Given that between 10 and 15% of the British officer corps of the Napoleonic period came from this source, and many more were from not much different stock, I doubt that many of the officers of the time drawn from other social strata, actually did either. I do rather think that Cornwell has found his "real enemy" (much like Dickie "Darling" Attenborough did in "A Bridge Too Far" - hint: it's NOT the Germans, no more clues.....) and has milked it for all it's worth, pandering to modern sensibilities with regard to "social injustice" and upper class twittery. It's one of the reasons I don't like him.
What is your source for the 10 to 15%?
I was just reading this study, where the number suggested was more like 4-5%. Granted accurately determining the percentage is quite difficult.
https://eprints.utas.edu.au/23780/See page 19.
And
“The ambiguous relationship between gentility and commissions is further highlighted in the case of officers who were promoted from the ranks. This group was a minority and comprised only five-and-a-half per cent of new officers in 1809, with most of these commissions awarded for either long service, or individual acts of merit.26 (Glover, Wellington’s Army, pp. 38-9.)”
And
“ Few officers, only five-and-a-half per cent during the Peninsular War, had been commissioned from the ranks.45 ”
45 Michael Glover, ‘Purchase, Patronage and Promotion in the Army at the Time of the Peninsular War’, Army Quarterly and Defence Journal, 2 (1973), p. 213.
As an American former US Infantry NCO that spent 4 months on exchange with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and about a decade with North Wales Police as a Constable perhaps I enjoy Sharpe, particularly the Sean Bean portrayal in the TV shows because I can empathize with his situation. Perhaps it is pandering to modern views.
However, I have yet to see evidence to indicate that social issues brought up in the books and tv shows did not exist.
There are awkward people of all social classes in the books and tv shows. Social class in them, just as in my experiences in real life, do not determine the merits of a person.
It was made sharply, pardon the pun, clear to me social class difference treatment in the US and UK militaries when I mistakenly sat at a breakfast table of officers in the British mess compared to the same treatment sitting with officers of the US mess.
But back to the historical context.
Again from the above linked document. Page 45, touching on the concept of “officer and gentlemen”.
“Officers drew distinctions between themselves and other officers, by either excluding others on social grounds, or by asserting cultural and social distinctions to create degrees of gentlemanliness. The late-Georgian officer corps was socially diverse; however, officers were largely drawn from social classes which could be broadly defined as ‘gentlemanly’. Furthermore, prospective officers also expressed the sentiments expected of ‘polite gentlemen’. George Hennell, then a volunteer with the 94th Foot who was waiting for a vacant commission, responded to the horrific 1812 storming of Badajoz using the language of sensibility to differentiate himself from the rankers he was serving alongside:
You can have no conception of the scene I witnessed, most of the soldiers drunk, staggering about with their plunder ... The want of reflection in numbers of the men surprised me. They were singing and swearing and talking of having a damned narrow escape while their comrades lay round them in heaps dead. It was horrible. It was a lesson for me that I did not let pass without taking a walk in the fields to reflect upon. I have an opportunity of doing this.
Hennell’s response mirrored that of officers who witnessed similar actions by the rank and file. As shown by Catriona Kennedy, by drawing on the language of sensibility and introspection, officers were engaged in ‘self-fashioning’ refined identities to differentiate themselves from the ‘coarse’ soldiery.
In relating his experience of the storming of Badajoz in this manner, therefore, Hennell was displaying his self-identification with polite, refined masculinity, even before he became a full officer.”
To me, the Sharpe books and TV series reflect this.
This section of the document relates to the point. Pages 48 to 50.
Wainwright’s and Gavin’s careers reflect the wider career trend of officers promoted from the ranks. Often ushered into the functional roles of adjutant or quarter-master, where practical experience as sergeants could be utilised, rankers promoted into these positions appear to have been broadly tolerated by their fellow subalterns, provided they exhibited proper ‘character’.31 Describing the deaths of officers of the 50th Foot in the Pyrenees in 1813, John Patterson praised an ensign who had been promoted from the ranks: ‘White had been for many years our Quarter Master Sergeant, and in consequence of his merit; he had lately been promoted in the regiment; he was a man advanced in life, and an excellent worthy character, esteemed by us all.’32 Lieutenant George Woodberry welcomed the arrival of a new adjutant to the 18th Hussars in
25 Lieutenant Charles Crowe, 2 Jun. 1813, in Crowe, An Eloquent Soldier, p. 81. 26 Glover, Wellington’s Army, pp. 38-9.
27 Kennedy, Narratives, pp. 22-3.
28 NAM 2007-10-15, David Wainwright, ‘Diary of Ensign David Wainwright’.
29 NAM 2007-10-15, Wainwright, ‘Diary of Ensign David Wainwright’.
30 William Gavin ‘The Diary of William Gavin: Ensign and Quarter-Master, 71st Highland Regiment, 1806-1815’, Highland Light Infantry Chronicle, ed. Charles Oman (1920-21).
