Abstract
In 1795, John Marsh, a gentleman composer of some repute, whose interests included astronomy, accounting and scientific instrument-making, and who, in addition to acting as an overseer of the poor, was a founding member of the Chichester book society, a share holder in the town theatre, and leader of the local orchestra, added a new military pursuit to his already extensive list of pastimes. Invited to enrol in the second company of the Chichester Volunteers, Marsh initially signalled his reluctance: his son had already joined the first company and he felt‘one of a family wo’d be enough’. With some pressing, he eventually relented and attended the first meeting of the Volunteer company where he and the other new recruits ‘practis’d standing at ease & at attention, facing to the right & left’. They agreed to meet four times a week thereafter to practice their drill. Whilst the first company of Volunteers, he recorded, had been primarily formed from young men and dressed in the short jacketed uniform of the light infantry, the‘elderly’ inhabitants of Chichester, deeming such light dress inappropriate, had ‘proposed forming themselves into a battalion company with coats, hats etc. proper for middle aged people’.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
John Marsh, 1795, Brian Robins (ed.), The John Marsh Journals: The Life and Times of a Gentleman Composer (Stuyvesant NY: Pergamon, 1998), 575–80.
For a more detailed discussion of Marsh’s journals and his varied accomplishments and interests see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 531–72.
R.J. Morris, ‘Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780–1850’, The Historical Journal, 26, 1 (1983), 95–118.
See Jon Newman, ‘”An Insurrection of Loyalty”: The London Volunteer Regiments’ Response to the Invasion Threat’, in Mark Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 75–91, 81.
J.R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1802 (London: Routledge, 1965), 127–61.
J.E. Cookson, ‘Service without Politics? Army, Militia and Volunteers during the American and French Revolutionary Wars’, War in History, 10 (2003), 381–397, 383.
Thomas Bartlett, ‘An End to Moral Economy: The Irish Militia Disturbances of 1793’, Past and Present, 99 (1983), 41–64.
Henry McAnally, The Irish Militia 1793–1816: A Social and Military Study (Dublin and London: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1949), 114.
R.M. Sunter, ‘The Problems of Recruitment for Scottish Line Regiments during the Napoleonic Wars’, Scottish Tradition, 26 (2001), 56–68, 58.
For the earlier interpretation of the Volunteers as an extension of loyalists associations see Robert R. Dozier, For King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1983).
J.E. Cookson, ‘The English Volunteer Movement of the French Wars, 1793–1815: Some Contexts’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989), 867–91
Austin Gee, The British Volunteer Movement 1794–1814 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003).
Thomas Bartlett, ‘”A Weapon of War as Yet Untried”: Militarisation and Politicisation in Ireland, 1780–1820’, Culture et Pratiques en France et en Irelande (Paris, 1988), 135.
William Wordsworth, ‘To the Men of Kent, October 1803’, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London, 1840), 6 vols, vol. 3, 197.
G. Strickland, York to Francis Cholmeley at Bransby, 3 October 1803. M.Y. Aschroft (ed.), To Escape the Monster’s Clutches: Notes and Documents Illustrating the Preparations in North Yorkshire to Repel the Invasion Threatened by the French from 1793 (Northallerton: North Yorkshire County Council, 1977), 71.
Emma Vincent McLeod, ‘A City Invincible? Edinburgh and the War Against Revolutionary France’, British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 23 (2000), 153–66.
Ann Kussmaul, The Autobiography of Joseph Mayett of Quainton (1783–1839) (Aylesbury: Buckinghamshire Record Society, 1986, no. 23).
Mark Philp, ‘Introduction: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815’, in Mark Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 7.
Duncan Ban MacIntyre, ‘Song of the Gazette’ translated from Gaelic by Angus Macleod in Angus Macleod, The Songs of Duncan Ban MacIntyre (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1952), 379.
For a more detailed discussion of Jane Austen’s treatment of the militia see Tim Fulford, ‘Sighing for a Soldier. Jane Austen and Military Pride and Prejudice’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 57, 2 (2002), 153–78.
Letters from Reginald Heber to his brother Richard Heber, September to October 1804. R.H. Cholmondeley (ed.), The Heber Letters, 1783–1832 (London: Batchworth Press, 1950), 146–55.
Joseph Farrington, 5 August 1803. Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre (ed.), The Diary of Joseph Farrington (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979), vol. 6, 2094.
Matthew McCormack, ‘Rethinking Loyalty in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35, 3 (September, 2012), 407–21.
Neil Ramsey, ‘Making Myself a Soldier: The Role of Soldiering in the Autobiographical Work of John Clare’, Romanticism, 13, 2 (2007), 177–88, 179.
Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 134–5.
Walter Scott, Summer 1803. H.J.C. Grierson (ed.), The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 1787–1807 (London: Constable & Co, 1932), 188–9.
Kevin B. Linch, ‘A Citizen and Not a Soldier: The British Volunteer Movement and the War against Napoleon’, in Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann and Jane Rendall (eds), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the French Wars, 1790–1820 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 303–10.
For a more extensive discussion of these issues see Louise P. Carter, ‘British Women during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: Responses, Roles and Representations’ (Unpublished D.Phil: University of Cambridge, 2005).
Mark Hallett and Jane Rendall, Eighteenth-century York: Culture, Space and Society (York: Borthwick Institute, 2003), ix.
On the gradual exclusion of women from the British army over the course of the nineteenth century see Myra Trustram, Women of the Regiment: Marriage and the Victorian Army (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984).
On wives’ incorporation into their husband’s work see Janet Finch, Married to the Job (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983).
Anna Walker, 1 August 1805. ‘The Diary of Mrs Walker’. PRONI, T/1565/1, 173. 95. On the Britannicization of the Irish garrison and the reduction in the proportion of Irish troops see Cookson, Armed Nation, 155. On women and the imperial garrison in India see Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992), 75–9.
Maria Edgeworth, ‘Castle Rackrent’, in Marilyn Butler (ed.), Castle Rackrent and Ennui (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992 [1801]), 122.
The role of the soldier in the transmission of British folktales, ballads and customs presents a potentially fruitful avenue through which militia service’s impact on the diffusion of local culture could be measured. On the soldier as a disseminator of folk customs in French culture see David Hopkin, ‘La Ramée: The Archetypal Soldier as an Indicator of Popular Attitudes to the Army in Nineteenth-Century France’, French History, 14, 2 (2000), 115–49, 121.
Elaine McFarland, ‘Scotland and the 1798 Rebellion: The Limits of ‘Common Cause’, in Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 570;
Katrina Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 6.
James Radford, 4 May 1797. E.F. Radford (ed.), Two Military Men. The Letters of father and Son, 1794–1816 (Durham: Roundtuit, 2006), 20.
A.R.H. Baker and M. Billinge, Geographies of England: The North-South Divide, Material and Imagined (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004).
James Oakes, 19 October 1798. Jane Fiske (ed.), The Oakes Diaries. Business Politics and the Family in Bury St Edmunds, 1778–1827 (Suffolk: Boydell Press for the Suffolk Records Society, 1990), vol. 1, 369.
Archibald McLaren, A Minute Description of the Battles of Gorey, Arklow and Vinegar Hill… (Dublin, 1798), 39.
Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London; New York: Verso, 1991), 95.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Catriona Kennedy
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kennedy, C. (2013). Citizen-Soldiers. In: Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32476-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31653-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)