Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

Like most investments a commission was never wholly secure. If an officer was killed in action or died of natural causes its value was usually lost, although there were times when a grateful government might waive the rules. In 1780 Major John André, adjutant general to Sir Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief in North America, was caught in civilian clothes carrying letters to Benedict Arnold, a major general in the Continental Army who was about to betray West Point to the British. An American court-martial sentenced him to death as a spy, and George Washington, stiffly adhering to the letter of the law, declined to vary the mode of his execution from hanging to shooting. He died bravely, declaring ‘I am reconciled to my death, but I detest the mode.’ André commended his widowed mother and his three sisters to Clinton, pointing out that bad investments had left them impoverished, and asking that they might receive the value of his commission. The circumstances of André’s capture and death made him a popular hero: the Government gave his family a pension, and George III made his brother a baronet.

The value of a commission was also lost if an officer was cashiered. The word is a borrowing from the German kassiert, broken. Its financial implications were serious in themselves, for the sentence usually deprived the victim of the right to hold any office of profit under the Crown. When Lord George Sackville was court-martialled for failure to charge at Minden in 1760, the court found him ‘unfit to serve his Majesty in any military capacity whatsoever.’ He lost his lucrative regimental colonelcy and was struck from the roll of the Privy Council. None of this, however, prevented him from emerging in 1775 as Secretary of State for North America, where he made a significant contribution to Burgoyne’s ill-starred Saratoga campaign. Sometimes an officer would sell out rather than face a court martial that might cost him the value of his investment. In 1833 Captain John Orrock of the 33rd Foot told a friend that ‘our senior captain, Jefferies got into a scrape and Colonel Gore has forced him to sell out or stand a court martial; he preferred the former.’

In 1858 Captain William du Vernet of the 84th Foot, on campaign in north India, was as Lieutenant Hugh Pearson aptly put it ‘“up a gum tree” … under arrest (with a sentry over him) for being drunk while Field Officer of the day.’ Du Vernet had a long record of similar misbehaviour, and when the papers in the case were sent on to the commander-in-chief Pearson wrote: ‘I think it is all “up” with him.’ Although Pearson believed that there was only a slight chance of his being permitted to sell out, du Vernet was generously allowed to do so, creating a vacancy instantly filled by purchase.

If an officer was cashiered after a trial, the vacancy was allocated to an officer from another regiment to ensure that there could be no suggestion that evidence against him might have been given by those who stood to profit from his conviction. Even if it did not cashier him, a court martial might suspend an officer from rank and pay for a specified period. While suspended he was unable to purchase if a vacancy became available, and would miss any free promotions, so it was by no means a derisory punishment. In 1779 Lieutenant Thomas Eyre of the 35th, while in drink, beat the surgeon’s mate of his regiment with the flat of his sword, and was suspended from rank and pay for six months. He was lucky, because an ‘unseemly quarrel’ might get an officer cashiered, and a surgeon’s mate was scarcely a gentleman’s legitimate adversary.

The career of that serious-minded soldier Samuel Bagshawe shows how interest and purchase combined to advance an officer’s career at a time when the system was still open to manipulation. He enlisted as a private soldier in 1731 and was bought out of the army by his uncle in 1738. He gained his first commission without purchase in 1740 when the Duke of Devonshire, lord lieutenant of Ireland and the most notable magnate in Derbyshire, where the Bagshawes owned land, procured him a commission in Colonel Andrew Bissett’s 30th Foot. This was on the Irish establishment, and so had fewer officers and men on its strength than regiments on the English establishment, but even so a free commission was not to be scorned. Thomas Fletcher, Dean of Down, and Devonshire’s private secretary, wrote to Bagshawe’s uncle in the approved style:

His Grace intending to give your nephew a pair of colours, desires you will send him his Christian name in a letter directed to His Grace the Duke of Devonshire Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at the Castle in Dublin.

I congratulate you upon this, and am Sir

Your most humble servant

Tho Fletcher

Just a year later he was promoted to lieutenant, again thanks to the duke’s influence, this time in the very desirable Royal Scots. Bagshawe travelled to London in April 1742 in search of preferment, but although the army was being increased for the War of Austrian Succession, captaincies, at £1,500, were beyond his reach. The duke generously secured him a captaincy without purchase, albeit in Colonel John Battereau’s 62nd Foot. As this was a ‘new corps’, recently raised, it faced early disbandment when peace came, and so the duke secured his transfer to the 39th Foot, on the Irish establishment, which had been raised in 1702 and was a copper-bottomed investment.

