In fortresses and barracks chaplains were able to avail themselves of garrison churches, but on operations they had to make do with what accommodation they could get. In 1761 Corporal Matthew Webb, commanding the 12th Foot’s pioneers in a chilly camp in Germany, received ‘unexpective orders’ to dig a circular trench and to set boughs around it ‘to screen the minister and congregation while at divine service it being so excessive cold standing without’. More branches were piled up in the centre, ‘where two drums was fixed, one upon the other, for the minister to lay his books upon’. On Sunday 25 October:
Every man had orders to clean themselves for church and soon after 10 o’clock the drum beat and the whole paraded and, the rolls being called, we marched into this new church that we had made where our chaplain read prayers and preached an excellent sermon and took his text from the 27th Psalm, verse the 2nd and 3rd. A’many of our officers being present acknowledged that our work had been to good effect, and the boughs broke off the wind greatly and made it very commodious, as the trench that was dug within the boughs round for the men to sit in, able to hold 1000 men and upwards.
The regiment’s chaplain, Thomas Milward Key, had deputised for his father, who had been chaplain since 1733, and formally replaced him when he died in 1760.12
In the eighteenth century it was rarely easy to find sufficient clergymen of the required standard, especially as chaplains with livings very often used a proportion of their army income to pay a deputy ‘from the Church of England’s underclass of unbeneficed clergy, a group that was responsible for a good deal of clerical scandal’.13 In 1705 a bishop found that one of his parishes was being looked after by a neighbouring clergyman because its vicar was ‘chaplain to a regiment of horse in Flanders’, and in 1757 Horace Walpole cheerfully asked the Duke of Bedford, lord lieutenant of Ireland, to allow a chaplain leave of absence from his regiment in Cork to see to his parish in England.14 The recruitment of chaplains was not helped by the steady decline in the relative value of their pay during the eighteenth century. They were encumbered by the need to cover the necessary expenses of living amongst the officers, and the need to provide themselves with a horse and suitable kit when on campaign. Nevertheless, as late as 1790 the chaplain’s £121. 13s. 4d. per annum compared very favourably with the income of many clergymen, and was all the more attractive if the chaplain could manage to avoid the expense of doing duty with his regiment. It is small wonder that there were so many absentee chaplains, and in 1759 the governor of newly captured Guadaloupe told Lord Barrington ‘Our new friends the French take us for atheists, as we have ne’er a chaplain amongst us nor any sign of public worship.’15 There was only one regimental chaplain with the Duke of York’s force in Flanders in 1793, although four or five deputies eventually turned up, and two years later not a single chaplain could be found to accompany Sir Ralph Abercromby’s expedition to the West Indies.
Wise chaplains kept in touch with influential patrons, hoping that ecclesiastical advancement might reward military virtue. The Revd Samuel Noyes, chaplain to Lord Orkney’s Foot in the War of Spanish Succession, wrote a series of informative letters to the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Ely. Noyes was close enough to the action to see how Marlborough ‘exposed his person the whole day in a most uncommon manner’ at Blenheim, and sufficiently well connected for Lieutenant General Lumley to tell him that all the senior Dutch generals had been killed or wounded at the storming of Schellenberg.16 Valuable though Noyes’ letters are to historians, their real purpose was to ensure that powerful prelates did not forget him. Nor did they, for he ended his career holding several good livings as well as a prebend’s stall in Winchester Cathedral.
In 1796, the patently unsatisfactory nature of the military chaplaincy encouraged the Duke of York to order all chaplains to join their regiments at once or retire from the service. Thereafter, commanding officers were required to certify, twice yearly, that their chaplains were carrying out their duties in person. New regimental chaplains and deputy chaplains were no longer to be appointed, although colonels of regiments were compensated by being allowed to sell an extra commission in their regiment when their current chaplain died. In place of regimental chaplains the Duke established the Chaplains’ Department, whose members were appointed to overseas forces at the rate of one to each brigade or static garrison. Units in the United Kingdom had no full-time chaplains, but were ordered to obtain the services of a nearby clergyman who was to be paid by the regiment. The Board of Ordnance had its own small ecclesiastical establishment to minister to the Royal Artillery, and retained it until its disappearance as an independent body in 1855.
