Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

The process was cumulative, for the generals and political leaders of the Second World War – most of whom had fought on the Western Front as young men – knew very well that society would never again tolerate the sacrifice of life on such a scale. Their soldiers, who had grown up in the shadow of the Somme, were less deferential than their fathers. Field Marshal Montgomery’s predilection for letting metal, not flesh, do the business of battle was firmly rooted not only in his own military experience but also in the culture of the men he commanded.

As I shuffle off to lunch after a morning spent lecturing newly promoted majors on the Intermediate Command and Staff Course, I am struck by that same mixture of continuity and change that characterises the whole of the army. There will be a few names that have been in the Army List since there was an Army List, with the same regimental connections. Introduce me to a Tollemache and I will confidently expect the cap-star of the Coldstream. The Winchester College–Oxbridge nexus that would once have taken a boy into the Rifle Brigade or the 60th Rifles, might now see him in the Rifles – arguably the most successful of the recent amalgamations. However, there will be many officers with no family connection with the army, who have arrived by way of comprehensive school and redbrick university, or indeed no university at all. There will be some who have risen through the ranks, being commissioned after making their mark as a private or junior NCO. Others will come up the hard way to a Late Entry commission by way of RSM. Whether on operations in Ulster, the Balkans, or Iraq, I have been struck by their grace under pressure; their constant determination to put the interests of their soldiers before their own; and that physical courage that gives this part of the book its title.

This is not uncritical admiration – their moral courage is not always equal to their physical valour. The desire to succeed in one of the most hierarchical of professions occasionally leads an officer to scramble up the greasy pole without much regard for the boot-prints he leaves on the faces of those below him. Lunching with the Louts Club puts one at serious risk of either injury from flying bread-rolls, whizzing like grapeshot around the great breach at Badajoz, or short-onset cirrhosis. Their champagne/burgundy/rosé striped tie was designed to minimise stains from the fluids that might fall upon it.

There can be surprises among the men in terms of their diverse interests and skills. Today’s officers are often as cavalier about reading worthy doctrinal manuals as their great-grandfathers were. At its 1917 Christmas party, the Doctrine and Training Branch in France sang a ditty with the words ‘We write books and pamphlets/Yes by the ton/But nobody reads them/No not bally one’, and I know how its members felt. Yet I also know a former Grenadier who can recite Chesterton’s Lepanto word-perfect, and who showed me the Moons of Jupiter; a Royal Signals officer who cuts the most perfect silhouettes; a Para who left the army after a very heavy landing and has become a successful artist; and an infantryman who combined being one of the most-be-medalled officers of his generation with knocking off a doctorate in his spare time and writing five good books. They are often irritating, but rarely less than engaging.

The notion of a ‘national’ army has changed over time. Back in the seventeenth century, Charles II united the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland only in his royal person. The Union of Scotland and England did not take place till 1707, and that of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. However, even while the three kingdoms had their separate legislatures, there was no easy relationship between the overall size, either of Britain’s population as a whole, or of the army that defended it, and the national backgrounds of officers. The eighteenth-century army was dominated, in numbers though not always in influence, by the Scots and Irish. The army in Ireland, right up to 1800, had its own sharply reduced regimental establishment. In 1774, 41 per cent of officers were English, 32 per cent were Irish, and 25 per cent Scottish. In 1776 these proportions were 37 per cent, 33 per cent and 27 per cent, and in 1782: 36 per cent, 28 per cent, and 33 per cent. Foreigners, mainly Americans, made up 2–3 per cent, though this may reflect the fact that Americans serving in British regiments often reported themselves as English. In the mid-1770s a little over half the population of the British Isles was English or Welsh, just under a third Irish, and one-tenth Scots. British line infantry, regardless of any designation its regiments bore, was officered by a rather larger proportion of Irishmen than existed in the general population, and over twice as many Scots, while the English produced just two-thirds of the officers to which their share of the wider population should have entitled them. The proportions of rank and file were rather different, with around 60 per cent English, 24 per cent Scottish, and 16 per cent Irish, so it is not unfair to speak of a predominantly English army that was disproportionately officered by Scotsmen and Irishmen.

Although the English content of the rank and file increased as the nineteenth century went on, with emigration to the United States replacing enlistment into the army as the preferred career choice for so many young Irishmen, the proportion of Scots and Irish officers remained high. Towards the beginning of the century it was said that if you walked into the officers’ mess of the 38th Foot (which boasted a Staffordshire connection) and yelled ‘Campbell’ a quarter of the officers present would turn round. The 22nd Foot had a proud affiliation to Cheshire but had a regimental agent in Dublin. In 1870, 71 per cent of the population of Great Britain hailed from England and Wales, with 17 per cent from Ireland and 11 per cent from Scotland. The birthplace of the 1914 generals is not necessarily an accurate index of their national background. Tommy Capper, killed at Loos in 1915, and William Birdwood, who went on to command the ANZACs, were both born in India. Only 63 per cent were born in England, with 13 per cent coming from Ireland and a remarkable 19 per cent from Scotland. Throughout the period, the minor gentry of Scotland and Ireland generated a disproportionate number of officers. Sir Walter Scott told the Duke of Wellington that

Your Grace knows that Scotland is a breeding, not a feeding country, and we must send our sons abroad as we sent our black cattle to England; and, as old Lady Charlotte, of Ardkinglass, proposed to dispose of her nine sons, we have a strong tendency to put our young folks ‘a’ to the sword.

