Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’

But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;

An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

An’ Tommy ain’t a blooming fool – you bet that Tommy sees!

Ambivalence about the redcoat long predated Kipling. To the Georgians he was Mr Lobster, a nickname stemming from a 1740 dialogue between ‘Thomas Lobster, soldier, and Jack Tar, sailor’, in the political news-sheet The Craftsman, a periodical so offensive to Prime Minister Robert Walpole that he had its publisher arrested every six months as a matter of course. The conversation redounded little to Mr Lobster’s advantage, for while he was weighed down by firm discipline and a heavy pack, plied his murderous trade at close quarters and was commanded by popinjays who had bought their commissions, his apple-cheeked interlocutor cruised the rolling main, defending Britain’s maritime prosperity, and returned to a grateful nation enriched by prize money. Nearly a century later Portsmouth’s ladies of the night made their own preferences clear:

Sailors they get all the money

Soldiers they get nought but brass.

I do love a jolly sailor

Soldiers you may kiss my arse.

Part of the reason for the nation’s long-standing suspicion of her soldiers can be traced to the circumstances prior to the regular army’s formation in 1661. Britain had just emerged from a long civil war, and had had quite enough of soldiers, whether they had fought for king or Parliament. Moreover, in 1655–7 Oliver Cromwell had instituted direct military government in England and Wales, through major generals presiding over twelve regions, answerable to the lord protector himself. Although the proximate cause of the experiment was a series of royalist plots, Cromwell believed that the nation’s morals needed urgent reform. The major generals, their troops of cavalry funded by a 10 per cent ‘decimation tax’ on royalists, stamped out seditious and ungodly pastimes like horse-racing, plays, bear-baiting and cock-fighting, and closed unruly ale-houses. They also punished those guilty of licentiousness, blasphemy, and swearing.

Although the rule of the major generals was unpopular, the scars left by the Civil War were far deeper. As historian Charles Carlton has observed, ‘No standing army’ was a Restoration slogan driven by ‘fear of soldiers, not because they killed people, but because they turned society head over heels’.

Oxford scholar Anthony Wood thought that his fellow undergraduates who went off to be soldiers were ‘debauched’ by the experience. Although Bulstrode Whitelock, Cromwell’s ambassador to Sweden, was on the winning side when he told his hosts of the horrors of civil war, he believed that his fellow-countrymen were heartily sick of ‘seeing servants riding on horseback and masters in great want’.

Although most of the New Model Army’s officers were not much different from their cavalier opponents – Lord General Fairfax was a peer’s son and Lieutenant General Cromwell a country gentleman – enough of them rose from humble beginnings to high rank to cause affront. Cromwell’s assertion that ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else’ struck a jarring chord within a stratified society used to obeying its natural leaders.

Amongst the reasons for the long-standing practice of the purchase of commissions, which disappeared only in 1871, was a desire to ensure that officers were gentlemen rather than enthusiasts.

Part of it was about national identity. The Civil War was not simply an English phenomenon, but had extended across each of the three kingdoms ruled by Charles I. It was at its most bloody in Ireland, where its agonies reflected long-standing religious frictions, and each new episode, from the revolt of 1641 to the Cromwellian pacification of 1649–53, simply added fresh horrors, with new heroes and martyrs, to a list that was long enough already. The Scots seemed to have prospered from their early alliance with Parliament, but their war soon turned sour. There was a bitter conflict within Scottish society: part clan feud, part power struggle, part confessional dispute. Alongside this there was an external war which saw Scots royalists suffer appallingly in their invasions of England in 1648 and 1651. So many were sent off as bondsmen to the West Indies after their defeat at Worcester, that merchants complained there was no profit in shipping them out. Suspicion of the soldier was writ large enough in England, but in Ireland and Scotland it was seared on the national consciousness.

The ripples of antimilitarism curled out across the Atlantic. Many Americans were ambivalent about their own Continental Army, without which the War of Independence could not have been won. After the Revolution, the State of Pennsylvania made its feelings clear by affirming in its constitution that a standing army was ‘dangerous [and] ought not to be kept up’. Americans did not simply dislike British soldiers, but regulars in general. ‘The general instinct to disparage the professional soldier,’ writes Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘which was discernable at the opening of the seventeenth century, had become by the eighteenth century a political and constitutional principle of enduring significance.’

