Mark Odintz is right to point out that social status in Britain was ‘an amalgam of birth, occupation, wealth and connections’, while an eighteenth-century foreigner noted that ‘the title of gentleman is commonly given in England to all that distinguish themselves from the common sort of people by good garb, genteel air or good education, wealth or learning.’56 Families rose and fell, notions of class changed as time went on, and in our eagerness to retro-fit politically based terminology to the past, we risk doing our subject a grave disservice. Most significant for our purposes is the development of those ‘middling sort of folk’ who could be identified at the Restoration, into the middle class of the late eighteenth century, as defined by John Seed:
Its constituent elements were distinguished from the landed aristocracy and the gentry by their need to generate an income from some kind of active occupation. And they were distinguished from the labouring majority by their possession of property – whether mobile capital, stock in trade or professional credentials – and by their exemption from manual labour. Their economic activity thus involved the possession and management of material resources and the labour of others.57
Class did not mean quite the same thing across Great Britain. The nineteenth-century humorist Jonah Barrington divided the landed society of Ireland into ‘Half-mounted gentlemen … Gentlemen every inch of them … [and] gentlemen to the back-bone.’ Those half-mounted gentlemen, farming a couple of hundred acres, would have ranked as yeomen in England, while in Scotland they would have looked very similar to the cash-strapped sons and tacksmen of Highland lairds, gentlemen in their own estimation but with precious little with which to reinforce their claim to gentility. Major Pierce Butler of County Carlow observed, in 1794, that he had joined the army ‘not by choice but from that necessity which flows from the injustice of a feudal system, giving to the first-born all.’58
Another difficulty is our fondness for terminology that is gloriously imprecise. Across the period 1660–1914 a large proportion of officers hailed from the ‘landed gentry’. Odintz’s painstaking examination of the officers of four regiments of foot between 1767 and 1783 identifies 155 of the 268 officers whose backgrounds can be shown as coming from this group. There were also twelve from the baronetage, eighteen from the aristocracy, with twenty-seven middle class (whose fathers were merchants, lawyers, clergymen, government officials or doctors), ten descending from ‘poor officers’, five rankers and one whose father was a grocer. There was also a substantial contingent of foreigners: thirty-seven of them American and five German. By 1830 the aristocracy (defined to include members of peers’ extended families) provided 21 per cent of officers, and the middle classes 47 per cent; the totals for 1875 were 18 per cent and 50 per cent; and for 1912, 9 per cent and 59 per cent respectively. In each of these three sample years landed gentry constituted a steady 32 per cent of the officer corps.59 We can thus identify a general trend for the proportion of aristocratic officers to decline and that of middle-class officers to grow, reflecting changes in society at large. Even these figures over-represent the impact of the aristocracy, for in 1838 the 462 officers who were peers or members of their immediate family constituted just 9 per cent of the whole officer corps.
This broad trend conceals a rich granularity, not least as there was a close relationship between an officer’s background and the regiment he chose to serve in. Aristocrats were not spread evenly across the army but became concentrated in the Horse and Foot Guards. In 1855 the Earl of Malmesbury spoke in the Lords to refute allegations made in The Times that the army was dominated by noblemen. He pointed out that even in the Grenadier Guards, with three battalions and about 100 officers, just eighteen ‘were connected by blood directly with your Lordships’, not he thought an excessive proportion in ‘a regiment particularly charged with guarding the throne of an ancient monarchy’. He then looked at the ten most senior regiments of line infantry, and found only seven sons or brothers of peers, four of them, unsurprisingly, in the smart 7th Royal Fusiliers. And in the seven regiments of heavy line cavalry there were only three officers with close links to the Lords. Moreover, General Sir James Kempt, who had died not long before when colonel of the 1st Royal Dragoons, had sprung from what Malmesbury called ‘the humblest order of people’, though he did not add that during a period on half-pay Kempt had eked out a living working as a clerk for an army agent.60
In 1858 Edward Barrington de Fonblanque reckoned that: ‘With the exception of the household troops and perhaps a few picked corps, the officers of which belong principally to the titled or untitled nobility, the upper section of the middle class is the most strongly represented in the higher ranks of the army.’61 He was perfectly correct, because while the overall number of aristocratic officers was falling, their proportion in the Household Cavalry and Foot Guards (excepting the Coldstream) would actually be higher in 1912 than it had been in 1830. On the outbreak of war in 1914 the officers of the Grenadier Guards included Lieutenant Colonel Lord Brabazon, Majors Lord Bernard Gordon-Lennox, the Hon Hubert Crichton, and Lord Loch, and Captains Lord Guernsey and Lord Francis Montagu-Douglas-Scott. By this time it was unusual to find a peer or peer’s son in most line infantry regiments. But there were always exceptions, and although the Royal Garrison Artillery was regarded by many as tediously serious-minded, in 1914 its 108th Heavy Battery was commanded by Major Christopher de Sausmarez, a peer’s nephew, and one of his two-gun sections was commanded by a baronet.
