Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  The other British rifle regiment, perversely styled the Rifle Brigade, had a parallel line of development, beginning as the Experimental Corps of Riflemen at Shorncliffe in 1800 and taking its place in the line as the 95th three years later. In 1966 it too became part of the Royal Green Jackets, themselves swept up in another major amalgamation in 2007 into The Rifles. The new regiment’s German ancestry may be long forgotten, but the red facings worn by its buglers in their green full dress is an echo of the old 60th, and somewhere the shades of a moustachioed Croat may be smiling wistfully at their busbies.

  It would scarcely have been possible for Britain to have fought the Revolutionary War without the use of Germans, just as foreign troops in British pay had played such a fundamental part in the army commanded by the Duke of Marlborough: slightly more Danish than British soldiers were killed at Blenheim in 1704. Often, in addition to paying for foreign auxiliaries that came directly under her command, Britain gave subsidies to friendly powers to help them fight a common enemy on the continent. Indeed, it was precisely by adopting arrangements like this that Britain was able to avoid conscription for so long. Moreover, it is impossible to consider Britain’s imperial achievement without reflecting on the indispensable contribution made by locally recruited forces of which the Indian Army is the most notable example.

  Sometimes foreign units were not auxiliaries at all, but were actually embodied within the army’s structure. Britain’s forces in the first Gulf War in 1990 were commanded by General Sir Peter de la Cour de la Billière, whose name gives a clue to his origins. Even before Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had given freedom of worship to his Protestant subjects, some Huguenots had seen the way the wind was blowing and departed abroad. After the Revocation over a quarter of a million Huguenots fled abroad, where there were already Huguenot communities in England and elsewhere. Early on around 175,000 Huguenots left, with more following as Louis’ cruel policies of enforced conversion took hold. Many had already served as officers or soldiers in the French army; the most senior of the exiles was the Duke of Schomberg, Marshal of France. Even those without prior military experience were tempted to join the armies of those states at war with France. William of Orange was especially eager to encourage Huguenots and there were some Huguenots in the army that invaded England in 1688. As soon as William was secure, he raised four wholly Huguenot regiments, three of infantry and one of cavalry. In 1690, shortly before the Battle of the Boyne, where Schomberg was killed, they contained some 2,600 officers and men.

  By the time that the Treaty of Ryswick ended the war against France in 1697 there were over 4,000 Huguenots serving in the British army, and William was reluctant to disband them largely because he could not afford to pay off their arrears. As they were now largely ‘landless refugees and exiles’ William knew that they were ‘the easiest of his soldiers to whom he could delay payment’, and packed them off to Portugal.7 Many of them subsequently fought in the Iberian peninsula during the War of Spanish Succession, and at least one wholly Huguenot regiment was raised in Portugal. Major General Theodore Vezey’s 40th Foot came into being in 1708, with Simeon Descury as its lieutenant colonel. A list of its officers suggests that all but one (Charles Keightley, the quartermaster) were Huguenot, with nineteen of them still awaiting naturalisation as British subjects. The regiment was reduced in 1712, but was called out from half-pay in 1715 and 1718.8

  The 40th eventually came under the command of one of the most distinguished of the Huguenot exiles, Henri de Massue, Marquis de Ruvigny, created Viscount Galway in 1692 for his services in Ireland and advanced to an earldom in 1697. He had effectively been William’s viceroy in Ireland and was in retirement when sent to the Peninsula in 1704. On 25 April 1707 he attacked a superior force commanded by the Duke of Berwick, one of James II’s illegitimate sons, at Almanza, near Albacete. Galway, who had already lost a hand in battle, was cut across the head while leading a cavalry charge, and his Portuguese horse broke down under Berwick’s counter-attack. Galway was roundly defeated, losing some 5,000 men killed or wounded, and another 12,000 captured. Almanza – every quiz-master’s favourite battle, for the British army was commanded by a Frenchman and the French by an Englishman – marked the collapse of Allied fortunes in Spain, and many of those killed there were Huguenot.

