Introduction

The British army was not of great interest to most nineteenth-century radicals. They tended to share the view of the laisser-faire Liberals that the army establishment was a system of outdoor relief for the unemployable younger sons of the gentry and aristocracy. Though they gave little thought to issues of army reform, this chapter examines radicals’ views of this subject, especially on the purchase of officers’ commissions and the abolition of corporal punishment. It outlines radical ideas on military theory, especially those developed by John Cartwright, William Cobbett and Richard Carlile. It explores the somewhat fanciful ideas of a people’s warfare, centred around militias and the revival of pikes. Awareness of new political ideas and events among rank-and-file soldiers is covered, together with the assimilation by some of radical principles. The phenomenon of soldiers joining the protesting crowd in popular riots is discussed, specifically those against the newly established police forces. These, it is argued, contributed to a ‘soldiers’ republic’, even in the absence of explicit radicalism.

Radical views of the military

Fired by his experiences in the American Revolution, Thomas Paine was an advocate of militias but did not propose abolition of the standing army. His Rights of Man (1791), dedicated to his old commander George Washington, suggested the reduction of the British army by 15,000. This, he argued could be achieved by pensioning off some soldiers while increasing rates of pay by six pence a week. Paine's proposals were championed the following year by the London Corresponding Society (LCS), which generally supported ‘the absence of a standing army, and the right of each citizen to go armed’.

Post-war radicals sometimes exhibited wider anti-militarism; for Henry Hunt, the standing army was ‘inimical to the liberties of the country’. According to a spy's report of a meeting of radicals in Bolton in November 1820, military issues headed the list of demands outlined by John Roper: ‘Let me see a Standing Army abolished. A National Debt paid and swept off. Let me see unrestricted and unlimited Commerce. Let me see all the useless sinecures and Pensions struck off. Let me see this Nation fairly represented. Let me see it governed by wise disinterested rulers’. Later the Poor Man's Guardian declared that if soldiers were ‘to be fit instruments of our slavery … [they] must be the most degraded of slaves themselves’.