Sieges were central to the evolution of customary laws of war in early modern Europe and represented the most regularised form of warfare. They were also where civilians were most at risk of exposure to the violence of conventional war, including the phenomenon of sack. A besieging force that stormed a town had the right to put the garrison to the sword and to sack the town. Yet the long tradition of sack has been neglected by historians, only now emerging as a subject of study in its own right. This chapter explores the history of sieges, sack, and the laws of war in Western Europe over the course of the long eighteenth century (1660–1815). It highlights sieges as an important but relatively neglected place for examining changes and continuities in customary laws of war, ideals of barbarity and civility, and moral sentiment over the long eighteenth century.

Introduction

The focus of this chapter is on capacity law in Northern Ireland, specifically the Mental Capacity Act (Northern Ireland) 2016, and exploring how the rights of people with disabilities are being framed, promoted and protected in that context. The central role of participation and values will be examined, and the potentially highly important roles of context and timing will also be acknowledged.

In comparison with other jurisdictions, perhaps the most significant aspect of capacity law in Northern Ireland is not the law itself, which is a largely conventional capacity-based law heavily influenced by the Mental Capacity Act 2005 for England and Wales, but its scope. The Mental Capacity Act (Northern Ireland) 2016 (the Act) will apply to everyone, aged 16 and over, whose ability to make the relevant decision(s), at that time, is sufficiently impaired, regardless of the cause of that impairment. Most importantly this means that the aim is for this relatively new law to completely replace the current mental health law, the Mental Health (Northern Ireland) Order 1986, for those aged 16 and over, rather than be in parallel to a specific mental health law, which is the approach in most other jurisdictions. The approach in Northern Ireland is therefore, as far as we are aware, the first attempt to fully implement the fusion approach, which highlights and addresses the discrimination involved in having separate mental health law which allows compulsory intervention, even when someone has the relevant decisionmaking ability. As will be explored in this chapter, the Northern Ireland context may have also have contributed to the adoption of this approach along with the high level of participation in the process of considering and developing the new law.

The development of the Act in Northern Ireland has been a long process and it is being implemented in stages. The first stage, which began on 1 October 2019, was to implement the aspects of the Act relevant to research with people whose ability to decide to participate in the research may be impaired. The second stage began on 2 December 2019, and that was the implementation of the aspects of the Act in relation to: interventions amounting deprivation of liberty; offences; and the money and valuables of hospital patients or care home residents.

This chapter examines siege surrender rituals and the obstinate defence of practicable breaches during the Napoleonic Wars, with a particular focus on French obstinacy in the Peninsular War, which triggered the British general storms of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian. Whereas a century earlier Louis XIV’s fortress governors had surrendered at the point of a practicable breach or beforehand, Napoleon’s now fought on. This chapter explores how this had come to pass, the extent to which eighteenth-century siege surrender conventions were disrupted during the Peninsular War and Napoleonic Wars more generally, and British attitudes and practices towards siege defences taken to the last extremity. On the one hand, French garrison commanders were adhering to Napoleon’s orders to defend practicable breaches, which became the subject of an instructional treatise by Lazare Carnot. On the other hand, this was the culmination of a much broader and long-term evolution in cultures of war and honour codes – that encouraged a cult of obstinacy. The chapter concludes by comparing siege surrender in Spain with siege defences and capitulation throughout other regional theatres of war and campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars.

This chapter explores the British sack of stormed towns from the perspective of Wellington’s command. Throughout his career, Wellington was not always consistent in how he dealt with sacks. He learnt lessons in India, but seemingly those lessons had to be learnt again in Spain. From Wellington’s perspective, the challenge was to manage and contain sack rather than prevent it entirely, something that he considered nigh on impossible. Given the centuries long tradition of plundering stormed towns, the chaotic circumstances of storming operations, and the prevailing articles of war, Wellington had only a very limited capacity to control the behaviour of his troops once beyond the breaches. Still, during the Peninsular War, as had been the case in India, a clear trend emerges: Wellington made progressively greater efforts to prevent or minimise sack plunder, with the growing encroachment of the military justice system into the space of sack itself. Moreover, Wellington cared about the welfare of civilians within besieged and stormed towns: it was not the breakdown of troop discipline alone that concerned him about sack – there was a humanity at play, too, as guarded and infrequently expressed as it was, in this most demonstrably unsentimental of soldiers.