  The remaining Huguenot regiments were disbanded after the Treaty of Utrecht ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, and no new regiments were raised subsequently. Huguenots, by now spread across the wider army, continued to play a notable part in British military history. In the 1740 Army List forty-nine out of fifty-seven English regiments, and eleven out of twenty Irish regiments contained at least one officer of Huguenot descent – all of them directly connected to officers who had served under William of Orange. The Huguenot military tradition is exemplified by the descendants of Samuel de Pechels, Seigneur de La Boissonade. Pechels, his family typical of the petite noblesse that produced so many French officers across the generations, hailed from Montauban in France’s Protestant heartland, and had been imprisoned and then deported to San Domingo when he refused to abjure. He escaped to England, took service with William in the Netherlands, and was pensioned in 1692 after being wounded as a captain in Schomberg’s Horse. His son Jacob received a captain’s commission in Stanhope’s regiment in 1707, was a major in Handasyde’s in 1737, its lieutenant colonel two years later, and a colonel the following year. Jacob de Pechels married Jeanne Elizabeth Boyd, daughter of Jean Boyd of Bordeaux, a Scottish merchant. Their son, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Paul Pechel, created a baronet in 1797, was the father of Major General Sir Thomas Brooke Pechel, who in turn sired Rear-Admiral Sir Samuel Pechel and Admiral Sir George Richard Brooke Pechel.9

  It is hard to overstate the importance of Huguenots in the British army of the early eighteenth century. Their doyen was Field Marshal Jean Louis, Earl Ligonier, born to a Huguenot family at Castres in 1680, who was engaged in nearly every important action in the War of Spanish Succession. This included the shockingly bloody battle of Malplaquet, where he was unhurt despite receiving twenty-three bullets through his clothing. George II knighted him on the field of Dettingen, and in 1757 he replaced the Duke of Cumberland as commander-in-chief of the army. A baron in 1763 and an earl three years later, he died unmarried at the age of 89, leaving behind a harem of young girls. One of his brothers was killed in action and the other, Edward, also an army officer, succeeded to his viscountcy. Although the earldom was revived for Edward, he died without issue after a messy divorce in which his wife Penelope was found to have had an affair with the Piedmontese Count Vittorio Alfieri.

  Huguenot names ripple like an alphabetical feu de joie through the Army Lists of the eighteenth century and beyond. Major John André was hanged in North America in 1780; Isaac Barré was Wolfe’s adjutant general at Quebec in 1759; Jean Antoine de Bernières’ son became a captain in the 30th Foot; and both grandson and great-grandson were major generals. The Champion de Crespigny family spread out to Australia, with H. V. Champion de Crespigny returning to command fighter squadrons on the Western Front, and then serve as an air vice marshal in the Second World War. Colonel Scipio Duroure was killed at Fontenoy. At the far end of the line, James Villettes soldiered on from ensign to captain in the 10th Foot. William Anne Villettes, perhaps his nephew, was commissioned into the 10th Light Dragoons in 1775, commanded the 69th Foot during the siege of Toulon, and was described by Nelson as ‘a most excellent officer’. He became a general, died of yellow fever (no respecter of rank or ancestry) while serving as lieutenant governor and commander of the forces in Jamaica and is commemorated in Westminster Abbey. Henry Clinton Villettes was named for General Sir Henry Clinton for reasons that remain obscure, and enjoyed a comfortable career in the Household Cavalry, retiring as a captain in the Life Guards in 1789.

  The visible Huguenot impact would be even greater but for the fact that names were often anglicised: Bourgeois became Burgess, Boileau de Castelnau simplified to Boil
eau, and de Foix to Defoe. The actor David Garrick’s father was a captain in the Buffs, and his grandfather had changed the family name from de la Garrigue. Some Huguenot officers tried hard to preserve their ancestral names and seigneurial pretensions. In 1697 Colonel Chalant de Romaignac optimistically bequeathed his fief in Burgundy to his grandson Charles Pierre d’Arassus with the stipulation that he should take the name and arms of Romaignac, but soon his soldier grandsons were spelling their name Darassus, and Burgundy was a forgotten dream. Over time the Huguenots integrated, and ‘by the turn of the nineteenth century their manners, speech and appearance were indistinguishable from that of their brother officers. Only their names continued to remind them of their origins in France.’10

  By this time there were a good many more French names in the Army List and on regimental muster-rolls. From 1789 French opponents of the Revolution had begun to flee abroad, and by 1793 perhaps a quarter of a million French subjects had become émigrés. Some had already been officers or soldiers. Indeed, one of the reasons for the relatively large artillery of the new republic’s armies was the fact that, with a smaller proportion of officers from the old nobility, it had been less damaged by emigration than the infantry and cavalry. Although the British government was at first uncertain about the émigrés, it soon identified them as a source of manpower. In 1794 parliament passed a bill ‘to enable subjects of France to enlist as soldiers’ or to accept commissions without suffering ‘pain and penalty’ for ‘professing the Popish religion’.

