Читать книгу Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket - Richard Holmes - Страница 16

IF THE ARMY HAD A HEART, then this organ beat away, very steadily indeed, in Horse Guards in Whitehall, and the expression Horse Guards became synonymous for the army’s high command. A spacious first-floor office, looking out across Horse Guards Parade to the trees, ponds and greensward of St James’s Park, housed the commander-in-chief. The first recorded commander-in-chief was General George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, described as ‘Captain General and Commander-in-chief of all Forces’ in a commission issued in 1660, and the Duke of Marlborough held the office twice. Its importance decreased in mid-century, and the office was vacant from 1778 to 1793, when the 76-year old Jeffrey, Lord Amherst, was appointed to it with the title ‘general on the staff’. He was so far past his best that even the deeply conservative General Sir David Dundas, author of the army’s principal drillbook and himself commander-in-chief 1809–11 reckoned that he produced nothing but mischief.

It was only with the Duke of York’s appointment in 1798 that the post recovered some of its earlier importance. However, its accession to the level of real authority suggested by its title was effectively blocked because of a typically British piece of constitutional evolution. The commander-in-chief’s clerk, the secretary at war, had grown rapidly in status. Even in the late seventeenth century, he was an official of considerable importance and by 1688 he ‘issued orders of almost every description for paying, mustering, quartering, marching, raising and disbanding troops, and also upon the various points of discipline, such as the attendance, duty and comparative rank of officers and regiments.’²⁶ In 1704, the post was held by a politician, the Tory Henry St John, later Viscount Bolingbroke. He dealt with the monarch on a regular basis, led on military matters in the cabinet, and spoke for the army in the House of Commons. And when one commanding officer wrote about the misconduct of officers direct to the prince consort, nominally commander-in-chief, he received a sharp reprimand from St John. Although not all St John’s successors claimed such powers – or, more to the point, wielded such clout within their party – they were a key instrument in the exercise of parliamentary control.

The secretary at war, however, shared his influence on military affairs with the cabinet’s two secretaries of state, whose responsibilities were divided geographically. In 1794 Pitt created a Secretary of State for War, adding responsibility for the colonies four years later. The first incumbent of the combined post was Pitt’s associate Henry Dundas, later Viscount Melville, who held office until the change of ministry in 1801 and in 1806 was unsuccessfully impeached for misappropriation of public funds. Although the importance of the Secretary at War declined after the establishment of a Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the post was not abolished but responsibilities were shared: thus while the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies controlled the overall size of the army, the Secretary at War was responsible for its finances and for the introduction of the annual mutiny act.

The misfortunes of the British army in the Crimea provoked enormous popular and political discontent, in part because of the war reporting of William Howard Russell of The Times. He was a man of courage, humour and great personal charm: William Makepeace Thackeray remarked that he would give a guinea any day to have Russell sitting with him at dinner at the Garrick Club. He painted a grim (if not always objective) picture of the impact of administrative incompetence on the British soldier. Early in the campaign, before the Allies had even reached the Crimea, he told his readers that:

The men suffered exceedingly from cold. Some of them, officers as well as privates, had no beds to lie upon. None of the soldiers had more than their single regulation blanket…The worst thing was the continued want of comforts for the sick. Many of the men labouring under diseases contracted at Malta were obliged to stay in camp in the cold, with only one blanket under them, as there was no provision for them at all at the temporary hospital.²⁷

He later wrote of the British base at Balaclava that ‘words could not describe its filth, its horrors, its hospitals, its burials, its dead and dying Turks, its crowded lanes, its noisome sheds, its beastly purlieus, or its decay…’²⁸ If Russell was subjective he was certainly not inventive: he told the truth. A medical officer also described the appalling conditions for the wounded, this time recalling the hospital at Varna.

No words can describe the state of the rooms when they were handed over for the use of the sick; indeed, they continued long after, from the utter inability to procure labour, rather to be fitted for the reception of cattle, than sick men. Myriads of rats disputed the possession of these dreadful dens, fleas were in such numbers that the sappers employed on fatigue refused to work in the almost vain attempt to clean them…²⁹

In 1854, in response to the outcry inspired by Russell’s articles, the government appointed a specific Secretary of State for War, the Duke of Newcastle. Newcastle’s successor, Lord Panmure, combined the offices of Secretary of State for War and Secretary at War, paving the way for substantial reform. The Board of Ordnance was abolished and its military functions transferred to the commander-in-chief. Its civil functions went to the Secretary of State for War, whose War Department was now responsible for the whole of army administration, including the Commissariat and Medical departments. This reforming zeal soon lost its impetus, and in many areas it did not go far enough. But as far as the army’s central administration was concerned, it had ended the worst abuses of the system that had prevailed throughout the age of horse and musket.

