Synopsis

Samuel Bagshawe, the orphaned son of a Derbyshire gentleman, enlisted in the Army as a private soldier in 1731. When he died in 1762, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, he was a colonel of a regiment of foot soldiers, raised in Ireland at his own expense, and also an MP. But this promotion was only achieved after a struggle against crippling disability, for in 1746 he had lost a leg by cannon shot in the abortive raid on the Breton arsenal and dockyard of Port l’Orient. Then in 1755, when he was second-in-command of the first King’s regiment to serve in the Indian sub-continent, he lost the sight of one eye from disease and his health was wrecked thereafter. From now on, the hunt for preferment and his desire to fix himself and his young family in the great world grew ever more desperate.

This selection of Bagshaw’s letters and papers, with an introduction, commentary and notes, offers a rich account of regimental soldiering as it was carried on by a cast of characters who would not be out of place in the pages of Henry Fielding or, in our own time , Evelyn Waugh. As an illuminating record of the military condition during what is still a relatively unknown period of the Army’s history, together with its often hilarious accounts of daily life on the battlefield, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the England of the eighteenth century.
 

ISBN 0-370-31501-4