  When the first phase of the long war against France concluded with the signing of the Peace of Amiens in 1802 there were some 17,000 foreign troops in the British army, constituting about 11 per cent of its total manpower. A few were ‘white cockade’ regiments, who wore the Bourbons’ white cockade on their hats rather than the black British equivalent, like Castries’ Regiment and the Choiseul Hussars, officered and manned by royalist Frenchmen. There were six ‘cadre corps’, all made up of former French officers who were to regain their commissions to command insurgents in the event of a landing in France. Each of the infantry cadres consisted of 319 gentlemen, each enjoying double rank. The captains commanding companies would be colonels in France, the corporals would be captains and the privates would become ensigns. Dozens of other units flickered into life and often flickered out again as suddenly, with Ceylon Regiments, Corsican Chasseurs, Hector’s Royal Marine, Hompesch’s Mounted Rifles, the Maltese Chasseurs, and Waldstein’s Light Infantry. Not all attempts at securing foreign troops worked. In 1799 William Villettes was sent to Corfu to raise a corps of Albanians, but the project foundered.

  Some units did well, such as the Corsican Rangers, who looked rather like a British rifle regiment with slightly swarthier soldiers, and fought bravely in Egypt in 1801. The York Rangers, mostly Germans with some Franco-Irish officers, earned distinction in Flanders and Holland in 1793–5 and its survivors finished up being incorporated into the 60th Foot in 1797. Others never amounted to much. The ‘white cockade’ regiment mustered by Comte Charles du Houx de Vioménil in 1794 could only boast 266 men in 1795, and was promptly disbanded. Still others were brave but unlucky. The Comte d’Hervilly’s regiment, recruited up to 900 officers and men from émigrés, Germans, and some prisoners of war, took part in an ill-starred expedition to Brittany in 1795. It fought well at first, but some deserters guided republican troops into its position and the regiment eventually collapsed, only 30 officers and 177 men escaping. The 22 captured officers were promptly executed as traitors taken in arms against the republic, and d’Hervilly himself died of wounds.

  Of the many foreign units raised between 1793 and 1802 most were disbanded after the Peace of Amiens. It was, after all, axiomatic that the army was reduced on the outbreak of peace, and foreign units had the most slender claim to national gratitude. When war resumed in 1803 the process of raising foreign units began again. This time there were far fewer émigré regiments, with French officers being scattered more widely across the board, and the main emphasis was on red-coated infantry rather than dressy but under-recruited cavalry units. Some contingents, like those raised in Calabria, Sicily, Malta, and Greece were at least partly officered and manned by patriots who hoped not simply to expel the French from their homeland but to influence post-war politics too. The most striking of the foreign corps was the Greek Light Infantry, whose members sported the engaging combination of short red jackets and the white fustanella kilt. The men warmed to their standard-issue British muskets, but although they were meant to have pistols too the men were believed to be rather volatile and it was ‘thought prudent’ not to issue the weapons.

  A few units looked and behaved much like regiments of the British line. Watteville’s Regiment was raised in 1801 from other Swiss regiments in British pay. It was part of Sir John Stuart’s little force that trounced General Reynier at Maida in Calabria in 1806, in a crisp demonstration of the efficacy of close-range volleys. After seeing further service in southern Italy and Spain, Watteville’s was sent to Canada, where it was roughly handled in the siege of Fort Erie, losing 278 of its soldiers. It was disbanded in Canada in 1816 and although they were offered land grants to stay on as settlers, most officers and men decided to return to Europe.11

  Most foreign units fought at the war’s periphery. The Chasseurs Britanniques, however, formed part of Wellington’s Peninsular army. The regiment had been raised in western Austria in 1801 from a mixture of émigrés, and was sent to the Mediterranean almost immediately. In late 1810 it was dispatched to Cadiz, and soon sailed thence to Lisbon, moving up to join Wellington’s field army. In his dispatch for Fuentes de Oñoro in May 1811 Wellington noted approvingly, ‘I particularly observed the Chasseurs Britanniques under Lieutenant-Colonel Eustace as behaving in the most steady manner.’12 The regiment was arguably less steady in the attack on Fort San Cristobal at Badajoz the following month, with Lieutenant William Grattan of the Connaught Rangers maintaining that the party of Chasseurs carrying the scaling ladders had simply slung them into the fort’s ditch. In July 1812 the regiment, as William Wheeler put it, ‘dropped for it pretty tidy’ at the Battle of Salamanca, advancing in the centre of its brigade under a heavy fire, though it lost only fifteen officers and men killed and wounded and another fourteen missing. In June 1813 it was the hardest-hit unit in its brigade at Vittoria, with 140 killed and wounded. It lost another 45 officers and men at Sorauren in the Pyrenees that July, and another 72 on the Bidassoa in August. The regiment was disbanded from the Foreign Depot at Lymington in Hampshire.

