Quite interesting thread here.
"As one whom Mark has been kind enough to bestow an honorary designation upon, it would be appropriate I guess that I tender some form of 'academic' advice. I tread a neutral road here – no matter how interesting the subject might be to me personally, an issue I shall leave hanging – so purely in terms of the historic particularities one way or the other….
It is the case that the war started before the Queen came to the throne, but also that her reign had commenced before it ended. Let's put the bracket 1835-8 on the activities of the Legion, noting at the outset that it was inevitably much more powerful, active and significant in its middle period than towards the end. Marginal, then, in that technical sense, but then again technical answers in matters of history seldom represent the whole story and do not necessarily resolve very much. Q. Has this war formerly been incorporated within academia and literature under the generic heading of 'Victorian Wars' or similar labels? A. No, most certainly not. It is the case that the British Auxiliary Legion was a powerful military force, the members of which would struggle to avoid the 'mercenary' label, but on the other hand they were also men dressed in red, wearing bell top shakoes and organized very directly after the British Army model. To their credit, they were doing their soldiering in the cause of traditional 'British' liberalism, regardless of who was actually paying them, and I suspect in most cases, doing it for their daily crust in what were after all notoriously hard times. They would certainly have been casually referred to as 'the British' in the broader sense of the word by their Spanish liberal confederates, but in truth they were 'some British' rather than 'the British'. They would seem on the face of it not to have been soldiering directly in the British or British imperial interest, while the Carlist camp, (very Roman Catholic and deeply reactionary as it was), assuredly posed no direct threat to either of the foregoing, the days of Spanish dabbling in Ireland being, if not long past, at least well past any continuing credibility. However, going beyond 'the face of it', there is that almost indefinable element of the national interest, let us term it the British 'strategic interest', which can be a bit grey round the edges and is something typically resolved in the closer detail, if not always by a broad consensus of Parliamentary opinion, then usually by the cabinet of the day. This is a theme I'll leave for now and come back to later. Q. Are the regiments of the BAL British Army regiments or units of the British 'colonial' military (in all its guises)? A. Stuffed full of Brits as they might have been, the answer to that question is, 'No, they were not'. Q. Were they recruited and formed with the tacit approval of the London government? A. Well yes, they had to be, because if you look at the South American Wars of Independence, (waged against substantially the same Spanish reactionary interest), you will see that an earlier British Legion fighting under Bolivar in what is now Colombia and Venezuela, was choked off for recruits when the London government withdrew its tacit assent to what Bolivar's agents in London were up to. Q. What about this Evans feller? A. It is true that Evans, a British regular soldier of Peninsular and War of 1812 vintage, (he was with Ross at Bladensberg and the burning of Washington for example, I seem to recall as an ADC), who was attracted to the Spanish liberal cause in the 1830s in his capacity as a combined soldier and 'radical' MP, went on to command a pukka British formation in the Crimea. He was, then, most decidedly a British Victorian soldier, meaning that discussion of him as an individual would certainly enjoy a conventional legitimacy here at VWF. The penultimate thing to throw into the cauldron, and here I return to my earlier remarks about the government's decisions on what is and is not in the British 'strategic interest', is the later committal of a pukka British contingent based on the Royal Marines, including I think that corps' own artillery arm….and if not them, then a RA contingent. There is no question about the status of these people….they are British servicemen, actively committed to combat operations against the Carlists by the British government. Now here's some sort of rub; I don't know at the time of writing whether the Marines present in Spain were Victorians or not and, ironically, there is only a technical answer by date to that question!! I suspect that it would satisfy nobody to have a thread where discussing the Marines was acceptable, but discussing the BAL was not. I do caution, however, that one of VWF's greatest strengths is its focus and would observe into the bargain that the 1st Carlist War is very substantially a Spanish War with some peripheral British involvement, rather than anything analogous to the Peninsular War which would not have been won without the British. I would counsel that it would seem sensible, in the circumstances, that if there were to be such a thread, that it should be restricted to British participation in the war. Even with the best will in the world, any other road will lead to convoluted discussions about medals awarded to the French Foreign Legion and such like, which is very definitely not what VWF is about and would function as a huge distraction from its highly compelling focus. The last thing that remains for me to do is to present you with the dates for the participation of the 'official' British contingent, which I hope my library will stretch to. I believe the Queen's reign commenced on 20 June 1837…"
Full thread here.
link
Hope you enjoy!
Amicalement
Armand