In 1812 President John Adams warned, ‘Nothing is more important than to hold the civil authority decidedly superior to the military power.’ The point was not lost on the opponents of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. A 2007 polemic lamented that ‘the conservative fawning over the military displays an attitude that would have infuriated those first generations of Americans who actually built this country.’

When Charles II was restored in 1660 he found himself the proud possessor of not one army but two, though he had scarcely the money to pay for either. First, there was the remnant of the Parliamentarian New Model Army under the command of General George Monck, soon to become Duke of Albemarle. In the Declaration of Breda, which set out the conditions for his acceptance of the throne, Charles had agreed to ‘the full satisfaction of all the arrears due to’ the New Model Army, whose officers and men ‘shall be received into our service, upon as good pay and conditions as they now enjoy’.

In practice, though, an ‘Act for the Speedy … Disbanding’ made provision for paying off the army, with a sweetener of a week’s bonus pay from the king’s own pocket. There was also a sensible relaxation of apprenticeship rules, so that discharged officers and men could practise civilian trades as they pleased. There were concerns, however, that pay arrears were too eagerly converted into ale, so in December 1660 discharged officers and soldiers were banned from coming within twenty miles of the capital. That month only Monck’s own ‘Coldstream Regiment’ of foot and his regiment of horse remained.

Next there was Charles’s own tiny army, raised in the Low Countries amongst exiled royalists. Much of this was stationed in the English enclave of Dunkirk, where life was complicated by the fact that the garrison included both royal troops, like Lord Wentworth’s regiment of foot guards, and former Cromwellian soldiers. The guards were brought back to England, and most of the rest were posted off to be part of the garrison of Tangier, which came to the English Crown in 1661 as part of the dowry of Charles’s wife, the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, or sent to Portugal to support Charles’s father-in-law, John IV. A smattering of plots culminating, in January 1661, in a rising in London led by the cooper Thomas Venner, encouraged Charles to proceed with earlier plans for the formalisation of a royal guard.

A new regiment of foot guards was raised by John Russell. He had commanded Prince Rupert’s guards in the Civil War; Wentworth’s regiment, at first dispersed amongst garrison towns, was soon amalgamated with it. In February 1661 Albemarle’s regiment of foot was mustered on Tower Hill and formally disbanded before being immediately re-engaged. The two senior regiments of foot guards, today the Grenadier Guards and the Coldstream Guards, both claim histories which pre-date the regular army’s formation: Monck’s regiment had been raised in 1650 and the royal guards in 1656. However, the peculiar circumstances of the Coldstream’s transfer to royal service made it junior to Russell’s 1st Guards. One would be pressed to notice the fact, however, for the Coldstream motto is ‘Nulli Secundus’ (‘Second to None’) and, despite Grenadier mutterings about ‘Second to One’ or ‘Better than Nothing’, the Coldstream has never been known as 2nd Guards.

Charles’s little army had cavalry too, with three troops of Life Guards, and a single New Model regiment of horse, Colonel Unton Crooke’s, that had somehow escaped disbandment. This moved to London, where it became the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards. It is generally known, from the colour of its coats, as the Horse Guards Blue or more simply The Blues. In addition, there were twenty-eight garrisons elsewhere, larger ones at seaports like Portsmouth and Hull and smaller outposts like the castles of St Mawes and Pendennis, their Cromwellian officers now replaced by reliable royalist gentlemen with local interests. The cost of guards and garrisons exceeded Charles’s total income. Parliament was reluctant to fund a standing army, and there were fears that the soldiery would soon become, as Lord Treasurer Southampton put it, ‘insolent and ungovernable’.

Charles’s motives in raising the army were threefold. First, at a time when monarchs were on the move a good deal, he would be personally vulnerable without reliable troops for close protection. Second, it was evident that an army, however small, was needed to underpin his foreign policy. Furnishing overseas garrisons is a recurrent theme in the army’s history. It is no accident that the Dunkirk garrison predated the Restoration, and it was run down partly by the direct dispatch of units to the new garrison of Tangier. Third, the army created jobs, and Charles had been restored to a throne resting on the shoulders of men who felt entitled to them. Some royalists had accompanied Charles into exile, and far more had endured life under the Protectorate, often ruined by having to ‘compound’ with the new authorities for their ‘delinquency’.