The paymaster general survived. Originally a subordinate official, he was primarily responsible for issuing money to regiments to pay the officers and men held on their strength. It had once been easy for commanding officers to maintain fictitious soldiers on their regiment’s rolls by inventing spurious recruits known as ‘widow’s men’ or by failing to report deaths, and in the early eighteenth century muster-rolls were approved by the commissary-general of the musters before being passed to the paymaster general for payment. These abuses had become rare by the mid-eighteenth century, but they undoubtedly continued. On 27 July 1778 John Peebles complained: ‘I signed for an effective drummer that I know nothing about, the Col. caused him to be inserted.’³⁰ Just as the Secretary at War evolved from official to politician, so too did the paymaster general, and by the time of the American War he was a member of parliament who assisted the Secretary at War in drawing up the army estimates and shared his responsibility for the yearly parliamentary approval of accounts.

Yet if the paymaster general was eager to stamp out financial irregularities within the army, he was often able to reap the considerable rewards of his own office. Fees could be charged for making payments, and, as a parliamentary commission reported in 1781, the fact that the Treasury gave the paymaster general his money in bulk, often without scrutinising his demands, enabled him to make enormous sums on the interest. The paymaster general was able to continue to use the money after leaving office until his accounts were finally passed. Henry Fox resigned in 1765 but his accounts had still not been audited in 1780, enabling him to draw an income of £25,000 a year on the paymaster general’s money.

The commander-in-chief was assisted by three senior officers. The adjutant general was responsible for personnel and the quartermaster general for the quartering and movement of troops. The military secretary, a civilian under Amherst, a field officer under the Duke of York and a general by the close of the period, initially dealt with the commander-in-chief’s correspondence, but his routine involvement with patronage meant that he assumed responsibility for officers’ careers. Lord FitzRoy Somerset, the future Lord Raglan, held the post from 1827 to 1852. He dealt with about fifty letters a day, on matters so varied as Major Champain’s claims to be ‘second lieutenant colonel’ of the 9^th Regiment, a plea (sadly unsuccessful) from Lieutenant W. I. B. Webb’s mother for his reinstatement following cashiering for fraud; and the application (rather more fruitful) by ‘a poor officer’ of the 43^rd for a post for his boy, ‘a junior clerk in a public office’.³¹ Although Somerset was affable and engaging, his was not an easy job, and his office was the scene of many a painful interview. Interestingly, when in 1837 Lieutenant General Sir Latimer Widdrington, who had failed to obtain the colonelcy of a regiment, protested to the Secretary at War that the military secretary and commander-in-chief had not treated him fairly, the Secretary at War replied that army patronage remained a matter for the commander-in-chief.

There was, though, one area where the commander-in-chief held no sway. The master-general of the ordnance commanded the ordnance corps – officers and NCOs of the Royal Artillery, officers of the Royal Engineers and other ranks of the Royal Sappers and Miners – whose personnel were financed by a parliamentary vote distinct from that of the army of a whole, and whose separateness was emphasised by its blue uniforms. The corps maintained its own medical department, paymaster-general and transport service. The civil side of the ordnance department supplied weapons and much equipment to army and navy alike, was responsible for defence works, barracks and military prisons, supervised the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, the Royal Laboratory and the Royal Carriage Works, and was charged (hence the Ordnance Survey) with military mapping.

The master general, generally a peer and a professional soldier, sometimes chaired the Board of Ordnance which met three times a week in summer and once in winter, in the ordnance office in Westminster, and later in Pall Mall. The Board of Ordnance – whose ambiguous initials BO were stencilled on a variety of equipment – responded to instructions issued by the king, privy council or one of the secretaries of state. The master-general often sat in the cabinet, providing the government with military advice. The board was jealous of its authority and notoriously ‘obnoxious and obstructive’. It once took three years for the Board to organise transport to England for a company of artillery in the Bahamas. In the interim, knowing that the unit would be coming home, the Board thoughtfully provided it with no new clothing. Its dead hand lay even on matters as minor as fences at Woolwich.

