Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes

and in the 29th (Worcestershire) the proportion rose from 19 per cent in 1809 to 37 per cent in 1811.⁶⁶

      The regional pattern of enlistment changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the great famine of 1846 the proportion of Irish recruits began to fall, with emigration to the United States coming to replace enlistment into the British army. In 1870 27.9 per cent of the army was Irish, dropping to 15.6 per cent in 1888 and 9.1 per cent in 1912, roughly proportionate to Ireland’s proportion of the population of the United Kingdom. The proportion of Scots – 7.7 per cent in 1879 and 7.8 in 1912 – remained more static, but significantly it fell below Scotland’s proportion of the United Kingdom’s population. Alongside a shift away from rural Scotland and Ireland as recruiting grounds went a growing tendency to recruit the English urban unemployed, and by the early twentieth century only eleven per cent of recruits were agricultural labourers. The effect was similar in microcosm. The Black Watch (42^nd Regiment) drew 51 per cent of its recruits from the Highlands in 1798, but only nine per cent in 1830–34 and just five per cent in 1854. Like other Highland regiments, it was driven to seeking more and more of its soldiers from the Lothians and Glasgow.⁶⁷

      Although the definitive swing towards urban recruiting occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, the robust, malleable and deferential countryman was never as plentiful as recruiting sergeants might have wished. A sergeant major of the 28th Regiment told the 1835 Royal Commission on military punishment that:

      There are no men so good soldiers as the man who comes from the plough. We would never take a weaver while they were there. [Townsmen] require all the means in the power of their officers…to teach them that subordination is the first duty of the profession into which they have entered.⁶⁸

      While around 25 per cent of Royal Artillery recruits gave the trade of labourer on enlistment between 1756 and 1779, thereafter there was a massive jump in the percentage of weavers enlisting, so that they outnumbered even day-labourers.

      The army of our period contained a far higher proportion of Scots and Irish officers and men than was to be the case at the end of the nineteenth century, and this was very evident to those who served in it – and fought against it. Highland regiments, recruited from Gaelic-speaking countrymen living north of the Highland line, wore the kilt. Even when it was replaced by trousers on active service in North America – Captain Peebles’ journal reveals a constant preoccupation with getting hold of sufficient material to make ‘trowsers’ for his company – their bonnets marked them out as Scots. Following the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 Scots were unpopular in England: indeed, for much of our period the term ‘North British’ was used in place of ‘Scots’ in regimental designations, thus ‘Royal North British Dragoons’ to describe Scotland’s only cavalry regiment, the Royal Scots Greys.

      After Culloden (1746) the carrying of arms and the wearing of Highland dress was proscribed by law, but joining a Highland regiment enabled a man to do both – and, indeed, to escape the destitution that threatened his countrymen as sheep drove out men during the Highland clearances. The enlistment of Highlanders also represented a good bargain for the government. It gave legitimate scope to a martial spirit that might otherwise have been used against it, and coincided conveniently with the growing need to find light infantry for North America. As Colonel William Stewart, a leading advocate of light infantry, was to observe, ‘being less spoiled and more hardy than [other] British soldiers, [they were] better accustomed for active light troops.’⁶⁹

      The senior Highland regiment, the 42^nd (Black Watch), gained its baptism of fire at Fontenoy in 1745, the year before Culloden. Other Highland regiments were raised for the Seven Years’ War but disbanded after it. More were raised for the American War of Independence, and all but two were disbanded after that. Thus although Highland regiments played a distinguished part in these conflicts, most were unable to trace continuous existence deep into the eighteenth century. The high regimental numbers of the Highland units which eventually became permanent during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (like the 71^st Highland Light Infantry, the 78^th Highlanders [the Ross-Shire Buffs] and the 79^th Cameron Highlanders), and consequent lack of seniority in the Army List contrasted with the unshakeable pre-eminence of the 1st Foot – the trousered Royal Scots – recruited, like other lowland regiments, from the largely English-speaking lowlands of Scotland.

      This suspicion of Highlanders, useful on active service but less desirable in peacetime, had deep roots in an English population badly frightened by the Forty-Five with a long retained latent fear of a Jacobite revival with French bayonets at its back. When James Boswell went to see ‘Love in a Village’ at Covent Garden on 8 December 1762 two uniformed officers of Lord John Murray’s Scots regiment, just returned from Havana – taken from the Spaniards after a costly siege – were hissed and pelted with apples to cries of ‘No Scots! No Scots!’ ‘I wish from my soul that the Union was broke,’ said one, ‘and we might give them another Bannockburn.’ ‘And this is the thanks we get,’ added the other, ‘to be hissed when we come home…If it was the French, what could they do worse?’ The first then slipped into a comfortable vernacular which Boswell, a fellow Scot, knew well: ‘But if I had a grup o yin or twa o the tamd rascals I sud let them ken what they’re about.’⁷⁰

      Neither lowland Scots nor Irish regiments were as easily distinguished as kilted Highlanders, though Regimental colours and individual appointments like shoulder-belt plates usually bore a harp for Irish regiments and a thistle for Scots. The 71st Highland Light Infantry went one better: although officers and men wore trousers, its unique head-dress was a blue Highland bonnet, complete with broad diced band, blocked into shako shape. The spread of tartan into all Scots regiments did not come until much later, when a combination of royal interest in Scotland and the novels of Sir Walter Scott meant that Scotland, ‘from being a tiresome frontier province, became fashionable’.⁷¹ Most lowland regiments had acquired pipers by the 1850s, and by 1881 they had tartan trews, Highland doublets and an appropriate Scots head-dress. It was the apotheosis of the Highlander from a potential rebel, useful for dealing with the King’s enemies in distant forests, he had become a martial pillar of the Victorian establishment.

      Ambivalence also surrounded the far more numerous, though less easily identifiable, Irish. They were accused by Englishmen of being dirty and verminous, ‘a standard accusation against those at the bottom of the social heap’. They were resented as a source of cheap labour, suspected because they were alleged to support the exiled Stuarts, and because they owed allegiance to the Pope. Thus they were ‘treacherous in all three spheres: economic, political and religious.’⁷² They were the butt of frequent jokes. When General William Howe, commander-in-chief in North America, evacuated Boston in 1776, an officer was detailed to scatter crow’s feet – sharp four-pronged irons that always lay with one point up – in front of the town gate. ‘Being an Irishman,’ sniggered an English officer, ‘he began scattering the crowfeet about from the gate towards the enemy, and of course had to walk over them on his return, and was nearly taken prisoner.’⁷³ It was not always safe to chuckle at such jests. The eccentric Lord Hervey entered a coffee-house to find his way barred by a man who ostentatiously sniffed the air and declared: ‘I smell an Irishman.’ Hervey snatched a carving-knife from a nearby table and slashed off the man’s nose, remarking sweetly: ‘You’ll not smell another.’

      The battlefield performance of Irish soldiers, whether serving in Irish regiments or in nominally English units, mocked the cliché. One of the most enduring battlefield descriptions of the period speaks of 1/27th (Enniskillen) lying literally dead in square at Waterloo. In the Peninsula the 88th (Connaught Rangers) had a fighting record which placed it amongst the bravest of the brave. Lieutenant William Grattan (a distant relative of the Irish opposition leader Henry Grattan) watched the 88th getting ready to assault the great