In every imperial garrison and on every quarterdeck there were young men of birth with absolute self-assurance, a sincere faith in their country’s imperial mission and a willingness to risk their lives to fulfil it. For all it meant the routine acceptance of sickness, discomfort and peril, and for some it was a glorious adventure. After 1842, all survivors of imperial campaigns were awarded handsome silver medals attached to coloured ribbons with the names of the recipients’ engagements engraved on small clasps. These decorations were worn publicly and were tokens of honour and bravery like the regalia of the old chivalric orders. A new one was created in 1855, the Order of the Victoria Cross, which was awarded for outstanding courage and open to all ranks.
Ancestral pride animated many aristocrats as they went to war. In his autobiography, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, a younger son of the fourth Marquess of Waterford, was immensely proud of a pedigree that stretched back to the medieval counts of Brittany and the legendary King of Ireland, Brian Boru. Lord Charles believed that the courage of these warriors ran in their descendants’ blood so that ‘every scion of the house is judged by the stern company of his ancestors’.
Their warlike spirits must have cheered Lord Charles and his brothers. He commanded HMS Condor in a plucky inshore attack on the Egyptian batteries during the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 and stood, firm-jawed, in the squares which repelled Dervish charges in the Sudan two years later. Lord William Beresford of the 9th Lancers was ‘renowned for reckless hardihood’, won a Victoria Cross fighting with sabre against assegai during the Zulu War of 1879, and was military secretary to five successive Viceroys of India. Another brother managed the royal stud and a fourth was a rancher in America. According to Lord Charles, all were ‘keen sportsmen, hard riders, men of their hands, high couraged, adventurous, talented in affairs, winning friendship and affection wherever they went’.4
As in the Middle Ages, the aristocracy and gentry elevated that honour and courage of the kind which Beresford sincerely believed he possessed. During the Crimean War, there were allegations that this genetic élan encouraged rashness on the battlefield.5 This was civilian bleating, for officers knew that by setting examples of audacity they inspired their men. Moreover, the rank and file were mentally conditioned to follow their betters into danger. ‘I always found the private soldier anxious to save my life because he looked up to me as the officer as being the person to lead him to victory,’ recalled the fifth Duke of Richmond, a veteran of the Peninsular War and Waterloo. He added that the ‘labouring classes’ possessed an instinctive trust in the intelligence, as well as the bravery of a gentleman and were, therefore, happy to place their fate in his hands.6
This formula worked and became embedded in the consciousness of officers at all levels. In March 1914, when some officers resigned their commissions rather than suppress the Ulster Unionists who were arming to resist Irish Home Rule, one officer told his sister: ‘As regards the men, the type of man we get has no feeling beyond his pocket and his stomach, the reasons being that he is uneducated and unintelligent.’7
Trust had to be won and repaid. The ordinary soldier or sailor expected his officers to show a paternal concern for his physical welfare and morale. Both, together with discipline, were at a low ebb in the 63rd Regiment during the Crimean War, which found itself encamped before Sebastopol in 1855. The state of the sick, hungry and ragged soldiers was blamed on the negligence of their Colonel, Robert Dalzell, the fourteenth son of the ninth Earl of Carnwath. He blamed his men (‘the very scum of Dublin’), an excuse which failed to impress his superiors, who insisted on Dalzell’s resignation.8 He had doubly failed as officer and gentleman through his indifference to the principle of the moral reciprocity between those in command and those below them. Translated into a civilian context, Dalzell was the equivalent of an idle landlord who cared nothing for his tenants and labourers.
The armed services remained a stronghold of the old moral economy. A regiment or a man-o’-war was like a landed estate and a colonel or a captain was the equivalent of a squire. Ideally, they exercised a firm, fatherly authority over their men, who, in return, gave them obedience and devotion. There were misfits. Captain George Cadogan, later the fifth Earl of Cadogan, was a martinet who commanded through fear and flogged the crew of HMS Ferret mercilessly to the point where some mutinied in 1806. A brave man, Cadogan faced the rebels stark naked and brandishing a pistol and a cutlass, telling them he had one life to live. They flinched and then submitted; afterwards he told one that he would not have him shot ‘for I am more of a gentleman’. The spared man turned evidence against the other mutineers. Cadogan rose to the rank of admiral.
