Читать книгу Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket - Richard Holmes - Страница 15

BY ALL APPEARANCES it was the monarch’s army. The red and blue so prominent in its uniforms originated in the Tudor livery; the royal cipher was embroidered on regimental colours, engraved on sword-blades and musket-locks; officers’ commissions bore the monarch’s personal signature, and orders were issued in his or her name. The monarch was commander-in-chief of the army, ‘unless the office is granted away,’ which was often the case.¹ Royal birthdays and accession anniversaries were marked with appropriate ceremony, even on active service. On 18 January 1777 John Peebles recorded:

This being the Anniversary of the Queen’s Birthday (or the day that is kept for it) a Detachment of 300 British fired 3 vollies on the parade at 12 o’clock Proceeded by 21 guns from ye Battery & the like number of Hessians on the Green behind the Church, and at 1 o’clock the navy fired, each ship 21 guns…

Unfortunately the frigate HMS Diamond, which had recently been in action, ‘had not taken sufficient care in drawing the shot, & discharged a load of Grape[shot] into a Transport ship close by them, & killed 5 men and wounded 3…’²

The guards – horse and foot – were troops of the Royal Household, and their officers came into frequent social contact with the royal family. William IV, Duke of Clarence before his accession, regularly dined with the officers of the company on duty at St James’s Palace and when at table expected no more deference than one gentleman might normally show another. He once asked whether officers still got ‘chocolate’, slang for a wigging, which derived from General Sir David Dundas’s practice of inviting offenders to breakfast and then giving them a talking-to over the hot chocolate. Young Ensign ‘Bacchus’ Lascelles of 1^st Guards (whose nickname arose from altogether different potations) piped up that he had got ‘goose’ from the adjutant for having too little powder on his hair that morning, adding ‘it is quite immaterial whether a rowing be denominated “chocolate” or “goose,” for it is all the same thing.’³ However, things were not always this genial. When Ensign Gronow went on duty with his hair unpowdered, George Ill’s seventh son, Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, threatened him with arrest for ‘appearing on parade in so slovenly and disgraceful a condition.’⁴ Shortly after his accession, William IV was furious when the guard at St James’s failed to turn out because the sentry had not recognised him in plain clothes. He also upset the guards’ bandsmen by making them play for him every night, thus depriving them of fee-paying engagements elsewhere.

The first two Georges were ‘soldier-kings in the German tradition. ’⁵ George II identified closely with his army, keeping a brown coat for civil business and a red one for military, and maintaining a notebook in which he recorded officers’ characters and achievements. He was the last English monarch to command an army in battle, at Dettingen in 1743. When his horse bolted he dismounted and spent the day on foot, stumping about bravely enough but doing little to control things. Frederick the Great described him standing in front of a favourite Hanoverian regiment with his sword out in front of him like a fencing-master demonstrating a thrust: ‘He gave signs of courage, but no order relative to the battle.’⁶ But he was certainly in the forefront of the action. Late in the day he said to Sir Andrew Agnew, commanding Campbell’s Regiment, that he saw ‘the cuirassiers get in amongst your men this morning, Colonel.’ ‘Oh aye, your Majestee,’ replied the broad Sir Andrew, ‘but they dinna get out again.’⁷ Lieutenant General Lord George Sackville was court-martialled for disobeying Prince Ferdinand’s orders to charge at Minden, and the king, who had a high sense of duty and discipline, regarded his sentence of cashiering as too lenient. He personally struck Sackville’s name off the roll of the Privy Council, and penned an addendum to the sentence, which was read out at the head of every regiment in the service:

that others may consider that neither high birth nor great achievements can shelter offences of such a nature, and that seeing they are subject to censure much worse than death to a man who has any sense of honour, they may avoid the fatal consequences arising from disobedience to orders.⁸

William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, George’s second son, was wounded at Dettingen and narrowly defeated at Fontenoy. He had greater success against the Jacobites at Culloden, but was retired after his defeat in Germany 1757. Cumberland was a martinet, with what might be called a Germanic approach to giving orders, and took no care that they should be ‘softened by gentle persuasive arguments by which gentlemen, particularly those of a British constitution, must be governed.’⁹ His elder brother Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his political allies maintained that he was a dangerous militarist, and after Frederick died in 1751 there were even suggestions that he coveted the succession.

