The Redcoat and Religion

The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War

Michael Snape

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136007422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This compelling study presents the most comprehensive examination available of the role of religion in the army during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Through extensive analysis of official military sources, religious publications and personal memoirs, Michael Snape challenges the widely-held assumption that religion did not play a role in the British Army until the mid-Victorian period, and demonstrates that the British soldier was highly susceptible to religious influences long before the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny rendered the subject of wider public concern.

In The Redcoat and Religion Snape argues that religion was of significant, even defining, importance to the British soldier and reveals the enduring strength and vitality of religion in contemporary British society, challenging the view that the popular religious culture of the era was wholly dependent upon the presence and activities of women.

Students of British history, military history, and religion will all find this an insightful resource for their studies.

Chapter 1

THE SOLDIER, RELIGION AND THE RISE OF METHODISM, 1702–93

The army and society

DESPITE ITS VICTORIES under the Duke of Marlborough, the British army did not find itself a popular institution after the Treaty of Utrecht brought Britain’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession to an end in 1713. Although relieved of meeting the costs of hugely inflated Army and Ordnance votes, the British public felt little affection for their country’s standing army, however many laurels it may have won. The problem, of course, was not simply a fiscal one. For the half century following 1714, Britain’s standing army was the armed guarantor of the Hanoverian succession and, until well into the nineteenth century, it was regarded as the government’s ultimate means of suppressing civilian unrest at home. If this dual role was unpopular enough, the army also lived in the long and uncomfortable shadow of the constitutional upheavals of the seventeenth century, the army having served as an instrument of tyranny under Oliver Cromwell and James II. In fact, its potential to become once again a bulwark for despotism was regarded as the greatest risk in maintaining a standing army, a conviction which inflamed annual parliamentary debates over the army estimates and the Mutiny Act.¹ In the eyes of Tories and of many Country Whigs, the army’s despotic nature inhered in the draconian system of military justice which the Mutiny Act sanctioned, a system which was viewed as prejudicial to the liberties of an Englishman. Because of these suspicions, the size of the army was a highly sensitive issue in British politics, a factor which helped to keep it small by the standards of other European powers.² In the relatively peaceful years of 1715–39, the British army numbered on average only 35,000 men, a size which rendered it comparable to the army of the distinctly second-rate kingdom of Sardinia.³ Even at a local level, the army was subject to firm civilian control and supervision. Soldiers were largely accountable to the civil law and civilian magistrates not only directed the deployment of troops in times of civil emergency but also regulated the army’s ordinary billeting and recruitment procedures.⁴

Despite its unpopularity, the British army served as an important integrative force for the disparate peoples of the British Isles during the period 1688–1815, decades so dominated by war with France that the period has even been dubbed the ‘Second Hundred Years War’.⁵ For the less affluent Scottish and Irish gentry in particular, the importance of the army was immense. By the 1740s, a third of army officers were of Scottish or Irish extraction. By the time of the American War of Independence, the Scots and the Irish had come to predominate, 27 per cent of all officers being Scottish and 31 per cent Irish.⁶ This ethnic diversity was also apparent among the rank and file, although here the English (and Welsh) remained in a majority. In the mid-1770s, they comprised approximately 60 per cent of the army’s NCOs and private soldiers, 24 per cent being Scottish and the remaining 16 per cent Irish.⁷ The army was, indeed, very much aware of its own ethnic diversity, its regiments routinely honouring the saints’ days of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.⁸ In Gibraltar in 1727 one observer noted how, on St Andrew’s Day:

a Scottish gentleman, bearing the dignity of a serjeant, dressed in Highland manner … made his appearance before Lord Portmore [the Governor] and had the liberty to have the bagpipes to attend him and his retinue in honour of the day. But some unlucky Welch wags, envying the gallantry of Sawney, dug a hole in a part of the town which covered the common sewer, which bonny Jocky had the good luck to descend into and marred his plaid and bonnet. This unlooked for accident spoiled the evening’s illuminations.⁹