A fence happened to require repairs in front of the barracks, and its dangerous state was repeatedly pointed out by the Commandant. But not until years had passed and an officer had killed his horse, and broken his own collarbone, did any steps occur to the Board to remedy it. Even then, while they were brooding, accidents continued, coming to a climax one night when the Chaplain in walking home fell in and broke the principal ligament of his leg…³²

Supply and transport were primarily the responsibility of the Treasury, and were in the hands of its officials, civilians holding appointments in the Commissariat, described by Wellington as ‘gentlemen appointed to their office by the king’s authority, although not holding his commission’. No qualifications were required of commissaries till 1810, and only in 1812 was an examination in English and arithmetic required. Although they were eventually uniformed, in sober blue, for many years they wore what suited them. Quasi-uniforms were popular, and one Peninsula commissary was unkindly described as wearing ‘an hermaphrodite scarlet coat’. Some were admirable: Assistant Commissary Brooke was killed at Talavera leading an ammunition convoy to the front line, and Assistant Commissary Dalton was to win a Victoria Cross at Rorke’s Drift in Zululand in 1879. Others were incompetent: Wellington complained that his commissariat was lamentable because ‘the people who manage it are incapable of managing anything outside a counting house’. And many were dishonest. Deputy Assistant Commissary General Thomas Jolly was court-martialled (officials of the commissariat were subject to military law when on active service) and cashiered for embezzlement in Spain in 1814. In Dominica in 1796 Commissary General Valentine Jones was estimated to have made £9,789 17s 6d on a single fraudulent transaction. It required great honesty to resist the temptation offered to commissaries. Havilland Le Mesurier, a West India merchant ruined by the collapse of his trade in the French Revolutionary War, gained a commissary’s post through his friendship with Pitt and was sent to establish a provision magazine at Bruges in 1793. He told his wife:

I am obliged to fight venality and corruption through all ranks, and overcome my feelings every day by turning out men who have large families and who have been negligent or corrupt in their duty. To convince thee, my love, of the necessity for this rigorous discipline, I need only say that the day before yesterday a man had the audacity to mention that as I took so much trouble about his contract he could not do less than acknowledge it, and begged that I would accept a 100 Louis…³³

He admitted that ‘I did not kick him or knock him down,’ but spoke so sharply as to ‘prevent my being again insulted in the like manner’.

What irritated many soldiers was the Commissariat’s insistence on a bureaucratic exactness seemingly at variance with the demands of the field. In 1854 Sergeant Timothy Gowing of 7^th Royal Fusiliers was sent to Balaclava with a working party to draw blankets. After:

trudging through mud for nine miles I presented my requisition to the Deputy-Assistant-Quartermaster-General, who informed me that it was not signed by the Quartermaster-General of the Division, and that I should not have an article until it was duly signed. I informed him that the men were dying daily for the want of blankets. He ordered me to be silent and…informed me he did not care – a correct return or no stores…I was ordered out like a dog.³⁴

A military transport service was tried briefly in 1794, and in 1799 a Royal Wagon Train was raised for the campaign in Holland. By 1814 it numbered almost 2,000 men with their own wagons. The unit was unkindly known, from the colour of its coats and the supposed origin of many of its members, as ‘The Newgate Blues’, and in 1814 Commissary August Schaumann wrote scornfully of ‘Fat General Hamilton…with his useless wagon corps.’³⁵ Yet it was not without its own remarkable achievements. At Waterloo, when the garrison of the crucial farm complex at Hougoumont, in Wellingon’s right centre, was running short of ammunition, Private Joseph Brewster of the Royal Wagon Train drove a tumbril of ammunition down to the farm complex, under fire the whole way. Wellington regarded retention of Hougoumont as fundamental to his success, and Brewster’s achievement can scarcely be over-rated.

Even when at its maximum strength, the Royal Wagon Train could not provide for all the army’s transport requirements, and most draught and pack animals, carts and drivers were hired locally. In 1776–80 the British army in North America employed an average of 739 wagons, 1958 horses and 760 drivers, some of them procured in England as a result of a contract with a Mr Fitzherbert. Muleteers and ox-cart drivers were hired in the Peninsula, and followed the army like a comet’s tail of disorder and dishonesty. The carts themselves had fixed wheels and rotating wooden axles, ‘making the most horrible creaking sounds that can be imagined…almost sufficient to make anyone within reach of the sounds pray to be divested of the sense of hearing.’³⁶

The army’s medical services plumbed the depths of administrative chaos. There was nothing approaching what would today be termed a medical corps. A physician-general and surgeon-general – both civilians with private practices in addition to their military duties – had existed since the time of Charles I, and an inspector-general of hospitals had been established in 1758. In 1794 an army medical board, on which these worthies sat, was set up, largely at the instigation of the Duke of York, in an effort to give more coherent direction to the medical services. Beneath them came the inspectors and deputy inspectors of hospitals, the physicians, surgeons and their mates who served in the hospitals, and the administrative officers who ran them. Each regiment had its surgeons and two mates, later termed assistant surgeons. In the eighteenth century they were essentially the colonel’s employees, who purchased their positions, received an allowance collected by captains from their company funds, and were given a grant from which they were expected to purchase all their medical necessities.

