Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  The army inherited by William and Mary needed radical remodelling. A few of James’s supporters (including Edward Hales) followed him into exile, and more, like Oglethorpe and Dartmouth, were imprisoned for plotting against the new regime. Some of William’s irregular adherents, like the volunteers who had seized Nottingham, were given the option of joining the regular army, and others were thanked and sent home, rather promptly. Roman Catholic soldiers, many of them Irish, were disbanded, although a few were packed off to join the Imperial army, deserting in droves (often to join the French) as soon as they reached Hamburg. It was more difficult for William to be sure what to do with his officers. He immediately sent all his English regiments off to the provinces; the Foot Guards were exiled to Portsmouth, Tilbury, Rochester, Dover, and Maidstone. The Dutch and German regiments that had come over with him assumed responsibility for the capital. Politically reliable colonels, even if they were men of little experience, were appointed. The untried Lord Delamere took over Lieutenant General Werden’s Regiment of Horse and set about turfing out suspect officers and men as well as improving efficiency. But his lordship’s lack of knowledge told against him, and he was soon replaced by the veteran Theodore Russell. The experienced Lieutenant Colonel John Coy was given Colonel Richard Hamilton’s regiment when Hamilton, an Irish Catholic, was clapped into the Tower. Perhaps most surprising was the resurgence of Colonel Solomon Richards, once lieutenant colonel of Oliver Cromwell’s own regiment of foot, appointed by James in September 1688 and then reappointed by William. Richards immediately sacked five suspect officers, but did not last long. In 1698 he brought his regiment away from Londonderry at the beginning of its famous siege, glumly reporting that the place was doomed, and William duly sacked him, not for political unreliability but for incompetence.16 Charles Trelawney was a Cornishman whose military career, with spells in the English regiment in French service and the garrison of Tangier, was classically that of the cash-strapped professional. He had been Percy Kirke’s lieutenant colonel, and took over the Queen’s Regiment from him. In 1688 he deserted to William, and returned to his regiment to get rid of his lieutenant colonel, major and eleven other officers.

  These measures took some time to take effect. In April 1689 John Evelyn, who had just heard that James had landed in Ireland ‘and was become master of that kingdom’, feared that ‘This is a terrible beginning of more troubles, especially should an army come thence into Scotland, people being generally disaffected here and everywhere else, so that the sea and land men would scarce serve without compulsion.’17 There were mass desertions, at least as much because of the disruption caused by the new postings and William’s decision to send some of his English regiments to fight in the Low Countries while many Dutch remained in Britain. Some units mutinied on their way to Harwich and Ipswich for embarkation. The poor reputation of the English may have encouraged Marshal d’Humières to attack the Prince of Waldeck’s allied force at Walcourt that April, but he received a sharp rebuff, not least because the newly created Earl of Marlborough had his English contingent well in hand. A commission ‘for reforming the abuses in the army’ was appointed in May, but the commissioners discovered that there were by now few Jacobite officers left, although there were abuses aplenty, like incomplete clothing, pay in arrears, and the familiar racket of colonels pocketing the pay for men who did not exist.

  William’s policy of appointing Dutchmen to senior commands (and giving them peerages, albeit Irish ones) exasperated his senior officers. Friction between the professional and gentleman officers remained. Although some of the former vanished – Hugh Mackay and John Lanier were killed at the shockingly bloody battle of Steenkirk in 1692 and Percy Kirke died of fever – others, like Marlborough and his brother Charles, Salamander Cutts, and Thomas Tollemache were rising stars. Trailing in their wide slipstream were the new professionals, no longer men who had to serve abroad because there were no vacancies in a small force dominated by court interest, but young men, often from the middling gentry or commerce, who sought to make a long-term career in the army. They served alongside men who would have been comfortable enough roistering with Charles II’s red-heeled gallants but did not intend to soldier forever.

