Hello All and I'm hoping you assist me.
I have seen images of British General Officers (certainly senior officers) uniformed under Portuguese regulations by Henrique José da Silva when in Portuguese service. I understand by Busaco 1810 a recent rapid expansion and intake of British officers thanks to the 'step-up' incentive yielded 158 new commissions.
Is there any evidence for how this new cadre was uniformed? I'm particularly interested in anything which might support temporary retention of their original British uniforms over the short term.
Thanks to anyone in advance with evidence either way.
Since Marshal Beresford was rather strict on the compliance with the regulations, issuing several orders of the day admonishing all the officers to follow those regulations, I think the British officers appointed to the Portuguese Army did not lost time to purchase their Portuguese uniform. Also, when Beresford announced, in one of his first orders of the day to the Portuguese army, the appointment of British officers to the army, a sensitive subject, he stressed that those officers will have to be considered in all equal to the Portuguese. So politically it was important for Beresford that those British officers presented themselves in the Portuguese uniform.
Thomas Bunbury, one that applied to enter the Portuguese service, mentions in his Reminiscences (vol. 1, p. 49-51) that some time elapsed between his application and he being gazetted and in the meantime he purchased his Portuguese uniform, which saved him from been harassed by Colonel Peacock which command the British depôt at Lisbon and was constantly looking for idlers, absent from their units and amusing themselves in the city.
Good point @Garry Wills . Some undress clothing could be mundane and ambiguous though. The rank was in the appointments
Don't forget that there was a considerable incentive to wear the Portuguese uniform as it would be a couple of ranks more senior than their 'old' British uniforms.
The officers usually wore the appropriate uniform for the unit they were assigned to. However, it depended how long they were in the unit and how long they were in the field. If their uniform wore out prior to the opportunity to replenish it, they would wear whatever they had. That is not just for the British officers who served in the Portuguese Army, which by the way, by April 1814, over 375 had served.
For example, Lieutenant John Kincaid, 95th Rifles, wrote in December 1810, after being in Portugal for only three months that:
"We had the utmost difficulty, however, in keeping up appearances in the way of dress. The jacket, in spite of shreds and patches, always maintained something of the original about it; but woe befel [sic] the regimental smallclothes,53 and they could only be replaced by very extraordinary apologies, of which I remember that I had two pair at this period, one of a common brown Portuguese cloth, and the other, or Sunday’s pair, of black velvet. We had no women with the regiment; and the ceremony of washing a shirt amounted to my servant’s taking it by the collar, and giving it a couple of shakes in the water, and then hanging it up to dry. Smoothing-irons were not the fashion of the times, and, if a fresh well-dressed aide-de-camp did occasionally come from England, we used to stare at him with about as much respect as Hotspur did at his ‘waiting gentlewoman’."