The Horrible Peace: British Veterans and the End of the Napoleonic Wars

Evan Wilson

How wars end and what happens in their wake is a subject that has not received its due. We study the proximate causes of a conflict’s end—the decisive battle or campaign, the armistice or surrender, the subsequent peace treaty, and the international realignments that follow. But these are macrophenomena concerning fleets or armies, at least, and states. Less understood is what becomes of the people who fight the wars, especially the common sailor and soldier.

While much has been written about British sailors and the challenges they faced—wages often two or three years in arrears, being “turned over” from one voyage to the next rather than being allowed to leave their ship, unhealthy conditions, especially in tropical climates—much less has been said about their lives when the shooting stopped.

Wilson’s The Horrible Peace: British Veterans and the End of the Napoleonic Wars sheds light on both the conditions people faced in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the limits of British capabilities overseas in the face of fiscal retrenchment. “Any history of the Napoleonic Wars that stops in 1815 is incomplete,” he writes. “What this book shows is how difficult it was for Britain to transition from war to peace after more than two decades of war on the grandest and most destructive scale then known.”

The fate of British sailors relieved from duty in the aftermath of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars makes an excellent case study in two respects. It reveals both how traditional understandings of British supremacy have ignored the role that fiscal austerity played in making Britain’s place in the world after Trafalgar and Waterloo far less secure than it would be later in the century, and the extraordinarily difficult circumstances that veterans faced at a time of sudden peace.

Peace was widely anticipated in 1813 and 1814—and Napoleon first abdicated in April 1814—which led to a chaotic demobilization of ships and crews in a frantic effort to trim the budget. The results were twofold. The Royal Navy’s failure to ensure that Napoleon remain on Elba enabled him to go from exile to ex-isle, which he almost certainly couldn’t have done had the Mediterranean fleet remained at strength. And by making demobilization a priority over fighting the United States in the War of 1812, the navy was hamstrung in its ability to blockade the United States coast and contain the threat of privateers.

On the home front, laissez-faire policies meant that there was only the slenderest of safety nets for veterans, who were classified as “deserving poor”—unless they happened to be foreign, Black, or over the age of forty-five, in which case there was none. Although sailors were considered to have marketable skills, there was essentially no market for them. The Royal Navy employed an average of 124,000 men annually between 1803 and 1815, but only 26,000 over the next dozen years. Over the same period, the number of merchant marine billets remained flat at about 123,000 from 1803 to 1826—a shortfall of nearly 90,000 jobs.

The lack of opportunity helps account for the widespread unrest that pit soldiers against veterans as well as the extraordinary exodus of veterans to Latin America to enlist in liberation movements in Chile, Peru, Brazil, and other countries shaking off their colonial masters.

Wilson also highlights one factor over which no one had any control: the catastrophic explosion of Mount Tambora in April 1815, the second largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Atmospheric dust was so dense that 1816 became known as the year without summer and crippled agricultural production, which contributed to widespread unemployment and acute scarcity, even starvation. Yet Tambora only aggravated what would have been a dire situation in any case.

Wilson’s thoughtful use of first-hand accounts, memoirs, literature, and songs adds depth to a crisp narrative. He also explains why comparable studies for other conflicts are needed, and how lessons from history can help inform how modern governments and militaries might better address their own handling of peace beyond the headlines.

Wilson, Evan. The Horrible Peace: British Veterans and the End of the Napoleonic Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2023.