money and loot played an important part in the motivation of officers and men alike. I am constantly exasperated by authors who give no idea what money was worth in practical and comparative terms. To be told that if an item cost 100 units in 1680 then it cost 123 units in 1750 is unhelpful, and to suggest that a pound then was worth x times more than now is rarely a safe comparator across a broad range of income and expenditure. I far prefer what some have termed the ‘Mars Bar Comparator,’ which looks at the prices of staple items over the period to provide a practical idea of what money was really worth. There were twelve pence (d) to a shilling (s) and twenty shillings to a pound. A guinea was worth one pound and one shilling. And an Irish shilling, exasperating to those paid in it, was worth a penny less than an English one.
But before we consider what Ensign Alvanley paid for his claret and Rifleman Harris for his bread and cheese, there are a number of important caveats. First, the idea of subsistence wages for agricultural workers may be a misjudgement, as such folk often raised their own pigs and chickens, cultivated cottage gardens, and benefited from a trickle-down income in kind as master’s old coat became ploughman Jethro’s best, and mistress’s worn-out petticoat found a new (and possibly more exciting) incarnation as chambermaid Eliza’s drawers. Second, modern ideas of inflation have little relevance to the period in question, where inflation did not rise steadily, but went up and down, sometimes quite sharply: it rose by 36 per cent in 1800 and fell back by 22 per cent in 1802. Prices were generally quite stable except at times of particular hardship, and a pint of decent porter (a more sustaining brew than watery small beer) cost around 2d for most of the period. Finally, there were wide regional variations in pay, and in the prices of goods not easily available locally. The Midlands and the North were the ‘Silicon Valley’ of the age, where there was good money to be made always provided one was not, like the handloom weavers who formed such an important element of the Wellingtonian army, sidelined by new technology.1
For most of our period an infantry soldier was paid a shilling a day, out of which an assortment of stoppages were deducted which might leave him with very much less. He would receive two (later three) meals a day, one of them usually including plenty of beef, bread and small beer. In 1750 a London labourer received 2s a day and a craftsman 3s. A day labourer in Gloucestershire drew is 4d but the same man picked up only 9d a day in the North Riding of Yorkshire. A mason or joiner earned 2s a day. In 1760 the weekly poor relief paid to a pauper by the parish was just is 6d. In contrast, the aristocrats of labour were respectably paid in 1790, with a chair-carver receiving £4 a week, a London compositor 24s, a London saddler 15s, a Newcastle Collier 13s 6d, a worker in the Worcester potteries 8s 7d, a Lancashire weaver 8s 7d and a woman textile worker 4s 3d.
By 1800 an agricultural worker received 10s a week, rising to 12s in 1812: in 1815 a skilled Lancashire
