The Rifle Brigade · Swift and Bold · Sharpe’s Regiment
The 95th Rifles were unlike any other regiment in the British Army. Where line infantry stood shoulder to shoulder in rigid formation and traded volleys at fifty yards, the riflemen fought in pairs, using cover, thinking independently, and shooting accurately at three times the range of the standard musket. Armed with the Baker rifle and clothed in dark green instead of the regulation scarlet, they were the most feared light infantry in Europe.
They are also Richard Sharpe’s regiment. The green-jacketed 95th is the home of Bernard Cornwell’s hero and of Sergeant Patrick Harper, the big Irishman with the seven-barrelled volley gun. In fiction and in fact, the 95th Rifles defined a new kind of soldier: skilled, self-reliant, and deadly at range.
The regiment was founded on 17 January 1800 as the Experimental Corps of Riflemen under Colonel Coote Manningham and Lieutenant Colonel William Stewart. It drew volunteers from across the army: men who could shoot, think, and act on their own initiative. From the beginning it was conceived as an elite, designed as a response to a specific problem: the British Army had no regular rifle-armed infantry capable of matching the French tirailleurs, the light troops who screened Napoleon’s columns and harassed enemy formations.
The Experimental Corps saw its first action within months, taking part in an unsuccessful raid on the Spanish coast at Ferrol in August 1800. In April 1801, a company under Captain Sidney Beckwith served aboard Nelson’s ships at the First Battle of Copenhagen as marksmen in the rigging. The regiment lost its first officer, a lieutenant, during that battle. The unit was renamed the Rifle Corps in 1802 and, in January 1803, was formally added to the line as the 95th Regiment of Foot (Rifles).
The training system that shaped the 95th was developed at Shorncliffe Camp in Kent under Sir John Moore. Moore’s methods emphasised individual initiative, marksmanship, fitness, and a relationship between officers and men that was closer and more respectful than in the line regiments. The soldiers were armed with the Baker rifle, a grooved, muzzle-loading weapon accurate to 300 yards, against the 50 to 75 yards effective range of the standard Brown Bess musket. They wore dark green jackets chosen for concealment, with black leather accoutrements: no bright brass buttons or white crossbelts to catch the light or the eye of an enemy marksman.
At Shorncliffe the 95th was brigaded with the 43rd and 52nd Foot for a new kind of light infantry training. The Shorncliffe experiment produced the tactical doctrine and culture that would define the Light Division through the Peninsular War. Before its Peninsular deployment, the regiment took part in the capture of Bremen in 1805, the failed South American expedition in 1806, and the Second Battle of Copenhagen in 1807.
The Baker rifle, designed by Ezekiel Baker of Whitechapel and adopted in 1800, was the weapon that made the 95th what they were. Its barrel was shorter than the Brown Bess musket and had seven quarter-turn grooves that spun the ball, giving it far greater accuracy at range. The cost was speed: the tight-fitting ball had to be hammered down the grooved barrel with a mallet, and greased leather patches were used to grip the rifling, making the Baker slower to load than a smoothbore musket. A trained rifleman could fire two aimed shots per minute; a line infantryman with a Brown Bess could manage three or four unaimed volleys.
The trade-off was deliberate. The 95th were not expected to deliver massed fire. They were expected to pick off officers, sergeants, artillerymen and colour-bearers at ranges where the enemy could not reply. The best shots in each company were designated “Chosen Men” and given a distinguishing badge: they were the elite of an elite, trusted to select their own targets and fire independently.
The Baker was fitted with a sword bayonet rather than the triangular spike bayonet of the line infantry. At 24 inches, it was longer than the standard bayonet and could be used as a short sword in close quarters. The rifleman was expected to be as dangerous with the blade as with the ball.
The most famous demonstration of the Baker’s reach was Rifleman Thomas Plunket’s shooting of the French General Auguste-Marie-François Colbert at Cacabelos on 3 January 1809, during the retreat to Corunna. Estimates of the range vary between 400 and 600 yards, with some accounts placing it further. Plunket then reloaded and shot the officer who came forward to help the fallen general, which was the point of the demonstration.
Riflemen fought in pairs. While one loaded, the other aimed, ensuring that at least one rifle was always ready. The pair moved together, used cover instinctively, and operated with a degree of autonomy unknown in the line regiments. They were expected to read the ground, choose targets, and act without waiting for orders.
Use of cover was revolutionary in an era when British line infantry stood upright in formation as a matter of regulation and pride. The 95th lay down behind walls, fired from copses, and crawled through standing crops to reach a firing position. NCOs and even privates were trained to act on their own initiative, a doctrinal shift that owed everything to Sir John Moore’s Shorncliffe system.
