Abstract
In November 1808, seventeen-year-old William Thornton Keep left his family in London to begin a career in the army. His departure had been marked by ‘tears’ and‘tender embraces’ as he set off‘to encounter the world and scenes so entirely new to me’. Keep had never travelled further than Windsor and during the coach journey to Winchester, where he was to join his regiment, he sat in silent reflection, anxiously clutching a bag of treats prepared by his mother. His route into the garrison-town took him through the medieval entrance gate and he imagined the warriors that had passed under the same arch in the age of chivalry, an age which, he observed, ‘could not have excelled … what is going on here in our present war with Bonaparte’. Once inside the gates he was immediately struck by the military figures that filled the streets, the Band‘in their fanciful apparel’ and the officers and soldiers saluting each other as they passed.1
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Notes
William Thornton Keep to his mother, Winchester, 7 November 1808. Ian Fletcher (ed.), In the Service of the King: The Letters of William Thornton Keep, at Home, Walcheren and the Peninsula, 1808–1814 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1997), 17.
David Roberts, The Military Adventures of Johnny Newcome: With an Account of his Campaign on the Peninsula and in Pall Mall… (London, 1815);
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N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Honour and Duty at Sea, 1660–1815’, Historical Research, 75, 190 (2002), 425–47, 426.
J.A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army 1715–1795 (Oxford: Oxford UP Reprints, 2000 [1981]), 100, 104. The purchase system would not be abolished until 1871.
Richard Glover, Peninsular Preparation: The Reform of the British Army, 1795–1809 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963), 146, 153.
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Letter from Lt John Mills, 20 May 1810. Ian Fletcher (ed.), For King and Country: The Letters and Diaries of John Mills Coldstream Guards, 1811–1814 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1995), 144.
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See Gillian Russell, The Theatre of War: Politics, Performance and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 12.
On the navy in British culture and society during this period see Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002);
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Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1996 [1814]), 92.
John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 64.
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William Surtees, Twenty-Five Years in the Rifle Brigade (Blackwood: Edinburgh, 1833), 2.
Anon., Journal of a Soldier of the Seventy-First or Glasgow Regiment, Highland Light Infantry from 1806 to 1815 (Edinburgh, 1819), 8. Joseph Donaldson similarly related how, before deciding to join the army, he had been shunned by the local community. Joseph Donaldson, Recollections of the Eventful Life of a Soldier (Philadelphia, 1845), 40.
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Louis A. Zurcher Jr, ‘The Sailor Aboard Ship: A Study of Role Behaviour in a Total Institution’, Social Forces, 43, 3 (1965), 389–400.
See Karen Harvey, ‘Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in the Eighteenth Century’, Gender & History, 21, 3 (November, 2009), 520–40.
On bachelors, domesticity and masculinity in Georgian England see Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale UP, 2011), 49–82.
William Thornton Keep to Sam Keep, Berry Head, 12 August 1812, Fletcher (ed.), In the Service of the King, 84. In her account of male bonding in World War I, Joanna Bourke suggests that the development of intimate male friendships was stimulated by the absence of women. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996), 133.
Roger N. Buckley, The Napoleonic War Journal of Captain Thomas Henry Browne, 1807–1816 (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1987), 67.
See Anon., Journal of a Soldier of the 71st, or Glasgow Regiment, Highland Light Infantry 1806–1815 (Edinburgh, 1819), 14 and Joseph Donaldson, Recollections of the Eventful Life of a Soldier (Philadelphia, 1845), 52.
The term ‘docile bodies’ is taken from Michel Foucault’s account of the development of a disciplinary society in which he identified the military as the forerunner of later disciplinary institutions. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (Penguin: London, 1979), 135–69.
See definition of ‘discipline’ in Charles James, A New and Enlarged Military Dictionary or Alphabetical Explanation of Technical Terms (London, 1805).
Captain T.H. Cooper, A Practical Guide for the Light Infantry Officer, Comprising Valuable Extracts from All the Most Popular Works on the Subject … (London, 1806), xvi.
See Arthur N. Gilbert, ‘Military and Civilian Justice in Eighteenth Century England: An Assessment’, The Journal of British Studies, 17, 2 (1978), 41–65.
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The shift from politeness, with its emphasis on the social aspect of gentlemanly behaviour, to the concept of ‘manliness’ and a greater stress upon men’s inner, individual character can be located even later in the early to mid Victorian period. See John Tosh, ‘Gentlemanly Politeness and Manly Simplicity in Victorian England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12 (2002), 455–72.
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For an ethnological analysis of the ceremony see Simon J. Bronner, Crossing the Line: Violence, Play, and Drama in Naval Equator Traditions (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2006).