What the junker squirearchy of East Prussia was to the German army, so Ireland was to the British. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey argue that the high proportion of Irish officers, even at the close of the nineteenth century, reflects a ‘shortage of other career options’.

Of the five non-royal commanders-in-chief of the army in the nineteenth century, one (Dundas) was Scots, two (Hill and Hardinge) were English, and the remainder, Wellington, Wolseley, and Roberts, were Irish. The latter, although born in Cawnpore, came from a distinguished Waterford family. Wellington disliked being called Irish, observing that one could be born in a stable without being a horse, but much of his political attitude was shaped by growing up as a child of the ascendancy. His brother-in-law Ned Pakenham, killed at New Orleans in January 1815 (wholly unnecessarily, for peace terms had been agreed, but news had not yet reached North America), was Irish. Galbraith Lowry Cole, a divisional commander in the Peninsula was Irish too. He was described by a biographer coming from a class of

energetic, masterful men, who interested themselves in local and public affairs and as such looked up to and respected by their neighbours; loving sport and country pursuits but with only a tepid interest in literature and art; careless about money, yet acutely aware of the need for it to make life pleasant; having a high sense of honour, but also a high temper and a lack of patience and caution.

This might almost have been written to describe the family of the future field marshal Harold Alexander, born in London but descended from James Alexander, 1st Earl of Caledon, who had built a fine house on the borders of Tyrone in the late eighteenth century. Alexander grew up on the estate, where ‘his mother did not care what he did out of her sight’, and joined the army because it had never struck him to do anything else, and was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1911.

His contemporary Alan Brooke was born in the French Pyrenees, where his parents spent their winters, but the family home was in Colebrooke, Co Fermanagh, held by the family since Major Thomas Brooke of Lord Drogheda’s Regiment of Horse gained it during the Williamite War. Sir Henry Brooke, 1st Baronet of Colebrooke, had three soldier sons fighting in the Napoleonic wars. One took over from Robert Ross, who burned Washington in 1812, another commanded the 4th Foot in Spain and took temporary command of his brigade when its commander was wounded at Waterloo, a battle in which his nephew, heir to the baronetcy, was killed. As David Fraser has pointed out, ‘Twenty-six Brookes of Colebrook served in [the First World War]: twenty-seven served in the war of 1939–45: and in those wars, or from wounds received in them, twelve died.’

The Anglo-Irish ascendancy and the Ulster Plantations have provided the army with many of its most distinguished senior officers. There has been a whole tribe of Goughs, from Hugh, 1st Viscount, who commanded in both Sikh Wars. His chief tactic was frontal assault, and on one occasion, having been told that his artillery had run out of ammunition, he replied gratefully ‘Thank God for that. Now I’ll be at them with the bayonet.’ The future field marshal Gerald Templer and the future general Richard O’Connor were both children of officers in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, while Field Marshal Sir John Dill, whose equestrian statue stands proudly in Arlington National Cemetery, was commissioned into the Leinster Regiment in 1901; he was the son of a bank manager in Lurgan, County Armagh. Yet to judge Ireland’s contribution simply by the senior officers it furnished is to miss the point. There was scarcely an engagement in which an Irish officer did not play a notable part, whether or not he happened to be in an Irish regiment. Joseph Dyas, ‘a young officer of very great promise, of a most excellent disposition, and beloved by every man in the corps – an Irishman whose only fortune was his sword’, was serving with the 51st Foot when he led the forlorn hope against Fort St Cristoval, at Badajoz, in 1811. Private William Wheeler saw him emerge from the first attempt ‘without cap, his sword was shot off close to the handle, the sword scabbard was gone, and the laps of his frock coat were perforated with balls.’

He promptly volunteered to lead a second fruitless attempt, from which only nineteen men of two hundred survived. Dyas was eventually made captain in the Ceylon Regiment, and ended his days as a resident magistrate in Ireland.

Infinitely more controversial was John Nicholson, born in 1822 to a family of Scots Lowland stock who moved to Ulster in the early seventeenth century. Educated at the Royal School, Dungannon, he gained a commission in the East India Company’s army in 1839. Nicholson quickly showed aptitude for political work, and the discovery of his brother’s emasculated body in the Khyber Pass did much to harden an already tough character. He believed in the application of what he called ‘swift, stern justice’, and on one occasion politely apologised to the officers waiting in their ante-room: dinner would be delayed because he had been hanging the Indian cooks. There was something of the wholly unforgiving Old Testament deity in him. When he appeared in the British camp on Delhi Ridge in 1857, black-bearded, grey-eyed, and unshakeably convinced in the righteousness of his cause, one young officer thought that he was ‘by the grace of God … a king coming into his own.’