In place of the rolling drumbeats that controlled line infantry manoeuvres, the 95th used bugle calls. The bugle carried further over broken ground and through the noise of battle, and it suited a regiment whose soldiers were often scattered as skirmishers. They fought ahead of the main line, harassing enemy columns, picking off officers, and disrupting formations before the main British line ever came into volley range. Where a line regiment stood and fired in unison, the rifleman moved, thought, and chose his target.
The doctrine had precedents in the North American wars, where British light troops had learned from encounters with French Canadian irregulars and American colonists. Sir John Moore’s contribution at Shorncliffe was to systematise these lessons and add a distinctive training culture. Riflemen were taught rather than flogged. They trained with live ammunition, a luxury in the British Army at the time, and took part in shooting competitions with prizes for accuracy. Those who could not read or write were taught, to give them a better chance at promotion.
The regiment carried no Colours: the standards that normally rallied a regiment in battle would have been a liability for troops fighting dispersed. Promotion in the 95th was more often by merit than by purchase, and the social distance between officers and men was narrower than in most Georgian regiments. Officers and riflemen slept rough on the same picket lines and endured the same marches. This egalitarian streak became a defining feature of the regiment’s culture and appears throughout the surviving memoirs.
The 95th were the first British regiment to abandon red for green. Their bottle-green jackets, black leather crossbelts and cartridge boxes, and dark shako were the British Army’s first serious attempt at camouflage. The reasoning was practical: a skirmisher’s job was to fire from cover and stay unseen. Red was ideal for line infantry, who wanted to be seen by their own side and unafraid of being seen by the enemy. For riflemen, red was a liability.
The distinctive green earned them nicknames on both sides. The French called them sauterelles (“grasshoppers”) for the way they moved through cover in short rushes. Wellington’s own army sometimes called them the “Sweeps” for the same reason. The green jacket became so identified with the regiment that it survived every subsequent renaming: the Rifle Brigade, the Royal Green Jackets, and today’s Rifles all wear it.
The 95th took part in the British expedition that bombarded Copenhagen and seized the Danish fleet.
The 2/95th covered the British landings in Portugal and fired the first British shots of the Peninsular War at Obidos on 15 August. Lieutenant Ralph Bunbury became the first British officer killed in the war.
The first pitched battle of the Peninsular War, fought on 17 August. The 95th fought as part of the 6th Brigade.
The second British victory in Portugal, ending French control of the country for the time being.
The harrowing winter retreat across Galicia. Riflemen of the 95th, with the 43rd and 52nd, formed the rearguard under Sir John Moore.
During the retreat, on 3 January, Rifleman Thomas Plunket shot the French General Colbert at extreme range, then reloaded and shot the officer who came forward to help him.
A rearguard action on the Portuguese frontier in July, where the 95th fought a difficult withdrawal.
The 95th skirmished ahead of Wellington's line on the ridge of Busaco, blunting the French advance before the main engagement.
The 95th spent the winter behind Wellington's fortified lines while the French army outside starved.
The Light Division covered a difficult withdrawal on the southern flank with exceptional discipline.
A midwinter siege opened in frozen trenches. The 95th provided sharpshooters and assault troops at the breaches.
The most costly night in the regiment's history. The 95th led storming parties at the breaches and the castle walls and was decimated.
Riflemen skirmished across the Arapiles as Wellington's army destroyed Marmont's in forty minutes.
The battle that drove the French from Spain. The 95th harassed the retreating French through the streets and into the baggage train.
In August, a company under Captain Daniel Cadoux held off an entire French division at the bridge of Vera before being killed with most of his men in a doomed defence.
The Light Division led the crossing of the Nivelle as Wellington broke Soult's defensive works on French soil.
Hard fighting around St Pierre in December as Soult attacked Wellington's divided army.
Wellington forced Soult from another stubborn defensive stand, opening the road into southern France.
On 20 March, all three battalions of the 95th fought together, unsupported, for the first time, sweeping Marshal Soult's forces from Wellington's line of advance.
The last major battle of the Peninsular War, fought four days after Napoleon's abdication. The 95th was in the line under Soult's guns.
The 95th fought in the centre of Wellington's line, supporting La Haye Sainte all afternoon, and joined the final advance at dusk.
A career rifleman who rose from junior officer to general. Commanded the 1st Battalion of the 95th at Waterloo, where he was wounded in the action that supported La Haye Sainte. He later served as a senior officer of the army.