This book is the first major study of British soldiers’ violence and restraint towards enemy combatants and civilians in the siege warfare of the Napoleonic era. Using British soldiers’ letters, diaries and memoirs, Gavin Daly compares and contrasts military practices and attitudes across sieges spanning three continents, from the Peninsular War in Spain, to India and South America. He focuses on siege rituals and laws of war, storm and sack of towns. The book challenges conventional understandings of the place and nature of sieges in the Napoleonic Wars. It encourages a rethinking of the notorious reputations of the British sacks of this period, and their place within the long-term history of customary laws of war and siege violence. Storm and Sack reveals a multi-faceted story of not only rage, enmity, plunder and atrocity but also of mercy, honour, humanity and moral outrage.

This book is the first major study of British soldiers’ violence and restraint towards enemy combatants and civilians in the siege warfare of the Napoleonic era. Using British soldiers’ letters, diaries and memoirs, Gavin Daly compares and contrasts military practices and attitudes across sieges spanning three continents, from the Peninsular War in Spain, to India and South America. He focuses on siege rituals and laws of war, storm and sack of towns. The book challenges conventional understandings of the place and nature of sieges in the Napoleonic Wars. It encourages a rethinking of the notorious reputations of the British sacks of this period, and their place within the long-term history of customary laws of war and siege violence. Storm and Sack reveals a multi-faceted story of not only rage, enmity, plunder and atrocity but also of mercy, honour, humanity and moral outrage.

This chapter explores the fate of obstinate enemy garrisons who chose to withstand British breach assaults in the Napoleonic era. Under customary laws of war, British soldiers had the right to put such garrisons to the sword. In the sieges of the Peninsular War, British soldiers generally gave mercy to their French counterparts, part of a consistent pattern of self-regulating restraint that characterised Anglo-French combat during the war. A shared Anglo-French martial culture of honour and civility prevailed. Amongst other national enemies, however, in other contemporary global theatres of war, a very different picture emerges. British soldiers put defending Spanish and Indian troops to the sword at the sieges of Montevideo, Seringapatam and Gawilghur, raising important questions about the complex ways in which military and cultural factors coalesced, in shaping patterns of restraint and excess. These comparative case studies reveal the paradoxical Janus-face of enlightened ‘civilized war’ in action, with moderation and protections accorded to those enemy soldiers who fell firmly within its self-defining and self-limiting boundaries, and a dramatic lowering of restraints towards those combatants deemed to be on its margins or beyond.

This chapter investigates British sack atrocities to civilians during the Napoleonic era. It analyses how British soldiers represented this violence in their memoirs, especially through the lens of sensationalist gothic horror; and the challenges of estimating the scale of atrocities. It adopts a multi-contextual and multi-causal framework for understanding these atrocities, from situational rage and the brutalising experiences of war to the cultural and political contexts in which sack violence could operate. Whilst most British soldiers participated in the plundering of stormed towns, the murder and rape of civilians during sacks was perpetrated by only a minority. Across soldiers’ writings, we find horror, shame, and moral outrage at such acts; empathy towards the suffering civilian; and a moral duty to bear witness. And despite lamenting the inevitability of such atrocities, this did not prevent individuals, especially officers, from intervening to protect civilians, especially women, acts framed by chivalric and humanitarian ideals.