George III, no soldier himself, had a martial brood. His fifth son, Ernest Augustus of sinister repute (he was said to have fathered a son on his sister Sophia) was created Duke of Cumberland in 1799. He lost an eye at Tournai, commanding Hanoverian cavalry, in 1794, and was badly injured by his own sabre in a murderous attack by his valet in 1810. He commanded the Hanoverian army, and in 1837 became king of Hanover. His brothers Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent and Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, both became field-marshals, and Kent served as Governor of Gibraltar during the Peninsular War, being recalled after his severity provoked unrest.

George III’s second son, Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, took the profession of arms seriously, though fortune did not smile on him in Flanders in 1793 or at the Helder in 1799. He was an efficient and wholly useful commander-in-chief of the army from 1798 till his death in 1827, with a brief interlude between 1809 and 1811 after he was accused of allowing his mistress, the ‘gaily-disposed’ Mary Ann Clarke, wife of a bankrupt stonemason, to dabble in the commissions trade. The duke had set Mrs Clarke up as his mistress in 1802 with a handsome £1,000 a year, but she supported her extravagant lifestyle by conning tradesmen who trusted her because of her royal connections, and taking bribes to secure the duke’s patronage for civil, military and even clerical appointments.

The duke, warned of what was afoot, ended the relationship in 1806, pensioning off Mrs Clarke on £400 a year provided she behaved discreetly. Two years later, however, she threatened to make matters public unless her full pension was restored and arrears paid. When the duke refused, her current protector, Colonel Gwylym Lloyd Wardle, a former officer of the Ancient British Fencibles who had been denied rank in the regular army by the duke’s reforms and was now a radical MP, raised the question in the House. A committee of enquiry could find no clear link between Mary Ann Clark’s acceptance of bribes and the granting of commissions, but the duke, duly acquitted of selling them, was urged, in treacly tones, ‘to exhibit a right example of every virtue, in imitation of his Royal parent’. He had to resign as commander-in-chief, but was reappointed in 1811 and remained in office till his death in 1827.

His younger brother Clarence joined the navy in 1779 and served in the American war. Peebles saw him in New York and thought him ‘a very fine young man, smart and sensible for his years, & sufficiently well grown, a strong likeness of the King…he was in a plain Midshipman uniform, & took off his hat with a good grace…’¹⁰ He was promoted steadily, becoming admiral of the fleet in 1811. Denied much active service in his naval capacity, he managed to accompany the army on an expedition to the Netherlands in January 1814. Displaying more pluck than prudence, he got up amongst the advanced skirmishers at Merxem, and was saved from capture by Lieutenant Thomas Austin of the 35th Foot in a brisk action in which he behaved very well. As a naval officer he had a sharp eye for detail, and this did not bode well. In March 1834 he conducted a minute inspection of the guards, horse and foot, and then ‘had a musket brought to him, that he might show them the way to use it in some new sort of exercise that he wanted to introduce: in short, he gave a great deal of trouble and made a fool of himself.’¹¹ He believed that sailors should wear blue and soldiers red, and instituted a brief and unpopular deviation from the custom by which light cavalry regiments wore blue. They reverted to blue in 1840 with the exception of the 16^th Lancers, which earned it the nickname ‘Scarlet Lancers’.

William’s illegitimate son, George Fitzclarence, served in the 10^th Hussars in the Peninsula, and went on to become deputy adjutant-general: the king made him Earl of Munster, with rather a bad grace, in 1831. Lieutenant John ‘Scamp’ Stilwell of the 95^th, believed to be a natural son of the Duke of York, was killed at Waterloo. Another of the duke’s alleged by-blows, Captain Charles Hesse of the 18^th Hussars, was wounded there. Charles Greville described him as ‘a short, plump, vulgar-looking man,’ but he was a famous Lothario and had affairs with both Princess Charlotte and the Queen of Naples. He was killed in a duel in 1832, ironically by Count Leon, an illegitimate son of Napoleon by Eleonore Develle, a young lady-in-waiting of Napoleon’s sister Caroline. In 1840 the disreputable Leon challenged his cousin Louis, the future Emperor Napoleon III, then in exile in London, but the duellists and their seconds were arrested on Wimbledon Common.