He was only a regimental captain but had just been appointed brigadier general to lead the Mobile Column down from Peshawar. When the British stormed Delhi, he was mortally wounded. As he lay dying, gut-shot in a sweltering tent, he thanked God that he still had the strength to pistol the British commander if he ordered a retreat.

Whatever Charles II’s problems, financial or domestic, officer recruitment was not one of them. There was a glut of ex-officers who had fought for his father, as well as former members of the New Model who had adhered to George Monck. The problem was not so much finding officers as in accommodating even a fraction of the claimants on royal gratitude who already had impressive military credentials. John Gwyn had just missed Edgehill, the first major battle of the war, but was at the storm of Brentford a few weeks later, and fought on throughout the first civil war, becoming a captain. He was in arms in the second civil war, and then fought in Scotland before joining Charles II’s little army in Flanders, where he was captured at the battle of the Dunes in 1658. Gwyn had lost his commission by 1663 and was then serving as a gentleman trooper. His Military Memoirs, a vivid account ‘of all the field-fights and garrisons I have been in’, were written with a view to gaining the employment to which his service seemed to entitle him. There were thousands of John Gwyns about, but in 1665 only 210 officers in Charles’s regiments and another 134 in his garrisons. By 1684 the overall number of permanent commissions had risen to 613. This increase resulted from bringing the Tangier garrison and the Earl of Dumbarton’s regiment (later the Royal Scots) onto the English establishment, and the raising of one new regiment, the Royal Dragoons. Even at the height of the Dutch War in 1678 there were still under a thousand officers, many of whom lost their commissions when war-raised units were disbanded. Gwyn was right to stress his royalist background (though we cannot tell what good it did him) because this was an army wholly dominated by old cavaliers. In 1665, 65 per cent of officers had fought for Charles I or been in exile with his son, and only 10 per cent, most of them concentrated in the Coldstream Guards, had served the Protectorate. Rather more, a full 25 per cent, had held commissions in the English brigade in Dutch service.

There was never a homogeneous officer corps. At this early stage, there were three broad groups of officers, a categorisation that would persist until well into the eighteenth century. First came the professionals, whom John Childs calls men ‘who were forced to look to their swords in order to earn a living’. Before the regular army came into existence there had been English families like the Cravens, Russells, Sidneys, and Veres who had traditionally sent their young men off to serve on the continent. Much the same thing happened in Scotland. Among the Scottish officers in Russian service in the early seventeenth century we find the names Crawford, Wemyss, and Hamilton. Alexander Crawford assured the tsar that he already had eight years experience as an officer in the Danish and Swedish armies, and was just the fellow to command a regiment.

The Hapsburgs, with their long-running wars against the Turks, were always on the lookout for smart young men. Their charmingly credulous acceptance of self-devised genealogy (‘Descended from King Arthur: why then, your highness, that must make you a prince’) and eagerness to bestow titles of their own, made them attractive employers. Ireland, with its heartbreaking catalogue of rebellion and disappointment, was a fruitful source of officers. Field Marshal Maximilian Ulysses von Browne, one of the most competent Austrian commanders of the Seven Years War, was son and nephew of Irish gentlemen exiled after the failure of Tyrone’s rebellion in 1603. Over the years the royal and imperial Rangliste included the delightful composites Franz Moritz Graf von Lacy and Laval Graf Nugent von Westmeath. The Prussians could do as well when they put their minds to it, and when an English war correspondent, Lieutenant Colonel Ponsonby, got into difficulties at the battle of Rezonville in 1870 he was saved by Oberleutnant Campbell von Craigmillie.

After 1660, though, there was at least a chance that some professionals could serve their own country. Professor Childs’ sample of forty-three of these officers shows them to have been a mixed bunch, with eight of them sons of peers, ten born to baronets or knights, and twenty to ordinary gentlemen, with just five from poor backgrounds.

Most were second or third sons, underlining their dependence on military service. Until the army’s wartime expansion of 1672 there were simply not enough vacancies in the English establishment for all these men, and commissions cost money that they could rarely afford. Some served in foreign armies (as their fathers or uncles might have done before them) or in overseas garrisons, whose troops were not part of the establishment. Tangier, in particular, was a source of both regular employment and frequent combat.

