Carole Divall - Redcoats Against Napoleon: The 30th Regiment During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Contents

List of Maps

List of Illustrations

General Thomas Graham, engraved for The Military Chronicle, 1811.

A view of Sabugal, drawn by Lieutenant Colonel Leith Hay.

A view of Guarda, drawn by Lieutenant Colonel Leith Hay.

The escalade of San Vincente, Badajoz, by the 2/30th.

Major George Grey, 30th Regiment.

A view of Salamanca, drawn by Lieutenant Colonel Leith Hay.

The French Eagle captured at Salamanca.

The bridge at Villamuriel showing the high ground to the west.

Quatre Bras, drawn by Craan.

La Haie Sainte, drawn by Craan.

The battlefield at Waterloo, from the south, with La Haie Sainte, drawn by Craan.

Captain Thomas Walker Chambers, 30th Regiment.

The Scotton Waterloo medal.

Preface

In the autumn of 1787 a 16-year-old ensign, Alexander Hamilton, joined the 30th Regiment of the Line (the Cambridgeshire). He retired forty years later as lieutenant colonel of the same regiment. In between lay one of the most cataclysmic periods of European history which embraced the French Revolution and the subsequent Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Hamilton had been born into a Britain predominantly rural. Industrial processes were only just beginning to transform the structure of a largely agricultural economy. Britain was acquiring an empire and still held the most important of its colonies, the seaboard states of North America; but was intermittently at war with its traditional enemy, France. When he died in 1838 he left a world essentially global in which Britain was the principal player, a world where technology and ideology were undermining the certainties of life at a bewildering rate. The ancients regimes of the eighteenth century were no more. The proletariat was stirring; democracy was the new watchword; Europe and the world were set on irresistible change.

The young Hamilton was typical of his time and his class. He had actually been commissioned in 1784, aged 13, as an ensign in the 84th Foot, although it is unlikely that he ever served with this regiment. Indeed, his obituary makes no reference to this connection, although Hamilton himself mentioned it in his record of service. But it was normal practice in the eighteenth century for the sons of the gentry to receive commissions long before they were able to perform the duties of an officer. Hamilton was the grandson of a Scottish landowner, and the great-grandson of the second Marquis of Lothian. This gave him a social status he shared with many of the officers of the British army before war and expansion led to the admission of the sons of the rising middle classes.

His arrival in 1787 was not coincidental, since an order of that year ordered the augmentation of the 30th Foot, so that each of the eight companies shall be forthwith augmented by adding One Sergeant One Drummer and Fourteen Private Men, as also that Two Companies each to consist of One Captain One Lieut. One Ensign Three Sergeants Three Corporals Two Drummers and Fifty-six Private Men, and also One other Company to consist of One Captain One Lieutenant One Ensign Eight Sergeants Eight Corporals Four Drummers and Thirty Private Men shall be added to Our said Regiment. An expanding regiment was a good place for a young man to begin his military career, although it is unlikely that Hamilton realised at the time that forty years later he would still be serving with the same corps, having seen action in France, Iberia, two islands of the Mediterranean, Egypt and India, on land and at sea.

His experience was the experience of the regiment, and it is his and their story which will be narrated in this work. Theirs was a workaday existence. They were not one of the crack regiments like the Guards or those of the Light Division. They do not live on in a host of letters and journals. Yet their experiences through the turbulent twenty-six years which began with the storming of the Bastille and ended at Waterloo were shared by many of the regiments which made up the British army of that time. Nor were such regiments incapable of inspiring the devoted loyalty of those who served with them. Writing in 1817, at a point when the Napoleonic crisis was over and the army was being reduced by the disbanding of many second battalions, Lieutenant Edward Neville Macready maintained that the junior battalion of the 30th This brave corps will be remembered as long as the names of Fuentes dOnor, Badajoz, Salamanca, Muriel, Quatrebras and Waterloo are emblazoned on the pages of British achievement.