The Parliament whose life ended with the general election of 2010 contained 43 MPs with military service of some sort. Eighteen were ex-regular army officers, ranging from Michael Mates, sometime lieutenant colonel in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, to Andrew Mitchell, who had held a ‘gap year commission’ between school and university. There were thirteen Territorials, one of them an ex-regular army officer and another a former member of the RAF; seven former members of the RAF; one of the Royal Navy; one who transferred from the Royal Navy to the Royal Naval Reserve; and another naval reservist. One, Rudi Vis, Labour MP for Finchley and Golders Green, had served in the Dutch Armed Forces in his youth. This constituted 6.6 per cent of a house of 646 members. The breadth of the definitions above, which includes both an MP who served in his university’s Officer Training Corps forty years ago, and another medically discharged after a brief period of regular training, underlines the thinness of real military experience, though at least two of the Territorials have been mobilised for service in Iraq or Afghanistan.
To enable peers and MPs without military service to speak with more knowledge of the armed forces, Sir Neil Thorne, a Conservative MP and Territorial colonel, founded the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme (AFPS) in 1987. ‘The whole purpose of the scheme,’ he writes, ‘is to enable Members of all parties to speak in debates on the Armed Forces from a position of experience’.14 The scheme lasts a year, during which participants are expected to spend at least 21 of 30 offered days with the armed forces, selecting the service of their choice. They are initially given status roughly aligning them with majors or their equivalents to enable them to spend time with soldiers, sailors, and airmen, rather than to receive the two-star status normally accorded to MPs visiting military units.15
The AFPS makes it possible for participants to return, ‘at four levels from Major to Brigadier equivalent’. At least one, Dr Julian Lewis, Conservative MP for New Forest East, spent some time at the Royal College of Defence Studies, writing a 10,000-word dissertation that was rated in the top ten for his year. In all about ninety MPs have participated in the scheme. The opinion of serving army officers on its usefulness is divided, with some contributors to the invaluable Army Rumour Service website arguing that anything that brings MPs into closer connection with the services can only do good. The facts that the scheme has flourished despite its lack of official funding, and attracts both peers and MPs who take it very seriously, underline the perceived need to remedy the progressive demilitarisation of parliament.
Political allegiance and holding a senior military position have existed independently of each other at many points in history. Most military and naval MPs still sitting immediately after 1688 were Tories, although they were soon outweighed by Whigs. It was, by then, possible for an officer to be opposed to the government and to enjoy senior command. Major General James Webb won a useful little victory at Wynendaele in 1708, ensuring that a vital convoy got through to Marlborough who was besieging Lille. Webb was a Tory and the Tories were in opposition. His supporters in the Commons at once complained that he had been insufficiently rewarded for the Wynendaele exploit. The credit seemed to have gone to Marlborough’s chief of staff, William Cadogan, who sat in the Whig interest for Woodstock – the town adjacent to Marlborough’s country estate, Blenheim Palace.
Ministers were assailed by those who shook the tree of patronage to get commissions, promotions, and appointments for family, friends, and clients. As time went on, ministers became more reluctant to intervene save where they could do so with probity. The papers of the hard-working William, Viscount Barrington, Whig secretary at war 1755–61 and 1765–78, show how patronage worked in the high eighteenth century. In 1760 George, Duke of Marlborough wrote asking for ‘a troop of Dragoons, or a company [captaincy] in an old regiment for a gentleman whose name is Travell: his father was a very zealous friend to us in the late Oxfordshire election … he may stick some time unless your Lordship will favour him with your interest to get promoted.’16 Marlborough’s insistence on an ‘old’ regiment was intended to ensure that Travell did not get appointed to a junior regiment that would be disbanded at the first opportunity, shoving him off onto half-pay. Barrington failed to oblige the duke, for Francis Travell soldiered on unpromoted, and the 1800 Army List has him as a half-pay lieutenant in the now-disbanded 21st Light Dragoons.
Barrington was unusually scrupulous in refusing to break the army’s rules even when pressed hard. In 1771 he told Lord North, then Prime Minister, that although he valued the influential Scottish Whig Sir Gilbert Eliott just as much as North himself did:
Yet I must not assist you in getting a company for his son.
