‘Scum of the earth’, ‘worse than an enemy in a country’, some of Wellington’s most famous and dismissive remarks about the men who served under his command can be sourced from letters that he wrote whilst commanding British forces during the Peninsular War. However, what is less well known is the context in which they were made: his ongoing battle to reform military justice.
In this talk crime and punishment expert Zack White will unpick the relentless lobbying that Wellington undertook in order to change the law on military justice to suit his own needs. We’ll consider where Wellington’s efforts sat within the wider political conversations on reforming military justice, explore the motives of the many players who sought to exert their influence on the way the system worked, and call into question just how ‘humanitarian’ the British Parliament was in an age when slavery and corporal punishment were never far from the political agenda. In the process we’ll discover how Wellington was able to wrangle a law that only he had use for, giving him unprecedented powers to override the usual operation of military justice, for his own, seemingly draconian, ends.
