Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  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.’1 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.2

  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.3

  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.4

  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.’5 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.’6 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.’7 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.’8

  Created D
uke 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’.9

  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.10

  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.’11 The prince also served in Egypt and Italy, but the same hard rule of no real action applied. He was unquestionably touched by all the suffering he saw. There is a painful account of his brushing the cheek of a badly wounded soldier with his lips. When assessing the complex character of Edward VIII, shot through with self-indulgence and populism, we should not under-emphasise the impact of the war, which saw him snared by a protective privilege he had never demanded and would willingly have discarded.

  His brother Bertie’s status as ‘spare’ rather than ‘heir’ meant that he had been able to embark on a full-time naval career, serving first as a Dartmouth cadet and then being posted to the dreadnought HMS Collingwood in 1913. At Jutland three years later Collingwood was bracketed by a salvo from Derrflinger or Lützow. He recalled the excitement of being aboard a great ship shuddering under the recoil of her guns, with water from the splashes of shell-bursts surging across the decks. Bertie transferred to the RAF on its formation in 1918 and, when he succeeded to the throne on Edward’s abdication in 1936, he was the only British monarch who had qualified as a pilot. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had no sons, but their eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was appointed colonel of the Grenadier Guards in January 1942, on her sixteenth birthday. At her first official function officers found her ‘charming, and very sincere’. In February 1945 she was commissioned into the Auxiliary Territorial Service as Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, and completed her basic training in driving and maintenance at No 1 Mechanical Transport Training Centre at Aldershot. She became colonel-in-chief of the Grenadiers on her accession, and for many years wore the regiment’s uniform at the Queen’s Birthday Parade. Until 1986 she attended the parade mounted, latterly on her favourite mare Burmese.

  Between 1971 and 1976 Prince Charles trained with both the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, qualifying as both fixed-wing and helicopter pilot. He also commanded the coastal minehunter HMS Bronington during the last year of his service. The Princes, William and Harry, both trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and were commissioned into the Blues and Royals – a 1969 amalgamation of the Royal Horse Guards, whom we first glimpsed as Colonel Unton Crooke’s Regiment, in 1660, and the Royal Dragoons, raised in 1661 for duty in Tangiers. Prince William, denied the chance of operational service by the same concerns that kept the future Edward VIII in limbo, qualified as a Search and Rescue pilot. Prince Harry characteristically affirmed, ‘There’s no way that I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.’ He served in Afghanistan, and might have stayed there longer had an unhelpful intervention by the press not drawn attention to his presence, imposing unacceptable risk on those serving alongside him. In 2008 Prince Harry received his medal for campaign service at Combermere Barracks, Windsor from his aunt, Princess Anne, colonel of the Blues and Royals.

  As we branch off from the direct royal line, so the undergrowth thickens, with junior members of the ruling house serving on their own account or marrying into military families. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who was to marry the future George VI, lost one brother, in that most traditional of Highland regiments, the Black Watch, at Loos in 1915. She also lost a cousin, also
in the Black Watch, at Ypres, Belgium in 1914, and another cousin, this time a Grenadier, at Cambrai in 1917. Centuries earlier illegitimate offspring also played their part in the process. Of Charles II’s extensive illegitimate brood, Henry, Duke of Grafton commanded the 1st Foot Guards, lined out along the Bussex Rhine as the Duke of Monmouth’s rag-tag men ran in through the mist at Sedgemoor in 1685; he was mortally wounded attacking Cork in 1690. His half-brother Monmouth, on the other side of the ditch at Sedgemoor, had commanded English troops in French service, showing courage that left him briefly when he pleaded with James II for his life, though he had recovered his self-possession when he faced the axe on Tower Hill.

  James II’s own child, James, Duke of Berwick, one of the four offspring borne him by Arabella Churchill, emerged as a general of European stature. He had already served against the Turks in Hungary when, in 1688, he did more to check the disintegration of the royal army than his father. In French service after 1690, he was largely responsible for wrecking allied hopes in Spain during the War of Spanish Succession. Although his character showed that streak of inflexible cruelty that had marked his father’s, he was the most capable of the later Stuarts, and had become marshal of France by the time that a cannon-ball carried him off at Philippsburg in 1734.

  William IV’s illegitimate son, George Fitzclarence, served in the Peninsula, became the army’s deputy adjutant general, and his father eventually made him Earl of Munster. All four of his boys served in the army or the navy; the youngest was killed in the assault on the Redan in the Crimea. Amongst George Fitzclarence’s grandsons were twin brothers, Edward, killed at Abu Hamid in the Sudan in 1897, and Charles, who won the VC with the Royal Fusiliers (first raised in 1685) in the Boer War, then transferred to the Irish Guards in its formation in 1900, and finally died as a brigadier-general on 11 November 1914 in the desperate fighting outside Ypres. His name heads the cruelly long list of officers and men missing in the Ypres Salient battlefields between 1914 and mid-1917, graven in stone on the Menin Gate memorial.