CHAPTER II.

FURTHER NOTES ON ITS HISTORY AND ON REGIMENTALS.

In the preceding chapter, the origin of the British uniform was plainly deduced from the fact of scarlet being the Royal livery alike of England and of Scotland, and hence its adoption as a general national colour. To these notes we purpose to add a few more on the gradual progress of badges and distinctions in the service.

The red cross of St. George was the general badge of England from the Crusades, till the time of Edward IV., and by an act of the Scottish Parliament passed in 1385, during the reign of Robert III., every soldier was ordained "to wear a white St. Andrew's Cross on his back and breast, which, if his surcoat was white, was to be broidered on a circle or square of black cloth."

In the time of Henry VIII., a red St. George's cross on a white surcoat was adopted as the distinguishing badge of English troops; and in an order to raise men for the service of Mary I., in the northern counties, she directs, that "they be clothed in whyt, with redde-crosses on ye arme, in ye olde maner."

These red crosses were destined to figure soon after, at the battle of Ancrum in 1544, when, as the ballad has it, the stream

"Ran red with English blood, For the Douglas true and the bold Buccleugh, 'Gainst keen Lord Evers stood."

When the English were routed, 700 Scottish outlaws of broken border clans, who had joined them, threw aside their red crosses, and joining their countrymen, made a merciless slaughter of the fugitives with axe and spear, shouting to each other the while, "Remember Broomhouse!"

Love of the sanguinary colour seems to have spread rapidly, and so, as some one has it, "no true Englishman can either fight, or hunt, to his satisfaction, save in a red coat," but badges were speedily added thereto.

Stowe records in his Survey of London, that "Robert Neville, Earl of Warwick, with 600 men all in red jackets, embroidered with _ragged staves_ before and behind, was lodged in Warwicke Lane; in whose house there was oftentimes six oxen eaten at a breakfast, and every tavern was full of his meat, for he that had any acquaintance in that house, might have as much of sodden or roasted meat as he could prick and carry away on a long dagger."

The proposal that the medical officers of all European armies should wear one great distinguishing badge, by which their profession might be known, is not a new one, for we find Ralph Smith, in the time of Elizabeth, after telling us that military "surgeons should be men of sobrietie, of good conscience, and skillfull in that science, able to heal all scars and wounds, especially to take out a pellet, &c., must wear their Baldricke, whereby they may be known in time of slaughter, as it is their charter in the field."

In this reign the Cavalry wore scarlet cloaks; but in the stirring times of Cromwell, with red and blue, a reddish-brown was much used by both horse and foot; hence he says in one of his letters, "I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain, that knoweth what he fights for, and loves what he knowes, than that which you call 'a gentleman,' and is nothing else."

Of all the colours for uniforms, the most absurd were some of those adopted by our Rifle Volunteers, in their too wary desire to be unseen. A battalion of the Italian Legion, raised during the Crimean war, was clad in silver grey; and it was admitted by all competent judges to be the colour best adapted for riflemen, and, moreover, when handsomely laced and trimmed, it was very becoming. This was the favourite colour of the Indian Light Cavalry.

When contrasted with the tight tunics, tiny shackos, and plain trousers of the present day, the equipment of a corps of the last, or the preceding century, in its amplitude and variety, must have presented a very different and very picturesque aspect. On the 8th, or King's Own Regiment, being raised for King James, by Richard, Lord Ferrars, the captains were armed with pikes, the lieutenants with partisans, the ensigns with half-pikes, the sergeants with halberds; thirty rank and file of each company were pikemen, seventy-three were musketeers, and all carried swords. The waistcoats and breeches were yellow; the uniform, scarlet lined with yellow; the stockings and cravats white; the hats were _à la_ cavalier, turned up on one side, and ornamented with flowing yellow ribbands. (Records 8th Foot.)

Ten years before this time, each company consisted of thirty pikes, sixty muskets, and ten men armed with light fusils, and "the tallest men were always culled out as pikemen." (_Bruce on Military Law_, 1717.)

The following description of a deserter, from the 22nd Foot, in those days, is rather amusing, as to costume:--

"Run away, out of Captain Soames' Company, in his Grace the Duke of Norfolk's regiment of Infantry, quartered at Newport, in Shropshire; Roger Curtis, a barber surgeon, a little man with short black hair, a little curled; round visage, fresh-coloured, in a light coloured coat, with gold and silver buttons, red plush breeches and white hat; he lived formerly at Downham Market, in Norfolk. Whoever will give notice to Francis Baker, agent to the said regiment, in Hatton Garden, so that he may be secured, shall have two guineas reward."*

* "London Gazette," 1689.