Their status improved with reforms introduced after medical catastrophes in Holland in 1793–94. However, it was not until the more far-reaching reforms after the Crimean War that the army’s medical services were put on a proper footing, with the creation of the Medical Staff Corps, forerunner of the Royal Army Medical Corps, in 1855. The keen but unqualified Sergeant Roger Lamb served periodically as assistant surgeon to the 9^th and 23^rd Regiments in the American War. Even the great James McGrigor, who became Wellington’s surgeon-general and was to do so much to improve the medical services and the lot of those in their care, joined the 88^th as a surgeon in 1793 without having completed his degree. Dr Hugh Moises declared that: ‘I have known men who have served not many months behind the counter of a country apothecary…admitted to a regimental practice…Mere apprentice boys were appointed as surgeons and mates without exhibiting the proper testimonials of their knowledge or abilities.’³⁷ A London surgeon observed that military medicine was no place for ‘a man of superior merit’, who would ‘soon abandon the employment for the more lucrative the more respectable and the less sordid work of private practice.’³⁸ It was not impossible to combine private practice and military employment: the London-based John Leslie remained surgeon to the 3^rd Foot Guards until advancing age and a successful private practice persuaded him to resign.

The medical profession was dominated by physicians. It was not until 1754 that the Company of Surgeons at last severed its connection with the barbers, and only in 1800 that the Royal College of Surgeons was founded. Military doctors, whether physicians or surgeons, were poorly regarded: Moises complained that when the king reviewed his unit in 1788 ‘no surgeon was allowed to kiss his hand’. Things improved, albeit only slowly. In 1796 surgeons were given captain’s status when quarters were allocated, their assistants became commissioned officers, ranking as lieutenants, and both were to be regularly paid and provided with medicines (though not their medical equipment) by the government. In 1798 it was ordered that physicians must hold a medical qualification, while assistant surgeons were required to pass a medical examination before being appointed. However, regulations accorded them ‘no claims whatever to military command’. It was not until 1850 that medical officers were at last eligible for admission to the military division of the Order of the Bath. The Lancet believed this ‘great triumph – for triumph it is – to be the greatest step ever made by our profession towards obtaining its just recognition by the state…It is the removal of a professional stigma.’³⁹ The low status of military doctors was mirrored by the limited resources placed at their disposal throughout the period. Many would have agreed with William Gibney, surgeon to the 15^th Hussars at Waterloo, that many men died who might have been saved had time or resources been available. It was the hardest part of their job ‘to be obliged to tell a dying soldier, who had served his king and country that day, that his case was hopeless.’⁴⁰

Military surgeons, like commissaries, ran the whole gamut from the idle and incompetent to the zealous and committed. And most, as we shall see, were often so busy that they overlooked the obvious. In 1812 Lieutenant William Grattan of the 88^th was helped to a field hospital by Dan Carsons, his batman, and the doctor only looked at the entry wound made by the musket-ball which had hit him. Carsons insisted that his officer should be turned over, and the doctor was able to extract a large piece of cloth from his coat, driven into his body by the bullet: ‘The doctor looked confounded; Dan looked ferocious…’

Some doctors became so fond of the military life that they laid scalpel and bone-saw aside and took up combatant commissions. William Grattan (another member of the widely-branching Irish family) studied surgery in Dublin and became assistant surgeon of the 64^th on the eve of its departure for the American War. While overseas he decided to become a combatant officer, and purchased an ensigncy and then a lieutenancy. In the words of the admiring Sergeant Roger Lamb, a fellow Irishman, he:

lived with economy and frugality, and in the course of a few years, he purchased a company [captaincy]. Captain Grattan possessed a strong understanding, sound judgement, and deep penetration; these, with a perfect knowledge of his profession, made him an invaluable officer. He became the soul of his regiment, which he never exchanged for another. Merit like his could not be hid.⁴¹

Wounded in America, he died in Ireland during the rebellion of 1798, catching a chill after bathing in a cold river after a long hot ride. The adjutant of the 73^rd at Waterloo was Ensign Patrick Hay who, as Sergeant Thomas Morris of his battalion observed, was ‘a fine-spirited fellow who had been our regimental surgeon, but, through the interest of the colonel, exchanged to ensign and adjutant.’ At Waterloo he saved one of the 73^rd’s companies from being cut off by French cuirassiers, shouting to its useless commander: ‘Captain Robinson, what are you about? Are you going to murder your men?’ He ordered the company back just in time for it to help the battalion form square.⁴²

