When the British Army as we now know it was founded in the reign of Charles II, the powers that be planned to have an army of bachelors. No married man was to be recruited, and any soldier who married would be dishonourably discharged. The army wouldn’t be burdened by a gaggle of women and children, and the soldiers would have no dependants that the Army would have to provide for.

This policy didn’t work out: very soon the Army found that it had to recruit anyone it could get, married or single; once it had got men it couldn’t afford to give them such a simple get out from service! So soldiers’ wives became commonplace, but for centuries the Army acted as though they would just go away if nothing was done about them. The official attitude was that soldiers ought not to many, that if they did they and their wives should expect to have a rough time, and if they were miserable it was their own fault for marrying in the first place.

Next in this series Permission to Marry

Reproduced with kind permission from the author Victoria Solt Dennis