Cadogan died in 1864 when flogging had become rare in both services. A more humane spirit prevailed with the public, and many officers now preferred a style of leadership which relied upon kindness and moral persuasion. Captain Lord Gillford, later Admiral the Earl of Clanwilliam, led by example and encouraged professional pride among the sailors and officers of HMS Tribune in the 1860s. Lord Charles Beresford, then a midshipman, recalled his pride at earning Gillford’s approval for some minor task correctly undertaken and was impressed by his insistence that every officer mastered all the skills of seamanship. ‘If a man is a lubber over a job, you ought to be able to show him how to do it, not tell him how to do it.’ Technical and mathematical expertise were vital in sailing and navigating a ship and so naval officers needed both practical and book learning and, as readers of the Hornblower novels will know, promotion required the passing of exams. Likewise, artillery and engineer officers in the army needed professional instruction.
None was required by infantry and cavalry officers. The army adhered to the cult of the gentleman amateur who led through force of character. Until 1870 commissions and promotion up to the rank of lieutenant-colonel were purchased from the Treasury, irrespective of merit or experience. The scale of charges was fixed, but there were variations according to a regiment’s social status. Fashionable units such as the Guards and all cavalry regiments were the most expensive and the laws of supply and demand often drove up prices far beyond the official limits. The third Lord Lucan was alleged to have paid £25,000 for the lieutenant-colonelcy of the 17th Lancers, nearly four times the regulation price. At the bottom of the scale, a cornet in a light dragoon regiment paid £632 for his commission and a further £134 for his uniform. His pay was eight shillings a day, out of which he paid two shillings and sixpence for his evening dinner in the mess and a further two shillings and sixpence a week to his batman.
There were additional expenses for his charger and horses for hunting and steeplechasing. All officers needed private incomes; the minimum in an infantry regiment was a hundred pounds a year and in the Guards and the cavalry three to five times that amount. William MakepeaceThackeray’s fictional young cavalry officer declares: ‘Must hunt you know. A man couldn’t live in the wedgment if he didn’t. Mess expenses enawmuth. Must dine at mess. Must drink champagne and claret. Ours ain’t a port and sherry light-infantry mess’.9 The drawl is authentic and so are the obligatory expenses in a mess where the tone is aristocratic, and where officers spent their plentiful spare time following the pursuits of landed gentlemen. If Thackeray’s plunger had been attached to the 13th Light Dragoons in the 1850s he would have needed as much as £500 a year to cover all his expenses, including three horses and contributions to the upkeep of the regimental pack of harriers.10
Sport was sacred to the Victorian officer. It was central to his daily existence, filled his off-duty hours and was of immeasurable value in the cultivation of the qualities needed to lead others. In 1916 Major-General Sir Harry Knox, a veteran of North-West Frontier and Ugandan punitive campaigns, declared that no man had ‘done as much as the fox and the fox-hound to foster the cult of character, quick decision, and nerve so necessary for leadership in war’.11 He was then a senior staff officer in France and must have been delighted to know that old sporting traditions were flourishing behind the lines, w
here the officers of many regiments had established packs of hounds and hunted whenever they could, much to the annoyance of French farmers.12
Regretting the absence of many familiar faces from race courses during the 1855 season, a sporting journal drew great satisfaction from the fact that the ‘gallant race brigade’ was now attending ‘meetings before Sebastopol’.13 There were indeed impromptu races held in the Crimea where officer jockeys showed their prowess, watched and cheered on by private soldiers. Some may have been followers of the Turf in peacetime and would have awarded sporting officers the same adulation they gave to sporting peers.