Two invariable and indispensable rules of the army are that every man shall begin military life with the lowest commission, and that he shall be at least 16 years of age till he shall obtain any …
Mr. Elliot was not I believe ten years of age when he had a commission of lieutenant & soon after he was most irregularly made a captain. At the reduction [disbandment] of the corps, he was not kept on any list, or kept on half pay … What shall I say to the friends of Mr Stuart, or Price, or a great many others if Mr Elliot is a Captain before them? I shall be told with great truth that his former commission is a nullity though it still remains in his possession. The whole world will condemn me, and what is worst of all, I shall condemn myself.17
There was a growing belief that an officer should not be penalised, in his military capacity, for opinions expressed as a Parliamentarian. Yet there were still some serious upsets. William Pitt the Elder was commissioned into Lord Cobham’s Dragoons, with Treasury approval, so that the government could expect the support of his brother, already an MP, and joined his regiment at Northampton. William himself soon became Whig member for that most addled of rotten boroughs, Old Sarum, which had no resident voters at all. He made strident attacks on government policy, causing Prime Minister Robert Walpole, always slow to turn the other cheek, to observe ‘We must muzzle this terrible cornet of horse.’ In 1736 Walpole duly secured the dismissal of Pitt and several other military and naval MPs who had opposed the government. The move was not popular in the house, but none of the dismissed officers was reinstated. In 1764 Lieutenant General Henry Conway, who enjoyed the prestigious colonelcy of the 1st Royal Dragoons, voted against the government and was stripped of his colonelcy. The opposition at once protested that this was military punishment for political offence, and although George III did not restore Conway ‘he never again breached the principle enunciated by Conway’s supporters’, and Conway himself went on to be commander-in-chief.18
By the 1780s it was clear that the espousal of firm political views was not necessarily a bar to either high rank or employment in sensitive posts. Three of the most senior generals in North America, William Howe (C-in-C 1775–78), Henry Clinton (C-in-C 1778–82) and John Burgoyne, who surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, were serving MPs. Both Howe and Burgoyne were Whigs, and had spoken in Parliament against the American war. Howe had assured his Nottingham constituents that he would not serve against the colonists. When he agreed to do so one told him that: ‘I don’t wish you to fall, as many do, but I cannot say I wish success to the undertaking.’ Howe replied that ‘I was ordered, and could not refuse, without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serve my country in distress.’19
The social unrest that followed the Napoleonic wars saw the clearest example of politically-engaged officers attaining high rank despite firmly held opinions. Charles James Napier was a scion of a military family: his father Colonel George Napier and brothers George and William were soldiers, and another brother was a sailor. He earned a brilliant reputation as an infantry officer in the Peninsula. The Napiers were all radicals, and in George senior’s case experience of revolt in America, Ireland, and France had given him much sympathy for the rebels. For Charles, the process owed much to his wide reading while at the Senior Division of the Royal Military College. In 1839 the government appointed him to command Norther
n District as a major general. It was a courageous choice, for he was known to sympathise with the Chartists, who constituted the greatest threat to the order he was sworn to preserve, to hate the Corn Laws that kept the price of bread artificially high, and to tell the government precisely what its errors were.
Charles Napier was able to distinguish between personal sympathy with the Chartists and professional determination to keep the peace. He was inclined to the view that ‘the best way of treating a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards’, and a notion of responsibility to the Crown rather than its ministers also helped him deal with the inconsistencies in his own position. He made it clear that if the ‘physical force’ Chartists rose, then he would crush them. ‘Poor people! They will suffer’, he wrote. ‘We have the physical force not they … What would their 100,000 men do with my hundred rockets wriggling their fiery tales among them, roaring, scorching, tearing all they came near.’20 This combination of genuine sympathy and absolute firmness made him a notable success in the post.