Storming the breaches of a fortress was the most perilous of military undertakings. After setting out the operational nature and challenges of British sieges in the Peninsular War, this chapter explores the cultural and emotional history of the British storming of besieged fortress-towns in the Napoleonic era, especially in Spain, revealing a cult and spectacle of storm that took hold in this epoch, borne of a reinvigoration of martial honour codes, ideals of heroic and patriotic self-sacrifice, and romantic and sublime sensibilities. British soldiers’ writings on their motivation for storming reveal a complex and interactive mix of remunerative incentives of promotion and plunder on the one hand, and bravery, esteem, honour and patriotism, on the other, with soldiers driven by both individual and collective values and loyalties. Further, this chapter analyses how soldiers managed fear and emotion in the impending eye of the storm, and the importance of sentimental culture in how they responded to the trauma and devastating loss of comrades in the aftermath.

This chapter spans the history of European siege warfare across the long eighteenth century, from the age of Louis XIV to the Napoleonic Wars. It lays out the key thematic groundwork and siege case studies explored in later chapters. The first half outlines the nature of ‘the siege’ as the classic form of old-regime positional warfare – its operational forms, temporal and spatial dimensions, and rituals and customary laws of war – and charts the relative historic decline of breach assaults and siege related massacres of garrisons and civilians in the eighteenth century. The second half shifts to the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era. It identifies the continuing importance of siege operations beyond their earlier high point in European military affairs; the regional and chronological shifts in sieges across the Napoleonic Wars; the nature of British siege operations in Continental Europe and the colonial sphere (India and South America); and ends with an overview of British and French sieges in the Peninsular War – the epicentre of Napoleonic siege warfare and of the storming and sack of besieged towns.

At the heart of most sacks – in terms of motivation, behaviour and the broad participation of common soldiers – lay plunder. This chapter explores British sack plunder in the Napoleonic era from multiple perspectives: the broad campaign and siege contexts in which it occurred; the dynamics and rituals of plunder on the ground; and the attitudes and practices of officers. Most British rank and file participated in the plunder of stormed towns, borne of customary right, the catharsis of passing through the breaches, and opportunism. Despite the seeming chaos, this plunder had its own distinct rituals, conventions and carnivalesque dimensions. Some officers were complicit, too, in tolerating plunder, or indulging themselves; and in India, given the traditions of Company plunder and profit-taking, officers were only too eager to enjoy the official spoils of distributed prize. Yet, whilst there was a general resignation that it was next to impossible to prevent the plunder of stormed towns, most officers, and some men from the ranks, were highly critical of troops doing so, on military and moral grounds, drawing particular attention to the drunkenness, destruction and violence that accompanied it.

Whilst the British sieges of the Peninsular War (1808–14) have long been studied from an operational point of view, it is only in very recent years that historians have turned their attention to examining what occurred to garrisons and civilians in the aftermath of the British storms of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian. This traditional neglect of the infamous British sacks of the Peninsular War is part of a broader neglect of the history of sieges in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era, and of the laws of war in which they were conducted. Yet sieges played a crucial role in shaping the development of customary laws of war in early modern Europe. Moreover, whilst battles had well and truly supplanted sieges as the principal form of operational warfare by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, sieges nevertheless remained important to military and civilian experiences of war, not only within European theatres of war, but within the European colonial sphere.

This chapter explores the often forgotten 1807 British siege and capture of Montevideo during the ill-fated River Plate campaign of 1806–07. Whilst the siege operation has been covered in detail in a number of recent campaign histories, this chapter examines the siege through the prism of laws of war, with a particular focus on the British storming of the town and the subsequent fate of the garrison and civilians. The siege did not constitute a large-scale operation relative to many other contemporary sieges, but it is nevertheless of particular interest in terms of the evolution of customary laws of war, and of how soldiers interpreted and enforced those laws, especially when compared with the more famous British sieges of the Peninsular War. In Spain, after storming the towns of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian, British troops spared the French garrisons but notoriously sacked the towns and committed atrocities against the Spanish inhabitants. Yet at Montevideo the opposite was true: a rare example of a besieged city taken by storm, where the enemy was initially given no quarter, but the inhabitants were spared the fate of sack.

The Siege and Its Context

The siege of Montevideo took place within the extraordinary context of the British invasion of the River Plate in 1806–07. Here, unlike what would soon unfold in the Peninsular War, British forces faced Spain as a traditional imperial rival and enemy.