During the Napoleonic Wars the land forces of the Crown comprised a number of sometimes quite disparate elements, and although this article is concerned with the greatest of them, the British Army itself, it is as well to begin by outlining all of them and briefly describing their status and relationship.

The British Army proper comprised General and Staff officers, the Household regiments of cavalry and infantry, and the cavalry and infantry of the line. Closely bound up with them, but constitutionally separate were those troops administered by the Board of Ordnance the most important of whom were of course the officers and men of the Royal Artillery. Although their rank structure, responsibilities and promotion system differed in some measure there was complete equality between the two services.

This was not always the case with the third of the services; the armies of the East India Company. While they had come into being as the mercenary servants of a trading company, the fact of the matter was that by the 1790s the Company was being run by the British Government through the Board of Control, rather than by the ordinary shareholders. In 1795-96 its officers successfully resisted assimilation into the British Army [1] while at the same time winning local brevets which placed them on something approaching an equal footing with regular officers. Consequently their de facto position, particularly after recruitment for the European regiments was placed on a regular footing in 1799, became similar to that of Ordnance officers; in that they were administratively separate but operationally fully integrated.

Of much lesser importance were the Militia and Volunteers, both of the whom were administered by e ome Office. Operationally they came under Army command but unlike Ordnance and EIC officers they certainly did not enjoy equal status.

More Officers and Gentlemen Part I

Part I: Introduction
Part I: Regimental Officer Structure
Part I: Surgeon, Chaplain
Part I: Quartermaster, Paymaster, Adjutant, Agent
Part I: Staff Officers