Capturing this strategic, high-walled compound would enable Napoleon to out manoeuvre Wellington. with the French attacking Wellington’s right flank at Hougoumont farm. (Image source: National Museum of Scotland) “The Bravest man at Waterloo.” A dramatization of the closing of the gate at Hougoumont. Of the 25,000 British troops at Waterloo, only 7,000 had any real battle experience, most of those were infantry, the majority being Irish. Wellington’s support for Catholic emancipation would even lead to his participation in an 1829 duel with the rabidly anti-Catholic Earl of Winchelsea. Napoleons’ troops were largely experienced veterans who were fiercely loyal to their emperor Wellington led an assembly of troops from Dutch and German states along with 25,000 British regulars.ĭespite Wellington famously declaring that his redcoats were the scum of the earth, he would graciously concede in 1829, when the Catholic Emancipation Bill was put before the House of Lords, that “It was mainly due to the Irish Catholic that we (the British) owe our pre-eminence in our military career.” A Prussian army of 50,000 led by the old war horse Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher would eventually join the battle at Waterloo and decisively turn the tide for Wellington. Facing him was an Anglo-allied army of 68,000 led by the Irish-born aristocrat, Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington. The destitute were disproportionately from the Catholic majority - victims of discrimination legalized by the harsh anti-papist penal laws.ĭespite this, the British army at Waterloo fielded three predominantly Irish, Gaelic-speaking and predominantly Catholic regiments: The 27 th (Inniskilling) Regiment of Foot, the 6 th Inniskilling Dragoons and the 18 th Kings Irish Hussars.įollowing his escape from Elba and his hundred-day return to power in 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte had massed an army of 73,000 battle-hardened troops.

Unlike Britain, which was undergoing an industrial revolution at the turn of the 19 th century, Ireland was suffering from massive unemployment.

The French and even German states fielded their own share of first- and second-generation Irish regiments, although as many as 40 per cent of these foreign fighters ended up in red coats. Of course, not all sons of Ireland fought for the British. Consequently, by the late 18 th century one third of the British army consisted of Irish-born soldiers. For some, the only realistic option for survival lay in the enlistment of a son or a father (or both) into the British army.Ĭaptured rebels were left with even starker choices: the hangman’s noose, transportation or conscription into the King’s forces. That coupled with the aftermath of the disastrous 1798 rebellion left many families destitute. The economic booms and busts produced by the decades-long war with France left Ireland’s economy in a perilous state. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which had raged continuously from 1781 to 1815, would have a profound influence on the course of Irish history, fomenting bitter divisions engendering the opposing ideologies of Republicanism and Unionism. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons) Taking the King’s Shilling The Battle of Waterloo, June 18, 1815, stands as a shining example of Ireland’s place in Britain’s military history. From the hobelar light cavalry in the 13 th century to the First World War and beyond, soldiers from Ireland have made outsized contributions. They don’t know when they are beaten.” - Napoleon BonaparteįOR ALMOST a millennium, the Irish have provided men and military expertise to the English and British crowns. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons) “That regiment with the castles on their caps is composed of the most obstinate mules I ever saw. The Irish may or may not have saved civilization, as proclaimed by a famous 1996 non-fiction best-seller, but they certainly helped saved Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo.

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