A spectator of the Camp of the Household Brigade, on Putney Heath, in October, 1694, describes the three regiments of Guards as wearing scarlet, of course; the 1st, faced with blue; the 2nd, or "Cole-stream," with green; the 3rd Scots, with white; the officers being distinguished by white scarves worn over the left shoulder, and fringed with the colour of the regimental facings. The Holland Regiment (Buffs), are described as wearing red, faced with flesh-colour; the Queen's or Tangier Regiment, red, faced with sea-green; the Lord Admiral's Regiment of Marines, raised in 1664 (and afterwards incorporated by William III., with the 2nd Foot Guards), in doublets and breeches of yellow.

Until the reign of Her present Majesty, red was worn by all the drummers and buglers of the regiment of Artillery; but although, from the earliest period, it was deemed the great national colour of our forces, it is somewhat remarkable that it was not adopted by the English or Irish Militia, until the year 1759, and a song of that period begins:--

"Ye mounseers, give ear, we have nothing to fear, For the Militia are now clothed in RED, Sirs! They have hearts that are stout and will never give out, With Rockingham bold at their head, sirs! You may brag and may boast, upon your own coast, And parade it from Dunkirk to Calais; But have a care now, how you venture too far, In your flat-bottomed boats to make sallies."

Long denied a militia force, in dread of Jacobite influences, Scotland had none from 1746 till the close of the last century, when, ten years after the death of her "Bonnie Prince Charlie," ten battalions were raised, and their colours and insignia (most of which are now deposited in the Castle of Edinburgh) were designed by the Court of the Lyon King of Arms, then Robert, Earl of Kinnoull, with whom the applications for such were lodged.

In our former chapter, the uniforms of the Irish and Scottish regiments which belonged to the French Line, during the last century, were referred to. These corps (according to the "Liste Historique des Troupes de France," 1758,) were numbered as the 92nd, 93rd, 94th, 98th (Gardes de Jacques II.), 99th, and 109th, all Irish; the 107th Royal Écossais under the Duke of Perth, and the 113th Écossais under Lieutenant-General Lord Ogilvie, who died in Scotland in 1803.

The two Scottish regiments wore coats and vests of blue, and their hats were bound with gold. All their Irish brother exiles wore scarlet, with white vests generally, and carried on their colours black or yellow crosses, with the "Couronne d'Angleterre," which had no braver or more bitter enemies, as the terrible day of Fontenoy attested; and where they seem to have acted true to the spirit of the Fenian song:

"Oh, if the colour we must wear. Is England's cruel red, Let it remind us of the blood That Ireland has shed!"

And when our troops landed at Cancalle Bay in 1758, they were surprised to find themselves stoutly opposed by entire battalions in scarlet; and no wonder was it that they were so, for it was the Irish Brigade, whose ranks were manned and officered by the sons and grandsons of the adherents of King James, the same gallant Irish Brigade which was welcomed to the British Establishment in 1794, and, unfortunately, was soon after reduced.

In our service, the White Horse of Hanover is borne on the colours of the 3rd Dragoons, the 7th, 14th, 23rd, and 27th Foot, &c. This badge is as old in history as the Welsh Dragon of the 10th Hussars and 12th Lancers, having been the ancient cognisance of Saxony or Westphalia,--a White Horse, on a field _gules_--borne for centuries by the House of Brunswick. Henry the Proud, Duke of Bavaria, in consequence of his marriage in 1123, with Gertrude, the lineal descendant of Wittekind, last of the Saxon Kings, assumed the armorial bearing of that Sovereign, if a barbarian so weak and savage deserve the title. The banner of Wittekind originally bore a black horse, which, on his compulsory conversion to Christianity, under the sword of Charlemagne, was changed to white, as emblematic of his new and purer faith. Hence our White Horse of Hanover and its motto _Nec Aspera Terrent_, which appears on the colours of the regiments above mentioned. It made its appearance in our service about the same time as the hideous black leather cockade, so long retained in loyal opposition to the White Rose of the Stuarts, and which is seen now only on the hats of footmen.

But the badge borne for the longest period in succession by the same unbroken body of men, is undoubtedly the St. Andrew's Cross of the 1st Royals, who represent alike the Scottish Guard of St. Louis (the comrades of "Quentin Durward" under Louis XI.), and the Green Brigade of Scots, who served Gustavus Adolphus, a corps whose almost fabulous antiquity was long a jest in the French service, as well as our own, being twitted in both as the Guards of Pontius Pilate, who slept on their post.

