This compelling study presents the most comprehensive examination available of the role of religion in the army during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Through extensive analysis of official military sources, religious publications and personal memoirs, Michael Snape challenges the widely-held assumption that religion did not play a role in the British Army until the mid-Victorian period, and demonstrates that the British soldier was highly susceptible to religious influences long before the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny rendered the subject of wider public concern.