Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
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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 the 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