He went to India, where his sense of natural justice (laced with a good slug of ambition) encouraged him to beat the Amirs of Sindh at Miani, going on to rule the newly annexed province with benevolent despotism. He returned home in 1847 after much bickering with the East India Company’s hierarchy. In 1849 that arch-conservative the Duke of Wellington was sure that Napier was the only general capable of rescuing the Sikh War from the head-on enthusiasm of the commander-in-chief in India, Sir Hugh Gough. By the time Napier arrived Gough had sledge-hammered his way to victory, and his subsequent trial of strength with the viceroy, Lord Dalhousie, saw Napier return home under a cloud.
Charles Napier died a general and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, an achievement not prevented by his political views or notorious scruffiness. His brother William, who had also fought with distinction in the Peninsula, was no less radical. When on half-pay in the 1830s, he declined suggestions that he should stand as an MP, and even more wisely refused command of the Chartists’ projected ‘National Guard’. He was a regular speaker at political meetings, and argued that while the army as an institution might indeed be politically neutral, ‘if a soldier does not know and love the social happiness springing from equal and just laws, how, in God’s name, is he to fight as the soldier of a free nation ought to fight?’21
He was not re-employed between the end of the Napoleonic wars and appointment as lieutenant governor of Guernsey in 1842, and in the meantime had produced his multi-volume History of the War in the Peninsula. This remains an extraordinary achievement, not least because of its flashes of tangible affection for private soldiers, such as John Walton, in Napier’s company of 43rd Foot on the retreat to Corunna. Walton was charged by determined French horsemen, but
stood his ground, and wounded several of his assailants, who then retired, leaving him unhurt, but his cap, knapsack, belts and musket were cut in about twenty places, his bayonet was bent double, and notched like a saw.22
There was much more to the book than narrative. Napier was convinced that the French army embodied the egalitarian principles of which he approved, while the British was dominated by privilege. ‘Napoleon’s troops fought in bright fields where every helmet caught some beams of glory,’ he wrote, ‘but the British soldier conquered under the cold shade of the aristocracy.’23 William Napier also died a general and a knight, as did his third martial brother, Thomas, who lost his right arm at Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812. Being in the same political camp as the rest of his family, Thomas was delighted to be governor of Cape Colony when slavery was abolished across the empire in 1834.
In the early nineteenth century in the unreformed House of Commons, officers sometimes sat for family-controlled constituencies. Occasionally, as an ingredient of the oleaginous mix of influence and obligation then known as ‘interest’, they were installed on behalf of a powerful patron, either because he valued their support, or because he believed that possession of a seat in parliament might improve their own career prospects. Lieutenant General Sir John Moore (killed at Corunna in 1808) was the son of a Glasgow doctor who acted as bear-leader to the Duke of Hamilton on his Grand Tour, travelling with the party. Hamilton not only secured John an ensign’s commission in the 51st Foot, but then proceeded to have him elected for the family-run Lanark Burghs in 1784–90. General Sir Henry Clinton sat from 1772 to 1784, first for Boroughbridge and then for Newark upon Trent. These were both constituencies controlled by his cousin, the Duke of Newcastle, who devoted almost as much attention to fostering his career as he did to the breeding of his affable Clumber spaniels. His widow married Thomas Crauford, and in 1802 gave another of her family’s pocket boroughs, East Retford, to his brother Robert ‘Black Bob’, who was to be mortally wounded commanding the Light Division at Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812.
There was much the same pattern in the Irish House of Commons until its disappearance with the Union of 1800. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, sat for the family borough of Trim, and Edward Pakenham, brother of Wellesley’s wife Kitty, for his own family’s Longford borough. Galbraith Lowry Cole (Kitty’s rejected suitor) sat first for Irish constituencies, and then represented Fermanagh in the British House of Commons, although he spent most of his time commanding one of Wellington’s divisions in the Peninsula. He might have discussed politics with several of his senior colleagues, including cavalry commander Lieutenant General Sir Stapleton Cotton, MP for Newark in 1806–1814 and in the upper house as Lord Combermere thereafter.