Two of Tangier’s paladins, admirable examples of the professional warrior, were Andrew Rutherford, Earl of Teviot and Sir Palmes Fairborne. We must not be misled by Teviot’s title. He was the impecunious fifth son of a junior branch of a great Scots family. Like many of his countrymen, Teviot learnt his trade abroad, becoming a lieutenant general in the French service where he earned a fine reputation for courage. In 1662 Charles made him governor of Tangier and an earl in the Scots peerage, but a misjudgement in the endemic irregular war against the Moors saw him caught outside the city’s walls in a savage little battle in which he was killed, with nineteen other officers and nearly 500 men. The ‘worthy and brave’ Fairborne was the son of Colonel Stafford Fairborne, royalist governor of Newark in the first civil war. This claim on royal patronage was not enough to get him a regular commission though, and he had already helped defend Crete against the Turks before he was made a captain in the Tangier Regiment in 1662. Fairborne spent much of his time as deputy governor of Tangier, not much helped by the fact that his master, the one-eyed William, 2nd Earl of Inchiquin (given the job because of his late father’s distinguished service to the royalist cause in Ireland) was incompetent and vindictive. In 1678 Fairborne slipped his eldest son Stafford into the governor’s regiment as an ensign. The lad was only twelve, and he would have been gratified by the fact that after eight years in the army, Stafford Fairborne shifted to the navy and died an admiral. Palmes Fairborne was mortally wounded in October 1680, but lived a day or two and so saw his soldiers mount the attack that ended the long siege of Tangier and enabled the English to conclude a three-year peace treaty. In the long term Tangier was untenable and was evacuated in 1684: the Tangier Regiment was taken onto the establishment as the Queen’s Regiment. Other professionals served in the English force in Portugal until its disbandment in 1668 or the Anglo-Dutch brigade in the Dutch service, whence several slipped back into the English army.

In contrast, the six regiments of horse and foot on the English establishment were in the hands of ‘gentleman officers’: the second category of officers. A sample of 188 who served between 1661 and 1685 shows thirty-nine to have been the sons of peers, seventy-three of baronets or knights, fifty-eight of ordinary gentlemen: the remaining eighteen were low-born.

It is striking to see that eighty of these officers were first sons, content to serve until they inherited. They were far happier to mount guard in Whitehall or Windsor than to fry their brains in Tangier. Most had bought their commissions. The classic arguments in favour of purchase had yet to be made, but public offices of all sorts – ‘places’ – were commonly bought and sold, so this practice ran comfortably with the venial tide of the times. A man who desired a first commission or promotion had first to obtain royal approval, and then find an officer prepared to sell, and agree a price with him. A set fee, according to a table laid down in 1667, had to be paid to the secretary at war for each transaction. The paucity of vacancies kept rates high, though the £5,100 paid by one of Charles’s illegitimate sons, the Duke of Grafton, for the colonelcy of 1st Foot Guards was very steep: a captaincy in the guards might cost £1,000. At the close of 1663 Pepys, a fast-rising civil servant with excellent connections, reckoned himself worth £800 in cash. Many gentleman officers sat in parliament, beginning that process of military representation at Westminster that we saw earlier. Their regiments did not generally serve abroad, for expeditionary forces were recruited as required. The rigid channelling of royal patronage, via the Duke of Albemarle at the beginning of Charles’s reign and the Duke of York thereafter, ensured that there were tight circles of family loyalty and political allegiance, widened only on the three occasions that troops were raised for war against the Dutch or the French.

Gentleman officers were Restoration England loud in all its privilege and affluence, and in contrast to the professionals, they were an unedifying crew. The MPs amongst them were allowed unlimited leave to attend Westminster when the House was sitting. Although regulations specified that only one-third of officers could be absent at any time, in 1679 Henry Sidney found only ‘a corporal and three files of musketeers’ at Tilbury fort, and ‘never a commissioned officer’ at Gravesend. Four years later Charles wrote crossly to the governor of Hull, warning him that officers absent without leave would face ‘absolute cashiering’. Not that cashiering was always absolute. Captain Thomas Stradling of 1st Guards lost his commission when he encouraged his soldiers to riot in Huntingdon. As he was a Stradling of St Donat’s, scion of a martial tribe that had done much for Charles I, he was soon reinstated. In 1678 Lord Gerard, captain of the King’s Troop of the Life Guard, accompanied by Lord Cornwallis, one of his officers, beat up the sentries at St James’s and then killed a footboy. Cornwallis (his father a royalist who had accompanied Charles into exile) was tried by his peers and acquitted: Gerard slipped abroad for a few months and then resumed his duties. He had bled for the king in the Civil War, and a cousin had been executed for treason under Parliament: Charles was not a man to punish an old friend for a vinous lapse. When Ralph Widdrington was blinded in a sea-battle against the Dutch, a grateful monarch gave him a pension of £200 a year – and a captaincy in the army, which he retained till 1688.

It was rarely a simple matter to get orders obeyed, especially if they were given to a gentleman of ancient lineage. Captain Sir Philip Howard was in the Queen’s Troop of the Life Guard, and brother to Charles Howard, the influential reformed Parliamentarian whom Charles had created Earl of Carlisle. In 1678, he fell out with James, Duke of Monmouth, not only one of Charles’ illegitimate brood but an experienced soldier to boot:

To show military discipline, Sir Philip Howard was suspended his employment for not obeying some orders the Duke of Monmouth gave him in which, though his Grace be found in the wrong, it is thought fit the other should suffer for example’s sake to show that orders must be obeyed though never so foolish.

