Breihan and Caplan: Jane Austen and the Militia L7

Jane Austen and the Militia JOHN BREIHAN Dept. of History, Loyola College, 4501 North Charles St., Baltimore, MA 21210 CLIVE CAPLAN PO. Box 47,New Islip York,Terrace, New New York York, NY 11752 ln 1796 Britain was in serious trouble. The three-year-old war against revolutionary France was being lost. The army had sustained heavy losses in the Low Countries and in the West Indies sugar islands. All the continental allies had fallen away in defeat. The victorious French armies threatened invasion, supported by the combined French, Dutch, and Spanish fleets. Ireland was seething with revolt. In England, revolutionary clubs had multi- plied, and rising prices and poor harvests led to widespread food riots. The govemment responded with repression. The Habeas Corpus Act had been suspended, and men were being imprisoned without trial. In the following year, 1797 , things became still worse. There was a financial crisis - the Bank of England suspended gold payments. The British fleets at Spithead and the Nore mutinied, desposing their offlcers and refusing to put to sea. In the rectory at Steventon in Hampshire, a twenty-one-year-old woman was writing a book she called "First Impressions." The woman was Jane Austen, and her book was to appear as Pride and Prejudice. It has long been a commonplace assertion that Jane Austen lived a calm, intensely private life isolated from dramatic public events and pointedly ignoring them in her writing. Recently a different view (Kent, Roberts) points out that her work generally followed the polite convention that ladies then did not comment on public affairs, either in society or in print. Women could discuss the horrors ofthe Gothic novel, but not any actual horrors of their time. Jane Austen's life was as active as her social circumstances could make it. Her brothers Francis and Charles were career officers in the Royal Navy and her brother Henry an officer in the militia. Her joumeys between Hampshire and the home of her wealthy brother Edward in Kent took her through that part of England where invasion was most feared, and most heavily garrisoned. In society, she frequently met soldiers and sailors, Members of Parliament and the aristocracy. So she knew what was going on; how could she not? But she made a conscious choice as an artist not to make public events prominent features of her work, and this has helped to make her novels the timeless studies of character and relationship that they are. Nevertheless, she was a child of her times, and had a keen eye for accurate detail. This essay will aralyze the military detail of that book which she drafted during those two eventful years of 1796 and 1797. Pride and Prejudice has been called "the story of a Militia regiment" (Rowland- Brown), and this study reveals the minute accuracy with which the novel describes the domestic military situation in England during the final year of the old system of quartering the militia, from the autumn of 1194 to that of t795. t6 Breihan and Caplan: Jane Austen and the Militia l7 In the novel the anonymous regiment of shires caused a consid- erable stir on its arrival in the quiet country town of Meryton - and among the Bennet family of five unmarried daughters. ". They were well supplied both with news and happiness by the recent- arrival of a militia regiment in the neighborhood; it was to remain the whole winter, and Meryton was the head quarters." (P&P 28). The regiment and its officers figure prominently in the fortunes of the Bennet family for the remainder of the novel. Jane Austen's own experience of the militia was probably not too different from that ofthe Bennet sisters. From about the age of sixteen she began to attend the monthly assembly at the town of Basingstoke, about seven miles distant from her home village of Steventon. Here, during the winter of 1794-95,the assemblies would have been graced by officers of the South Devon Militia: three.of their eight companies were quartered in Basingstoke. Their colonel was John Tolle, Member of Parliament for Devonshire since 1780, whose support for William Pitt, the Prime Minister, had made him the butt of the opposition Whigs in the mock-epic Rolliad. The officers of the South Devonshires would have enlivened local society just as the shires did at Meryton. As they all came from the neighborhood of Exeter, it is likely that Jane Austen heard a great deal about that area from them, and it is probably not coincidence that when she wrote the beginnings- of her flrst mature novel in the summer of 1795 about two girls called Elinor and Marianne, she set their new home, Barton, in South Devon "within four miles northward of Exeter" (SAS 25). Jane Austen had another source of information about the militia that winter - her favorite