The late Victorian army lay under the conservative shadow of the queen’s cousin, George William Frederick Charles, Duke of Cambridge, son of George III’s seventh son. Given command of 1^st Division in 1854 at the age of 35, he was the only divisional commander in the Crimea not to have served in the Peninsula, and some of the misfortunes suffered by his men in their untidy advance at the Alma sprang from his inexperience. ‘What am I to do?’ he asked Brigadier General ‘Gentlemanly George’ Buller, an unreliable fount of advice. ‘Why, your Royal Highness,’ replied Buller, ‘I am in a little confusion here – you had better advance, I think.’¹²

He was in the very thick of the fighting at Inkerman, where his division bore the brunt of the battle. The duke laconically ordered the Grenadier Guards to clear the Russians from the sand bag battery: ‘You must drive them out of it.’ The Grenadiers did as they were told, and the duke then halted them, but part of the 95^th, in another division, surged on past, led by a huge Irish lance-corporal shouting: ‘We’re driving them, sir, we’re driving them.’¹³ Captain Richard Temple Godman of the 5^th Dragoon Guards thought that he had been marked by the battle. ‘He is said to be in an extraordinary state of excitement since Inkerman,’ he wrote on 12 November 1854. ‘He seems much liked by the soldiers. I hope there is nothing wrong with his mind.’¹⁴ All was certainly not well with his body, for he was apparently as verminous as his men. When the surgeon of the Scots Fusilier Guards complained to his servant that his shirt was full of lice, the servant replied: ‘The Duke of Cambridge is covered with them, sir.’¹⁵ He became commander-in-chief of the army in 1856, and had to be bullied into retiring at the age of 76 in 1895. He set his face firmly against military reform, fearing that tradition would be undermined, and arguing that the army’s success had been repeatedly demonstrated on the battlefield and could be ensured by a repetitious round of field-days and inspections.

Queen Victoria, disbarred by her gender from military service, nonetheless appeared, when a young woman, in a fetching uniform of a round black hat with a red and white plume, a general’s tunic (turned down at the collar to show white blouse and black cravat) and dark blue riding habit. She rode side-saddle on a horse with field-marshal’s badges on its saddle-cloth and holsters. Victoria took her military duties very seriously, presenting medals with evident pride and, at the very end of her life, doing her best to sign commissions personally despite failing health and a burgeoning of temporary appointments to meet the demands of the Boer War. Her alleged partiality for the Scots Fusilier Guards caused resentment in the Guards Brigade, and when the regiment fell back in some disorder at the Alma as the result of a misunderstood order, the Grenadiers and Coldstream, coming on steadily through the fire, chorused: ‘Shame! Shame! What about the queen’s favourites now?’¹⁶ Her husband, Prince Albert, took a lively interest in military affairs. He attended the allied Council of War, held in London on 16 April 1855, and helped dissuade Napoleon III from going to take personal command in the Crimea. He was Colonel of the 11^th Hussars and the Rifle Brigade, and both retained his name as part of their regimental titles until the amalgamations of the 1960s.

Many officers found comfort, then as now, in claiming to serve the monarch rather than the government, although it was not always an easy distinction to make in an age when officers often sat in the House of Commons, usually returned for a seat where their family or friends had a controlling interest. In 1775, William Howe, then a major general and MP for Nottingham, assured his constituents that his political principles precluded him from accepting a command in North America. When he did agree to serve there, an aggrieved elector told him frankly: ‘I don’t wish you to fall, as many do, but I cannot say I wish success to the undertaking.’ Howe replied that ‘my going thither was not of my seeking. I was ordered, and could not refuse, without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serve my country in distress.’¹⁷