In 1745 the regiment’s majority came up, and the Duke of Devonshire pressed Bagshawe’s uncle to stump up the purchase money: a loan of just £800 would suffice, because Bagshawe ‘had been so far a prudent manager as to be able to produce the other two hundred himself without troubling you.’ This £1,000 reflected the difference between the value of Bagshawe’s captaincy, which he was to be allowed to sell, and the majority’s full cost of around £2,500. Bagshawe acknowledged that the promotion would be particularly advantageous, admitting (in a sentence through which he wisely struck his pen) that ‘I am the youngest captain save one in the regiment.’ The project was certainly not proper, for the vacancy should have been offered to the regiment’s captains in order of seniority. It collapsed because Colonel Edward Richbell, the regimental commander, was unaware of it, and before he heard that Bagshawe had the money to hand ‘the senior captain had borrowed money for the purchase which effectively overturned my scheme’.

In 1746 Richbell managed to obtain Bagshawe the appointment of brigade major for an expedition against L’Orient, but his leg was smashed by a roundshot and he was very lucky to survive its amputation. In October 1747, on hearing that the major of the 39th was near death, he pressed Richbell ‘to have your approbation and recommendation to succeed him … I can ride sufficiently to discharge the duty and only expect to be continued on the service on those terms.’

The application failed, probably because Bagshawe’s missing leg raised concerns, and Matthew Sewell, who had held the lieutenant colonelcy in a short-lived regiment raised for the suppression of the ’45, was brought back from half-pay to be major of the 39th. The regimental agent warned Bagshawe that Sewell had irresistible interest in his favour. The 39th was stationed in Portsmouth, and Sewell ‘has been recommended by the gentlemen of Hampshire, and in particular by Mr Bridges, one of the members [of parliament] for Winchester, who personally asked the king’.

In 1749 Lieutenant Colonel James Cotes of the 39th announced his intention of selling out, and offered Sewell his commission ‘on the same terms that I had purchased’. Sewell asked for time to consult his friends, and decided against purchase, though he would have accepted better terms. Cotes then offered to sell to Bagshawe:

I am to receive £3,360, and to have my personal account and the non effective account of my company made up to the day you succeed me. I am to give the company complete, and if you will take my tent, and field bed on the same terms, that I bought them. My trunk containing two suits of regimental clothes, linen, etc. are at your service.

A regiment’s field officers – its colonel, lieutenant colonel, and major – all commanded companies, and the colonel had an officer, called the captain lieutenant, to do the work for him. Here Cotes offers to sell his company and his lieutenant colonelcy, and takes care to specify that the profit he made from the non-existent soldiers in his company whose pay he drew (‘the non effective account’) should be made up on the day the transaction took place. Bagshawe borrowed £1,000 from his uncle, got the regimental agent to advance him the rest of the money, and duly became a lieutenant colonel. His friend Lieutenant Archie Grant wrote at once to ‘most sincerely congratulate not only you but the whole Corps upon your affairs being at last done’. Apparently, Sewell had doubted if the commissions would be signed, and ‘seemed very much surprised and disappointed when he heard they were’.

Having become a lieutenant colonel at last, Bagshawe could expect promotion by seniority. His health was ruined by service in India, he fell out with his colonel, and on his return to England he found himself on half-pay, living the life of a country gentleman, but he was still anxious for advancement. In 1758 he told Lord Barrington, Secretary at War, that he believed that he had been unfairly passed over when new regiments were being raised:

I have done my duty punctually, I have been as ready to serve and I have run as great hazards and I have suffered as much as any lieutenant colonel in the service … I think there are only eight lieutenant colonels who are seniors and there has been eleven junior officers … promoted to the rank of colonel …

Barrington replied that he had indeed considered Bagshawe when ‘the regiments were disposed of,’ and ‘I do not see that any one here has been put over your head, except the Duke of Richmond’s and the King’s aides de camp, whom his Majesty has always chose without a strict regard for rank.’

In 1759, with more troops being enlisted, Bagshawe wrote to the Duke of Bedford, lord lieutenant of Ireland, offering ‘to raise a regiment of infantry at his own expense.’ By this procedure, known as ‘raising for rank’, Bagshawe would recruit the regiment and furnish its swords and accoutrements at his own expense, although if the regiment was disbanded in less than three years the public purse would refund the cost of these items. The government accepted the offer, and his commission as colonel was dated 17 January 1760.

No sooner had Colonel Bagshawe set about raising his regiment, the 93rd Foot, than he found himself the target of just the sort of pleas that powerful men had once made on his behalf. Lieutenant Francis Flood was the nephew of Warden Flood, attorney general for Ireland, and Bagshawe thought that part of the agreement for Flood’s commission was that his uncle would provide sufficient money for Flood to raise ten men. The attorney general loudly denied that any such agreement existed, and young Flood was soon in financial difficulties, for he could not balance his recruiting account. ‘My family is in distress,’ he lamented, ‘being concerned with a contested election’, so no money was to be had there.