In 1673 Charles hoped to make Frederick, Duke of Schomberg, a professional soldier of wide experience in the French and Portuguese service, commander-in-chief of his own army as it prepared for the Dutch War. But some officers behaved appallingly, with a contemporary admitting that they ‘daily offer him affronts’ on the grounds that he was a Frenchman; in fact his was an old Palatinate family. Matters were not helped by the legal nonsense that prevented him from ordering capital punishment while the army was still on home soil, without officially suspending common law within it. Officers treated him with disdain and men grumbled about the severities of French discipline: the experiment was not a success. The Earl of Feversham, James II’s commander in 1685 and 1688, was less competent than Schomberg, and he owed some of his difficulties to the fact that, as Louis de Duras, Marquis de Blanquefort, he was French-born, though he had come to England in James’s retinue in 1663 and lived there ever since. When the test came in 1688 he remained true to his oath, which is more thsn we can say for many of the milords who sent him up as a fop who ‘no spikka da lingo’. The gentleman officers drank and duelled, swore and swaggered, abused tavern-keepers, tumbled serving-girls, and set the worst possible example to their men. Even that satisfied royalist Samuel Pepys could not help comparing the quiet disbandment of Parliament’s old army to the noisy indiscipline of the king’s supporters, who ‘go with their belts and swords, swearing and cursing and stealing – running into people’s houses, by force oftentimes, to carry away something’.

Public dislike of soldiers, already sharpened by civil war and the Interregnum, was revived by such conduct.

We will see more examples of professionals and gentleman officers, though the contrast between them will never be as sharp as it was in those first two decades of the Restoration. The third category of officer – from the local gentry – left a less enduring mark. The Restoration army comprised the six standing regiments, overseas garrisons and expeditions, and individual garrison companies of locally-raised foot that had never been assembled into regiments and remained scattered in castles and forts across the land. Garrison companies were officered by local gentry who did not allow their military duties to weigh too heavily upon them. In the West Country the same tribal connections that had taken Bevil Grenville’s lads up Lansdown Hill ensured that the Arundells of Trerice ran Pendennis Castle, and the Godolphins the Scilly Isles as family fiefs. We will not be surprised to find Sir Bevil Grenville’s boy John, whom we last saw in his dead father’s saddle on Lansdown Hill, created Earl of Bath and made governor of Plymouth.

These categories were never wholly distinct. Professionals were glad to get onto the establishment if they could manage it, and not all gentleman officers were drunken louts. John Churchill was given an ensign’s commission in 1st Guards in 1667. The young man went off to learn his trade in the Tangier garrison, and then fought aboard James’s flagship at the Battle of Solebay in 1672, gaining a captaincy in the Lord Admiral’s Regiment. The following year he accompanied the Duke of Monmouth to the siege of Maastricht as a gentleman volunteer. Not only could he learn more of his trade but, given that the Lord Admiral’s was unlikely to outlast the war, there was much to be said for getting into a regiment that would.

Volunteers might be serving officers whose own regiments were not engaged in the campaign, or civilians who hoped that their conspicuous bravery might help ease them into a commission. When the besieged Dutch put in a brisk counter-attack on a captured work, Monmouth dashed back into action accompanied by ‘Mr Charles O’Brien, Mr Villiers, Lord Rockingham’s two sons, and Captain Watson their kinsman, Sir Tho Armstrong, Capt Churchill, Capt Godfrey, Mr Roe and myself, with the duke’s two pages and three or more of his servants …’

Mr O’Brien was shot through both legs for his pains, but the little affair did the survivors no harm: O’Brien secured a French commission for a kinsman, and Edward Villiers got an English one, secured a regiment in 1688 and died a brigadier. Monmouth’s favourable report to his royal father helped persuade the king to forgive Churchill for the oversight of impregnating Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, who was one of his mistresses. Captain Charles Godfrey went on to marry Arabella Churchill, and to serve under Churchill after he had become, as Duke of Marlborough, the most illustrious British soldier of his age.

If John Churchill is the best example of the gradual blurring of boundaries between professional and gentleman officers he is certainly not the only one. As civil war veterans outlasted their military usefulness, a series of wars against first the Dutch and then the French made it increasingly hard to maintain a standing army that only did duty at home and increased the demand for competent officers. Percy Kirke spelt his first name Piercy and probably pronounced it that way. He was the son of a court official and commanded enough interest to get commissioned into the (rather fragile) Lord Admiral’s Regiment in 1666 and then to go on into the (wholly more robust) Blues and to serve as a volunteer at Maastricht. He became colonel of the Tangier Regiment in 1682, and was made governor two years later. His behaviour shocked Pepys – there on a fact-finding mission with Lord Dartmouth. Kirke tolerated the drunken behaviour of soldiers and generously offered to find a conveniently sized whore for a vertically-challenged member of Dartmouth’s retinue, warning the young man that he needed to strike fast before all the ladies had gone aboard the fleet to accommodate the sailors. Kirke brought his regiment into English service, and was a brigadier for the Sedgemoor campaign. His regiment’s paschal lamb insignia and less than mild behaviour to the rebels earned it the nickname Kirke’s Lambs. He assured James II that he had no interest in becoming Roman Catholic. If he was to change his religious opinion he had already given the Emperor of Morocco first refusal and would become Muslim. He defected to William of Orange in 1688 and died a lieutenant general, in 1691.