Many doctors shared the risks of the men they tended. Few did so as spectacularly as Surgeon William Bryden, seconded to Shah Shujah’s medical services in Afghanistan, who accompanied the army on its retreat from Kabul in 1842:

I with difficulty put my pony into a gallop, and, taking the bridle in my teeth, cut right and left with my sword as I went through them. They could not reach me with their knives…One man on a mound over the road had a gun, which he fired close down upon me and broke my sword, leaving about six inches in the handle. But I got clear of them, and then found that the shot had hit the poor pony, wounding him in the loins, and he could hardly carry me.⁴³

Bryden was the only member of the entire force to reach safety in Jellalabad after cutting his way through the Afghans.

Without doubt the most remarkable medical officer of the age was James Miranda Barry, who entered the army as a hospital assistant in 1813, was appointed assistant surgeon two years later, and rose to become inspector-general of the Army Medical Department in 1858. It was only after Dr Barry’s death in 1865 that it was discovered that she was a woman, who appeared to have given birth to a child: she had concealed her gender throughout her military service. While serving at the Cape she was described as the most skilled of physicians but the most wayward of men, and her quarrelsome temper had led her to fight a duel.

The theme of ‘the female drummer’, the woman who passes herself off as a man, was a familiar one in the period, and the song ‘Polly Oliver’ describes a girl who decided to ‘list for a soldier and follow my love.’ Very few women actually accomplished this feat in the British army (though the Russians had Nadezda Durova, who served in the Napoleonic Wars as ‘Cornet Aleksandrov’) but Barry’s officer status would have given her far more privacy than a private soldier could have attained in barrack-room or bivouac.

The best-documented female soldier is Hannah Snell, who seems (though it is hard to separate fact from fiction) to have served four and a half years in the marines and been discharged in 1750. She subsequently made a living by appearing on the stage in her regimentals to perform arms drill, and selling buttons, garters and lace. The diarist Parson Woodford saw her at the White Hart, at Weston, near Norwich. He believed her assertion that she ‘was 21 years as a common soldier in the Army, and was not discovered by any as a woman’ and, kindly soul, ‘took 4 pr of 4d buttons and gave her 0.2.6.’⁴⁴ As we shall see, women routinely accompanied the army and some were killed or died of illness or exposure. One of them, the wife of Sergeant Reston of the 94^th Regiment, carried ammunition and supplies to the front line, at the siege of Matagorda Fort at Cadiz in 1810, and received no official recognition of her heroism despite the efforts of her regiment. But Mrs Reston made no attempt to conceal her gender, and Dr Barry’s sustained achievement is all the more remarkable.

Lastly, the Home Office had a voice in military policy, for it controlled the non-regular forces of the crown until they were actually embodied into service and came under military command. The oldest reserve force was the militia, liable for limited training in peacetime and embodiment in grave emergency. Parish constables kept ‘fair and true lists’ of men between the ages of 18 and 45, and militiamen were selected from these rolls by ballot to serve for five years. County militia lists throw fascinating light on village society. In 1777, the village of Yardley Gobion in Northamptonshire listed four farmers and two farmers’ sons, each dignified by ‘Mr’ in the roll, two bakers, two tailors, a butcher, a horse-dealer, a hog-dealer, five servants, two men who maintained (apparently unsuccessfully) that they had already performed militia service, and nine labourers. Seven men were exempted as unfit, among them William Holman, who was ‘very near sighted’, Thomas Bignall, ‘very bow legged’ and William Robinson, who ‘saith he has fits’. Literary consistency was not the constables’ strong suit. Those of the Chipping Warden Hundred of Northamptonshire managed to spell Thorpe Mandeville, where appeals against listings were determined, as Thorp Mundville, Thrup Mandivil, Thrupmandeveill and Throp Mandevile.⁴⁵

The militia was organised in county regiments, officered by gentlemen selected by the lords-lieutenant of those counties. Sometimes their martial zeal caused marital upset. In 1759 Lord Robert Manners, colonel of the Nottinghamshire Militia, told the Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, that:

Mr Martin Bird wants his name scratched off the Militia List, as his wife, on hearing he had taken a commission, was so affected that he thought she would have died! I suppose the Lady’s condition will be sufficient plea with Your Grace to let the gentleman off.⁴⁶

