Abstract
The British army which Wellington led from Lisbon to Toulouse and again in the Waterloo campaign was made up entirely of volunteers. Britain in the Napoleonic Wars did not have conscription, except for the militia, which was limited to home service. Each year of the war the British army lost between 15,000 and 25,000 men: some of them were killed in battle; many more died of disease; quite a number (between 3000 and 5000 each year) were discharged as unfit for further service; and even more (between 4000 and 7000) deserted, mostly at home, and mostly within a year of taking the King’s shilling.
Kevin Linch’s significant new monograph explores the sources of the new recruits who volunteered to make up these losses. Only in 1807 did ordinary recruiting supply sufficient men to fill the ranks: in every other year of the war there was a deficit of at least 5000 men, rising to over 10,000 each year after 1808, when Britain’s commitment to the Peninsula began. A variety of expedients were tried in the early years of the war with mixed success, but from 1807 the government relied upon encouraging men from the militia to volunteer to join line regiments. This had the advantage of supplying the army with men who were already trained and accustomed to military life, while their place in the militia was taken by a mixture of volunteers and men raised by periodic ballots. The system was not perfect: one grievous anomaly was that the family of militiamen were entitled to a small allowance to preserve them from utter destitution, which they lost if the soldier joined the regular army. The Horse Guards proposed extending this allowance to the families of all soldiers, but the cost would have been considerable (over £200,000 per annum) and Perceval’s government simply could not afford it at a time when it was having to cut expenditure wherever possible.
Linch’s work extends beyond recruitment into a number of related topics, and the mass of data he has collected from a detailed study of the inspection returns and other records provides a solid statistical base for his conclusions. Among other noteworthy points he shows that the contemporary belief that Scots and Irish were over-represented in the army was not accurate: they were over-represented among ordinary recruits, but this was offset by a disproportionate number of Englishmen volunteering from the militia. Most recruits joined the army in their early twenties and typically spent as much as two years at home, in the second battalion, before being sent on active service: for example in 1810 the men of the 1st Battalion 8th Foot averaged seven years’ service and only five privates had been in the army for less than two years, while there were 297 men in the second battalion who had been with the colours for less than twelve months. This seasoning helps to explain the high quality of the army in the Peninsula. Linch has also discovered some fascinating evidence of the attitude of the Duke of York and the Horse Guards towards the Peninsular commitment, which at times was less than wholehearted.
Britain and Wellington’s Army is not without flaws: it is very much a thesis, and there is little in the first third to reward the reader. Although Linch includes a wide-ranging round-up of the literature on the British army and the Napoleonic Wars, he never engages with the one previous study of recruitment: Fortescue’s County Lieutenancies and the Army. Linch is more analytical; Fortescue, more discursive and readable. But they cover much the same ground, and anyone working on the internal history of the army in these years will need to consult both. And Linch concludes his study with a strange statement blaming the Duke of Wellington for the conservative, authoritarian regime that, he claims, gripped the army between the death of the Duke of York in 1827 and a revival of ‘the spirit of the 1810s’ in the 1840s, ‘except during Hill’s brief tenure as Commander-in-Chief’ (p. 147). However, Wellington was only commander-in-chief for a few months in 1827–8, and Hill’s ‘brief tenure’ lasted from early 1828 until his retirement in August 1842. Wellington then took over, and, if there was any revival of ‘the spirit of the 1810s’, it was on his watch.
Nonetheless, Kevin Linch has made an important contribution to the study of the British army that fought, not just in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, but in a dozen theatres across the globe. His approach is original and fruitful, his judgements are sane, and his research is thorough.