The International Brigades and Mercenaries of the British Empire

The British army of the long eighteenth century was an unusually cosmopolitan institution, in which foreign units, mercenary regiments, and subsidised allied forces played a regular part. The army of the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, for example, included substantial German and Dutch-Belgian contingents, and the army of the Peninsular War was supported by a Portuguese force reorganised under British command. Foreign units had been central to British warfare since the seventeenth century, and their presence reflected both the size of the British military commitments and the limited population from which the British army could be raised. By the late nineteenth century, the professionalisation of the British army and the rise of mass conscript armies on the continent had largely ended the role of foreign units in British service, although the tradition survived in the continued recruitment of Gurkhas and other colonial troops.

The British reliance on foreign units was, in the judgment of the historian Rodney Atwood in The Hessians (1980), “a structural feature of British warfare, not a tactical expedient.” The British had no conscript army; they had a small regular army; and they relied on the long eighteenth century’s international military market to fill the gap. The system worked, in the main, but it was a system that depended on the willingness of foreigners to die for British interests.

Foreign Units in the Early Modern British Army

The British army of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries regularly included foreign units. Scottish regiments, including the Scots Guards, served alongside English and Welsh units. Huguenot regiments, raised from French Protestants after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, were a regular feature. Irish Catholic units, often recruited in the diaspora, were raised for continental service. Foreign Protestant regiments — Swiss, German, Dutch — were used both in the British Isles and in the Low Countries.

The King’s German Legion

The most famous foreign unit in British service was the King’s German Legion (KGL), raised from Hanoverian volunteers in 1803 and disbanded in 1816. The KGL at its peak numbered about 28,000 men in around a dozen battalions of infantry, plus several regiments of cavalry and horse artillery. The Legion fought with distinction throughout the Napoleonic Wars and the British Empire, serving in the Peninsular War, at Waterloo — where the 2nd Light Battalion famously held the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte against repeated French attacks — and in the West Indies.

The Italian Levies

The British also recruited significant numbers of Italians during the Napoleonic Wars, mostly from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Sardinia. The Calabrian Free Corps and other small Italian units served in the Mediterranean. The Sicilian contribution included the formation of a substantial force under Sir John Stuart, who took the British and Sicilian army to the Battle of Maida in 1806, one of the few successful British engagements of the period.

The Swiss Mercenaries

The Swiss mercenary tradition, which supplied guards and regiments to most of the European powers, also produced some units in British service. Swiss mercenary regiments were raised throughout this period for service in both the French and the British armies; the Régiment de Roll, in French service from 1795, is illustrative of the wider European market. Britain was both a beneficiary of the system and a leading critic of the practice of selling Swiss citizens into foreign service.

The French Royalist Forces

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the British subsidised substantial French royalist forces, including the army of the Chouans in Brittany and the army of the Vendée. The British supplied money, arms, and, in 1795, an expedition to the Quiberon peninsula that ended in disaster. The failure of the Quiberon expedition marked the end of serious British attempts to organise royalist risings on French soil.

The Decline of the Foreign Units

The post-Napoleonic period saw a substantial reduction in the use of foreign units. The army of the Duke of Wellington had been unusually cosmopolitan; the army of the mid-Victorian period was more typically British. The Cardwell reforms of the 1870s, which localised regiments, made it harder to incorporate foreign units. The professionalisation of European armies, with their own mass conscript bases, also made it less necessary for Britain to recruit abroad. By the time of the Second Boer War, the British army at the front was essentially British — although Indian Army units served in substantial numbers in the later phases of the war.

The Modern Foreign Volunteers

The British army of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has continued to recruit foreign soldiers, particularly from the Commonwealth and the Overseas Territories. The Gurkhas, who served in the British Indian Army until 1947, have continued to serve in the British Army since 1949. The recruitment of Commonwealth citizens into the British army has been a long-standing practice, and Fijian, Jamaican, Ghanaian, and Nepali soldiers have all served in the modern British army.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British foreign units was, for a long time, dominated by the regimental histories and the work of the British official historians. The post-Cold War revisionist literature, led by Rodney Atwood’s The Hessians (1980) and the more recent work of Stephen Summerfield on the King’s German Legion, has produced a more critical picture, in which the foreign units are treated as serious military actors rather than as auxiliaries. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of the contributors to Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians (2019), is over how far the British reliance on foreign units was a sign of weakness in the British military system and how far it should be read as a sign of British integration in the eighteenth-century European military market.

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