In 1662, when Parliament decided to raise money to pension royalist ex-officers, it found that no less than 5,353 gentlemen, mostly former captains and subalterns, were entitled to a share. Ex-NCOs and men petitioned local magistrates for pensions, supporting their claims, where they could, by fulsome testimonials from former commanding officers, setting out the ‘many dangerous hurts’ they had received. Those who could manage it got jobs not just for themselves, but for their children too. Winston Churchill, father of the future Duke of Marlborough, was a West Country gentleman and lawyer turned captain of horse. He spent the 1650s living, with his growing brood, in the genteel poverty of his Parliamentarian mother-in-law’s house. But in 1660 he found himself the delighted recipient of royal favour, with an augmentation (‘Faithful but Unfortunate’, announced his new motto) to his coat of arms, a knighthood, a series of sinecures and a seat in Parliament. His daughter Arabella and his son John both obtained minor posts at court, and after the former had attracted the roving eye of James, Duke of York (she went on to bear him four children), young John was given an ensign’s commission in 1st Guards.

Charles’s little army survived, and by his death in 1685 had taken on some of the characteristics which still define it. It was the monarch’s own, its officers ‘trusty and well-beloved’ gentlemen bearing royal commissions whose wording has changed little over the centuries, with a fresh document marking successive promotions.

CHAPTER 2

KING’S ARMY

MANY OFFICERS AND men have felt comfortable in vesting the moral responsibility for their actions in the monarch’s person. Waterloo veteran Colonel Francis Skelly Tidy told his daughter: ‘I am a soldier and one of His Majesty’s most devoted servants, bound to defend the Crown with my life against either faction as necessary.’

Sergeant Sam Ancell, who fought in the 58th Regiment in the 1779– 83 siege of Gibraltar, announced:

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

In 1914 Dora Foljambe, married to a keen Territorial, with a brother in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a brother-in-law in the same battalion and two sons in the regular army, was delighted to see that the government had apparently shrunk from using the army to enforce Home Rule in Ireland. She told her daughter, married to yet another rifleman, that

I am very glad this did happen as it shows the feeling in the army against being used as a political tool – for one party against another – if there is to be civil war the army must break up or stand in a body for the King, it is impossible they should fight side by side with the [Irish] Nationalists who cheered every Boer victory in the South African war. Our army is not made up of paid levies.

Writing in 1972, Lieutenant Colonel John Baynes affirmed that the monarch’s

immense significance to the armed forces must first be strongly emphasised … This link with the Head of State is not merely symbolic, but reflects a close loyalty to the person of the Queen as well as to her office. No firmer guarantee of the British soldier’s exclusion from politics exists than his personal dependence on the authority of Her Majesty.

Robert William Lowry’s commissions lie before me. His appointment as ensign in the 47th Foot, dated 7 June 1841, is signed by Queen Victoria (black ink over a pencil cross reminding the young monarch where she should put her name), though by the time he became a lieutenant colonel on 18 February 1863 the queen entrusted such work to the army’s commander-in-chief, her uncle, George, Duke of Cambridge. He later became the epitome of conservatism, telling the officers of Aldershot garrison, assembled to hear a lecture on cavalry, ‘Why should we want to know anything about foreign cavalry? … We have better cavalry of our own. I fear, gentlemen, that the army is in danger of becoming a mere debating society.’

But he had commanded a division in the Crimea, fighting bravely in the shocking bludgeon-match at Inkerman, and was, as William Robertson recalled, ‘a good friend of the soldier and extremely popular with all ranks of the army.’

When he signed Robert Lowry’s new commission he was interested not only in military reform, but in maintaining (though with diminishing success) that he was directly subordinate to the monarch rather than to the secretary of state of war.