  Although William hated the practice of buying commissions, and would happily have adopted the Dutch custom of promoting men on merit, purchase was by now too deeply entrenched for him to expunge it. It remained central to providing officers for an army that, in the reigns of William and his successor Anne, grew in size and self-esteem to become a force of European stature. It expanded, but not steadily, as wartime growth was usually matched by peacetime contraction. James II’s army of around 20,000 rose to some 70,000 in 1709, up to 134,500 in 1762 at the height of the Seven Years War, down to around 40,000 in 1793 and then up to a staggering quarter-million in 1814. In Victoria’s long reign it bottomed out at 91,300 in 1839, and then rose again to exceed 200,000 by 1861. By this time, despite the strictures of Liberal politicians and the complaints of economists, the old pattern of expansion and contraction was constrained by the need to defend the empire and fight a series of small wars, some of which, like the Crimean War of 1853–6 and the second Boer War of 1899–1902, had the uncomfortable ability to morph into big ones.

  Whatever the system’s purely military defects, it did have the political advantage of producing an officer corps which, while far from homogeneous, was composed largely of men with the proverbial ‘stake in the country’. Regimental rolls were filled with officers who wanted stability. Charles Clode, writing in 1871, argued that the system attracted ‘men of independent means – not merely professional officers,’ and added that Wellington had approved of purchase because ‘it brings into the service men of fortune and character – men who have some connection with the interests or fortunes of the country.’18 The historian Sir John Fortescue maintained that the whole system was economical: for an officer’s pay rarely exceeded the interest on the price of his commission; secure: because officers were bound over for good behaviour on the price of their commissions; and convenient: because sales ensured a steady flow of promotion. Across the whole period 1660–1871 about two-thirds of commissions were purchased. In peacetime the great majority were bought, but in wartime it was difficult to ensure a steady flow of young men whose relatives were prepared to disgorge a substantial sum to give the lad an early chance of death or dismemberment. In 1810, for instance, about four-fifths of all commissions – whether on first appointment or promotion – had been given without purchase.

  Purchase was never universal. It did not apply in the artillery or engineers, where officers advanced by remorseless seniority, and there were always non-purchase vacancies that could be given to NCOs promoted to adjutants’ posts or deserving young men able to generate sufficient interest to get a free ensigncy, perhaps by serving as a gentleman volunteer. Once the system was fully established, vacancies left as a result of death, retirement or promotion were filled by the next most senior officer on the regimental list, so ‘a bloody war or a sickly season’ helped the impecunious to rise. In William’s day the rules had not solidified and abuses were common: Percy Kirke’s son, inconveniently also named Percy, was made an ensign at the age of twelve months in 1684, a captain on his sixth birthday in 1689 and by the time he reported for duty he was his regiment’s senior captain. He went on to be colonel of the Queen’s, like his father and, like him died a lieutenant general. The practice of commissioned well-connected children went on well into the eighteenth century. Lord George Lennox, second son of the Duke of Richmond, was made an ensign at the age of thirteen in 1751 and was lieutenant colonel commanding the 33rd Foot just seven years later at the age of 20. If some officers were too young, others were too old, for there was no way of forcing a man to retire. In 1699 Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Compton, who had survived being pistolled in the chest in the first confused clash on Sedgemoor, was seventy years old, three years younger than his colonel, the Earl of Oxford. Compton evidently had some life left
in him, for he had just married a 17-year-old.

  Although the detail of purchase varied between 1660 and its abolition in 1871, its general principles are so clear that this is a good moment to explain how it worked. A young man purchasing a commission made an investment, and the pay of his new rank provided him with a dividend. As he bought successive promotions his investment increased, and when he eventually retired he ‘sold out’ and cashed in his shares. The regulation price of his commission might not increase greatly since the initial purchase – in 1766 a lieutenant colonelcy in an infantry regiment cost £3,500 and had only gone up to £4,500 by 1858. But the fact that the purchaser would have to add a non-regulation premium, varying according to the desirability of the regiment in question, meant that that he could expect to make a profit on his investment to support his old age. In 1745 Lieutenant Colonel Cuthbert Ellison sold his commission in the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers for £3,500, saying that his poor health was the ‘great motion’ behind his selling. His estate in County Durham was hopelessly encumbered with debt, but he hoped the proceeds of selling his commission would, with another annuity left him by his uncle, ‘support me with decency, in the decline of life.’ This ‘delightful old hypochondriac’ then proceeded to live for another forty years, dying in 1785 at the age of eighty-seven.19

  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.’20 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.21 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 Fletcher22

  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’.23 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.’24 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 f
avour. 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’.25

  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’.26