Some clergymen had been given the temporary status of chaplain general, to supervise regimental chaplains on specific campaigns: the sharp-tongued Dr Francis Hare, who was to die a bishop (and, indeed, came close to becoming Archbishop of Canterbury) had been Marlborough’s chaplain general. In 1796 a chaplain general was appointed to head the new department. The first incumbent, the Revd John Gamble, was an experienced regimental chaplain. He had been the only clergyman to accompany the Duke of York’s lacklustre expedition to Flanders in 1793–4 and was rewarded by being made the Duke’s domestic chaplain. Although Gamble succeeded in putting his department on a firm financial footing, it remained hard to fill chaplains’ posts.
His successor, the Revd John Owen, took over in 1810. He had already served in the Peninsula, where he had been warned that if he moved up with advancing troops he was likely to be killed. Owen steadfastly replied ‘My primary duty is now to those departing this life.’ As chaplain general he implemented a thoroughgoing reform. Staff chaplains, serving with brigades on operations, received the pay of infantry majors and were entitled to half-pay. Garrison chaplains were less well rewarded, as were the home chaplains appointed to large garrisons within the United Kingdom who formed, in effect, a pool of probationers for the staff chaplain posts. A new selection process ensured that potential chaplains were first approved by the two archbishops and the bishop of London, and then interviewed by the chaplain general before being commissioned. No clergyman holding a living could now be a chaplain, a regulation that caused fifteen of them to resign immediately.
Sadly, neither Owen’s determination nor the wisdom of the new policy succeeded in getting sufficient chaplains into the Iberian Peninsula, where Wellington was at grips both with the French and with the advance of Methodism within his army. Methodism had a tradition of appealing to labourers, prisoners and others who felt excluded from the established Church, and its founder, John Wesley, had published A Word in Season, or Advice to a Soldier, in 1744. The following year he preached, with little apparent success, to the soldiers of General Wade’s army encamped in rainy misery outside Newcastle. Military Methodism was strongest amongst private soldiers and NCOs, although its advance in North America owed much to Captain Thomas Webb, who had lost an eye at the siege of Louisbourg in 1758 and then served as barrack-master at Albany in New York, retiring in 1767. It did not do for an officer to be too zealous. In 1765 Captain John Scott of the 7th Dragoons encouraged Methodists to hold meetings in the regiment’s riding school, and actively proselytised amongst the men. His brother officers were unimpressed, and he had to sell out in 1769. Some officers supported Methodism not from religious conviction but because they felt that it had a beneficial effect on soldiers’ behaviour. The Duke of Cumberland, when commander-in-chief, had been encouraged to suppress Methodist meetings in the army, but after hearing one soldier-preacher ‘engaged in prayer, and earnestly entreating God on behalf of the King and all the Royal Family,’ reportedly said ‘I wish to God that all the soldiers in the British army were like these men.’17
The soldier-preacher Duncan Wright, who served in Ireland during the Seven Years War, said:
here there was none to hinder me but the commanding officer, and he did not choose to do it. Though he did not like the Methodists, yet he wanted us all to be very good, as we did not know how soon our valour might be trie
d by the French. Therefore we had very strict orders against swearing, drunkenness, &c.; but these orders did not effect any great reformation.
One of his officers told him that he ‘feared what our enthusiasm would turn to, and mentioned Cromwell, who could preach and pray one part of the day, and kill and plunder the other’.18
Wellington, however, saw Methodism as a potential threat to discipline, as he explained to the adjutant general in 1811:
The meeting of soldiers in their cantonments to sing psalms, or hear a sermon read by one of their comrades, is, in the abstract, perfectly innocent; and it is a better way of spending their time than many others to which they are addicted; but it may become otherwise: and yet, till the abuse has made some progress, the Commanding Officer would have no knowledge of it, nor could he interfere. Even at last his interference must be guided by discretion, otherwise he will do more harm than good; and it can in no case be as effectual as that of a respectable clergyman. I wish, therefore, you would turn your mind to this subject, and arrange some plan by which the number of respectable and efficient clergymen with the army may be increased.19
Wellington complained that the Revd Samuel Briscall, attached to his headquarters, was ‘the only Chaplain doing duty’. When Wellington first attended one of Briscall’s services he warned the young man not to linger over his sermon: ‘say as much as you like in five and twenty minutes. I shall not stay longer.’ Owen sent four more chaplains to Lisbon, and told Briscall:
You will please to take care that they receive directions … Be very peremptory in your orders and give every Chaplain to understand that they must immediately obey … Know from every man how often he does duty on the Sunday on his part of the line. Entreat my Lord Wellington to issue orders for the facilitating of Divine Service, a great deal is in his power. Direct, as I have done, every Chaplain to give a short discourse intelligible and suitable to the men.