His rather deliberate ‘George’, with a curlicue swinging round from the last letter to encircle his name, looks restrained on a document rich in stamps and seals. Both commissions are made of robust parchment, folded in four, with the holder’s name on an outer fold, and fit neatly in the inside pocket of an officer’s tunic. Lowry’s second commission is almost exactly the same size as my own – though that was produced almost a century later. When Cambridge was eventually prised out of office in 1895, after a tenure just short of forty years, Victoria resumed signing commissions on her own behalf. Declining health and the flood of new commissions necessitated by the army’s expansion for the Boer war (1899–1902) made things difficult but, borne on by a powerful sense of duty, she struggled hard against having a signature stamp until she was at last persuaded that it would not be misused.

With the exception of Queen Mary and her sister Anne, all British monarchs who ruled 1625–1760, had fought in battle. Charles II received his baptism of fire at twelve at Edgehill in 1642. His brother, James II, had also participated in the Civil War, and was a lieutenant general in the French service during the Interregnum. He accompanied the royal army to the West Country to face William of Orange in 1688 although, racked by nose-bleeds, he was not an inspiring commander. William himself was an accomplished general. His invasion of England in unreliable autumn weather, in the face of a well-posted royal navy and an army whose internal collapse could not be confidently predicted, betokened extraordinary self-confidence. He beat James (also present in person on the field) at the Boyne in 1689, where he was clipped by a cannon-ball that came within an inch or two of changing history.

The first Hanoverians came from a Germanic tradition of soldier-kings. The future George I had fought the Turks as a young man and served as an Imperialist officer in the War of Spanish Succession. His eldest son commanded the allied army in the victorious battle of Dettingen in 1743. The first two Georges took a close interest in the day-to-day running of the army. During their reigns it was still small enough for them to know all senior officers by name and repute. When Lieutenant General Lord George Sackville was court-martialled for failure to charge as ordered at Minden in 1759, George II personally struck his name from the roll of the Privy Council. The king also penned an order, which was read at the head of every regiment in the service, saying that such conduct was ‘worse than death to a man who has any sense of honour’. Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, the king’s second son, was wounded at Dettingen, narrowly beaten by Marshal Saxe at Fontenoy, and then broke the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746. Defeated in Germany in 1757, he was disgraced on his return home. Opinion on ‘Butcher Cumberland’ has now softened somewhat. His style of command was uncomfortably Germanic; he was easily impressed by severe officers like Lieutenant General Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley. He backed the seedy and idiosyncratic James Wolfe, victor at Quebec in 1759. The attractive old Huguenot warrior, Field Marshal Lord Louis Jean, Lord Ligonier, always thought Cumberland a good general.

George III had a military brood. His eldest son, the Prince of Wales or ‘Prinny’ (later George IV) was no soldier, although in later life he came to believe that he had served with Wellington in the Peninsula. ‘So I have heard you say, Sir’, the Duke would observe when the Regent recounted another martial triumph and turned to him for support. Prinny’s younger brother Frederick, Duke of Albany and York, was not a successful field commander, for the French thrashed him in both 1793 and 1799. However, he was a serious-minded commander-in-chief of the army from 1798 to 1827. There was a brief gap in 1809–11, after he had been forced to resign when it transpired that his mistress, Mary Ann Clark, had been dabbling in the sale of commissions. George III’s fourth and seventh sons, Edward, Duke of Kent, and Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, both became field marshals, although they never held command in the field. His fifth son, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, lost an eye at Tournai in 1794, later commanded the Hanoverian army and succeeded as King of Hanover in 1837.

The third son of George III, Prince William, broke with family tradition by joining the navy at the age of thirteen, and fought at the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1780. Captain John Peebles saw him in New York during the American War, and reported that he was ‘a very fine grown young man, smart and sensible for his years … & sufficiently well grown, a strong likeness of the King … he was in a plain Midshipman uniform, and took off his hat with a good grace.’

Commissioned lieutenant in 1785 he was a captain the following year. Prince William served under Horatio Nelson in the West Indies, and the admiral reported that: ‘In his professional line, he is superior to two-thirds, I am sure, of the [Navy] list; and in attention to orders, and respect to his superior officer, I hardly know his equal.’