A generation later, John Fitzmaurice of the 95^th believed that a soldier should have no politics, and Francis Skelly Tidy, who commanded a battalion of the 14^th at Waterloo, told his daughter that he was neither Whig nor Tory: ‘I am a soldier and one of His Majesty’s most devoted servants, bound to defend the crown with my life against either faction as necessary.’¹⁸ General Sir Charles Napier, conqueror of Sind, had radical political views, and when in charge of Northern Command in England hoped that the ‘physical force’ Chartists did not attempt an armed rising, for their own good. ‘Poor people! They will suffer,’ he wrote. ‘We have the physical force not they…What would their 100,000 men do with my hundred rockets wriggling their fiery tails among them, roaring, scorching, tearing and smashing all they came near?’¹⁹ He was perfectly prepared to take extreme action to defend the state, though he had little time for its government. Sergeant Samuel Ancell of the 58^th Regiment a veteran of the siege of Gibraltar, summed up his own allegiance in words reminiscent of those put by Shakespeare into Henry V’s mouth, the night before Agincourt:

Our King is answerable to God for us. I fight for him. My religion consists in a firelock, open touch-hole, good flint, well-rammed charge, and seventy rounds of powder and ball. This is the military creed. Come, comrades, drink success to British arms.²⁰

Yet for all the royal iconography on its uniforms and royal interest in its activities, the army belonged to the government and was controlled by Parliament. The Mutiny Act, first passed in 1689, established military law in time of peace, and was renewed annually. The system of governing troops on active service by Articles of War issued under the prerogative power of the crown continued, on an occasional basis, even after 1689, but was finally superseded in 1803 by a revised form of Mutiny Act which made the Articles of War statutory. From then until the passage of the Army Discipline and Regulation Act in 1879 the Mutiny Act and Articles of War formed the basis for army discipline. The principle of Parliamentary supremacy was, however, firmly asserted. The Army Act, which replaced the Army Discipline and Regulation Act in 1881, ‘has of itself no force, but requires to be brought into operation annually by another act of Parliament…thus securing the constitutional principle of the control of Parliament over the discipline requisite for the government of the army.’²¹

Parliament also exercised control through the power of the purse. Army Estimates were published annually, and passed by Parliament. Central government spent little on areas like poor relief, public health or the maintenance of roads, and defence accounted for a high proportion of the money it did spend. In 1803, for example, of a total government spend of £38,956,917, the regular army received £8,935,753, the navy £10,211,373, the militia £2,889,976 and the Ordnance £1,128,913. Subsidies to allied nations were also costly, amounting to nearly 7.7 per cent of the Treasury’s revenue in 1800. Expenditure fell sharply in peacetime, and governments strove to economise by disbanding regiments and laying up warships, sending the officers of both home on half-pay.

There were complaints both inside and outside Parliament, about the way this money was spent. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period criticism ‘was concerned more with the manner with which the war was waged than with doubts about the wisdom of waging it.’²² William Cobbett, sergeant-major of the 54^th Regiment turned radical politician, lambasted the Peninsular War in his Weekly Political Register, complaining that ‘we do, indeed, cause some expense and some mortality to France, but we, at the same time, weaken ourselves in a degree tenfold to what we weaken her.’²³ Support for wars flagged when they dragged on, or seemed hard to relate to the national interest: the American War was generally unpopular by its close. Yet there was often the paradox that made casualties harden opinion in favour of war, as Greville acknowledged on 16 November 1854 when reporting the death of his brother’s ‘youngest and favourite’ son, the eighteen-year old Lieutenant Cavendish Hubert Greville, Coldstream Guards, killed in his first battle at Inkerman. Grief-stricken, he wrote:

But the nation is not only as warlike as ever, but if possible more full of ardour and enthusiasm, and thinking of nothing more than the most lavish expenditure of men and money to carry on the war; the blood that has been shed appears only to animate the people, and to urge them to fresh exertions.²⁴

The problems of controlling the army and of its integration into the national framework were either solved directly, ‘or by the more British method of procrastination and evasion.’²⁵ Despite a growing tendency towards centralisation, the high command of the army displayed a very British mixture of checks and balances, shot through with odd historical survivals and a whole host of offices, great and small, which played their part in a wider system of patronage characteristic of the age. Until the Act of Union with Ireland in 1801, there were two distinct armies, with an Irish establishment of 12,000 officers and men (15,325 from 1769), with its own commander-in-chief, paid, administered and commanded from Dublin Castle. Although there was also a commander-in-chief in Edinburgh, Scotland had lost its independence with the Act of Union in 1707, and this officer reported directly to his superiors in London.