A very remarkable instance of love of the "Old Red Coat" occurred when the Scots Greys marched from Carlisle in April, 1766. A troop-quartermaster named Robert Mackenzie, then in his eighty-eighth year, was left behind, totally prostrated by age and infirmity. He was born in Scotland in 1688, had joined the Greys in 1705, when Lord John Hay was colonel, and was proverbially known as "the oldest soldier in the service."

The sound of the trumpets had scarcely died away homeward on the north road, when the hand of death came on the old enthusiast, and feeling that the hour of his dissolution was come, he insisted on being clad in his full uniform, his boots were drawn on, his sword girt about him, and thus accoutred, he expired, of sheer "disappointment at his inability to proceed. He was carried to his grave by six invalids; the pall being supported by six sergeants of recruiting parties in the town, and the Cumberland Militia fired six platoons at his interment."

An old enthusiast of a similar kind, though of higher rank, was the amiable General Charles O'Hara, the comrade of Granby and Ligonier, Lieutenant-Colonel of the 22nd, somewhere before 1788, and who, in the first year of the present century, died Governor of Gibraltar. He was the last British officer who adhered to the uniform of the Minden days, and to that remarkable style of cocked hat introduced by the great Austrian Marshal, with its tall straight feather and large black rosette on the dexter side; hence O'Hara was known in the service as "the last of the Kevenhullers."

At Gibraltar "he was buried with all the honours due to his rank," wrote an officer of the 29th, who was present. "I had never before seen the funeral of a general officer. There was his horse--the well-known charger oh which we had so often seen him mounted--bearing the boots and spurs of his departed master; on the coffin lay other mournful insignia, the sword, the sash, and not the least prominent memorial, the Kevenhuller hat, with its tall, unbending feather, and I gazed on it for the last time."

He was succeeded in his command by the father of her present Majesty.

But in the quaint adherence to the costume of a past age, there are few cases like one recorded by O'Keefe, the player, whose recollections were published in 1826, and who mentions that in his day, there was an aged captain, John Desbrissay, who walked about the streets of Dublin, "unremarked," in the Cavalier dress of the reign of Charles II. This, however, was before the time of the notorious Wilkes. This eccentric veteran lived in Corkhill, Dublin, and his name appears in the Army Lists for 1747, as agent for the 5th Horse, 5th Royal Irish Dragoons, 12th Foot, and several other corps stationed in Dublin.

County designations were not given until 1786, but numbers had been introduced, and badges, pretty generally adopted for all corps of Horse and Foot, on their colours, buttons, or belt-plates, prior to the first year of George the Third's reign.

In 1759, when Colonel John Hale (who came to London with the news of Wolfe's fall, and the conquest of Canada) raised the 17th Light Dragoons (now Lancers), it was ordered that "on the front of the men's caps, and on the left breast of their uniform, there was to be a death's head and cross-bones over it, and under the motto, 'or glory;'" and this grim device (the badge of the famous Black Brunswickers in later times) they still retain, like the old Pomeranian Horse, who, since the days of Gustavus Adolphus, have worn skulls and cross-bones on their high fur caps, and in Sweden are now known as the King's Own Hussars.

It was not until 1764 that the swords of the Grenadiers were abolished, and the arms of the foot soldier were confined to the musket and bayonet; and it was in that year when the officers and men of our cavalry first wore the epaulette (in lieu of the old aiguilette) on the left shoulder; at the same time, the jack-boots were abolished, and the horses were ordered to have long tails. The 8th Light Dragoons, however, had long the peculiar favour of wearing cross-belts for the pouch and sword. Having annihilated a corps of Spanish Horse at Almenara in 1710, and equipped themselves with the Spanish belts as trophies, they wore them in memory of that event until January, 1776, when they were abolished, and, at the same time the helmets were substituted for the cocked hats.*--("Records, 4th and 8th Hussars.")

* It was in 1794 that the Blues resumed for a time the cuirasses, which the Corps had not worn since their march to Salisbury in 1688.

Singularly enough, the 90th Light Infantry (still affectionately remembered in Scotland as Sir Thomas Graham's Perthshire Greybreeks), when serving under Abercrombie, in Egypt, wore helmets of brass, and being taken for dismounted Dragoons, were vigorously charged by the French cavalry at the battle of Alexandria. In the _mêlée_, their Lieutenant-Colonel, old Lord Hill of gallant memory, received a ball on his helmet, which brought him to the ground, though it failed to penetrate the brass metal, of which it was composed.

In these brief memoranda on uniforms and equipment, to enter elaborately on the dress of our Highland regiments, or its antiquity and advantages, would take up too much space.