The Guards did indeed go on active service. They fought in North America, in Spain at the end of the Peninsular War, at Waterloo, in the Sudan in 1882, and in the Boer War. They were subjected neither to the debilitating process of repeated moves about the United Kingdom, nor to virtual abandonment in some imperial outpost. Although serving as a Guards officer was expensive, for commissions, uniforms and messing costs were significantly more expensive than in line regiments, they gave an officer the best opportunity to combine military service and the lifestyle of a well-to-do gentleman. They were wholly unlike the business end of an army that won and secured an empire. Donald Breeze Mendham Huffer’s wonderful study of forty-two officers of the 32nd Foot in 1857, the year the regiment distinguished itself at Lucknow, identifies three officers from landed families, eight who were the sons of officers, fourteen whose fathers were middle-class professionals, seven who were probably middle class, and three who had been commissioned from the ranks. This was a good, solid regiment of foot, its officer corps robustly middle class without a nobleman in sight.
The printed Probate Indexes for England, first published in 1858, show a similar trend. A random selection of the first hundred officer fatalities from the Mutiny reveals that 10 per cent of them left estates worth over £5,000, 20 per cent between £1,000 and £500, 10 per cent between £450 and £100, and a remarkable 60 per cent between £450 and £20. This cannot be deemed representative, for no Guards regiments and few cavalry regiments (where one might expect to find wealth most heavily concentrated) served in the Mutiny. Interestingly, the richest of the officers in this sample, who left an estate worth £16,000, was Cornet William George Hawtrey Banks, 7th Hussars. He was recommended for the VC after being ‘almost cut to pieces’ while ‘thrice charging a body of infuriated fanatics’, and was indeed decorated when the VC’s regulations were modified to permit posthumous awards. Next below him came Lieutenant William Glynne Massey of the 35th Foot, with an estate of £8,000, who had ten years’ service and could have afforded promotion, but was evidently content to remain a subaltern in his regiment of choice until a captaincy came up.
At the other extreme, the twenty poorest officers had probate settled at just £20. One was the Hon Henry Handcock, son of Baron Castlemaine of West Meath, an ‘aristocrat’ as far as social origin is concerned, but one of the seven sons of a father not overburdened with wealth. Another of the ‘bottom twenty’, though wholly different in background, was Paymaster Henry Donelan of the 84th Foot, commissioned from the ranks in 1854. Four officers in th
is group were from service backgrounds, one the son of an officer in the East India Company’s service, another of an army surgeon, and a third of a commander Royal Navy. The fourth was Colonel Robert Parker Campbell CB, to all appearances one of the army’s rising stars, son of a colonel and brother of a lieutenant colonel, both of whom had commanded the 52nd Light Infantry. When he died of disease at Lucknow the governor-general declared that ‘the Queen’s service possessed no more gallant or promising officer’. Commissioned in 1837, he had bought all his promotions up to major, attaining that rank in 1854. He had become a lieutenant colonel without purchase in March 1855 and a colonel later the same year. Campbell had commanded the 90th Foot at Canterbury and rented the handsome Nackington House just south of the city, but successive purchases seem to have left him impoverished, for his widow immediately moved out of Nackington House and applied for a pension.62
So we can see texture that makes a nonsense of sweeping categorisation. ‘Aristocratic’ did not always mean well-off. At one extreme came Cromartie Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 4th Duke of Sutherland, the largest landowner in Britain with 1,358,600 acres in Sutherland, Shropshire, and Staffordshire (and the steam-yacht Catania to boot). He was an officer in the 2nd Life Guards from 1870 to 1875 and subsequently commander of the part-time Sutherland Rifles from 1882 until he succeeded his father in 1892. Somewhere in the middle came the family of Robert Molesworth, son of an old Cromwellian, created an Irish viscount in 1716. Three of his sons became regular officers. There was money and interest enough to help Richard, who became the 2nd Viscount, on his way to field marshal, but another military brother, Edward, retired as a major after thirty-eight years’ service, and the third, Walter, left as a dragoon captain after twenty; this was scarcely aristocratic influence at its most unbridled.