Sporting officers won the hearts of their men. ‘The same qualities which bring a man to the front at polo are required by anyone who aspires to lead men,’ claimed a Lancer colonel in a 1922 polo handbook.14 For over sixty years, polo had mesmerised the British officer corps. It originated in India and soon surpassed in popularity such imported sports as hunting, shooting, cricket, tennis and billiards. A young Hussar subaltern in Bangalore in the 1890s, Winston Churchill, recalled that the ‘hour of polo’ was the high spot of his day. By this date, polo mania had reached such an intensity that senior officers became anxious about its harmful side effects: players were killed or injured, and the costs of maintaining a string of ponies were stretching the resources of officers to breaking point. In polo’s favour was the fact that it reduced drinking and gambling in messes.
Next to polo, Churchill relished pig-sticking: hunting wild boar on horseback with short lances. All officers indulged in every form of hunting whenever they had the opportunity. Like the medieval and renaissance knight, the Victorian officer treated sport as a physical and mental preparation for war. Sometimes, the two were complementary. A former naval officer and obsessive sportsman, Sir Claude de Crespigny Bt. recalled that in 1905: ‘I went out to East Africa for a little big-game shooting, and had the luck to arrive just in time to join the Sotik punitive expedition, so that I was able to combine a certain amount of fighting with some excellent sport.’15 Other officers’ memoirs are full of references to shooting game of all kinds during pauses in campaigns. When their ships anchored, naval officers never missed an opportunity to go ashore for some shooting.
The essentially aristocratic sporting ethos formed a bond between officers and their men. Failure to conform estranged an officer from his brothers and led to unpleasantness in the mess. In 1894 a subaltern in the 4th Hussars who was the son of a retired naval officer and had an allowance of £300 a year admitted to his colleagues that he lacked the wherewithal to keep hunters and racehorses. He was threatened, assaulted and told: ‘It is not what you do, Hodge, but what you don’t do.’ He resigned and his replacement was told that his private income of £500 a year was insufficient ‘for the pace of this regiment’.16 One of his fellow subalterns, Winston Churchill, underwrote his own mess and stable bills by being a war correspondent.
A similar case surfaced in 1903 and involved the Grenadier Guards. It was exposed by Rear Admiral Sir Arthur Cochrane, the son of the Napoleonic naval hero, the tenth Earl of Dundonald. He complained to The Times that his nephew, an Oxford graduate who was studying Russian and strategy as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Guards, was threatened with a beating by the senior subaltern unless he rode with the Guards’ draghounds at a meeting at Windsor. It seemed that conformity in the mess was enforced by a subalterns’ court martial, which frequently ordered miscreants to be caned on their bare buttocks. Leaving aside the homoerotic undertones of this ritual, it suggests the lengths to which officers would go to uphold the aristocratic ethos of their regiment.17 Interestingly, prefects were allowed to administer such punishments in public schools where sports mania was also rampant.
The aristocratic tone of the army had survived the abolition of purchase. The late-Victorian officer still needed a private income to keep up appearances in the mess, at the racecourse and on the polo pitch. The fifty pounds a year allowed George Younghusband as subaltern in the 17th Regiment in the late 1870s proved inadequate even in a comparatively modest mess, and so he secured a transfer to an Indian regiment, the Guides Cavalry. Indian pay and allowances were far higher than in the British army, and so a deliriously happy Younghusband could now ‘play polo, hunt, shoot, and be merry’ without any fear of being out of pocket. And there was always the prospect of action against some ‘pretty tough customer’ on the North-West Frontier.18
Younghusband was proud to be commanding what he called ‘the fighting classes’ of India. They were ‘splendid men, brave and fearless in action’, but ‘to be at their best, they require to be led by British officers’. Their age was irrelevant, what mattered was that they were British and, it went without saying, were gentlemen; the Indian belonged to a layered, hierarchical society and was historically conditioned to obey his superiors. He knew a sahib when he saw one and responded accordingly, and so too did the hereditary princes of India, whose collaboration was vital to the British government.
