Representing Regency: Peers and the Military

A few years ago I tackled the myth of University education for peers and their children, and included in that some numbers of the peerage that are helpful for this post, where I am to tackle the oft repeated myth in Regency Romance that it was commonplace for peer’s second, third, etc. sons to enter the military.

I don’t know the origin of this myth, but I see it repeated a lot by historical romance authors and readers. I am pretty sure I have repeated it as fact a time or two. But let’s walk through the available data to unpack this myth.

Data from enlistment shows that in 1809, only 140 officers were peers or peer’s sons (Haythornthwaite, 1990).

Burnham and McGuigan (2010)’s analysis is shown in two charts that list the nobility in the army between 1805-1816.  Their numbers are slightly different than Haythornthwaite’s, and show on average 210 peers and their sons in the military between 1805-1816.  Their list include Princes, Dukes, Marquesses, Earls, Viscounts, Barons, Courtesy Lords, and Honourables, which presumably capture most sons.  While I can accept there may be a margin of error in this data, if you were to conservatively estimate 250 peers or peer’s sons in the British military in the middle of the long Regency, without an estimate of the number of sons in your peerage total*, you are still at about 42% of peers going into the military. More realistically, I would hazard 15%-20% of just the peerage + sons were going into the army.

Naturally, there is still yet some fuzziness with the math. It assumes all 600-ish peers had male sons of enlistment age during the Regency, which we know from our math on Dukes is unlikely.

In fact, other data suggests the peerage made up just 2% of all officers. Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of British Army personnel during the Napoleonic Wars, and if you peruse the list you do see a mix of peers and landed gentry among the officers, as well as legacy military people. There are a fair amount of second sons (or even first, third, fourth, fifth, etc) among the ranks, which is perhaps how the myth got started — there is enough truth that it’s hard to question. But I think the alternative, of a more mixed class of officers better tells the story of a changing Britain. No doubt peer and peer son’s experience in the Army helped expose them to a variety of people, officers included, that helped to strengthen the changing tides of class into the Victorian era.

The military was incredibly important to national identity in the long Regency, but this idea that every second or third born of gentry or nobility bought a commission to fight Old Boney or any other war is not based on even rough statistical fact. Some families had grand military legacies, while others seemed concentrated on politics or life in other service, like clergy or law. In other words, the scale of peers having a military career is overstated, likely because the math is a sticky mess.

I struggled with some of this math because of the sheer number of variables and different sources on total peerage numbers, some duplication with titles, etc. My math is rough, admittedly, but there is enough there to suggest that this long-held belief that all second or third sons marched right into the British military doesn’t square with the stats.  At the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars, the army was a small 40,000.  The Napoleanic Wars and other conflicts abroad saw rapid expansion of the British military, with at its peak some 250,000 men just in the army.  However, like militaries today many of the raw recruits were from the lower classes. Even if all second or third peer sons were eligible, and marched into the military, they would still be outnumbered by lower and middle classes, and landed gentry.

Although as historical romance readers, we are familiar with the concept of a purchased commission, less than 20% of officers during the Napoleonic Wars were from a purchased commission. A larger number came from the militia, and a small number from gentlemen volunteers. Promotions did occur by seniority, and on occasion, merit.

This is all to say that the British military had a significant impact on the upper class and their life. From entertainments to politics, Regency life revolved around the campaigns of His Majesty’s army and navy. But it does not follow in all and even most cases that one of the peer’s sons chose a military career.

Burnham, R., McGuigan, R. (2010). The British Army Against Napoleon: Facts, Lists and Trivia, 1805-1815. United Kingdom: Pen and Sword.

Haythornthwaite, Philip J. (1990). The Napoleonic Source Book. London: Guild publishing. ISBN 978-1-85409-287-8.

*285 English Dukes, Marquis, Viscounts, Earls, Barons; 87 Scottish peers;  221 Irish; from The Present Peerage of the United Kingdom; with the Arms of the Peers and Baronets, Etc. (1815). United Kingdom: (n.p.).