Because the militia was funded by the land-tax, country gentlemen had a proprietary interest in the force:

For this reason they felt a pride in furnishing it with officers; and indeed the militia lists of the period are simply a catalogue of the names of the leading county families…[Lords lieutenant] were to some extent petty Sovereigns, with the Militia for their army. They were attached to the force, frequently spent very large sums upon it, and easily grew to regard it as their own. The officers shared their views, and hence in many cases a regiment of Militia became a very exclusive country-club, with a just pride in itself which was not of little value.⁴⁷

In February 1793, 19,000 militia were called out, but individuals were allowed to provide substitutes, and the demand for volunteers to act in this (relatively safe) capacity deprived the regular army of many potential recruits. Subsequent attempts to use the militia in direct support of the regular army – for instance by drafting the flank companies of militia regiments into battalions under the command of regular officers, granting regular commissions to militia officers who persuaded their men to volunteer for regular service (the so called ‘raising for rank’), and finally by raising the Army of Reserve, whose members could be drafted into the regular army (conscription by any other name) – were deeply unpopular in the shires.

There was no militia in Scotland until 1797, not least because of the risk of distributing weapons to a society that had only recently been disarmed. In order to meet the demands of home defence during the Seven Years’ War and American War, Fencible regiments were raised, composed of regulars enlisted for home service for the duration of the war. In 1793 nine new Fencible regiments were raised, and more followed. Lastly, although there had been a short-lived plan to raise volunteers for home defence in 1782, in April 1794 an Act of Parliament authorised the formation of Volunteer units which would be subject to military discipline and eligible for pay when called out.

An explosion of volunteering ensued: the five Associated Companies of St George’s, Hanover Square, actually formed up before the act was passed. Lord Winchelsea’s three troops of ‘Gentlemen and Yeomanry of the County of Rutland’ were the first units of the new Yeomanry Cavalry. The Yeomanry’s home defence role was to be overtaken, in the nineteenth century, by a growing emphasis on the preservation of internal security in a struggle which often pitted town against country, Yeoman against worker. Volunteers and Yeoman who could produce a certificate of regular attendance at drills were exempted from service in the militia. There were repeated suggestions that the congenial part-time soldiering enjoyed by these worthies induced those who could afford it – for Volunteers and Yeoman had to provide some of their own necessities, and the latter required access to a horse – to join the Volunteers or Yeomanry in order to avoid the militia.

In a book whose chief concern is with the army’s combatant teeth rather than its administrative tail I have little time to delve more deeply into the labyrinth. But a labyrinth it was, with dark corridors of boards and officials. The Board of General Officers, established in 1705, had some thirty members, of whom five constituted a quorum, met irregularly and reported to the king, through the secretary at war, on a wide range of issues such as misbehaviour, grievances and abuses. The Clothing Board agreed regulation patterns of uniform, approved contracts and examined the clothing supplied. The Board of Commissioners of Chelsea Hospital regulated the affairs of the hospital, a home for old soldiers known as ‘in-pensioners’, founded by Charles II. They decided who might be admitted to the hospital as in-pensioners, or, as ‘out-pensioners’, and who might receive an annual pension in lieu of residence at Chelsea.

The judge advocate general, a civilian appointed by letters patent under the great seal, was responsible for advising both monarch and commander-in-chief on the administration of military law, submitting the sentences of courts-martial with recommendations for confirmation or rejection. He attended some trials himself, sometimes as prosecutor but more usually to assist the court and to ensure that the law was obeyed. The apothecary general, another civilian, was responsible to the secretary at war, and supplied the army with medical and hospital stores.

At the start of the period this system worked ponderously, as one example shows.

In 1758 Lieutenant General Bligh was selected to go on foreign service in command of a body of cavalry. Lord Barrington [secretary at war] first wrote to him, by command of the king, that he was appointed to that service. He then wrote to the Commissioners of the Treasury to tell them that five regiments of cavalry were to go on foreign service, that their lordships might give orders to the Victualling Board for a supply of bread and forage. He next sent orders to each regiment to hold themselves in readiness to embark. He then wrote to the Paymaster-General, signifying to him the King’s pleasure, that he should issue subsistence to the men, and twelve months off-reckoning to the Colonels; and lastly, to the Apothecary-general, desiring him to send immediately a supply of medicines for the expedition.⁴⁸

Had the detachment included artillery or engineers the Board of Ordnance would have required a separate approach, and getting the force to its destination would demand the co-operation of the Navy Board, which would furnish and, if necessary, escort the transports. It is small wonder that the historian Sir John Fortescue was to call the entire apparatus, characterised as it was by overlapping, duplication, and decentralisation, as ‘a hopeless organisation for war’.

