‘These peaceable times are the devil’: Royal Navy officers in the post-war slump,1815–1825

During the Napoleonic War, the Royal Navy grew to an unprecedented size, but with the return of peace it dispensed with the services of an also unprecedented 124,000 men. By 1818, around 90% of commissioned officers were unemployed and on half pay. Drawing on the papers of navy agent Robert Brine, as well as Admiralty and Parliamentary sources, this paper sets out the scale of the unemployment problem among commissioned officers and the effects it had upon them, and surveys the options available to erstwhile sea officers and the strategies the deployed to make a living amid the post-war slump.