Since the turn of the eighteenth century, when the East India Company underwent a change from a commercial enterprise to a politico-military power with administrative responsibilities, it had preferred gentlemen as its servants. The aristocratic principle was implanted in the government of the Company’s territories by Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington and later Marquess Wellesley, who served as Governor-General between 1797 and 1805. Typically, he recommended his brother Arthur, the future Duke of Wellington, as an ambassador to the ruler of Poona on the grounds that his ‘firmness, integrity [and] temper’ would overawe the prince.19
Imperial government, like domestic, was an aristocratic duty. Offered the governor-generalship of Bengal in 1784, Lord Cornwallis asked himself, ‘Why should you volunteer plague and misery?’ ‘Duty’ dictated the answer. ‘You are not here to please yourself . . . try to be of some use; serve your country and your friends.’20 Cornwallis imposed high standards of humanity, probity and decorum on the Company’s staff. ‘Exemplary punishment’ was inflicted on an officer who struck an Indian, and another who refused to pay his debts to an Indian moneylender was judged ‘unworthy’ of being an officer and a gentleman and sacked. Another aristocratic proconsul, Montstuart Elphinstone, fourth son of Lord Elphinstone and Governor of Bombay between 1819 and 1827, was admired for his gracious bearing and courtesy towards Indians of all ranks.21
As Talleyrand once remarked, ‘Empire is the art of putting men in their places.’ This was something which aristocrats understood and so they were indispensable to governing the Empire. Since its infancy, the British had been acutely aware that they were acquiring power over races which adhered to and practised the principles of hierarchy.22 In 1710 four Iroquois chiefs visiting London were held to be ‘kings’ and one an ‘emperor’ and people were struck by their ‘awful and majestic’ presence. One High Church Tory hailed them as:
Four kings – each God’s viceregent
With Right divine inherent.23
Such men of rank were naturally susceptible to the aristocratic principle and, it therefore followed, would gladly accept imported aristocrats as their rulers. Mornington was right to believe that Indian princes had sensitive social antennae which made them infallible judges of who was, or was not, a gentleman. This was important when it came to observing the nuances of Indian court protocol and following the proper linguistic forms in political and social intercourse with princes. One raja contrasted the finesse and bearing of Lord Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal between 1813 and 1822, with his predecessor, whose manners revealed that he was from the ‘weaver caste’.24 The man concerned, Sir George Barlow, had been a middle-class civil servant.
The romantic medievalism of the early nineteenth century made it easy for proconsuls to identify Indian landowners of all ranks with barons and knights. The comparison was made by Colonel James Tod during his survey in Rajasthan, where he was enthralled to find a ruling elite devoted to war, horsemanship and hunting. ‘The Rajput’, he wrote, ‘slays buffaloes, hunts and eats the boar an
d the deer . . . he worships his horse, his sword . . . and attends more to the martial song of the bard than to the litany of the Brahmin.’25 He might easily have stepped from the pages of Scott’s Ivanhoe.
Addicted to chivalric literature, T. E. Lawrence was spellbound when he first encountered the Sharif Husain of Mecca and his sons Faisal and Abdullah in 1917. They and their armies of spear- and sword-armed camelry and horsemen brought to life Lawrence’s romantic vision of the Middle Ages. Faisal and his brothers were aristocrats whose bloodlines and character gave them the right to rule others in a stratified society that had been unchanged for centuries. Lawrence, the illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish baronet, was determined to preserve this old order and played kingmaker, setting Faisal on the throne of Iraq and Abdullah on that of Jordan. The objective was British paramountcy in the Middle East and regional stability through the preservation of what seemed an immutable order. Lawrence’s accomplices in this exercise in freezing societies were Winston Churchill, Sir Mark Sykes Bt., a Yorkshire landowner, and Aubrey Herbert, half-brother of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon.26 British patronage of local aristocracies extended to the Persian Gulf, where old Arab dynasties were placed in mothballs and protected.
Here, as elsewhere in the Middle East, India and Nigeria, Burkean ideology was adapted. Native societies had developed organically, fulfilling peculiar needs and, in most instances, aristocracies had emerged. They were invaluable allies and, like British aristocrats in the past, could be made into servants of the Crown. Many needed close supervision and lessons in the arts of benevolent paternalism from British residents, and their sons and grandsons were packed off to British public schools, Oxford and Cambridge and Sandhurst to acquire the accomplishments of gentlemen.
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 34