The army’s fighting strength lay in its regiments of infantry and cavalry, self-contained enterprises with their own administrative and financial structures, which provided officers and soldiers with a focus for their loyalty: a small, compact, self-regarding world in which they lived and, all too often, died. The most senior were the Household troops, horse- and footguards. Most European armies maintained bodies of Household troops – Austria was a notable exception – in which birth and breeding were prized. Regiments of the Russian Guard maintained 3–4,000 supernumerary NCOs on their lists, all from the higher nobility, and the French Maison du Roi cavalry was entirely composed of noblemen.

British guards regiments, quartered in and around London, shared some of the characteristics of European Household troops with, as we have just seen, a close relationship with the royal family. They also enjoyed a rank-structure which ensured that guards officers ranked higher in the army than they did in their regiments. When John Aitchison of 3^rd Foot Guards was promoted lieutenant on 22 November 1810 his commission granted him ‘the rank of captain in our army,’ and guards captains ranked as lieutenant colonels of the line. The three regiments of foot guards – the 1^st (subsequently Grenadier) 2nd (Coldstream) and 3^rd (later Scots Fusilier Guards and later still Scots Guards) – were officered by gentlemen but recruited from men who differed little from recruits into the remainder of the army. But in the eighteenth century the Household Cavalry still included units with gentlemen serving in their ranks, and whose corporals were commissioned officers. In 1760 the Life Guards comprised two troops of Horse Guards and two of Horse Grenadier Guards, and a full regiment of Royal Horse Guards Blue, or Blues for short. In 1788 the Horse Guards and Horse Grenadier Guards were restructured into two regiments, 1^st and 2^nd Life Guards: most of the gentlemen serving in their ranks were discharged, although some became officers in the new regiments. The three regiments of Household Cavalry – two of Life Guards and the Blues – retained a peculiar terminology for their NCO ranks, with their sergeants being styled ‘corporal of horse’ and sergeant-majors ‘corporal major’.

There was never any doubt that the guards, regardless of military seniority and social standing, took their share of fighting. Although they did not serve in India, they fought in North America, the Peninsula, during the Hundred Days and in the Crimea, and certainly felt war’s rough edge. The Hon John Rous, who joined the Coldstream Guards as a volunteer in Spain before being commissioned ensign in December 1812 cheerfully reported that ‘I am bitten all over by fleas and bugs’. After Vitoria he told his mother that ‘we went through some very severe work owing to the wet weather and not having any rations of biscuit; we were five days in arrears, but there were scarcely any grumbles amongst our men who seemed to be aware of the consequence of pushing on and the impossibility of the Commissariat department keeping up with us.’ Yet he retained a young gentleman’s sartorial aspirations, asking for ‘two pairs of short boots with buckles at the sides (Kennett, 39 Silver Street, Golden Square) made some for me that I brought out and I believe he has my measure.’⁴⁹

There were moments when guards officers’ resolve to take their campaigning as comfortably as possible conflicted with a more austere high command. In 1813 when Wellington saw several guards officers using umbrellas he sent Lord Hill over with a message: ‘Lord Wellington does not approve of the use of umbrellas during the enemy’s firing, and will not allow the gentlemen’s sons to make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of the army…’ Yet there was no doubting the distinctive contribution the guards made to the battles of the era, as this account by Private Bancroft of the Grenadiers in which he describes the desperate fighting around the Sandbag Battery at Inkerman demonstrates:

I bayoneted the first Russian in the chest: he fell dead. I was then stabbed in the mouth with great force, which caused me to stagger back, where I shot this second Russian and ran a third through. A fourth and fifth came at me and ran me through the right side. I fell but managed to run one through and brought him down. I stunned him by kicking him, whilst I was engaging my bayonet with another. Sergeant-Major Algar called out to me not to kick the man that was down, but being dead he was very troublesome to my legs; I was fighting over his body. I returned to the Battery and spat out my teeth: I found only two.⁵⁰

The infantry and cavalry of the line formed the bulk of the army. Renumberings, the raising of new regiments which took the numbers of disbanded units and, in the cavalry, changes in terminology as fashionable lancers and hussars replaced the less fashionable light dragoons, make the charting of regimental lineage a science bordering on the occult, but the trends are clear. The army’s establishment varied with the ebb and flow of national security. Junior, more recently-raised regiments faced disbandment with the onset of peace, with their officers sent on half-pay and their soldiers discharged or sent to strengthen regiments that were to be retained.