A notch or two further down came the alliteratively-named Edric Frederick Gifford, 3rd Baron Gifford, who won the VC as a lieutenant in the 24th Regiment fighting the Ashantis in 1874, not long after he had inherited the title. Lord Gifford transferred to the 57th in 1876 (somewhat presciently, for the 24th was to suffer severely in Zululand in 1879) and left the army as a brevet major in 1882 before becoming a colonial administrator. His grandfather, the 1st Baron, was the son of a grocer and linen-draper of Exeter, and the choice of a military career for Edric represents a well-established tendency for families who had risen fast to use the army as a ‘confirmer’ of their new status. At the bottom of the category came officers like Henry Handcock, younger sons of noble families with small estates. There were 585 peers in 1883. Sixty-six of them had estates with less than 2,000 acres and sixty had no land at all. The 2nd Lord Raglan, son of the commander-in-chief in the Crimea, rubbed along with 95 acres in Monmouthshire.63
Just as ‘aristocratic’ is too broad a category to aid useful analysis, so too is ‘landed interest’. By the 1880s most of those officers falling into this category were recruited from amongst what a contemporary called ‘yeomen’, farming between 100 and 3,000 acres, or ‘small proprietors’, with up to a hundred acres. While purchase was in force many of them inched their way up the Army List by seniority, sometimes profiting from casualties sustained in the Crimea or the Mutiny to get an unexpected step or two up. Sometimes they came to the attention of an influential senior who helped propel them upwards with brevets. William Francis Butler was born in 1838 in a farmhouse in Ballyslateen, Golden, County Tipperary, seventh child of a small landowner who was always short of money and fell on the very outside edge of ‘landed interest’. Nominated to a free ensigncy in the 69th Foot in 1858 by a distant relative, William Butler rose slowly by seniority to become a captain in 1872. He might have trudged on like this had he not come within the charmed circle of fellow-Irishman Garnet Wolseley, whose ‘ring’ of clients constituted an important interest group in the mid-Victorian army. Wolseley, son of a retired major, whose influence gained him his ensigncy, had been commissioned only six years before Butler, but had shot up to captain in less than three years’ service (and, crucially, as many shifts of regiment) as opposed to Butler’s fourteen, and his spectacularly brave service in Burma, the Crimea, China, and the Mutiny wafted him up to colonel by brevet in 1865. Knighted for his service in Canada, Wolseley was made a major general for the Ashanti campaign but, scenting the way the wind was blowing, let his wife know that, just in case she was asked, the peerage titles Lord Trent or Viscount Cannock would do him rather well.64 However, he had to wait for his victory over Arabi Pasha in Egypt in 1882 to make him a viscount and a full general.