Apart from written history, song, or tradition, there are in Scotland many records of vast age carved in stone, such as the Cross at Dupplin and the tomb at Nigg--both works prior to the eighth century,--which represent the Caledonian Warriors kilted to the knee, exactly like our Highland regiments now; and on the last-named memorial, the figure has a purse or sporran.

The first regiments of Highlanders embodied were two battalions raised, among other Scottish levies, by the government of Mary Queen of Scots, in 1552, to aid Henry II. of France in his wars. Each man would seem to have provided his own kilt or tartans, as the Scottish Privy Council ordain that they shall be "substantiouslie accompturit, with jack and plait, steilbonett, sword and buckler, new hose and new doublett of canvouse, at the least, and sleeves of plait or splints, with one speir of sax ell long or thereby." These men were chiefly drawn from the same glens, and by the same noble family, which in later years enrolled the 92nd Gordon Highlanders of Egyptian and Peninsular fame.

The early Highland corps were remarkably jealous of any alteration or innovation in their costume, real or fancied, and hence a dangerous mutiny broke out among the West Fencibles, in Edinburgh Castle, in 1778, in consequence of some changes that were proposed, particularly in the adoption of a cartridge-box, which they oddly alleged "no Highland regiment had ever worn before." A portion of the battalion was ultimately surrounded on Leith Links (where they had flung their pouches mutinously at the feet of the General), and compelled, by the 10th Light Dragoons, to adopt them at the point of the sword; but the remainder in the Castle broke out into open revolt, raised the drawbridge, and threatened to turn the guns on the city; nor did the matter end, until one Fencible was sentenced to be shot, and another to receive a thousand lashes, punishments which were, however, commuted.

In the following year occurred the dangerous mutiny at Leith, when seventy recruits for the 42nd and 71st, on a rumour being mischievously spread that they had been betrayed into a Lowland corps, which wore trousers, fought with the South Fencibles, till forty-five of them were shot down and bayonetted.

In 1811 we had two Greek regiments raised in the Ionian Isles, the 1st and 2nd Light Infantry, which were kilted, and wore the full Albanian costume.

All these various distinctions in uniform, badges, and insignia which we have briefly noted, and others, such as the Sphinx of Egypt, the Tiger of India, the Lion of Nassau, the Dragon of China, the Eagle of France, the Elephant of Assaye,* the Castle and Key of Gibraltar (_Montis insignia Calpe_), and all the other noble emblems borne on the colours of our various regiments, are the historical HERALDRY of the service, and are worthy of the highest consideration.

* The 74th and 78th Highland Regiments are entitled to carry a third colour for Assaye. The antelope was bestowed on the 6th Foot, in the war of the Spanish Succession, with the motto _vi et armis_, which they seem to have relinquished till 1878, though it used to be painted on the knapsacks, as on an old one possessed by the Corps in 1825, remained to testify. The Scots Greys, who forgot their old motto "SECOND TO NONE," resumed it in 1871. The origin of it seems scarcely known; but Colonel Darby Griffith, who so gallantly led the Greys at the battles of Balaclava, Inkermann, and the Tchernaya, in a letter to the author on the subject, says, "It is well authenticated that the Greys were raised in Scotland before the 1st Dragoons were raised in England, as also were the Coldstream before the Grenadier Guards. The English Regiments were accorded the No. 1, as taking precedence; but as a kind of atonement, both the Coldstream and the Scots Grey have the motto 'SECOND TO NONE.' Aldershot, 15th May, 1865."

They are eminently calculated to produce the _esprit de corps_, a just pride and honourable rivalry; and, by the past glories they represent, to inspire in our army that heroic virtue of which the elder Pitt spoke so eloquently in Parliament, when he said of our troops, in the debate upon pay:--

"To the virtue of the British Army we have hitherto trusted; to that virtue, small as the army is, we must still trust; and without that virtue, the Lords, the Commons, and the people of England may intrench themselves behind parchment up to the teeth; but the sword will find a passage to the vitals of the constitution!"

Hence it is, that even the lace, the buttons, and other insignia of a corps are so carefully shorn from the uniform of the unhappy soldier who is disgraced, and rendered incapable of bearing arms again; and when writing of those things, perhaps we cannot do better than close this article by an anecdote which records one of the most startling instances of wholesale disgrace that ever occurred in a European army.

THE DEGRADATION OF THE REGIMENT OF ABO.

In all armies corps have frequently been punished _en masse_, by being sent on foreign service or hazardous duty out of their turn, for the crimes of individuals, for general discontent, or for mutiny. Some have been exterminated, like the Janizzaries and the Mamelukes; decimated, like the Chapelgorris, or Red Caps, a battalion, of 800 Guipuzcoan Volunteers, famous in the army of the Queen of Spain; or, like that Carlist Regiment, which, for sundry acts of sacrilege, was formed in line, and had every tenth file, with his coverer, taken out and shot.