Author of Rough Sketches of the Life of an Old Soldier (1831), one of the best officer memoirs of the Peninsular War. Leach served with the 95th from 1808 to Waterloo and wrote with dry humour and a soldier’s eye for detail.
Author of Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (1830). Served with the 95th from the Walcheren expedition through the Peninsula to Waterloo, where he was adjutant of the 1st Battalion. The droll, literate voice of the regiment. Read his Badajoz extract on Stories →
A Dorset shepherd turned rifleman whose dictated Recollections of Rifleman Harris (1848) is the finest private-soldier document we have of the Peninsular War. He served on the retreat to Corunna and his plain voice gives the experience a reality no dispatch can. Stories → · Resources →
Co-founder and first commanding officer of the Experimental Corps of Riflemen. His lectures on light infantry service helped shape the regiment’s doctrine. He died of illness in 1809 while the regiment was fighting in Spain.
Commanded the company that served aboard Nelson’s ships at Copenhagen in 1801, later commanded the 1st Battalion in the Peninsula, and rose to command a brigade in the Light Division.
Served with the 95th through the Peninsula and at Waterloo, and married a young Spanish woman named Juana at Badajoz, whose story is told in Georgette Heyer’s The Spanish Bride. He later became a general and a colonial governor.
The rifleman who shot General Colbert at Cacabelos in January 1809, the most famous single shot of the Napoleonic Wars. His later life was less distinguished; he ended up in poverty and drink.
The captain who held the bridge of Vera with a single company against an entire French division in August 1813, and died there with most of his men in a doomed defence.
The 95th was not the only rifle regiment in Wellington’s army. The 5th Battalion of the 60th Regiment of Foot, known as the 5/60th, was also rifle-armed and served alongside the 95th throughout the Peninsular War. The 60th had been raised for service in North America in the Seven Years War and drew heavily on German and other continental European recruits. Its riflemen wore green jackets and carried Baker rifles, and were distributed in companies among Wellington’s brigades to provide skirmishing capability across the whole army.
In Bernard Cornwell’s novels, Sharpe serves in the 95th while his friend Captain William Frederickson is a 60th officer. The two rifle regiments had different characters: the 95th was a self-contained elite formation with its own three battalions and distinctive culture, while the 60th’s rifle battalion was more often broken up and distributed for tactical use. Read about Frederickson →
On the night of 6 April 1812 the 95th went into the breaches of Badajoz with the Light and 4th Divisions. The casualties were catastrophic. The assault parties at the Trinidad and Santa Maria breaches were broken again and again on the chevaux-de-frise and the murderous fire from the ramparts; dead Britons piled in the ditch until the storming columns could climb on their bodies. The 95th lost officers and men in numbers the regiment had never suffered before, and would not suffer again.
The courage shown that night became part of regimental legend. Officers led from the front and died there; sergeants and corporals took over and led on. Wellington, who had seen many battles, wept on the glacis at dawn when he saw the cost.
Read the Battle of Badajoz →At Waterloo the 1st Battalion of the 95th, under Sir Andrew Barnard, was positioned in the centre of Wellington’s line. They skirmished ahead of the main British formations through the morning, then took up a position around the sandpit and a broken hedgerow on the eastern side of the Brussels road, directly supporting La Haye Sainte. From this ground they shot at French skirmishers and gunners all afternoon, and their fire disrupted repeated French infantry advances against the farm and the ridge behind it. When La Haye Sainte fell in the late afternoon, after its King’s German Legion garrison ran out of ammunition, the 95th’s position became critical. They held on as French infantry pushed up the slope behind them.
When the Imperial Guard advanced and was broken, the 95th joined the general advance at evening, pursuing the French into the night. Casualties for the regiment at Waterloo were severe: the 1st Battalion lost roughly a third of its strength in killed and wounded. The 95th ended the day, and the war, in the centre of Wellington’s victory.
In 1816 the 95th was removed from the numbered line of the army and constituted as the Rifle Brigade, a unique regiment marked out from the rest of the infantry. The number 95 was later assigned to a different regiment. From 1852 to 1861 Prince Albert served as colonel-in-chief, and the regiment took his name as the Prince Consort’s Own Rifle Brigade. It fought throughout the Crimean War of 1854-1855, earning eight Victoria Crosses, the highest total for any single regiment, and served with distinction in both World Wars: in the First at Ypres and on the Somme, and in the Second in North Africa, Italy, and North West Europe.
