The politics of foreign recruitment in Britain during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars

Abstract

In 1815, the Duke of Wellington took command of a multinational army that comprised British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops in the culmination of the 20-year conflict with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Such was the contribution of non-British troops to the victory at Waterloo that a recent revisionist history of the campaign has rechristened it ‘The German Victory’.1 Alongside the regiments of the British Army present at Waterloo were units from allied nations, including Hanover, Brunswick, the new Kingdom of Holland and a separate Prussian Army. Also present within Wellington’s army was the King’s German Legion (KGL), a corps of Hanoverians that had been created when the electorate was overrun by the French in 1803, and there were other links between the allied troops and the British Army. The Brunswick army contained a nucleus of men from the Brunswick regiment which, like the KGL, had found its way into the pay of the British Army as a foreign regiment. As with much of the history of transnational recruitment, Britain’s extensive use of foreign troops was a product of manpower demands yet they were maligned despite their significant numbers and involvement in the war.