brother, Henry. He had received a B.A. from St. John's College, Oxford, and was intended for the Church, but, as he later wrote to the Bishop of Winchester, not being old enough for ordination, and political circumstances of the times, 1793, calling on everyone not otherwise employd (sic) to offer his services on the general defence of the Country, I accepted a commission in the Oxfordshire Militia. Henry and his Oxfordshires also went into winter quarters not far from Steventon during the winter of 1794-95. Their headquarters were at Pe- tersfleld, sixteen miles to the south. Three companies, perhaps including Lieutenant Austen, were quartered closer, at Alton, Faringdon, and at the family's future home at Chawton. Henry Austen must have been pleased with this posting, which gave him every opportunity to tell his sister Jane stories of his regiment, and of the grand encampment at Brighton in which they had participated the summer before. The origins of the English militia dated back to the Anglo-Saxonfyrd, a levy of all adult males summoned to war by the king. The Georges claimed the same prerogrative as had King Harold, but the system of conscription was regulated by parliamentary statute. In each parish fixed quotas of men were chosen by lot or ballot from lists of able-bodied men between 19 and 45 years old. Up until 1796 about one man in eighteen was balloted; in the crisis of that year the rate went up to one in six. A balloted man often found, or paid 18 Persuasions No. 14 f 10 for, a substitute, so many of the militiamen were poor and illiterate manual laborers, much the silne as the recruits of the regular army. The militia regiments were organized by county. Offlcers were drawn from the county gentry; often the Lord Lieutenant or a principal nobleman served as the colonel. During peacetime, the men were drilled periodically, but they really became soldiers only when "embodied" in wartime. Once embodied, the militia regiments usually marched away from their home counties. This had a number of advantages for the high command. Military discipline could be applied free from domestic distractions. Militiamen would be less hesitant about suppressing civil disorder if their own neighbors and family were not involved. Finally, the militia's main duty was to defend the kingdom, not necessarily their home county, against foreign invasion. The militia could not be ordered out of England, but by manning the defenses they freed the regulars for service abroad. George III had embodied the militia at the end of 1792; war was declared in February, 1793. During the next summer nine great military camps guarded the coast from Roughborough in Devon to Caistor in Norfolk. These camps were great training centers, where regular soldiers labored to teach the rudiments of military drill to raw county levies. Autumn storms reduced the threat of invasion and at the same time made the tented camps increas- ingly unhealthy. Regiments therefore marched off to winter quarters in inland towns. This was an annual cycle, repeated in 1794-95. A militia regiment normally consisted of eight companies of sixty men each, with an official complement of twenty-four officers: three field officers (colonel, lieutenant-colonel, and major), five captains, and a lieutenant and ensign for each company. Although a generous leave policy allowed two- thirds of militia officers to be absent from their regiments during the winter, a headquarters like Meryton with four companies in residence would just about account for the eight or nine officers followed so avidly by Kitty and Lydia Bennet. ll Pride and Prejudice, the shires arrived in Meryton in early November. Scattering the regiments to fit the accommodations available in small towns and villages made effective training impossible (Houlding), and so the officers, with few military- duties to distract them, were ready for fun. They exchanged visits with Bingley and Darcy, enjoyed good dining at Uncle Phillips', dallied with the local belles at the lending library, and clustered in the ball rooms in their handsome red coats. Mrs. Bennet joined heartily in her daughters' fascination with the officers, remembering her own captivation by militia officers in previous wars: "I remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very well - and indeed I do still at my heart" (229). Her recollection of this a quafier-century earlier probably recalls the final days of the militia of the Seven Years War, which ended in 1763 (Mrs. Bennet characteristically lying a bit about her age). As usual, her flrst concem was with marriage, for which these bored young men far from home were prime candidates. Mrs. Bennet described her ideal: "if a smart young colonel with five or six thousand a year should want one of my girls, I shall not say nay to him" (29).

Load more