From the 1790s there were as many redcoats as black in the Commons, for, with the country mobilised against France, it was hard to tell regulars from militia or volunteer officers. About half the members returned in 1790–1820 held part-time commissions. Indeed, Robert Crauford was nicknamed ‘the regular colonel’ to distinguish him from the numerous MPs whose colonelcies reflected their local status. William Pitt the younger, out of office as prime minister from 1801 to 1804, raised three battalions of Cinque Ports Volunteers. He modestly referred to them as ‘the advanced guard of the nation’, drilling them himself as their colonel commandant and expatiating, red-coated in the House, on the virtues of volunteering. There was a similar rash of part-time officer-MPs during the French invasion scare of the 1860s, and in 1869 no less than 130 had connections with the volunteer movement.
While a government could not affect a senior ranking military career, they could influence their income, being in control of the much desired government appointments. All promotion above lieutenant colonel was, until the reforms of the 1880s, wholly dependent upon seniority, and so once an officer had reached this rank even the government’s concentrated spite could not stop further ascent. But generals received no pay (getting by on the half-pay of their regimental rank) unless they were given a specific appointment, like command of troops engaged in operations or a governorship, at home or abroad. There were a good deal more such jobs than one might expect: Regency Brighton kept three generals gainfully employed. All of these posts were at the government’s disposal, as were regimental colonelcies, a useful source of income until the late nineteenth century.
George De Lacy Evans – ‘an obstreperous radical from an Irish landowning family’ – had served in the Peninsula, was present at the burning of the White House in 1814, and fought at Waterloo the following year.24 On half-pay after the war, in 1835–7 he commanded the British Legion that fought for Queen Isabella, the liberal claimant to the Spanish throne, in the first Carlist War. The British Government was anxious to help Isabella against her uncle Don Carlos but was not prepared to do so directly, although it is clear that Evans’ officers and men were ex-soldiers, most serving because of the lack of employment at home. But Evans was also an MP, sitting for Rye in 1830 and 1831–32, and then for Westminster from 1833 to 1841 and 1846 to 1865. Although the diarist Charles Greville testily described him as republican, he was impeccably radical, pro-Chartist but (like his middle-class electors, whose opinions he took very ser
iously) firmly opposed to political reform by force. He was passed over sixteen times for the colonelcy of a regiment, but when Horse Guards was reviewing the long list of generals to find commanders for the Crimean expedition, it settled on Evans to head the 2nd Division. His broad military experience commended him even though his political views did not, and, in the event, he proved one of the war’s most capable generals – and returned to radical politics after it.
The dukes of York and Wellington, as commanders-in-chief, did their best to consider claims to commissions, promotions and appointments on their own merits, and in 1827 Wellington told the king, ‘The principle is that the pretensions of officers to Your Majesty’s favour should be fairly considered, notwithstanding their conduct in Parliament.’ He was less scrupulous during his second term as commander-in-chief (1842–52) when ‘he made partial sacrifice of the claims of merit to those of political or party interest’, and Rowland Hill (commander-in-chief 1828–42) was, in the kindly way that had earned him the nickname ‘Daddy’, inclined to favour ‘Conservative members of Parliament, old friends, the offspring of brother soldiers and unfortunate widows, [who] all found the way open to their solicitations.’25
The abolition of the purchase in 1871 and the increasing formalisation of promotion made it harder for politics to influence an officer’s career for good or ill, though it has never wholly prevented it. While government could not stop the declining number of officer-MPs from speaking their minds in parliament, it stamped down hard on the public expression of political opinion by serving officers. Redvers Buller was one of the heroes of his generation. His VC, won in a dreadful fight with the Zulus on Hlobane mountain in 1879, was a remarkable achievement even by the high standards of that award. He was less successful commanding British troops in the Boer War, and in the mood of recrimination that followed his recall he was widely attacked. On 10 October 1901 he replied publicly to an outspoken article by Leo Amery. Both Lord Roberts, now the army’s commander-in-chief (and, no less to the point, Buller’s successor in South Africa), and the Conservative Secretary of State, St John Brodrick, had much to gain from off-loading the blame for initial failures onto Buller. For speaking without authorisation he was summarily dismissed on half-pay and denied the court martial he requested. Buller remained popular in the country at large, and when the Liberals came to power in 1905 they offered him a safe seat, which he was wise enough to decline.
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