In the "Art of War, 1720," we are told that during the campaign in Holland, a captain, and his entire company, belonging to an Italian regiment, were hanged in line for desertion at Emerich, in the Duchy of Cleves; and in later times, in our own service, the 6th Royal Irish Dragoons, a fine old corps, consisting originally of nine troops, embodied under Colonel James Wynne, in the winter of 1688, with the Harp and Garter on their colours,--a corps that was brigaded with the Greys on the extreme right in the campaigns of Marlborough, and which, after serving with characteristic bravery in all our wars till those of the French Revolution, was disbanded in 1798 (for alleged sympathy with the Irish Insurgents), when General Lord Rossmore was their colonel; and since when, as a mark of the royal displeasure, their place and number remained vacant in the Army List for sixty years, until the present 5th Royal Irish Lancers were embodied in 1858; but in no instance was there ever a wholesale disgrace inflicted on a corps such as that to which the King of Sweden, Gustavus III., subjected the unfortunate Regiment of Abo.

When in the year 1788 he suddenly attacked Russia, victory remained undecided in a naval engagement between his fleet under the Duke of Sudermania and that of the Empress under the Scoto-Russian Admiral Greig, and his nobles who served in the Marine refused to act further in a war, which seemed to have no cause but the will of the King. Gustavus was inflamed by this opposition; he wished an object on which to vent his wrath and pride, and soon found one in the Regiment of Abo.

A brief armistice had ensued, during which he summoned a diet at Stockholm, where, on the 22nd February, 1789, by a preponderance of three inferior states, a declaration placed in his hands unlimited power, and he still resolved to prosecute the hopeless war against Russia.

In the army, at the head of which he placed himself, was this Regiment of Finlanders from Abo, a province which comprehends a part of Eastern Bothnia and the Aland Isles, whose inhabitants are a hardy and industrious race. The regiment fought with all the hereditary bravery of the old Finns, and served at the capture of several small towns; but the arms of Gustavus were unsuccessful by land, where his measures were disconcerted by an event which he could not have foreseen.

After making all his preparations to storm the strong fort and town of Fredericksham, which had been ceded to the Empress Elizabeth in 1743, and the repossession of which would have opened to him the gates of the Russian capital, his officers, and chiefly those of the Finnish Regiment of Abo, flatly refused to pass the frontier, alleging as a reason, "that the constitution of the Swedish kingdom would not permit them to be accessory to foreign war which the nation had not sanctioned."

This put an end to what was named the Finland Expedition; it gave the enemy time to put themselves in a perfect state of defence, and filled Gustavus with fresh fury; but despite the attempts of the Russians to intercept him, he reached Borgo, an old seaport in the district of Nyeland, where he established his headquarters, and where his first act was to assemble the whole Swedish Army, under arms, on the 8th of June, 1789, in front of the town, and along the margin of the river, which there flows into the Gulf of Finland.

A hollow square of contiguous close columns of Horse, Dragoons and Infantry was then formed; the whole were ordered to prime and load with ball-cartridge. The Artillery were unlimbered and loaded with round and cannister shot, in case of resistance, though none, save a very few, knew precisely what was about to ensue.

Then the fated Regiment of Abo, which had taken so marked a part in the defection before Fredericksham, was marched in a solid close column of companies into the centre of this vast hollow square, with its colours flying; and a hum of expectation and surprise, not unmixed with dismay, pervaded the whole assembled masses.

By Gustavus, a king whose ruling passions were heroism and selfishness, vanity and ambition, they were ordered to "ground their arms," which were at once taken away, with all their swords, bayonets, and accoutrements.

They were then ordered to strip off their regimental coats, and appear in their shirts and breeches. The officers were deprived of their epaulettes and commissions, and were cashiered on the spot.

Their colours were then rent from the poles and torn to pieces, the poles being broken under foot, while the drums were defaced by persons appointed to do so.

The whole battalion then passed from the right of companies out of the hollow square by single files, while a general hiss was maintained by the whole army until the last man had quitted it; and the united sound of this unpleasant expression of contempt rising into the still air, by the sea-shore, is said to have had a very singular and remarkable effect on those who heard it.

Though thus broken up and disbanded, the Corps was not set adrift; for the whole of the privates were drafted into the different battalions of the Artillery, and long after the fiery Gustavus had perished by the hand of the regicide Ankerström, it was a bitter taunt in the Swedish army to have belonged to "the degraded Regiment of Abo."