We do not think of camp followers as middle or even aristocratic women nor as a major type of theatre character. The lower class wives and dependents of active duty military men in Humours of the Army that Alice Snecker and Moll are our image today. As individual representatives of people and as characters in a play, thet are largely invisible. For hundreds of years, such women would be in danger of dire poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness.
There is another camp follower in Shadwell’s Humours of the Army. Belvedera is Brigadier Bloodmore’s niece disguised as a just-arrived, young, well-connected recruit named Hickumbuz. She is seeking the fiancé that she jilted. Wilmot, is a gentleman with family and a large estate. He is disguised as a recruit named Straitup and is seeking death because of his broken heart. Belvedere has letters of introduction allegedly from Bloodmore’s sister that ask him to take Hickumbuz into his regiment. Because the troops are desperately in need of reinforcements, Hickumbuz is given the rank of lieutenant and commands Wilmot’s unit. They do not recognize each other in their uniforms and personae. The audience sees a proud, higher class man adjusting to the life and status of a private and a young officer without an imposing physique trying to establish company discipline and command.
The play highlights an important historical fact. Regardless of class and economic status, all of the women who follow their military loved ones endure the “grueling journey” of the voyage and march to Portugal. Belvedera, Alice, Moll, Mrs. Bloodmore, Victoria, and Leonora have all experienced it and refer to having passed “all the hazards in the World.” Even the Brigadier’s wife says she knows “too well the Plague of trudging after a Soldier.”
The part of Belvedera was first played by the beautiful comic star, Susana Mountford, who was admired for her physical comedy—for posture and pose, facial expression, gesture, and lively personality. Belvedera, in Juan Pablos’s words, is “a new iteration of the typical runaway girl in pursuit of the man she loves,” and became one of the most frequently performed characters on the British stage. Like her, these were not impoverished or without strong families and came to have a variety of timely reasons for their interventions in the orderly recruitment and deployment of men. Some want to “rescue” the man from service as Nancy does in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Camp. It is a well-developed account of a woman’s hope of earning William’s discharge becoming her decision of whether or not to follow him, thereby becoming a camp follower, or trying to persuade him to desert or resigning herself to waiting anxiously for his return. Some, like Eliza in The Flitch of Bacon have disguised themselves and pretended to be part of the husband’s recruiting or deployed party. Nancy and Eliza, like Belvedera, are of the social class of women in comedy-of-manners courtship plots, not lower class.
Belvedera was identified in the printed cast list for the first performance in 1713 as “the Female Officer.” The play was frequently revived, especially in times of national military crises. Not only does the play feed civilians’ curiosity about the camps, but with the emphasis on the “Female Volunteer,” Humours of the Army intersects with an unusual theme that arose in the 1740s from what came to attention as a national failing: regiments not standing and fighting. Oglethorpe tried to protect the Georgia colony and attacked St. Augustine, but his men deserted in large numbers. The fleet failed at Toulon twice, once unable to capture or destroy a single Franco-Spanish ship. Enraged at the fleet’s failure to engage the French at Ushant in November 1744, Admiral Vernon demanded the answer to “a simple question: ‘Did you fight or did you not?’”
When Bonnie Prince Charlie invaded Scotland to reclaim his throne in 1746, at Falkirk the dragoons and most of the royal regiments simply fled in disarray toward Edinburgh. In February, “The Female Volunteer: or, An Attempt to Make Our Men Stand” was published, and the incomparable Irish actress Peg Woffington performed it repeatedly in a redcoat uniform. She took over the part of Belvedera (now identified only as the “Female Officer”) and other parts in which she could model and represent military masculinity better than many of the men strutting through London. The character type and theme of the romantic woman who becomes a camp follower proliferated and powered the success of many playwrights and actresses.