31 Glover, Wellington’s Army, pp. 38-9; Brumwell, Redcoats, pp. 93-5.
32 John Patterson, The Adventures of Captain John Patterson: With Notices of the Officers &c. of the 50th, Or Queens’s Own Regiment (London, 1837), p. 327.
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1813: ‘Mr. Duperier, our new adjutant, arrived this morning. He was originally adjutant to the Tenth Hussars, and was before that a Private and rose thru merit. I can only account for the wretched insubordinate state of the Regiment to the want of a good adjutant. Reports speak highly of Mr. Duperier.’33
Concerns that men from the ranks had ‘unsuitable’ characters for holding a commission, however, had played no small role in excluding rankers from being promoted during the eighteenth century, and, as noted by Brumwell, rankers promoted to the position of quarter- master or adjutant still struggled to be accepted as ‘real’ officers or gentlemen by their peers.34 This continued into the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. William Grattan of the 88th Foot offered his opinion of the role of adjutant: ‘I always had, and have, an aversion to adjutants raised from the ranks. An adjutant is, properly speaking, the mouth-piece of his commanding officer, and should be a gentleman capable of writing a good official letter; and surely this cannot be expected or looked for in a man raised from the station of a private soldier.’35 A passing remark by William Tomkinson, then a lieutenant in the 16th Light Dragoons, suggests that even when former rankers were promoted to positions of relative significance, the social taint of having been with the ranks still remained. Describing officers in the army who actively sought to return home by faking illness in the wake of the failed 1812 siege of Burgos, Tomkinson pointedly noted that the single such officer from the 16th had once been a ranker: ‘Captain Macintosh (raised from the ranks), went before a medical board and got sick leave to England. He was much better than myself after he had passed the board.’36 Tomkinson’s insistence on mentioning Macintosh’s low origins in the context of perceived cowardice suggests that Tomkinson connected the two instances, with the underlying assumption that Macintosh’s social inferiority resulted in a deficiency of character.
Officers promoted from the ranks were also criticised on the grounds of brutishness. Crowe stated: ‘I must confess I generally found such men were the greatest tyrants in the services,’ and cited an anecdote of a colonel and former ranker, ‘an inhuman monster’, who punished a ranker for stealing a leg of mutton by imprisoning him in the ‘Black Hole’, with a leg of mutton suspended from a string above him.37 Undoubtedly, there was snobbishness and fear of social inversion inherent in the scepticism of volunteers and officers promoted from the ranks, and the propensity of officers to exclude individuals could only have reinforced a sense of individual
33 NAM 1968-07-267, Lieutenant George Woodberry, 25 Jul. 1813, ‘The Idle Companion of a Young Hussar in 1813’, p. 189.
34 Brumwell, Redcoats, pp. 93-5.
35 William Grattan, Adventures with the Connaught Rangers, from 1808 to 1814, Vol. I (London, 1847), p. 123. 36 William Tomkinson, The Diary of a Cavalry Officer in the Peninsular War and Waterloo Campaign, 1809- 1815, ed. James Tomkinson (London, 1895), p. 222.
37 Lieutenant Charles Crowe, 6 Dec. 1812, in Crowe, An Eloquent Soldier, p. 25.
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gentlemanliness. As will be explored more fully in Chapter Six, junior officers distinguished themselves from the ranks by virtue of their traditional social standing and elevated sensibilities. Implicit in this understanding of leadership was the belief that these were essential qualities, not only for having the personal ability to lead men competently, but to treat and direct their men in a humane manner, and emphasised the importance of affording social inferiors the benevolence expected from a gentleman. In the case of volunteers and men raised from the ranks, the association between common soldiering and brutishness could remove these justifications, weakening their claims to gentlemanliness and leadership. As the ambiguity, and even hostility, towards volunteers and rankers suggests, gentlemanliness was not inherent in the holding of a commission. Rather than viewing the connection between being an officer and gentlemanliness as a linear progression, therefore, it is more revealing to consider the relationship between the officer corps and gentlemanliness as one revolving around reputation. Maintaining the appearance and manners of a gentleman was central to fashioning a sense of gentlemanliness which was palatable to other officers.”
So as you can see, examples of tolerant and intolerant people. Yet clearly an acknowledgment of class being an issue for many. And rare individuals acting outside class norms or expectations.
I used the term mess earlier. I meant that in relation regular dining facility, the chow hall as we used to say in the US Army. Not to be confused with the British regimental mess which is something different. Again, a surprising wake up call as a young American soldier trying to learn British military customs and culture… often getting it wrong as Sharpe does.
From page 50 the author talks about the egalitarianism of British Officers Regimental Mess but that same egalitarianism is for officers only and with an expectation of gentlemanly behavior. Again, Sharpe as his lack of gentlemanly upbringing seems historically accurate to me from evidence presented by the writings of contemporary officers.
Harking back to the earlier criticism noted of officers from the ranks of tyranny and cruelty, this section talk about the revision of contemporary scholars views on discipline in the British Army of the time.