In a happier vein, the lonely garrison of Annapolis, Nova Scotia, marked St Patrick’s Day 1758 ‘with great chearfulness and good humour; the colours were hoisted, and the soldiers, natives of Ireland, had one shilling each advanced to them, the British taking the guards for them, as is alternately practised on these festivals’.¹⁰

However, in view of the political tensions of the age, the diversity of the army also had more serious implications and considerable attention was devoted to monitoring the national profile of the army’s constituent regiments.¹¹ The potential for conflicts of loyalty was vividly illustrated in December 1745, when Adam Ferguson, the regimental chaplain of the Black Watch (then Murray’s Highlanders), preached a sermon in Gaelic to the officers and men of the regiment which was encamped at Camberwell awaiting the Jacobite descent upon London. Taking as his text 2 Sam. 10: 12, ‘Be of good Courage, and let us play the Men for our People, and for the Cities of our God’, Ferguson reminded these Highlanders (whose reliability appears to have been seriously in doubt)¹² of their duty to the Hanoverian regime: ‘Remember’, he admonished, ‘you are Men sworn to defend your Country … If you oppose your Acquaintances, it is to prevent their Ruin: If you oppose your Relations, it is to save them and their Posterity from Slavery for ever’.¹³ If the existence of the Jacobite menace gave rise to well-grounded suspicions as to the loyalty of its Highland soldiers, relations between the army’s national groups were not always amicable either, a situation which reflected broader ethnic tensions in eighteenth-century British society.¹⁴ At Inverness in 1746, for example, fighting broke out between English and Scottish soldiers after the execution of a Scottish-born rebel and deserter from the government army, a quarrel which was only brought to an end through the personal intervention of the Duke of Cumberland.¹⁵

The army and religion

Given the religious geography of the new United Kingdom of England and Scotland, and the existence of established Episcopal and Presbyterian churches on either side of the Scottish border, the army’s ethnic diversity almost demanded a pragmatic spirit of religious tolerance among army officers. Many officers deliberately sought to avoid controversy by attending the established church of the kingdom in which they were stationed. Thus, James Wolfe, the future hero of Quebec, attended Church of Scotland services while in Edinburgh during the late 1740s, concluding from this experience that ‘the generality of Scotch preachers’ were ‘excessive blockheads … truly and obstinately dull’.¹⁶ However, by the 1770s it also appears to have been common practice to allow Protestant Dissenters the ‘reasonable privilege’ of attending their own places of worship when the opportunity arose, these soldiers being paraded separately for church on the Sabbath.¹⁷ Such latitude in religious matters was not always welcome, however, and was viewed as pernicious by certain parties. During the Seven Years War, William Agar, the Anglican regimental chaplain of the 20th Regiment, remonstrated with its officers for attitudes and behaviour which defied the terms of the English Test Act of 1673. However, by this time the religious tests imposed by this Act were largely unenforceable in a military context. Besides the passage of recurrent Indemnity Acts (which extended the period by which officers were required to receive communion in an Anglican church, make the declaration against transubstantiation and swear the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to the crown), nobody was actually directed by the Test Act to ensure that its terms were met.¹⁸ As J.R. Western observed, the system ‘almost invited slackness’ and it is likely that many officers ignored it altogether. Certainly, this appears to have been the case in the 20th Regiment, as Agar was at pains to point out:

[We are] obliged to take the Test or Sacrament six Months after we receive our Commission, or else be void. And sorry I am to find this very often neglected, that many of our younger Officers at least never received the Sacrament at all; a matter worthy [of] Attention …¹⁹

In this respect, Agar was no doubt challenging systematic abuses as well as simple neglect. The career of Samuel Bagshawe, a well-connected English Presbyterian, shows that he was able to obtain successive commissions in infantry regiments on the Irish establishment in the 1740s notwithstanding his known Dissenting sympathies.²⁰

