The year is 1817, and Captain Matthew Hervey has returned from India to an England in turmoil - close, perhaps, to revolution. The onerous task of policing falls increasingly to the army, especially the cavalry.
And there's unrest too within the 6th Light Dragoons. Their new commanding officer – a wealthy, arrogant and cruel man - takes an immediate dislike to Hervey who must somehow earn promotion while retaining his integrity and the loyalty of his men. The trauma of a regimental flogging is swiftly followed by action against the Luddites, and it comes as something of a relief when the 6th are dispatched to Canada. But there, in the aftermath of war with the United States, tension along the border is still high and although Hervey doesn't know it yet, he and his commanding officer are on a collision course. The consequences for them both will be devastating…
‘Soldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer’, wrote William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
At the end of every war, a grateful British nation dismisses its surplus soldiers, and usually with indifference. One has only to look back to the end of the Cold War, to see how ill-used a soldier can be when his arms are no longer required. Invariably too, the calculation proves wrong and a shortage of soldiers soon follows – as was the case with the 1992 reductions, and I am quite certain is already the case with those of 2006.
After Waterloo, there was a wholesale disbanding of regiments. Unlike 1992, however, when the cavalry – or more properly, the Royal Armoured Corps – was all but eviscerated, the Duke of Wellington’s horsed regiments escaped the worst for a time because they were needed to deal with civil disturbances at home, there being no proper police force. On the whole they found it disagreeable work, as soldiers still do. One of the reasons was that their legal position was often ambiguous. Arguably it is less ambiguous today, but since much aid is now rendered overseas to foreign civil powers, the position can be even more perilous.
With Bonaparte banished to St Helena, there ought to have been peace and prosperity in England. Instead there was economic depression and widespread civil disorder, the worst of which, the authorities feared, might lead to revolution.
Such was the situation that Captain Matthew Hervey and the 6th Light Dragoons faced in the spring of 1817: they were chimneys in summer, and yet fires were breaking out in England.