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See Robert Clyde, From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander, 1745–1830 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1995), 150–80.
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See, for example, Charles O’Neil, Private O’Neil: The Recollections of an Irish Rogue of HM 28th Regt (Leonaur, 2007 [first published as The Military Adventures of Charles O’Neil (1851)], 12;
Edward Costello, Adventures of a Soldier: Written by Himself Being the Memoirs of Edward Costello (London, 1852, 2nd edn), 2;
Ruan O’Donnell, ‘Liberty or Death’: The United Irishmen in New South Wales, 1800–4’, in Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The 1798 Rebellion: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), 607–19, 609.
J. R. Western, ‘Roman Catholics Holding Military Commissions in 1798’, English Historical Review, 70, 276 (1955) 428–32;
E.M. Spiers, ‘Army Organisation and Society in the Nineteenth Century’, in Tom Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 335–358, 341.
Sam Scott, ‘The French Revolution and the Irish Regiments in France’, Hugh Gough and David Dickson (eds), Ireland and the French Revolution (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990), 14–27, 19.
See Stephen Conway, ‘Christians, Catholics, Protestants: The Religious Links of Britain and Ireland with Continental Europe, c. 1689–1800’, English Historical Review, 126, 509 (2009), 833–862, 857.
Watkin Tench, Brest, 9 November 1794. Watkin Tench, Letters from Revolutionary France: Letters Written to a Friend in London Between the Month of November 1794, and the Month of May 1795, ed. Gavin Edwards (Cardiff: Cardiff UP, 2001 [1796]), 11–13.
Philip J. Haythornthwaite, The Armies of Wellington (London: Brockhampton, 1998), 48.
Charles James, The Regimental Companion Containing the Relative Duties of Every Officer in the British Army (London, 1800), 2 vols, vol. 1, 59.
Geoff Quilley, ‘Duty and Mutiny: The Aesthetics of Loyalty and the Representation of the British Sailor c. 1789–1800’, in Philip Shaw (ed.), Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 80.
James Stanier Clarke, Naval Sermons Preached on Board His Majesty’s Ship the Impeteux… (London, 1798), 172.
Laurence Brockliss, ‘The Professions and National Identity’, in Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c.1750- c.1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 9–28, 9.
See for instance Andrew Ross’s letter declining an application from an Irish gentleman for a ensigncy in the Reay Fencible Highlanders in preference for Scottish officers ‘who understand the language and are accustomed to the dress of the corps’. Major Andrew Ross to Michael Grace Esq., 2 August 1798. NAM, 6406–22. The memoir of William Grattan of the Connaught Rangers relates an anecdote concerning a young Gaelic-speaking private in his regiment, who, upon being asked a question in English by General Mackinnon, could only answer him in Irish. William Grattan, Adventures with the Connaught Rangers, 1809–1814, ed. Charles Oman (London: Greenhill, 2003), 126.
Alexander MacKinnon, ‘The Battle of Holland’ (Blàr na h-Òlaind), in Ronald Black (ed.), An Lasair: Anthology of 18th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse (Edinburgh: Berlin, 2001), 355.
Michael Snape, The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War (London: Routledge, 2006), 91–2, 161.
Thomas C. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 1803–1811 (1812), vol. 19, 350–6.
John Green, The Vicissitudes of a Soldier’s Life (Louth, 1827), 21–2. Rifleman Benjamin Harris recorded a similar instance of sectarian violence amongst a group of freshly recruited ‘hot-headed Paddies’ of the 95 th regiment. Christopher Hibbert (ed.), The Recollections of Rifleman Harris: As Told to Henry Curling (Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush, 1996), 6–7.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), 68–9.
See, for example, the court martial of Lieutenant Lawson Huddlestone, 14 March 1811 in Charles James, A Collection of the Charges, Opinions, and Sentences of General Courts Martial; As Published by Authority, from the Year 1795 to the Present Time (London, 1820), 368–70.
Alan Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1990), 28–9.
Andrew MacKillop, ‘For King, Country and Regiment?: Motive and Identity within Highland Soldiering, 1746–1815’, in Steve Murdoch and Andrew MacKillop (eds), Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience, 1550–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 185–212.
For example, John Kincaid of the Rifle Brigade, while declaring his preference for mixed regiments, concluded ‘I love to see a national corps, and hope that the British army is never without one’. John Kincaid, Tales from the Rifle Brigade (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2005 [1830, 1835]), 293.
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© 2013 Catriona Kennedy
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Kennedy, C. (2013). Becoming Soldiers and Sailors. In: Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_3
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