Butler served with Wolseley on the Red River Expedition of 1870– 71 in Canada, and then – a captain at last and so eligible for brevet – in the Ashanti War of 1873–4. Still in Canada when he heard that Wolseley had got the command, he telegraphed: ‘Remember Butler. Will sail by first steamer’, and he promptly did so, entering the port of Liverpool just as Wolseley was leaving it. In January 1874 Wolseley told the Duke of Cambridge that: ‘Captain Butler is in Western Akim endeavouring to raise the people there … he is a very able and energetic officer – just the man for this sort of work, and if he fails, I am sure that no other man could have succeeded.’65 He did fail, though it was not his fault and he received a well-deserved brevet majority. He then accompanied Wolseley to South Africa (brevet lieutenant colonel) and the Sudan (colonel by seniority 1885). He became a brigadier general almost immediately, was knighted in 1886, commanded south-eastern district as a major general before going off, as a local lieutenant general, to be commander-in-chief in South Africa. Recalled when he expressed a gloomy opinion that, astonishingly, ran contrary to the government’s unrealistic but more optimistic policy, he was promoted lieutenant general in 1900 and retired to Bansha Castle in Tipperary, not far from his birthplace, in 1905. In retirement he was made an Irish Privy Councillor and a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath. Butler was much marked by the sufferings that accompanied the Great Hunger of 1847, and was a committed supporter of nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell. His youngest daughter, Eileen, married Ireland’s premier viscount to become Lady Gormanston, and she found a poem amongst his papers:
Give me but six-foot three (one inch to spare)
Of Irish earth, and dig it anywhere;
And for my poor soul say an Irish prayer
Above the spot.
In 1877 Butler had married the painter Elizabeth Thompson, whose full-blooded battle scenes, the best-known of them ‘Scotland for Ever’ showing the Royal Scots Greys charging head-on at Waterloo, were much in demand. She took on a good deal of her husband’s political shading. ‘Evicted’ has a very clear message, and even the less explicit ‘Listed for the Connaught Rangers’ shows two Irishmen marching happily enough down a Kerry glen with a red-jacketed recruiting party. One of them, though, throws a rueful sideways glance at a ruined cabin, perhaps the home he had to leave. When William Butler found his six-foot three of Irish earth (may it lie light upon his bones) he had risen to an eminence that belied his humble origins and firmly held political opinions, even if today we remember him best as the husband of Lady Butler.
Many middle-class families set the seal on their status by buying land, sending a son into the army, and sometimes marrying a daughter into an aristocratic family glad of the money. It was a playing board with as many snakes as ladders. The woollen draper William Mawhood (1724–1797) had grave reservations about allowing his boy William into the army, although the lad obtained a free ensigncy in the 17th Foot in 1777 and was bought a lieutenancy in the same regiment just over a year later. Mawhood père warned the subaltern, ‘For God’s and your own sake that your conduct and whole deportment be such as may establish your character, this often does more than money.’ Things went from bad to worse, as Mawhood lamented ‘and so you have kept a horse, kept a whore, spent your company’s money and ruined your constitution: your soul I shall say nothing of.’ The young man went onto half-pay in 1785, fled to France to avoid his creditors and married a count’s daughter. When his father persisted in his deter
mination to cut the scapegrace out of his inheritance, young Mawhood conspired with his sister to have the old gentleman declared a lunatic to invalidate the will.66
Between 1660 and 1914, while the army did indeed contain many officers with aristocratic connections or substantial landed interests, they were never more than a minority, albeit a significant and influential one which, because of the importance of money and interest from promotion, commanded a disproportionate share of regimental colonelcies (founts of interest in themselves) and senior command appointments. The influence of this group shrank, in part because of the wider trends towards making the public service more accountable and accessible, and, as the period went on, officers with this sort of background tended to concentrate in the Guards, both horse and foot. Major landed families often groomed their eldest to inherit the estate, perhaps after a little light soldiering, sent another son into the army as a career and another into the Church or the law. When Arthur Wesley married Kitty Pakenham in his family’s Dublin house his clergyman brother, Gerald, officiated, and it was to him that Arthur muttered ‘She has grown ugly, by Jove’, when his faded bride entered the room. Even this received wisdom needs leavening with caution, because there is abundant evidence of some eldest sons paying more attention than cliché would suggest. The second Duke of Northumberland, whom we have seen raising the Percy Tenantry Volunteers, had a serious career, as Lord Percy, as a regular officer before he inherited the dukedom.
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