Abstract
In 1815, the Duke of Wellington took command of a multinational army that comprised British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops in the culmination of the 20-year conflict with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Such was the contribution of non-British troops to the victory at Waterloo that a recent revisionist history of the campaign has rechristened it ‘The German Victory’.1 Alongside the regiments of the British Army present at Waterloo were units from allied nations, including Hanover, Brunswick, the new Kingdom of Holland and a separate Prussian Army. Also present within Wellington’s army was the King’s German Legion (KGL), a corps of Hanoverians that had been created when the electorate was overrun by the French in 1803, and there were other links between the allied troops and the British Army. The Brunswick army contained a nucleus of men from the Brunswick regiment which, like the KGL, had found its way into the pay of the British Army as a foreign regiment. As with much of the history of transnational recruitment, Britain’s extensive use of foreign troops was a product of manpower demands yet they were maligned despite their significant numbers and involvement in the war.
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Notes
Peter Hofschröer, 1815, The Waterloo Campaign: The German Victory: From Waterloo to the Fall of Napoleon (London, 1999).
For a short survey of these units see Robert W. Gould, Mercenaries of the Napoleonic Wars (Brighton, 1995).
Maurice Hutt, ‘The British Government’s Responsibility for the “Divided Command” of the Expedition to Quiberon, 1795’, The English Historical Review, 76.300 (1961), pp. 479–89.
C. T. Atkinson, ‘Foreign Regiments in the British Army, 1793–1802’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 21, 22 (1942), pp. 175–81, 2–14, 45–52, 7–15, 32–42, 87–97, 234–50, 65–76, 313–24;
C. T. Atkinson, ‘Swiss Levies in British Pay, 1799–1801’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 34 (1956), pp. 99–103
J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. 4 (London, 1899–1930), pp. 411–22.
See also M. E. S. Laws, ‘Foreign Artillery Corps in the British Service. No. 1: The French Emigrant Artillery’, Journal of the Royal Artillery, 65.3 (1938), pp. 356–67
M. E. S. Laws, ‘Foreign Artillery Corps in the British Service. No. 2: The Dutch Emigrant Artillery. No. 3, the Royal Foreign Artillery’, Journal of the Royal Artillery, 73, 75 (1946), pp. 250–60, 57–63.
More modern studies can be found in Robert Grouvel, Les Corps De Troupe De L’émigration Francaise, 1789–1815 (Paris, 1957)
Alistair Nichols, Wellington’s Mongrel Regiment: A History of the Chasseurs Britanniques Regiment (Staplehurst, 2005)
R. L. Yaple, ‘The Auxiliaries: Foreign and Miscellaneous Regiments in the British Army, 1802–17’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 50 (1972), pp. 10–28.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992);
J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997);
John Cookson, ‘Regimental Worlds: Interpreting the Experience of British Soldiers During the Napoleonic Wars’, in Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the French Wars, 1790–1820, ed. A. Forrest, K. Hagemann, and J. Rendall (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 23–42.
Janice E. Thomson, ‘State Practices, International Norms, and the Decline of Mercenarism’, International Studies Quarterly, 34:1 (1990), pp. 23–47.
See for example: John Childs, The British Army of William III, 1698–1702 (Manchester, 1987), pp. 102–3, 115–16 and especially 132–7;
Reginald Arthur Savory, His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany during the Seven Years War (Oxford, 1966).
Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 74–5;
A. V. Campbell, ‘A “Nursery for Soldiers to the Whole World”: Colonel James Prevost and the Foreign Protestant Military Migration of the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 129:3 (2005), pp. 253–81.
John M. Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France, 1793–1815 (Cambridge, MA, 1969).
John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe 1648–1789 (Manchester, 1982);
Guy Rowlands, ‘Foreign Service in the Age of Absolute Monarchy: Louis XIV and His Forces Étrangères’, War In History, 17:2 (2010), pp. 141–65.
Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies!’: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1974);
John Randle Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1802 (London, 1965).
J. L. Pimlott, ‘The Administration of the British Army, 1783–1793’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leicester, 1975), pp. 6–8.
Geoffrey Francis Andrew Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London, 1980).
Roger Norman Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville, FL, 1998), pp. 110–11.
For the campaigns see Michael Duffy, ‘World-Wide War and British Expansion, 1793–1815’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Peter James Marshall (Oxford, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 184–207;
Christopher D. Hall, British Strategy in the Napoleonic War, 1803–15 (Manchester, 1992);
Rory Muir, Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807–1815 (New Haven, CT, 1996).
D. S. Gray, ‘“Prisoners, Wanderers and Deserters”: Recruiting for the King’s German Legion, 1803–1815’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 53 (1975), pp. 148–58
George Canning and Peter Jupp, The Letter Journal of George Canning: 1793–1795, Camden Fourth Series, 41 (London, 1991), p. 82.
W. H. Fitchett, How England Saved Europe; the Story of the Great War 1793–1815 (New York, 1899).
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Linch, K. (2013). The Politics of Foreign Recruitment in Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In: Arielli, N., Collins, B. (eds) Transnational Soldiers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296634_4
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