In contrast, Theophilus Oglethorpe, scion of a Yorkshire Catholic family, served under Marshal Turenne in France. He was commissioned into the Tangier Horse, which came onto the English establishment as the Royal Dragoons in 1684, and then moved on to the Life Guards. In 1685, while commanding a flanking force of Feversham’s army as it marched west, he stumbled into a smoky little clash at Keynsham bridge. He was so well regarded by Feversham that Churchill, just ahead of him in the hierarchy, feared that he would scoop the campaign’s honours. In the event Churchill not only made the right dispositions at Sedgemoor but also profited from the widespread criticism of Feversham afterwards. Whereas Churchill changed sides in 1688, Oglethorpe did not, although the victors courted him assiduously and he knew that opposition to William of Orange must inevitably cost him his commission, and so it did. He is another good example of the well-connected officer with enough money to sustain himself in the army but a keen interest in his profession.

The contrast between Churchill and Oglethorpe in 1688 illustrates one of the dangers of the growing professionalisation of officers. The line of cleavage in 1688 was complex, for personal ambition and genuine political and religious conviction were often so closely interwoven it might have been difficult for a man to tell us just how he arrived at his decision. Although both Charles II and James II were Roman Catholic – the former fully reconciled to the Church only on his deathbed and the latter a proclaimed Catholic – theirs was in theory a Protestant army. Parliament, perennially nervous about Catholic plots that could imperil the whole Restoration settlement, pressed the king to require officers and men to swear the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy. In 1667 those who had not taken the oaths were turned out, a process which swept up just two officers in the ex-Cromwellian Royal Horse Guards but seventeen from the four regiments of foot. Some crept back in almost at once and others went off to raise troops to serve in France. When parliament passed the Test Act in 1673, Charles sweetly observed it applied to troops on land and not at sea, and quickly parcelled off lots of infantry to serve aboard the fleet. This royal prevarication could not go on forever, and although Charles used his dispensing power to free some Catholic officers from the Act, after the Popish Plot in 1678 he was forced to order the dismissal of all known Catholic officers and soldiers as well as those who had not taken the oath. Ninety-one soldiers and sixteen officers were dismissed from Monmouth’s Regiment of Foot alone.

James, disinclined to take his brother’s more serpentine approach, forced the issue. Sir Edward Hales, a baronet from Kent, stood high in royal favour, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1685. As colonel of a regiment of foot, he was obliged to take the oath yet did not do so. His coachman Arthur Godden (collusively acting on his master’s orders) brought an action against Hales, who was convicted at Rochester assizes in March the following year. Hales appealed to the Court of the King’s Bench, arguing that he had letters patent from the king that dispensed him from the need to take the oath. The judges found in his favour by a majority of eleven to one. The Lord Chief Justice affirmed that it was ‘an inseparable prerogative’ springing from ‘the ancient remains of the sovereign power’ for the monarch to ‘dispense with penal laws in particular cases and upon particular necessary reasons’. We may now doubt whether James seriously proposed to convert England to Catholicism, as was widely alleged at the time. But his action in favouring Catholics and sacking anyone who crossed him, in the army or any other branch of public life, aroused widespread fear. Worse, it was evident that Lord Tyrconnell, James’s lord lieutenant of Ireland, was indeed engaged in the comprehensive catholicisation of the Irish army, which might then come across to coerce England. As the last straw, in 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed freedom of worship to Huguenots; thousands of dispossessed French Protestants duly arrived in England with horrid tales of the rack, breaking-wheel and pyre.

Many officers disapproved of James’s policy. Captain Sandys of the Blues gruffly told him to his face that ‘I understand Your Majesty well enough. I fear God and honour the King, as I ought, but I am not a man that is given to change.’

Many, including those who, like Churchill, knew him well, feared that he was riding for a fall and his destruction must inevitably encompass those of his adherents. Churchill admitted that his own experience of growing up on the losing side after the Civil War had given him a hatred of ‘poverty and dependence’. His wife Sarah was the prime confidante of Princess Anne, James’s youngest daughter. Anne’s sister Mary was married to William of Orange, head of the Dutch state and leader of the European opposition to Louis XIV’s dynastic and religious ambitions. The details of the military conspiracy against James II are necessarily vague, for the conspirators took good care to keep their tracks covered. The so-called ‘Treason Club’ met in the Rose Tavern in Covent Garden, and the ‘Tangerines’, a loose association of officers who had served there – many of them of a whiggish persuasion in any event – discussed how they might help unseat James. They were kept in contact with the English officers in William’s service by one of the latter’s lieutenant colonels, John Cutts. He had served as a volunteer against the Turks in Hungary, establishing an early claim to the reputation that was to give him the nickname ‘Salamander’ – after the mythical creature that lived in fire – by placing the Imperial standard on the ramparts of Buda. Cutts had no private fortune. Indeed, even after he had been made an Irish peer with a seat in the House of Commons and the governorship of the Isle of Wight he was never free of money worries. A professional rather than a gentleman officer by our earlier categorisation, Cutts had much to gain by a radical shift in patronage in England. We talk lightly about the Curragh affair of 1914 being a ‘mutiny’. In fact the 1688 conspiracy was a genuine mutiny, which succeeded by depriving the army of its leadership in its hour of greatest need.