Besides encouraging a certain forbearance among Protestants, military service even became a means of redemption for British Catholics as well.²¹ In theory, Catholics were debarred by the English, Scottish and Irish Test Acts from serving as army officers. Furthermore, throughout this period it was also incumbent upon English and Scottish recruits to attest their Protestantism on enlistment. However, as early as the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession, offers were being made to British Catholic officers then serving the French and Spanish Bourbons to defect in exchange for commissions in the armies of Britain’s Catholic allies or in auxiliary regiments maintained by Britain.²² Quite apart from these enticements to Catholic gentlemen, the evidence would suggest that, from as early as the 1740s, plebeian Irish Catholics were being widely (if illegally) recruited into marine and colonial regiments as well as into regiments on the Irish establishment.²³ One reason which has been advanced for the flight of Colonel James Gardiner’s regiment of dragoons at Prestonpans was that it had been stationed in Ireland until 1743 and its Catholic troopers had no stomach for closing with the Jacobite rebels.²⁴ A chronic shortage of manpower ensured that, during the Seven Years War, large numbers of Irish and even Scottish Catholics were present in the ranks and an Irish deserter who was executed in 1756 was suspected of being a Catholic priest.²⁵ However irregular this situation may have been, the introduction of a new oath of allegiance by the Dublin parliament in 1774 eased and extended the recruitment of Catholics in Ireland and, in its wake, the impoverished Irish quarters of London became rich recruiting grounds for the army.²⁶ Given the manpower requirements of the Seven Years War, leading Catholics came to view soldiering for the British state as an ideal means of demonstrating Catholic loyalty and of obtaining legislative relief from the penal laws. In 1762, two Irish Catholic peers proposed that the Irish parliament authorise the raising of a ‘Roman Legion’ of several regiments of Catholics for service in Portugal.²⁷ Although this idea came to nothing, by the outbreak of the American War of Independence, Irish Catholics were being recruited in ever-increasing numbers and even Catholic gentlemen could obtain commissions by this time, a subterfuge which relied on their own discretion and on the connivance of their fellow officers.²⁸

However, the British army of the eighteenth century was in theory – and to a certain extent in practice – a Protestant institution. Notwithstanding a ban dating from 1701 on the recruitment of Irish Protestants (one which was born of a prudent desire to safeguard Protestant numbers in Ireland) this ban was repeatedly waived prior to 1774 in order to avert the still less desirable expedient of recruiting Irish Catholics.²⁹ Indeed, and despite the abandonment of this position, the army was still sufficiently identified with Protestant exclusivism for the Catholic Bishop of Cashel to brand the wearing of a red coat ‘a badge of Protestantism’ as late as 1781.³⁰ Given the Catholicism of the French, the Spanish and the exiled House of Stuart, British soldiers could express strong anti-Catholic sentiments and the army could even attract some Protestant zealots into its ranks. Following the capture of Gibraltar in 1704, Catholic shrines were systematically plundered and, during the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745–6, Catholics in England and Scotland fell victim to sustained military harassment. In North America during the Seven Years War, British soldiers widely detested French missionary priests as leaders of Canadian and Indian resistance.³¹ By this time (and no doubt encouraged by Britain’s alliance with Protestant Prussia against Catholic France and Austria) some militant Protestants were enlisting in order to lend a hand in the far- flung battle against popery. Partly because of his loathing of Rome, the Welsh revivalist, Howell Harris, joined the Breconshire Militia in 1759. In the same year, one of his confederates wrote to Harris from Canada, speaking of a personal ‘longing to give a blow to Popery’.³² Even during the American War of Independence, when the army’s most implacable foes were rebellious Protestant colonists (and when the Protestant character of the army was being diluted by the large-scale recruitment of Irish Catholics) an anti-Catholic animus could still surface in certain quarters. Some delinquent soldiers who were tried following the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780 pleaded in their defence that they had loyally served their cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Soldier, Religion and the Rise of Methodism, 1702–93
• 2. The Soldier and Society, 1793–1914
• 3. The Churches and the Soldier, 1793–1914
• 4. The Soldier and the Churches, 1793–1914
• 5. Religion and the British Military Experience, 1793–1914
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index