  Although administratively the Chasseurs Britanniques behaved like an infantry regiment of the line, it retained strong links to émigré families in north-eastern France. Most of the first batch of officers had served in the French royal army, and many of the young officers commissioned to make good losses in the Peninsula came from the French school at Penn in Buckinghamshire. There were also a few British officers. Some, like William Cornwallis Eustace, who purchased the lieutenant colonelcy in 1810 and commanded the regiment for much of its time in the Peninsula, were long-term members: he was swept onwards by the inexorable laws of seniority and died a general in 1835. Others simply used the regiment for bureaucratic convenience. Robert Arbuthnot exchanged into it as a captain from the 20th Light Dragoons in March 1809 and departed as an unattached major the following month. The Hon John O’Neill, promoted as a lieutenant colonel in April 1808, never actually joined, but left for his former regiment two years later.

  Most French officers were commissioned and promoted without purchase, and a free commission in the regiment was a typical reward for a young man who, like Edward Richard Dalton, appointed ensign in 1812, was worthy of an ensigncy but could not generate sufficient interest to gain one in a British regiment. Dalton went on to half-pay when the regiment was disbanded and died in Brighton in 1877. NCOs were sometimes commissioned, just as they would have been in the British army proper. Both Antoine Servais and Francis Kander rose through the ranks to become serge
ant major and were alike commissioned. Désiré Lernon, a native of Marcoing, was appointed quartermaster sergeant in 1809. He married the daughter of Jean Frédéric Wolf, sometime bandmaster of the Ancien Régime’s Dragons de la Reine (Queen’s Own Dragoons) and Lisbon-based composer-musician, and joined the Chasseurs when the regiment broke its voyage from Jersey to Malta in 1804. Lernon was commissioned in 1811, but died of sickness less than two years later. Pietro Santocolumbo, not a common name in the Army List, had served in the Calabrian Free Corps and was given his ensigncy as a reward for recruiting. Wounded at Sorauren, he retired when the regiment was disbanded and enjoyed half-pay at Milazzo in Sicily till he died in 1852.

  The officers evidently spoke French amongst themselves. In August 1813 when Lieutenant William Thornton Keep of the 28th Foot, thoroughly exhausted, and drenched with sweat and rain, saw a convenient campfire on the heights above Maya he crawled towards it in the hope of drying out. He was not alone, for a

  group of finer officers, about twenty, I never saw. They were attired in handsome uniform, and appeared quite unfatigued. At first the extreme exhaustion of my bodily powers led me to suppose my mind was disordered, and that this was a mere fantasy … My companions were all French … our bugle sounded, which gave me strength to jump up. I rushed to the tree from whence I had proceeded … [and] met my sergeant, of whom I immediately learnt that these were the Chasseurs Britanniques …13

  The regiment’s soldiers were a mixed bag. In its earliest days a majority of French, Germans, and Swiss served in its ranks. After Maida, Poles became the largest single nationality, and they were joined by other Eastern Europeans, notably Hungarians and Austrians, many of whom had served in the French army. There were always several Russians, rather more Italians, and even the occasional American. Amongst the casualties at Fuentes were the Polish Private Nicolas Yetchinchen, ‘supposed dead’, the German Private Conrad Shybell, who had a leg amputated, and Private Casimir Seresniack, another Pole, who was left wounded in the field and escaped from French captivity to turn up of his own free will at the Foreign Depot at Lymington over a year later. The authorities evidently believed him, for he received his arrears of pay.14 Even the regiment’s warmest advocate, however, cannot deny that its men deserted on an almost migratory scale, with 224 making off in 1813 alone. Wellington attributed the ‘disposition of all foreign recruits to desert from our armies to the regularity of system and to the strictness of discipline which exist, and which must be upheld, in order to keep a British army in the field in a state of efficiency for any length of time’.15 Yet despite the fact that so many soldiers had already deserted from other armies, throughout the regiment’s history only two faced general courts martial for crimes other than desertion. In 1809 Private Bernard Durcurzel was sentenced to death for theft from an officer and desertion ‘towards the enemy’. He was reprieved and sent off to serve in the Royal African Corps. In 1813 Corporal Francis Oddo was tried for stealing two mules from officers and selling them to Spanish civilians. He was acquitted on one count but found guilty on the other, and was sentenced to lose his two stripes and get 500 of another sort.