In 1966 the Rifle Brigade amalgamated with the 43rd, 52nd, 60th and King’s Royal Rifle Corps to form the Royal Green Jackets. A further amalgamation in 2007 formed The Rifles, currently the largest regiment in the British Army, which still wears the green jacket the 95th first put on in 1800. The regimental museum is at Peninsula Barracks in Winchester, where the Royal Green Jackets Museum holds Baker rifles, jackets, colours and the largest 95th collection in the world. Find it on the Resources page →
Fiction · Bernard Cornwell
The 95th is Sharpe’s true home throughout the Cornwell novels. He transfers to the Rifles after his commission and spends the rest of the Peninsular series fighting in the green jacket. The dark coat and Baker rifle become inseparable from his identity: when he is detached to the (fictional) South Essex line battalion in Sharpe’s Eagle, he keeps his green jacket and his rifle as a deliberate refusal to assimilate. Patrick Harper, the huge Irish sergeant with the seven-barrelled volley gun, is the archetypal rifleman: skilled, independent, devoted to Sharpe and to the regiment. Cornwell uses the 95th as a counterpoint to the line: a regiment of thinking soldiers in an army of drilled formations.
Sharpe was not the first rifleman in fiction. C.S. Forester’s Rifleman Dodd (published as Death to the French in the UK, 1932) is a taut novella about a lone rifleman cut off behind French lines in Portugal, widely used in military reading lists for its portrayal of small-unit initiative. Georgette Heyer’s The Spanish Bride (1940) is a historical novel based closely on Harry Smith’s memoir, telling the story of his marriage to Juana Maria de los Dolores. Both earlier works influenced Cornwell’s decision to set Sharpe in the 95th.
The 95th Rifles was a British Army regiment formed in 1800 as the Experimental Corps of Riflemen and established as a regular regiment in 1803. It was the first British regiment to be armed with rifles rather than smooth-bore muskets, and the first to wear green rather than red. It fought throughout the Napoleonic Wars, most notably in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, and was renamed the Rifle Brigade in 1816.
Three things: they carried the Baker rifle instead of the Brown Bess musket, giving them greater accuracy at long range; they wore green jackets instead of red, making them harder to see in cover; and they fought in dispersed pairs as skirmishers rather than in line. They also had a distinctive culture that emphasised marksmanship, merit-based promotion, and individual initiative.
No. Richard Sharpe is a fictional character created by Bernard Cornwell. However, Cornwell drew heavily on real officer and rifleman memoirs, particularly those of Harry Smith, John Kincaid, Jonathan Leach, and Rifleman Harris, and Sharpe's world is closely grounded in the real experience of the 95th.
The Baker rifle was the first British-made rifle accepted for regular infantry service, adopted by the 95th and the 60th in 1800. Designed by Ezekiel Baker of Whitechapel, it was a muzzle-loading flintlock accurate to 200 yards or more, considerably slower to load than the Brown Bess musket but dramatically more accurate.
In 1816 the 95th was renamed the Rifle Brigade and removed from the numbered line of infantry. Through a series of subsequent amalgamations, the regiment's lineage passed to the Royal Green Jackets in 1966 and then to The Rifles in 2007, which is today the largest regiment in the British Army and still wears the green jacket the 95th first put on in 1800.
The Royal Green Jackets Museum at Peninsula Barracks in Winchester holds the largest 95th Rifles collection in the world, including Baker rifles, uniforms, and colours from the successor regiments.
Yes. The 1st Battalion of the 95th held a sandpit next to the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte in the centre of Wellington's line throughout 18 June 1815. They lost roughly a third of their strength killed and wounded.
The 95th left an unusually rich body of first-person literature for a single regiment. The memoirs of Leach, Kincaid, and Harris, together with those of Edward Costello and William Green, are the reason we know so much about the daily life of the Peninsula’s riflemen, and Bernard Cornwell drew heavily on them for the Sharpe novels.
The dictated memoirs of a Dorset shepherd turned rifleman. The best private-soldier document of the Peninsular War.
Buy on Amazon →The literate, droll account of an officer of the 95th from Walcheren to Waterloo. Available in multiple editions; search Amazon for current paperbacks.
Search on Amazon →Another important 95th memoir. Costello served through the Peninsula from the Coa to Waterloo, and his account is one of the frankest descriptions of a rifleman’s life on campaign.
A brief outline of a rifleman’s service, valuable for its private-soldier perspective on the marches, sieges and battles of the Peninsular War.
Follow the regiment through the battles of the Peninsular War and beyond.
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Page last updated: July 2026