Created Duke of Clarence in 1789 by his reluctant father, to avoid political embarrassment, William sought active command during the Napoleonic wars, though without success. He managed to get involved in a skirmish near Antwerp in early 1814, narrowly avoiding capture thanks to the efforts of Lieutenant Thomas Austin of the 35th Foot. When George IV died without legitimate issue in 1830, Clarence ascended the throne as William IV. His simple, approachable style gained him many supporters, but his intervention in military affairs was not a success. Coming from a highly centralised service, he had no feel for the army’s innate tribalism. He insisted that soldiers should wear red, and sailors, blue, resulting in light cavalry (traditionally clad in what had begun as workmanlike blue) becoming redcoats. Most of them gladly reverted to blue in 1840, although the 16th Lancers, perverse as ever, retained red to become the ‘Scarlet Lancers’.

In her youth Queen Victoria appeared in a prettily modified version of a general’s uniform, and took military duties very seriously. She had a passionate interest in regimentalia, especially where it concerned the Scots regiments so close to her heart. In 1877 she told the Duke of Cambridge that projected amalgamations would create insuperable problems as far as tartans were concerned, for ‘to direct the 42nd to wear the Cameron tartan, or my own Cameron Highlanders to wear that of the Black Watch, would create the greatest dissatisfaction, and would be unmeaning.’ She went on to warn against the compromise of using the ‘Royal Hunting Tartan … which is a sort of undress Royal Stewart, [and] will not be appreciated by the Highlanders, nor considered advisable by the Queen’.

Her husband Prince Albert was colonel of both the 11th Hussars and the Rifle Brigade. He ensured that two of the equerries allocated to their eldest son, the future King Edward VII, were upright men who had won the Victoria Cross in the Crimea. Albert, had he lived longer, might have ensured that the prince received a proper military education. As it was, young Bertie was commissioned lieutenant colonel on his eighteenth birthday, and in the summer of 1861 was sent off to the Curragh, the great military camp near Dublin, to train with the Grenadier Guards.

The project was not a success. Amongst the visitors to the Curragh was the actress Nellie Clifden, ‘a London lady much run after by the Household Brigade’ who did not need much persuading to share the prince’s bed. Bertie’s parents soon found out: Prince Albert wrote him a pained paternal letter, and Victoria always attributed her husband’s fatal illness to the shock and disappointment caused by the news. Despite this inauspicious apprenticeship and his reputation for being ‘lackadaisical’, Edward took a serious interest in military reform, notably in the period of national soul-searching that followed the Boer War. His adviser, Lord Esher, sought to persuade him that he was de facto commander-in-chief of the army, an argument strengthened by the abolition of the post of commander-in-chief in 1904. The following year he affirmed that:

There is always to be developed as time goes on the authority of the King as Commander-in-Chief. I mean in all personal questions. The King should adhere tenaciously to his right to veto any appointment. Gradually it will become clear to everyone that under the King a C-in-C was an anomaly.

Edward’s heir apparent was Prince Albert Victor. Albert died from influenza in 1892, leaving his brother George heir. George married his late brother’s fiancée, Princess Mary of Teck. He had served as a naval cadet with his elder brother and was commissioned sub-lieutenant in 1884. George left the navy on his marriage and lived quietly in York Cottage on the Sandringham Estate, succeeding to the throne in 1910. The couple had six children, five of them sons. Their eldest, Edward (known in the family as David), had served as a naval cadet and midshipman. As an undergraduate at Oxford he had trained in the university Officers’ Training Corps. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, and urged Lord Kitchener to allow him to go to France with his regiment, saying ‘What does it matter if I am shot? I have four brothers.’ Kitchener pointed out that it was not the risk of death but the possibility of capture that prevented him from serving at the front. General Sir Dighton Probyn VC, the distinguished warrior-turned-courtier, feared that the young prince felt ‘disgraced’ by his inability to share his generation’s risks.

The Prince of Wales spent 1915–16 on the Western Front, occasionally under shellfire, sometimes closer to the fighting than was wise, but scarcely deserving the Military Cross he was awarded in 1916. General Sir Charles Monro tells us that he heard that the prince had gone up the line, early in the morning, with a Grenadier battalion. He set off in pursuit in his staff car, soon caught up with the young man, and ordered him in. ‘I heard what you said, prince’, said Monro, ‘Here is that damned old general after me again. Jump in the car, or you will spoil my appetite for breakfast.’