The chaplain general agreed with Wellington that ‘the Zeal of the Chaplains’ was ‘the surest obstacle’ to the progress of Methodism.20
However, Peninsular diarists testify to the fact that many chaplains made a poor showing. Sergeant William Lawrence of the 40th Regiment maintained that ‘They used to say that the three scarcest things to be seen in the army were a dead parson, drum-major, or a woman; the explanation of this was that they were none of them often to be seen on a battle-field.’21 In 1813 Ensign George Bell of the 34th saw an outdoor service ruined before it had begun when the chaplain entered the battalion’s hollow square and thought that the big drum, provided to do duty as a lectern, was there for him to stand on. He had already got one foot up on it when he was vigorously tugged backwards by the anxious drummer: ‘You’ll be through it, sir; the only parchment in camp.’ ‘No one, of course, could keep his gravity during this scene’, wrote Bell.22
Corporal William Wheeler of the 51st was in hospital at Fuentarrabia in the summer of 1814, and his ghastly experience of ‘the incurable ward’ for infected patients convinced him that chaplains failed in their duty to the sick and wounded:
In this house of misery how many fine brave young fellows have died without the assistance of a friend, mother, sister or wife to sooth their agony in their last moment. No minister of religion to cheer the dying sinner.
The people of England little think how her soldiers are neglected respecting spiritual aid, or I believe it would not be so. If they could but hear or see the agony of the dying, their prayers, their despair and the horrid oaths uttered by some in their exit from the world, I am sure that this most of wants would be attended to. It is true there are chaplains with the army who sometimes perform divine service, but of what use are they, the service they perform has no effect, for their mode of living do not agree with the doctrine they preach. I have often heard the remark ‘That a Chaplain is no more use to the army than a town pump without a handle.’ If these Reverend Gentlemen were stationed at the sick depots and made to attend to the hospitals, they would be much more usefully employed than following the army with their brace of dogs and gun, running down hares and shooting partridges, etc.
Although Wheeler had little use for army chaplains, in Madrid two years before he had been charmed by Father Kelly, a Roman Catholic friar:
At first I was not well pleased for I dislike the whole fraternity. He was about thirty years of age and stood about six feet. He had a good open countenance, which in spite of my prejudice to the order I could not but think him a good free hearted fellow … I soon found he was possessed of all that generosity of soul so common to his country. He was from the ‘Green Isle’. He took off his shovel hat and seated himself. In a few minutes we were as well acquainted as if we had known one another before. As I proceeded with the account of the campaigns he seemed to enter into the very spirit of what I was saying. His remarks was so much to the purpose that I could not help observing that he would look well at the head of a Grenadier Company.23
Lieutenant George Gleig of the 85th was to be ordained in 1820 and went on to be chaplain general. He too complained that chaplains not only neglected their duties to the sick and wounded, but rarely conducted services for the dead:
Into huge pits dug to receive them the slain in battle were cast, as manure is cast into a trench, and the victims of fever and privations were in a somewhat similar manner disposed of. Even the officers, though interred apart, had no prayers read beside their graves, for this, among other reasons, that the chaplains of the army were very few in number, and of those few not one, so far as I know, cared to make more than a convenience of the service.24
Allocating one chaplain to each brigade, with two to four regiments in it, meant that even if all were present they were hard-pressed to cope. One brigade chaplain found that he had to deal with the whole Lisbon garrison, five regiments spread about the city in barracks, convents, and the citadel, as well as a number of regimental and general hospitals: he reckoned on carrying out three to six burials a day. Those chaplains who did indeed visit hospitals often paid dearly for it. One died on active service, another succumbed soon after his return to Britain, and Owen’s correspondence with the adjutant general is speckled with requests for sick leave for chaplains suffering from ‘intermittent fever’ or worn out by work at ‘the great depots of the sick’.