Enterprising officers who sought long-term careers strove to obtain commissions in senior regiments. Conversely, in 1763, James Boswell, lobbying as persistently as unsuccessfully for a commission in the London-based guards, told Lord Eglinton that he would not ‘catch at any string’. Any other commission, which might involve posting to some distant garrison, would be ‘a rope wherewith to hang myself; except you can get me one that is to be broke [eg disbanded], and then I am not forced from London.’⁵¹ In contrast, his friend Captain the Hon Andrew Erskine, who wanted to serve on, had the bad luck to hold a commission in the 71^st, disbanded that year along with all regiments junior to the 70^th: he remained on half-pay till 1765.

In 1783, as the American war ended, the 106^th Foot was transferred to the Irish establishment (where the authorised strength of units was much lower and their cost, in consequence, smaller), and a dozen regiments of foot were disbanded: another ten followed the next year. There was no blood-letting on quite this scale after the Napoleonic wars. In 1817 ten infantry regiments were disbanded, but there were still 95 on the establishment on George III’s death in 1820, and 100 on William IV’s death in 1837. The cavalry was no less vulnerable to peacetime economies: four regiments of light dragoons were disbanded in 1783 and in 1818–19 three more regiments of light dragoons and one of lancers followed suit.

Infantry regiments were generally raised with a single battalion, although most obtained further battalions subsequently. The practice of raising second and subsequent battalions was unusual at the start of the period, but 1^st Foot Guards and the 1^st Foot or Royal Regiment (later the Royal Scots) had two battalions. Second battalions were either taken into the line as regiments in their own right, or disbanded altogether. In 1755–6, for instance, fifteen regiments were authorised to raise second battalions, but in 1758 these became the 61^st to 75^th Foot. Extra battalions were raised on a large scale during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The 60^th Foot (Royal Americans) was granted a 5^th Battalion on 30 December 1797 ‘to enable His Majesty to Grant Commissions to a certain number of foreign Protestants who have served abroad as Officers or Engineers,’ and in 1809 it boasted seven battalions. The post-Waterloo reductions took their toll of junior battalions, leaving the regimental structure largely intact, but vexing officers in second battalions of senior regiments, many of whom found themselves shunted off on half-pay while their comrades in the first battalions of junior regiments soldiered on.

In contrast to continental practice, where the different battalions of a single regiment usually served together, it was uncommon for the battalions of a British regiment to find themselves side by side, and they were generally treated as if they were separate units. There were of course exceptions. The practice of keeping Guards units together on active service meant that at Waterloo, for instance, 2/1^st and 3/1^st Guards fought side by side in Maitland’s Brigade. Both battalions of the 42^nd served together in North America during the Seven Years War. Two battalions of 7^th Royal Fusiliers and two of the 48^th fought at Albuera in 1811. At the end of that dreadful day Houghton’s brigade was commanded by Captain Cimtière of the 48^th, a French émigré commissioned from the ranks in 1794, and 1/48^th was commanded by a lieutenant.

A regiment was headed by its colonel, and until 1751, when the official numbering of regiments was introduced, bore his name as its title and might carry a badge from his armorial bearings on his colours, harking back to the days of the English Civil War when, for example, Sir Bevil Grenvile’s fine regiment of Cornish foot wore the blue and silver of the family livery and carried his griffin badge on its colours. The colonel of the regiment, perversely, was usually not a colonel at all, but a general officer for whom the colonelcy represented not simply a personal honour but the opportunity to wield patronage and make money into the bargain. However, for most of the period, despite the occasional nod to political interest, officers appointed to colonelcies were men of experience and probity.⁵²

George III himself told General William Picton, brother of the better-known Sir Thomas, and entirely lacking in influence or powerful friends, that for his appointment as colonel of the 12^th Foot ‘you are entirely obliged to Captain Picton, who commanded the grenadier company of the 12^th Regiment in Germany [during the Seven Years’ War].’⁵³ Picton held the post for 32 years, but still fell short of the record set by the 1^st Marquess of Drogheda, colonel of the 18^th Light Dragoons from 1759 until its disbandment, as part of the post-Waterloo reductions, in 1821. It was unusual for a colonel to resign voluntarily, but the 2^nd Duke of Northumberland gave up the colonelcy of the Royal Horse Guards in 1812 when the Duke of York refused to give him a free hand in the appointment and promotion of its officers. Only one colonel was dismissed, the unlucky John Whitelocke of the 89^th Regiment, because his sentence of cashiering, imposed when he was court-martialled after the Buenos Aires fiasco, debarred him from serving in any military capacity whatever.