Amidst all the smoke and shadow two things are evident. William would never have launched his expedition against the grain of autumn weather, with Lord Dartmouth’s royal fleet close at hand, to land in the West Country where Monmouth had been so easily bottled up in 1685, without being certain that James’s army would not fight. The stakes were very high, for the French tide lapped at the borders of Holland, and failure in England might compromise all William’s ambitions. Second, there was every chance that James’s rank and file would indeed have fought. Although we know annoyingly little about the men who plied their pikes and muskets in James’s regiments, this was now, with around 20,000 men, a much bigger army than anything his brother had dreamt of. It was well trained, and nothing in its past suggested that it would not follow its officers. Too many officers, however, declined to lead and those who did try to fight, like the Duke of Berwick, one of James’s sons by Arabella Churchill, and Lieutenant Patrick Sarsfield (big, brave, and not over-bright) found that too many senior officers had defected to William to give the loyalists the least chance of success. James had been a gallant soldier in his youth, and was eventually to face a lingering death through illness with an uncompromising courage that impressed Louis XIV. But a combination of nosebleeds and the defection of his favourite Churchill, his son-in-law Prince George of Denmark, and even the flight of his daughter Anne from Whitehall, unmanned him: he abandoned his men to their fate.

The army inherited by William and Mary needed radical remodelling. A few of James’s supporters (including Edward Hales) followed him into exile, and more, like Oglethorpe and Dartmouth, were imprisoned for plotting against the new regime. Some of William’s irregular adherents, like the volunteers who had seized Nottingham, were given the option of joining the regular army, and others were thanked and sent home, rather promptly. Roman Catholic soldiers, many of them Irish, were disbanded, although a few were packed off to join the Imperial army, deserting in droves (often to join the French) as soon as they reached Hamburg. It was more difficult for William to be sure what to do with his officers. He immediately sent all his English regiments off to the provinces; the Foot Guards were exiled to Portsmouth, Tilbury, Rochester, Dover, and Maidstone. The Dutch and German regiments that had come over with him assumed responsibility for the capital. Politically reliable colonels, even if they were men of little experience, were appointed. The untried Lord Delamere took over Lieutenant General Werden’s Regiment of Horse and set about turfing out suspect officers and men as well as improving efficiency. But his lordship’s lack of knowledge told against him, and he was soon replaced by the veteran Theodore Russell. The experienced Lieutenant Colonel John Coy was given Colonel Richard Hamilton’s regiment when Hamilton, an Irish Catholic, was clapped into the Tower. Perhaps most surprising was the resurgence of Colonel Solomon Richards, once lieutenant colonel of Oliver Cromwell’s own regiment of foot, appointed by James in September 1688 and then reappointed by William. Richards immediately sacked five suspect officers, but did not last long. In 1698 he brought his regiment away from Londonderry at the beginning of its famous siege, glumly reporting that the place was doomed, and William duly sacked him, not for political unreliability but for incompetence.

Charles Trelawney was a Cornishman whose military career, with spells in the English regiment in French service and the garrison of Tangier, was classically that of the cash-strapped professional. He had been Percy Kirke’s lieutenant colonel, and took over the Queen’s Regiment from him. In 1688 he deserted to William, and returned to his regiment to get rid of his lieutenant colonel, major and eleven other officers.

These measures took some time to take effect. In April 1689 John Evelyn, who had just heard that James had landed in Ireland ‘and was become master of that kingdom’, feared that ‘This is a terrible beginning of more troubles, especially should an army come thence into Scotland, people being generally disaffected here and everywhere else, so that the sea and land men would scarce serve without compulsion.’

There were mass desertions, at least as much because of the disruption caused by the new postings and William’s decision to send some of his English regiments to fight in the Low Countries while many Dutch remained in Britain. Some units mutinied on their way to Harwich and Ipswich for embarkation. The poor reputation of the English may have encouraged Marshal d’Humières to attack the Prince of Waldeck’s allied force at Walcourt that April, but he received a sharp rebuff, not least because the newly created Earl of Marlborough had his English contingent well in hand. A commission ‘for reforming the abuses in the army’ was appointed in May, but the commissioners discovered that there were by now few Jacobite officers left, although there were abuses aplenty, like incomplete clothing, pay in arrears, and the familiar racket of colonels pocketing the pay for men who did not exist.