From page 163…
“Scholarship on the relationship between British officers and rankers during the eighteenth century has traditionally focused on the social disparity between officers and rankers, and the coerciveness of military discipline. Junior officers were drawn from across the gentlemanly classes, and were socially remote from the rank and file, the majority of whom were drawn from the labouring classes.4 The social distinction between officers and rankers has been frequently highlighted in studies of the eighteenth-century army, and has traditionally been seen as
1 Robert Blakeney, A Boy in the Peninsular War: The Services, Adventures, and Experiences of Robert Blakeney, Subaltern in the 28th Regiment, ed. Julian Sturgis (London, 1899), p. 49.
2 Blakeney, A Boy in the Peninsular War, p. 52.
3 Alexander Gordon, A Cavalry Officer in the Corunna Campaign, 1808-1809: The Journal of Captain Gordon of the 15th Hussars, ed. H.C. Wylly (London, 1913), p. 180.
4 For the social composition of the rank and file during the eighteenth-century, and during the Napoleonic period, see Arthur Gilbert, ‘An Analysis of some Eighteenth-Century Army Recruiting Records’, Journal of Army Historical Research, 54 (1976), pp. 38-47; Edward J. Coss, All for the King’s Shilling: The British Soldier under Wellington, 1808-1814 (Norman, OK, 2010), pp. 67-72.
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imbuing officers with an indifference towards their men.5 In his study of desertion from the eighteenth-century army, Arthur Gilbert portrayed army discipline as overbearing and constrictive, as officers relied on corporal punishment to keep men in the ranks.6 Similarly, Edward J. Coss viewed military leadership as offering ‘the stick without a carrot’, and further emphasised officers’ preference for corporal punishment as a way of maintaining discipline.7 Recent scholarship, however, has revised the view of officer-soldier relations in the eighteenth century British army. Sylvia Frey has highlighted how British officers during the American War of Independence were generally reluctant to use corporal punishment to maintain order, preferring to inculcate the values of honour and duty to motivate troops.8 John Cookson argued that military authority was contingent on the successful maintenance of reciprocal relationships.9 In an important essay, William P. Tatum highlighted soldiers’ agency in protesting against grievances, which resulted in officers exercising ‘negotiated authority’ over the rank and file.10”
Take into consideration the reaction of some junior officers the General Picton when he had two men publicly flogged.
Also consider another contemporary view of the social distinctions associated with gentlemen officers and the enlisted ranks.
“Officers and rankers were drawn from unequal social backgrounds, yet birth and wealth were not the only distinctions between officers and rankers. Officers emphasised the cultural differences between themselves and their men to explain and buttress their authority. The rank and file’s vulgarity was a source of disgust for officers. Ensign George Hennell wrote to his brothers about the behaviour of his men before a battle:
The conversation among the men is interspersed with the most horrid oaths declaring what they will do with the fellow they lay hands on. What they intend to get in plunder, hoping they will stand a chance that they may split two at once. Then someone more expert at low wit than his companions draws a ludicrous picture of a Frenchman with a bayonet stuck in him or something of the kind, which raises a loud and general laugh. Others describe what they have achieved in this way ... They marched off ... & for amusement by the way commenced their wit upon each other with grossness and sometimes [in] point hardly to be exceeded.16”
Sharpe is portrayed not only as a “mustang”, and officer made up from the enlisted ranks, but one reluctant to adhere to the expectations of gentlemanly conduct largely where there appears a hypocrisy in such behavior. A criticism that is not completely contemporary, such as members of gentlemanly culture questioning the cruelty of killing for sport , a common gentlemanly class pastime. Or the perception of dishonesty in “polite conversation” which can conflict with a background of more direct communication.
Again, I think accurately reflected in Sharpe. You can see criticisms of this in for example the contemporary writing of Jane Austen. Surely those rebelling against certain tenets of gentlemanly cultural norms existed, even if not easily documented by their own admissions. And that is not even taking into account those described as “blackguards” at the time.
And in the author’s summary.
“Nor were military men solely products of the military. Junior officers were open to a wide range of influences from late-Georgian society, particularly the influences of polite masculinity. Junior officers’ status as ‘polite gentlemen’ provided a model for male interaction between officers, while debates over honour were also informing how officers related to each other. Class distinctions between officers manifested themselves within the army, as elite regiments adhered to a more opulent concept of politeness than their more austere comrades in line regiments. As ‘polite gentlemen’, junior officers erected social and cultural distinctions between themselves and their men, which reinforced the military hierarchy while also encouraging officers to treat their men with humanity and sparking debate over the use of corporal
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punishment in the army. In addition to the influences of gender and class, junior officers were also fighting in a ‘British’ army, in a war they first conceived of as an ideological struggle, which then evolved into a patriotic struggle for national survival. Serving within this patriotic British context reinforced junior officers’ sense of ‘European’ identity, while contributing to a common sense of ‘Britishness’ between officers drawn from across Britain and Ireland.”
Again I think Cornwell and his Sharpe series accurately reflect a then contemporary conflict between corporal punishment and more humane disciplinary practices as an evolution of then progressive enlightenment ideals.
So in other words, the contemporary social justice.
17 April 2008, 05:25:54 PM
