81st ( Loyal Lincolns Volunteers ) Regiment of Foot
★★★ History ★★★
The 81st Regiment, raised late in the 18th Century amid the hurried expansion of the British infantry to face the armies of revolutionary France, was the regiment to which we trace the title “Loyal.” It was a distinction, unique in the regular British infantry, borne proudly by the 81st and its successor regiments for almost 200 years, until The Loyal (North Lancashire) Regiment became part of The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in 1970.In February 1793, three weeks after France declared war on Britain, Major General Albermarle Bertie, late of the Foot Guards, was authorised by the War Office to recruit a new regiment in Lincoln. Soldiers from the Lincolnshire militia, already called up to defend against invasion, volunteered en masse for Bertie’s regiment which took the title of The Loyal Lincoln Volunteers to mark the militia’s ready patriotism. In January 1794, the regiment was numbered 81st by the War Office. It was the fifth of some 70 new infantry regiments to be added to the regular army during 1793-94 although many were short-lived training units.
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1795 West Indies – annihilation by disease
In 1795, the 81st was ordered to join an expedition to the West Indies where valuable French sugar islands might be captured for the Crown. The British force landed on the island of Santo Domingo (now Haiti) in April 1795. The 81st saw little glory and was so reduced by disease that the battalion had to be merged for a time with the similarly stricken 32nd (Cornwall) Regiment of Foot. Defeated more by fever than the French, the British withdrew and in March 1797 the 81st, a skeleton of a regiment, sailed for England. In two years, the 81st had lost the equivalent of its established strength twice over, almost all to disease.
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1806 Kingdom of Naples – triumph at the Battle of Maida; inactivity in Sicily
The war against Napoleon resumed in May 1803. The “Great Terror” – invasion fear gripped the British and the 81st was among the infantry regiments ordered to raise second battalions. Most of the new recruits for both the 1st and 2nd battalions came from Wales.In 1804, Spain joined the war against Britain in response to the Royal Navy capturing Spanish ships on the high seas. Emperor Napoleon and his new Spanish allies thus faced a coalition of Britain, Austria, Russia and Sweden. The British intended to use their navy to transport troops to fight in southern Europe, co-operating with the Russians in the Mediterranean Sea. The 1st Battalion, 81st Regiment (1st/81st) sailed for Malta in April 1805. In November two companies joined British and Russian forces which landed in the neutral but pro-British Kingdom of Naples and marched northwards to support Austria against France. The British naval victory at Trafalgar had ended Napoleon’s maritime ambitions but he inflicted crushing defeats on the Austrian and Russian armies on the Danube. Russia was forced to accept peace terms and withdrew her forces from Italy which caused the British to evacuate their army to Sicily, also part of the Kingdom of Naples, where the 1st/81st re-formed as a complete battalion.Napoleon claimed the Naples throne and French regiments marched into the kingdom. To prevent an invasion of Sicily, the British landed seven battalions – 4,600 men – on the south Calabrian coast. This little army met over 6,000 veteran French troops near the town of Maida and defeated them in two hours of intense fighting on 4 July 1806. The 1st/81st had hard fighting, suffering 84 of the 327 British casualties. The battle of Maida was the first time that the British Army defeated French revolutionary troops on the European mainland. It was celebrated in London with the naming of part of Edgeware as Maida Vale. After Maida, the British again withdrew to Sicily and did little else to challenge the French occupation of the Kingdom of Naples. The 1st/81st saw no action until early 1808 when it sailed with an expedition which failed to prevent the French capturing the island of Capri from Corsican troops. Inactivity and sickness lowered British morale on Sicily and nothing much happened until June 1809 when the 1st/81st took part in some small scale raids on French occupied islands in the Bay of Naples. Two more uneventful years followed.The second battalion (2nd/81st), which had been raised in 1803, saw action in northern Spain while the first battalion remained in Sicily. In late 1807, Napoleon had suborned his hapless Spanish allies into letting French troops cross Spain to attack Portugal which was almost the only country in Western Europe defying his ban on trading with Britain. Portugal capitulated, the royal family fled to Brazil and a French force occupied Lisbon at the end of November 1807. Next spring, Napoleon declared his own Brother Joseph as King of Spain and expelled the Spanish royalty from Madrid. Spanish provinces and much of the army rose in revolt against their former allies, the French, and appealed to their supposed enemies, the British, for help. So did the Portuguese. In August 1808, the British landed an army 100 miles north of Lisbon commanded by Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) and marched on the capital. Outnumbered and faced with mass revolt in Spain and with the Royal Navy offshore, the French army in Lisbon was cut off from support by land or sea. The French offered terms to stop fighting and evacuate Portugal. Accordingly, British ships duly transported the 25,000 fully armed French troops home to France. When news of this deal reached Britain, there was public outrage at the French army’s repatriation and the British commanders were ordered home to face a court of inquiry – including Wellesley who was later cleared of blame.In late 1808, with Portugal lost to him and all Spain in revolt, Napoleon himself crossed the Pyrenees, defeated several Spanish armies and re-captured Madrid in December.