William’s policy of appointing Dutchmen to senior commands (and giving them peerages, albeit Irish ones) exasperated his senior officers. Friction between the professional and gentleman officers remained. Although some of the former vanished – Hugh Mackay and John Lanier were killed at the shockingly bloody battle of Steenkirk in 1692 and Percy Kirke died of fever – others, like Marlborough and his brother Charles, Salamander Cutts, and Thomas Tollemache were rising stars. Trailing in their wide slipstream were the new professionals, no longer men who had to serve abroad because there were no vacancies in a small force dominated by court interest, but young men, often from the middling gentry or commerce, who sought to make a long-term career in the army. They served alongside men who would have been comfortable enough roistering with Charles II’s red-heeled gallants but did not intend to soldier forever.

Although William hated the practice of buying commissions, and would happily have adopted the Dutch custom of promoting men on merit, purchase was by now too deeply entrenched for him to expunge it. It remained central to providing officers for an army that, in the reigns of William and his successor Anne, grew in size and self-esteem to become a force of European stature. It expanded, but not steadily, as wartime growth was usually matched by peacetime contraction. James II’s army of around 20,000 rose to some 70,000 in 1709, up to 134,500 in 1762 at the height of the Seven Years War, down to around 40,000 in 1793 and then up to a staggering quarter-million in 1814. In Victoria’s long reign it bottomed out at 91,300 in 1839, and then rose again to exceed 200,000 by 1861. By this time, despite the strictures of Liberal politicians and the complaints of economists, the old pattern of expansion and contraction was constrained by the need to defend the empire and fight a series of small wars, some of which, like the Crimean War of 1853–6 and the second Boer War of 1899–1902, had the uncomfortable ability to morph into big ones.

Whatever the system’s purely military defects, it did have the political advantage of producing an officer corps which, while far from homogeneous, was composed largely of men with the proverbial ‘stake in the country’. Regimental rolls were filled with officers who wanted stability. Charles Clode, writing in 1871, argued that the system attracted ‘men of independent means – not merely professional officers,’ and added that Wellington had approved of purchase because ‘it brings into the service men of fortune and character – men who have some connection with the interests or fortunes of the country.’

The historian Sir John Fortescue maintained that the whole system was economical: for an officer’s pay rarely exceeded the interest on the price of his commission; secure: because officers were bound over for good behaviour on the price of their commissions; and convenient: because sales ensured a steady flow of promotion. Across the whole period 1660–1871 about two-thirds of commissions were purchased. In peacetime the great majority were bought, but in wartime it was difficult to ensure a steady flow of young men whose relatives were prepared to disgorge a substantial sum to give the lad an early chance of death or dismemberment. In 1810, for instance, about four-fifths of all commissions – whether on first appointment or promotion – had been given without purchase.

Purchase was never universal. It did not apply in the artillery or engineers, where officers advanced by remorseless seniority, and there were always non-purchase vacancies that could be given to NCOs promoted to adjutants’ posts or deserving young men able to generate sufficient interest to get a free ensigncy, perhaps by serving as a gentleman volunteer. Once the system was fully established, vacancies left as a result of death, retirement or promotion were filled by the next most senior officer on the regimental list, so ‘a bloody war or a sickly season’ helped the impecunious to rise. In William’s day the rules had not solidified and abuses were common: Percy Kirke’s son, inconveniently also named Percy, was made an ensign at the age of twelve months in 1684, a captain on his sixth birthday in 1689 and by the time he reported for duty he was his regiment’s senior captain. He went on to be colonel of the Queen’s, like his father and, like him died a lieutenant general. The practice of commissioned well-connected children went on well into the eighteenth century. Lord George Lennox, second son of the Duke of Richmond, was made an ensign at the age of thirteen in 1751 and was lieutenant colonel commanding the 33rd Foot just seven years later at the age of 20. If some officers were too young, others were too old, for there was no way of forcing a man to retire. In 1699 Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Compton, who had survived being pistolled in the chest in the first confused clash on Sedgemoor, was seventy years old, three years younger than his colonel, the Earl of Oxford. Compton evidently had some life left in him, for he had just married a 17-year-old.

Although the detail of purchase varied between 1660 and its abolition in 1871, its general principles are so clear that this is a good moment to explain how it worked. A young man purchasing a commission made an investment, and the pay of his new rank provided him with a dividend. As he bought successive promotions his investment increased, and when he eventually retired he ‘sold out’ and cashed in his shares. The regulation price of his commission might not increase greatly since the initial purchase – in 1766 a lieutenant colonelcy in an infantry regiment cost £3,500 and had only gone up to £4,500 by 1858. But the fact that the purchaser would have to add a non-regulation premium, varying according to the desirability of the regiment in question, meant that that he could expect to make a profit on his investment to support his old age. In 1745 Lieutenant Colonel Cuthbert Ellison sold his commission in the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers for £3,500, saying that his poor health was the ‘great motion’ behind his selling. His estate in County Durham was hopelessly encumbered with debt, but he hoped the proceeds of selling his commission would, with another annuity left him by his uncle, ‘support me with decency, in the decline of life.’ This ‘delightful old hypochondriac’ then proceeded to live for another forty years, dying in 1785 at the age of eighty-seven.