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.11 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.12
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’.13 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 …’14 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 t
he 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.’15 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.
Soldiers Page 18