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1808 North Spain – the terrible retreat to Corunna
The British Lieutenant General Sir John Moore had replaced Wellesley in Lisbon and marched east to help the Spanish with 20,000 troops. A second British force of 12,000, among them the 2nd /81st, was landed on the North West coast of Spain at Corunna. They joined Sir John Moore north of Salamanca on 20 December 1808. But Napoleon’s victories over the Spanish and the prospect of being cut off from the sea caused Moore to abandon plans to attack and to start to retreat across the barren and freezing mountains towards the port of Corunna 300 miles away. During the long, demoralising retreat, discipline broke down in many regiments, sick and wounded troops were abandoned and a rabble of an army eventually straggled into Corunna where it destroyed its own stores and waited for evacuation by the Royal Navy. Napoleon returned to Paris and left his generals to complete the British army’s destruction. Forced to fight before the Navy could rescue them, the British achieved a hard won defensive victory over the French in the Battle of Corunna on 16 January 1809. The 2nd / 81st had a desperate, two hour fight on the right flank, running out of ammunition and losing over 160 killed and wounded before the French were repelled. The army commander, Sir John Moore, was fatally wounded. Spanish troops in Corunna fought until the British were safely evacuated and then surrendered. The military disaster and the appalling state of the army which disembarked in England caused a public outcry although in fact the French had been drawn away from Portugal where there was still a British garrison in Lisbon.
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1809 The Scheldt – malaria and a failed expedition
The 2nd/ 81st , posted to Bletchingley, Surrey, rested and trained replacements for the more than 300 killed, wounded and missing in Spain. They had six months before another even more costly and ill-fated expedition. In July 1809, Britain committed 40,000 troops, including 40 infantry battalions, to capturing Antwerp and the River Scheldt estuary. The aims were to stop Napoleon developing Antwerp as a commercial rival to London, to bottle-up the Dutch fleet, to demonstrate support for Austria and to restore some British military prestige after the failure in north Spain. Progress was slow. Part of Walcheren Island was captured but any advance on Antwerp was abandoned.
A malaria epidemic killed some 4,000 men and 106 fell in battle before the operation was abandoned in December and the force evacuated. The 2nd/81st had left home on 30 July with 656 soldiers; after two months, 40 officers and men were still fit for duty. The battalion had fewer than a dozen battle casualties, all the rest were lost to disease.
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Eastern Spain and amphibious operations
The British land war against Napoleon moved back to the Iberian peninsula. With Sir John Moore dead, Wellesley was ordered back to Lisbon in April 1809, built massive fortifications around the capital and stayed on the defensive until 1812 when Napoleon was suffering in the depths of Russia.
The Spanish continued the fight with British help and Madrid was re-captured in August 1812. To divert French forces from the allied advance in central Spain, the British deployed their long-inactive forces in Sicily, including the 1st /81st, to mount an expedition of 8,000 men which landed on the east coast at Alicante in May 1812. The 1st / 81st took part in a brave but failed seaborne attack on the Castle of Denia but the Alicante expedition did little else to trouble the French that year. In 1813, the British and Spanish began another tentative advance and defeated a French force at the Battle of Castalla before retreating again to Alicante. A seaborne expedition was then landed to besiege Tarragona but, fearing a French relief force, the British hastily abandoned their heavy siege guns and re-embarked for Alicante. The British commander was brought to account by court martial. It was allied successes elsewhere, not least in central Spain by the Duke of Wellington’s army, which forced the French back towards their frontier. The 1st / 81st saw some further action, with few casualties, and took part in the allied march into France. They arrived at Toulouse on 4 May 1814 to hear that the war was over and Napoleon to be exiled to Elba. And, although they had not seen Britain for eight years, they were posted to a different war within weeks – across the Atlantic.
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