Mark Wishon,German Forces and the British Army: Interactions and Perceptions,1742–1815

Reviewed by: Matthew McCormack, University of Northampton, UK

The year 2015 sees the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, when a series of events will commemorate probably the greatest victory in the history of the British army. Waterloo has a huge status in British history, national identity and public memorialization. As Mark Wishon reminds us in his excellent new book, however, if you count the predominantly-German foreign troops among the British force, plus the Prussians whose arrival famously sealed Napoleon’s defeat, then only around 20 per cent of the troops on the victorious side were actually British. This serves as a timely reminder about the sheer extent of international participation in Britain’s armed forces: German Forces and the British Army might appear to the uninitiated to be a rather niche, thesis-like title, but the subject is in fact a huge and important one.

Military and political historians have long noted eighteenth-century Britain’s reliance on troops from the Holy Roman Empire. These included formal allies (Prussia and Austria), states that provided auxiliary regiments (Hanover, Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and Hessen-Kassel) and troops who served within the British army itself (most famously the King’s German Legion). Wishon sensibly adopts the anachronistic catch-all ‘German’, not least on the grounds that this was the term usually employed by Britons at the time. This extensive use of German troops was partly political in origin. The Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Accession tied Britain’s military policy to the fate of European Protestantism. At the same time, the political settlements from this period purged Catholics from the army and insisted that the ‘standing army’ be stripped back in peacetime, lest it become a tool of oppression and an objectionable expense. The military had therefore to expand quickly in times of war, hence the employment of ‘auxiliaries’ (not ‘mercenaries’, as Wishon rightly notes) from friendly German states which kept up large armies and were renowned for professional soldiering. Ironically, the very political culture that made this situation necessary often found the employment and subsidy of foreign troops to be objectionable, especially when they were stationed in Britain for home defence. In the mid-century, this led to some vitriolic and xenophobic commentary, which went hand in hand with Jacobite or ‘patriot’ critiques of the Hanoverian dynasty and the culturally ‘foreign’ ruling class. This later had echoes in the American colonies, where the ‘Hessian mercenary’ became ‘one of the more memorable actors in the American creation myth’ (104). Wishon only touches on this political and foreign policy context on the grounds that it has been explored elsewhere, but I wonder if a fuller treatment might have helped to contextualize and explain some of his own findings.

The first chapter sets up the two themes that are in tension throughout the book: national character and military professionalism. These themes encapsulate the tension between national difference on the one hand, and sameness on the other. This is a common division within the history of war itself, where political and cultural historians (who often focus on representations in the public sphere) emphasize distinctiveness, and military historians (who focus on realities on the ground) emphasize the basic commonalities of the military experience. Wishon’s focus is on soldiers themselves and their interactions with and perceptions of each other, so tends to come down on the latter side of the debate. Given that this was the eighteenth century, these perceptions were inevitably informed by theories of national character. Although historians tend to identify Britain’s ‘other’ in the French, Georgians had an equally vivid stereotype of the German. Perhaps because of the pervasiveness of this cross-national military engagement, the stereotype of the German was the soldier: stolid, dull, mercenary, elaborately moustachioed, and oppressed by his absolutist rulers and excessive military discipline.

Whereas many of these stereotypes were apparently borne out in practice, Wishon emphasizes that British soldiers’ perceptions of their collaborators could be much more positive, and even warm. He makes this case with an impressive survey of soldier writings on both the British and the German sides. There are some real gems here, such as when George Sackville reported in 1744 that the English and Hanoverians ‘get drunk very comfortably together, and talk and sing a vast deal without understanding one syllable of what they say to one another’ (93–4). Given the richness of this source material, it is a shame that the index is unhelpful for the study of recurring themes: there are no references to food, height or duelling, for example. What Wishon does give us is further ammunition for the case – recently argued by Stephen Conway and Marie Peters – that the British experience in the eighteenth century was essentially a European one.