Most chaplains arrived in the Peninsula with little idea of how to look after themselves. Briscall was soaked though on his second night in Portugal, and when he reached Lisbon he lamented that while ‘turning out into the street for a certain necessary purpose’ he had, in his ‘great bustle and confusion,’ availed himself of the paper in which he had wrapped a £20 note and the money had suffered a nameless fate. The average Oxbridge fellow or country curate was uncomfortable with soldiers, who came largely from a class with which most clergymen had little real contact. Briscall found attending executions a melancholy business, and another chaplain had to minister to five men who had deserted to the French and had been captured when Ciudad Rodrigo was stormed in 1812. Wellington pardoned others who could obtain ‘anything like a character’ from their former officers, but the unlucky five, all confirmed delinquents, were to be shot. They greeted their sentence with oaths and scorned the chaplain’s prayers. Two remained standing after the volley and had their brains blown out by the provost-marshal: it was enough to shock hardened campaigners, let alone a gently-bred chaplain.
Nor was it necessarily easier for chaplains to strike the right balance with officers, their natural associates. If they slipped too comfortably into the happy-go-lucky life of an officers’ mess on campaign, with its sporting dogs, heavy drinking, and bawdy songs, they were accused of failing to practise what they preached. But when the Reverend George Watson persuaded some officers not to attend a ball at Tarbes in May 1814 ‘as it would be an unjustifiable breach of the sabbath’ we may doubt whether his propriety was widely applauded by the revellers.25
Post-Waterloo retrenchment hit the Chaplains’ Department just as hard as the rest of the army. In 1
829 the post of chaplain general was downgraded to principal chaplain, and by 1844 there were only four staff chaplains still serving, with most of the work in garrisons carried out by civilian officiating chaplains. After much squabbling it was agreed that Presbyterian ministers could act as officiating ministers outside Scotland, and in the 1830s discretionary payments to Roman Catholic priests (made briefly, during the Napoleonic wars, to priests ministering to Irish militia stationed in England) were resumed. Given the scale of the Scots and Irish contribution to the army’s manpower, both measures were long overdue.
Because of the importance of the regiment in the army’s structure, and the sharp differences between regiments, even of the same arm of service, it would have been surprising had religion not contributed to the complex cultural mix. Although regiments did not always draw their men largely from their theoretical recruiting areas, not least because of the wide distribution of Irishmen across the redcoat army and the presence of some Scots Catholics in Highland regiments, the authorities’ growing identification of Scots regiments as predominantly Presbyterian, and Irish regiments as predominantly Catholic, ‘was not only administratively convenient but it invariably struck deep roots in the culture of these regiments’.26
The 93rd Foot, later the Sutherland Highlanders, was raised in 1800 almost entirely from highlanders, and in 1811 numbered over a thousand Scots with just forty English or Irish soldiers. Most of its men were Presbyterian, and its earnest religiosity (it had over 700 communicants in Canada in the 1840s) and high standard of discipline made it wholly remarkable. Most troops embarking for the Crimea were confined to barracks on the night before their departure to prevent last-minute desertions. In contrast, the men of the 93rd were allowed out, and every one of them was in his place the following day. When the 93rd was about to go into action at Lucknow one soldier swore so horribly that an officer was about to send him to the rear, though the curses would not have aroused such concern elsewhere. However, an old sergeant advised the officer to let things be, as the man was fey, doomed to die, and was not to blame for his words; sure enough, he was killed almost immediately. There were certainly some Roman Catholics in the 93rd, for in 1835 a regimental standing order decreed that an officer was to accompany them to church and remain there throughout the service. Officers were to see that no treason was preached from the pulpit, for
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